Less than meets the eye, and light on details
Vaughn Palmer, Vancouver Sun
Published: Tuesday, January 15, 2008
The B.C. Liberals promised their new transit plan would come with an unprecedented price tag and so it did: $14 billion.
But the accompanying release -- less a plan than a 20-page brochure padded with pictures and fact boxes -- didn't put the Liberals on the line for anything like that amount of new money.
The "new" plan includes the Canada Line, already fully financed and nearing completion, plus other, previously committed improvements in transit services.
It further anticipates billions of dollars in new funding from "partners," including the federal government, local government, and the regional transportation authority (TransLink.)
Strip away old news. Strip away the presumed matching funding.
The province says it will spend "up to $4.75 billion . . . by 2020," which works out to about $400 million a year in new money.
The B.C. Liberals are spending about $1 billion on transportation infrastructure in the current budget year.
No wonder Premier Gordon Campbell is saying the province won't need the much-rumored carbon tax to cover its share.
But having said that, the Liberals have shifted priorities. Campbell's last transportation plan, announced two years ago, was the all-roads-and-bridges expansion known as the Gateway project.
The new plan puts transit at the forefront.
It calls for extension of the existing network of rapid transit lines eastward to Coquitlam, westward to the University of B.C., and southeasterly along the Fraser Highway toward Langley.
The Liberals further propose to double capacity on the existing Expo transit line by building larger stations and operating longer trains.
They would help fund the purchase of some 1,500 new buses and bankroll a rapid bus service for the Lower Mainland, the Okanagan and the provincial capital.
The biggest outlay would be for the extended transit lines and estimates for all three projects point to a continued escalation in construction costs.
Taking them in the order in which they would probably be built, the Coquitlam service ("the Evergreen line") is priced at $1.4 billion, about double the estimate when the Liberals took office.
The Surrey extension, perhaps next on the construction schedule, is pegged at $1.1 billion.
The service to UBC, which wouldn't be ready until 2020 at the earliest, is estimated at $2.8 billion in current dollars.
On a comparative basis, the costing for the Evergreen line works out to $127 million a kilometre, Surrey is $183 million and the UBC service $233 million.
The $2-billion Canada Line, linking Vancouver to Richmond and the airport, is being built for about $105 million a kilometre.
Labour and materials account for some of the escalation.
But the extra budget for getting to Coquitlam is also a sign that the Liberals are preparing to abandon the current plan for a surface light rail system in favour of a more expensive SkyTrain service.
The hefty price tag for getting to UBC is partly a product of the running controversy over the construction of the Canada Line along Cambie Street.
The Liberals don't want to subject west-side businesses the experience of cut-and-cover construction, which ruined many a Cambie merchant.
So they've budgeted for extensive tunneling along much of the proposed 12-kilometre route along (or rather under) Broadway toward UBC.
Given the time frame of a dozen years, it would be a mistake to treat any of this as the last word on the plan or even on B.C. Liberal priorities.
It offers a vision of greatly expanded transit services, without a lot of detail on specific projects, timetables or how taxpayers will pay for all of it.
Campbell and Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon insist the province can cover its share from existing sources of revenue.
But that doesn't mean that local governments won't be hitting up their ratepayers for additional contributions via the property tax. Or that TransLink won't be using every bit of its new, provincially mandated room to move on the gas tax.
The Liberals say these projects will tap into other potential sources of revenue, including partnerships with private developers and sale of increased density along transit lines and around stations.
One last point of qualification that ought to be noted is the impact of this megaplan on the government's effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Campbell floated a big number on that score as well: "The plan will reduce emissions by 4.7 million tonnes cumulatively by 2020."
But note the use of the word "cumulatively." The Liberals simply added together the much smaller reductions for each of a dozen years to make the end product look bigger.
As with the big dollar figure, the more you look at the plan's imputed impact on greenhouse gas emissions, the less impressive it is.
vpalmer@direct.ca