New network of high-tech, low-emission buses dominate TransLink priorities for next decade

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Newly proposed transportation connections across the Lower Mainland will feature snazzy-looking buses, not SkyTrain, if long-term priorities unveiled on Wednesday by TransLink go ahead.

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Zero-emission, high-tech vehicles, nine new corridors for them to drive on dedicated traffic-separated lanes, and 450 kilometers of new traffic-separated rolling/walking paths are among the projects TransLink is planning for the coming 10 years.

TransLink CEO Kevin Quinn said the proposed projects reflect an urgent need to rapidly invest in improvements to ease congestion, counter climate change, and address housing affordability.

The proposals are priorities TransLink and the mayors’ council on regional transportation have identified to be completed in the first 10 years of a report called Transportation 2050which was adopted in January by the council.

TransLink and the majors are asking for feedback through May 4, followed by an investment plan later in the month and then municipalities’ approval of the 10-year priorities in June.

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“In this region, especially, we are at an inflection point for our future … with the goal of addressing some of the greatest challenges of our generation,” Quinn said.

The last 10-year plan in 2014 was budgeted at $10 billion, but neither Quinn nor Jonathan Cote, chair of the mayors’ council, could provide even a ballpark figure for the cost of the new 10-year priorities, let alone how the funding would be split between various levels of government and other potential sources such as developers.

In information handed out Wednesday by TransLink, the proposed priorities list is described as needing “unprecedented” amounts of new capital and operating expenditures.

“We need to have a larger conversation about revenue sources than what TransLink has traditionally relied upon,” Quinn said. “We need to be creative.”

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The usual ways of raising funds will not be enough, Cote added.

“We are not at the point where we have the specific funding of the overall plan. That will come in various phases,” he said. “Things we’ve traditionally relied upon such as property taxes aren’t going to be a sustainable way to fund a plan like this.

“We don’t have specific solutions today.”

Key to the priorities list is a new transit way system, known as bus rapid transit (BRT), sometimes called light-rail on wheels. It would feature new stations as well as state-of-the-art vehicles already being used in cities around the world.

They are cheaper to put in place than SkyTrain, can be built much faster, and can reach a greater area, Quinn said.

According to TransLink, the 80 kilometers of SkyTrain track laid since 1985-86 has cost $400 million per kilometre. The 130 kilometers of BRT corridors proposed for the next decade will cost an estimated $15 million per kilometre.

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“SkyTrain has served the Metro Vancouver region well. I think it will remain the spine of our transit system into the future,” said Cote, who is a mayor of New Westminster.

It is not out of the question that SkyTrain could one day serve the North Shore and south of the Fraser River, he added.

But it could take 100 years, never mind the cost, to build SkyTrain to the BRT areas is scheduled to service within a decade’s time, Cote said.

“I think we realize we need to do rapid transit differently … looking at (BRT) as an alternative form to quickly, cost-effectively be able to expand rapid transit in a way we’ve never seen, and at a pace we’ve never seen in this region here.”

One of the proposed nine new corridors served by BRT would connect Park Royal in West Vancouver to Metrotown’s SkyTrain station and bus loop, while another would link Metrotown and Richmond.

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Others would connect Surrey Center to White Rock, Langley and Haney Place, replace the R buses on Lougheed Highway, Hastings Street and Scott Road, connect Lynn Valley in North Vancouver to downtown via the Lions Gate Bridge, and connect Marine Drive and 22nd Street stations along Marine Way to link the Canada Line and Expo Line.

Rounding out the priorities are extending the Millennium Line along Broadway from Arbutus to UBC and a gondola up Burnaby Mountain to SFU.

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