Aldergrove Transportation Forum

As the May election gets closer, there will start to be more events from the different candidates and political parties in Langley. I will be posting information about all-candidates debates and other forums around transportation or sustainable communities as they come up. I've always felt that this blog should be non-partisan and I will endeavor to keep it that way. The following was sent to me and I thought it was worth sharing.

Will Aldergrove ever see good public transit?: A Community Conversation with B.C. NDP Transportation Critic Harry Bains
Saturday, March 16, 2 to 4 p.m.
Prest Hall, corner of 248th and Fraser Highway

This is a free event that is open to everyone and is sponsor by Shane Dyson who is the NDP candidate for Fort Langley-Aldergrove.

Bus Rapid Transit on King George and SkyTrain to Langley?

Since 2010, TransLink has been working on a Surrey Rapid Transit Study which aims to find a preferred technology, routing, and timeline with full lifecycle costing for rapid transit in the South of Fraser. The study's planning area includes Surrey, White Rock, and Langley City. TransLink has already determined the routing for future rapid transit in the South of Fraser and is working on narrowing down the technology options.

Yesterday morning at the UDI Vancouver Breakfast, TransLink presented the latest information on the study and further narrowed down the technology options from ten to four.

1. Bus rapid transit on Fraser Highway, King George Boulevard, and 104th Avenue
Capital Cost (2010$): $0.9 billion
Lifecycle cost (2010$): $0.82 billion
New weekday transit trips (2041): 13,500
Regional transit mode share (2041): 16.5%
Travel time (2041)*: 30 min

2. Light rail transit on Fraser Highway, and bus rapid transit on King George Boulevard and 104th Avenue
Capital Cost (2010$): $1.68 billion
Lifecycle cost (2010$): $1.28 billion
New weekday transit trips (2041): 12,500
Regional transit mode share (2041): 16.5%
Travel time (2041)*: 29 min

3. Light rail transit on Fraser Highway, 104th Avenue, and King George Boulevard south to Newton, with bus rapid transit from Newton to White Rock
Capital Cost (2010$): $2.18 billion
Lifecycle cost (2010$): $1.63 billion
New weekday transit trips (2041): 12,000
Regional transit mode share (2041): 16.5%
Travel time (2041)*: 29 min

4. SkyTrain on Fraser Highway, and bus rapid transit on King George Boulevard and 104th Avenue
Capital Cost (2010$): $2.22 billion
Lifecycle cost (2010$): $1.67 billion
New weekday transit trips (2041): 24,500
Regional transit mode share (2041): 16.6%
Travel time (2041)*: 22 min

It is interesting to note that Fraser Highway is actually the highest demand corridor in the study area which is good news if you live in Langley as rail rapid transit goes to Langley in three of the four options. Surrey’s King George Boulevard gets bus rapid transit in three of the four options. While putting SkyTrain on Fraser Highway and bus rapid transit on King George Boulevard/104th Avenue looks like it might become the preferred technology recommendation, I wonder if this recommendation will fly politically.

Surrey has been pushing hard for light rail as a tool to reshape the community. You can see the positive results that rail-based transit can have in shaping communities when you look at areas like Central Surrey. Even TransLink understand this and noted that building light rail is “most consistent with the City of Surrey’s urban development aspirations.” Sometime transit is about more than just moving people from point A to point B. Surrey could certainly benefit from the urbanity that comes with rail-based transit. It will make our region more livable.

Alternative 3: LRT on Fraser Highway, LRT on King George Boulevard south to Newton with BRT, continuing to White Rock, and LRT on 104 Avenue

Alternative 4: RRT on Fraser Highway, and BRT on King George Boulevard and on 104 Avenue

My prediction will be that either alternative 3 or 4 will become the recommendation for rapid transit in the South of Fraser. With an estimated capital cost of $2.2 billion, it is about the same price as the Canada Line.

*Travel time is Surrey Central to Langley Centre

Working More Efficiently at the Municipal Level

Yesterday, I posted about how I believe that municipal employees should be paid fairly and that it was unreasonable to expect zero increases in property tax due to labour costs. I also believe that municipalities need to be mindful of the amount of staff needed to do existing jobs or new jobs, and look towards implementing innovative methods to accomplish tasks before simply hiring another person. One area that concerns me is the increasing cost of policing, mainly due to an increase in policing staffing levels. Is there a better, more efficient way to create safer communities? I believe there is.

I know that this is a hard one to do, but cost savings can be found by questioning why certain tasks are done for a desired outcome. I’ve managed several multimillion dollar, complex projects in my professional career and one of the major things I’ve noticed is that people don’t like changing processes even if there is a more efficient way to get a desired outcome. At a municipal level, one example of questioning a task could be as simple as looking at why the City pays someone to drive around a truck to water plants. You could go one step further and question why the City chooses plants that need watering in the first place. If the desired outcome is a beautiful downtown, is there another path to this desired outcome?

Another area to look at is if operating costs could be reduced by one-time capital projects. This could be something like having the City install its own data network to connect its facilities and out-of-planet equipment like traffic lights, water pumps, etc. I know from personal experience that hundreds of thousands of dollars per year can be saved by doing something like this.

Given that today pretty much anything can be connected to a network, I have to wonder if there are more efficient ways of managing municipal infrastructure. For example, wouldn’t it be good if the City could be alerted to a possible leak in a water main, so it could be repaired before a more costly water main breakage?

I'm certainly not a fan of underpaying people or cutting jobs that are needed, but I believe that there is more our local governments could be doing to make their operations even more efficient by questions work flows and by embracing 21st Century technology.

Public Sector Salaries

This morning, I was looking over the comments from the public hearing for the City of Langley’s proposed 2013 – 2017 Financial Plan which includes the 2013 budget. One citizen talked about how he only learned at the City’s open house that the largest cost in the operating budget was staff salaries. I found this a bit surprising because generally labour cost are the largest operating expense for any organization. This citizen also thought that the tax increase this year should be 0% which if I read between the line means that he believes that public employees should have a wage freeze. Collective agreements aside, I don’t think that this is a reasonable expectation.

I’ve worked in the private sector my whole life in both unionized and non-unionized positions. The general annual wage increase that I’ve received over the last decade has always been no less than 2%. This is about the average rate of inflation. I had a look at the collective agreement that covers staff at the City of Langley. Over the 2007 to 2011 period, the general annual wage increase was 3% to 4%. Giving the slow economic recovery, while 3% to 4% isn’t an opulent increase, I believe the next collective bargaining period should have wage increases around the 2% mark. I certainly don’t believe that people should be making less money the longer they have a job. I know that many people also believe that public workers are on the gravy train, but if you look at the collective agreement, salaries range from $47,174.40 to $88,732.80 per year for the most senior employees. Of those senior employees, the highest paid workers are engineers and planners. The median annual salary for senior employees is around $60,000. Certainly you make less money working at a coffee shop, but the median annual income for households in Metro Vancouver was $67,090 in 2010 (which is the last year I could find information.)

One of the things that I always find interesting is that some people feel that public employee shouldn’t be paid well. I believe that we should be trying to attract talented people to the public sector at local level. To attract those people, you need to have a competitive salary. Also, I always thought that if public employees are underpaid, they would be more susceptible to bribery and corruption like in other countries.

All that to say, municipal operating budgets are always likely to see around a 2% annual increase largely due to labour costs. I’m actually alright with that in principle, but I do believe that the public salary annual growth should be slowed to around 2% per year. The problem is operating budgets are paid for with property tax which isn’t tied to economic productivity, so municipalities always have to fiddle with the property tax rate.