TransLink foes have good reasons to vote No

The key point of those voting No in the upcoming plebiscite on whether to hike the sales tax in Metro Vancouver to pay for improved transportation is that TransLink can’t be trusted with more of our hard-earned cash.

If you read letters to the editor in this or other newspapers, or listen to radio call-in shows, you’ll quickly discover that many people believe that TransLink executives and even the staff are overpaid, that the system is grossly inefficient, that it uses unnecessarily expensive equipment and that the transportation authority already sucks up too much money through too many taxes. But is that the case? Given that the proposed 7.14-percent increase in the sales tax in Metro Vancouver (to 7.5 per cent from seven per cent) affects every man, woman and child in the region and that most of the spending will go to public transit, I wanted to compare the per-capita transit cost in metro with the costs in two other large cities in Canada, Montreal and Toronto. I thought it would be easy, but I quickly found myself mired in a veritable fruit salad of apples to oranges — different transit technologies, population densities, service levels, etc. While it appeared to me that TransLink’s cost per citizen was considerably higher than in Toronto and Montreal, I wasn’t confident in my findings.

Fortunately, not too long ago actual experts conducted such a review and, as I suspected from my own calculations, TransLink doesn’t stack up well against transit systems in other Canadian cities.

The TransLink Efficiency Review, conducted by Shirocca Consulting in 2012 for the TransLink Commission, says that TransLink “continues to lag other systems in cost efficiency, cost effectiveness and service productivity.”

The report to the regulator also concluded that the “consolidation of custom transit into a single regional operator in 2009 has not yet resulted in expected cost efficiencies or improvements in service effectiveness. Instead, slippage has occurred.”

“TransLink’s performance relative to the four Canadian transit peer systems has also deteriorated. The declines are across the board in all indicators. As a result, a costly service has become even more expensive.”

For example, the study notes that between 2006 and 2010, TransLink increased revenue hours by 24.7 per cent while costs rose by a whopping 50.7 per cent in the same period — the highest increase among other Canadian transit systems studied. Victoria’s system, for instance, increased service hours by a larger amount (28.7 per cent) while costs rose much less (38.7 per cent) compared with TransLink. Other findings include:

TransLink’s revenue passengers per kilometre was lowest.

It had the highest operating cost per revenue passenger of $3.92 in 2010, which was a third higher than the average cost and 92 cents higher than the system with the secondhighest costs — Victoria.

TransLink’s administration cost as a percentage of revenue was also highest among the systems studied. The investigators found that like another large system, Toronto, TransLink had achieved a diseconomy of scale compared with smaller systems when the opposite would be expected. (Larger systems should be more efficient, not less.)

These numbers are a little out of date, but I’d be surprised if TransLink had become a pillar of efficiency in the last few years.

So it would appear that TransLink’s critics are making a good point: Why should taxpayers give such a clearly inefficient organization yet another tax? When is enough?

Further, why are the politicians and business leaders so hell-bent on imposing another tax on us not demanding improved efficiency from TransLink or even talking about the elephant in the room?

Taxpayers aren’t idiots. They understand that the region needs new investment in transportation as the population grows. They just want their taxes used as efficiently as possible and they don’t feel that’s the case with TransLink.

Some politicians have tried to warn voters not to reject the new tax out of their contempt for TransLink, saying they’re separate issues. They’re wrong. As long as TransLink wastes money, taxpayers will be disinclined to give it any more.

Gordon Clark is a columnist and the editorial pages editor at The Province.