CTF Note: The following blog post was written by Rei Miyasaka, a Tri-Cities resident concerned about the Evergreen Line's high costs and lack of direct democracy. As you may recall, the CTF has calculated that Greater Vancouver residents now pay 50 cents a litre in gas tax, after regional mayors voted to up gas and property taxes to pay for the Evergreen SkyTrain line. Rei has been fighting for a smarter solution to the Tri-Cities' transportation woes for a long time, and blogs regularly at www.evergreenlightrail.com. Here is Rei's post, which I think is a great thumbnail of what has gone on in this long, convoluted, expensive process:

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We all want better transit, but the Evergreen Line SkyTrain is a financial and social disaster in the making.

Until quite recently, TransLink had planned the Evergreen Line to be an attractive light rail project instead of SkyTrain. Instead of costing over $1.5 billion, it would have cost just $900 million – which means we wouldn’t have had the need for the 2c/l gas tax or any other nonsense to pay for the $574 million deficit.

The gas tax (which, by, the way, only 26% of Metro Vancouver residents support) only pays $40 million per year. We need another $30 million to fund the Evergreen Line. It could come from a property tax increase, road levies, or tariffs on all port cargo.

The port cargo tax option was mentioned on the Tri-City News a month ago, but was apparently pulled from their website. Of course, it’s easy to see why:  cargo tariffs would risk making our exports less competitive and our imports more expensive.

So is SkyTrain worth it? Nope. Here’s why:

• SkyTrain is only providing 6 stations. We would have had 11 with light rail.
• Light rail costs an average of $35m/km in the States and elsewhere, as opposed to $133m/km with SkyTrain. Port Coquitlam wants the line extended, and that could have been accommodated.
• TransLink’s ridership estimates are dubious. So is long-term funding.
• Social impacts of light rail are much less: much quieter; no shadows cast on adjacent roads, businesses and residences; open, ground-level stations means less crime than SkyTrain.
• SkyTrain is being built and used in just a few cities around the world; light rail is used in hundreds, including more than 70 in North America alone. Many of those cities run at higher capacity than our SkyTrains do, and because the technology is not proprietary to Bombardier, everything is much more competitively priced. One study at UBC says we could use the old streetcar routes to make 175km of light rail for the price of the proposed Commercial-UBC line!
• If all else fails, we could just have much better bus service. One of the options proposed by TransLink to fund the Evergreen Line, called “drastic cuts”, would have reduced bus service by 40%. It follows that with about $400 million, we could have about 40% more worth of bus service.
• Worst of all, there are strong indications that they’re going to run out of money half way through. When that happens, they’ll tax us more, raise fares as with the Millenium Line, or leave us with an inoperable array of concrete pillars looming above the cities. Don’t think it can’t happen.

Let’s call for a review and a referendum on the Evergreen Line SkyTrain. It’s a boondoggle. It’s absurdly expensive. It’s extremely risky. It does more harm than good to BC, and especially to the cities that the line passes through.

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Rei's blog can be found here. To contact Rei, email [email protected] or connect on Facebook here.