BCTA urges road users to ‘say no to TransLink’

VANCOUVER — The association representing many of B.C.’s for-hire trucking companies has issued an editorial to local media blasting TransLink’s “inability to improve transportation in Vancouver’s Lower Mainland despite its $800 million budget.”

TransLink — the government agency responsible for the Greater Vancouver Regional District’s (GVRD) major roads, bridges and transit system — has toyed with the idea of raising tolls and hiking fees recently.

Some media reports have alleged that calls from within the organization to hike fees for road users are a reaction to TransLink’s financial shortfalls. In an email to TodaysTrucking.com, a spokesperson denied the agency is currently experiencing a cash crunch.

BCTA says BC road users always get snagged
on the hook for TransLink’s expenditures

But the president of the B.C. Trucking Association suggests TransLink’s problems have nothing to do with how much it takes in, but what it spends.

“Financial crises are a repeating theme for the GVRD’s transportation authority,” states BCTA President Paul Landry in a letter to area newspapers, entitled “Say No to TransLink.”

“Since inception, TransLink has raised transit fares and property taxes, enjoyed revenue windfalls as property values rose, finagled a fuel tax increase and introduced a new property tax disguised as a parking tax. Many readers will also recall the failed annual vehicle levy six years ago … Simultaneously, TransLink’s ridership has risen in line with population growth, but far less than its spending rate.”

Landry points out that in 2003, TransLink’s annual expenditures were $640 million. That number is projected to jump to $1.185 billion by 2010. “That’s an 85 percent increase in seven years, much of which is interest on debt to pay for rapid transit projects we apparently can’t afford,” he writes.

“TransLink’s failure to resolve our transportation problems is not due to lack of sustainable funding as TransLink would have us believe,” Landry continues in his editorial. “Rather, it is centered on application of traditional public transit solutions to a service area characterized by waterways with limited bridge capacity and widely dispersed low-density communities, an indefatigable focus on large, expensive, inflexible mega-projects, a refusal to fully explore potential private sector solutions, and paying only lip service to its roads and bridges responsibilities.

Landry adds that he’s hoping the province’s governance review of TransLink will result in more accountability to taxpayers.

“Bail TransLink out again with bridge tolls, fuel or parking taxes or vehicle levies? No way,” Landry closes. “Not until it embraces creative solutions that will actually achieve improved travel times for all GVRD residents and businesses, regardless of their mode of transport.”