The TransLink gas tax is about to put one poor entrepreneur out of business.

The Maple Ridge News tells the sad story of Hardeep Sidhu’s struggling Ruskin gas station, located just within the TransLink gas tax zone on the border of Maple Ridge and Mission. From their story:

Eight years ago, when Hardeep Sidhu first bought the Ruskin gas station and general store and started selling gasoline, the price difference between Metro Vancouver and Mission, in the Fraser Valley Regional District, was about five cents a litre.

But the gap has grown over the last few years as the gas tax was hiked – to the point that Metro Vancouver’s transit taxes add 17 cents to a litre and the trickle of motorists crossing into Silverdale a few kilometres away in west Mission for lower prices, has grown into a flood that’s washing away Sidhu’s station on 287th Street and Lougheed Highway.

“I used to have almost 12 employees, but now I have three or four. Now I’m thinking I’m going to close it because I’m losing money,” he said Wednesday. “I’m so far away, I don’t have any services.”

Sidhu’s property is also on well water, which means the property wouldn’t work for a fast food restaurant, which needs municipal water. “If I can’t do something, maybe I’m going to close it. Because there’s nothing else you can do in that location.”

That could happen next spring, he added.

Sidhu said he used to open 24 hours a day, then cut hours from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m., then 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. as business dropped.

The cash flow tells the same story.

An average day now brings in about $500 in gas sales. It was 10 times that when he first bought the business.

TransLink’s 17 cents a litre gas tax—which makes Lower Mainland fuel the most taxed on the continent—is sending drivers east (and south to the U.S.) in droves.

The population of TransLink-free Abbotsford from 2007 to 2010 grew 5.5 per cent, but gas purchases jumped 33 per cent. In Mission, the population grew 5.6 per cent, and gas sales grew 18.6 per cent.

And poor Mr. Sidhu is paying the price.