Guest: Brad West (mayor of Port Coquitlam)
On this edition of Journal: fresh off an election, we take on the challenge of transit planning with the newly re-elected mayor of Port Coquitlam, Brad West.
I should say “resoundingly re-elected,” with almost 90% of the vote. As Chair of Metro Vancouver’s Mayor‘s Council on regional transportation, Brad West knows the complications of transit planning.
In one of his pointed op-eds last year, he said that with transit: “People want results, not announcements. Service, not ribbon cutting.”
But I’m guessing that many politicians didn’t get the memo in our recent election because what we got was announcement after announcement and very little discussion of costs or priorities
SkyTrain expansion to Newton. Of course, extension of the Broadway line to UBC. Why not? And, for sure, more RapidBus routes.
But how do we, as a region, decide which project should go first? During the election, Brad West was on television saying that at some point, people have to realize not everyone can have a rapid transit stop at the end of their driveway.
And as for the cost for any of these major infrastructure projects – how can we avoid the financial fiasco of the wastewater treatment plant that went from $700 million to $3.8 billion?
Part of the problem is that we have overlapping governance and split decision-making. For instance, Metro Vancouver approves a transit budget, but can’t tell TransLink how to spend it.
So, I would like to ask mayor Brad West to wipe the slate clean and explain how we could do transit planning better and control costs for the taxpayer. Impossible? We’ll see.
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