It's all how you ask the question.
This question asks: "Should funding for TransLink be increased …"
OK, let's stop right there. By wording it that way, the vote turns into a poll on the organization, not its purpose. For the Canadian Taxpayers Federation that wording is a terrific opportunity to further discredit the agency – an opportunity to vent, to "send a message." If the question were worded "Should funding for transit be increased …" that might get a different response.
The hard-working taxpayer might well agree that we need more transit – "but not until that blankety-blank bureaucracy spends what it's already got with some common sense" – as though the Broadway line could be paid for by cutting executive bonuses and public art.
So what happens in the event of a no vote? No more transit for Metro – for a decade? For a generation? Forever? No one believes that. But this imposed referendum – unlike every other major transportation project (no vote on bridges, no vote on highways) – puts the whole regional vision at risk.
Combined with the opening up of the Agricultural Land Reserve and the extension of auto-dominant highways, bridges and development south of the Fraser, the region's growth strategy becomes irrelevant, and the regional plan is as good as dead. The vision that has sustained us for half a century – "Cities in a Sea of Green" – could be lost overnight. And what a dispiriting loss it would be for a place that, to quote Mike Harcourt, "mostly got it right."
We'd also be in endless rounds of negotiations, conflicts and expenses. Perhaps after considerable angst, we'd find some way to make transit happen. But why then have a referendum with "none of the above" as an option – especially if a referendum is required every time the region wants to expand its transit system to accommodate growth and shape development?
So three reasons why it's worth voting for something rather than nothing.
No transportation system works if it's dependent on one mode of travel. No growing region has built itself out of congestion by just relying on wider highways and bigger bridges. Like a good diet, it needs balance. If car drivers choose to support transit because other people might take it, that's a perfectly good reason to do so.
Secondly, transit is an excellent return on investment, especially when building cities over centuries. Imagine any major metropolis – New York, Paris, Shanghai – without transit. Impossible.
As Bob Rennie said (hopefully to the premier), the future of real estate in this region is not location, location, location; it's transit, transit, transit. And you don't get to invest, build or live in transit-oriented development if there's no transit.
Thirdly, even if this vote turns into a referendum on TransLink, we have one of the best integrated transportation agencies in North America. Yes, really. When we build transit, we use it – to the point where the system cannot meet current demand, much less the next million people who will show up in the next 30 years. And unlike our toll bridges, we use transit beyond the expectations of the planners. Given the decline in driving already occurring, it makes no sense to extravagantly fund bridges and highways while starving transit.
There's likely a reason why the taxpayers' federation would have you believe otherwise.
If a government agency delivering a public good paid for collectively can be discredited and defunded, it leaves more room for other purposes: namely roads and bridges, and more reliance on individuals to fund the transportation system privately through car purchase and maintenance.
A more expensive way to get a worse transportation system.
Just as some would have you vote no to send a message, the referendum is a way to vote yes to send a better message: a message that our quality of life, our economic prosperity and our hope for a more livable future is dependent on continuing to plan, implement and pay for an expanded transit system as part of a regional vision that has served us all so well. •
