Why not four lanes?

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I was driving on Helmcken road the other day and shortly after VGH it goes from four lanes to two lanes and often has very long lines of cars moving at a slow pace.   I also noticed that the space is there to make the road four lane all the way to where it merges with Wilkinson.   Why not have four lanes all the way there?

I know that Wilkinson would be an issue to four lane to the intersection with Interurban, but there is enough space to make it four lane if you get creative.  There are six houses that would need some help because they would be fronting a large street.


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There is a clear demand for the road to be a larger one and the world will not come to an end if you provide better roads within the city.  The lack of a larger road means I simply avoid the whole neighbourhood between 3pm and 6pm weekdays.   There are restaurants there that do not get business from me because of traffic issues.

Sidewalk shoveling

Victoria, Saanich and Esquimalt all claim to have by-laws on the books that mean you will get a fine if you do not shovel your sidewalk promptly after a snowfall.   None of them seem to do anything about it according to this Times Colonist article.

I decided to send the following letter to the City of Victoria at teh following email address snowclearing@victoria.ca

So how do you go about getting sidewalks shoveled? As in what needs to be done so that you will ticket the people that have not shoveled? 

The majority of properties in my neighbourhood, Burnside Gorge, have made no effort to shovel the sidewalk. It is bad governance to have a by-law and then not enforce it, it only encourages a disrespect of government and civil society. 

I can send you a list of houses, apartments/condos in my neighbourhood that are now 48 hours overdue in shoveling. Would you like me to list them all and send you pictures? I would be happy to see you ticket them all, 1000 tickets like that would bring in an extra $150,000 to the City making my tax burden lower.

I will start taking the pictures and documenting the properties this morning, I assume that you can still ticket them next week after the snow is gone.

If you are not planning on doing any enforcement, I would like to send a bill for shoveling City property to you. It is only fair that you pay people that actual do the work for the City to keep sidewalks clear if you are not going to enforce the bylaw.

yours

Bernard von Schulmann

I encourage others to register complaints.  

In Saanich at stormevents@saanich.ca
In Esquimalt at http://www.esquimalt.ca/contactForms/MLetham.aspx

Some quick notes on Transit

1) The other day I did some calculations on the costs of operating light rail to get a ball park sense of what it would take.  

I got an email from a person working for a city operating light rail here in Canada and he/she said that there is a problem with my assumptions of operating costs per service.    They asked I do not say anything to identify where they are from so I can only paraphrase what we talked about in our emails.

That they pointed out is that my assumptions of the amount of rail cars and the total use of the line means there are fixed operational costs that will boost the hourly operational cost of the line.  They said it would be safer to assume for the scenario I suggested having an operational cost of  $300 per hour +- $25 per hour.  

Further in their emails they made it clear that they could not see the business case for light rail to the Westshore, certainly in their planning they would not consider offering light rail for such a small population as they could not afford it.   Their existing light rail works well, but expansion will only come when there is a proven demand for the service that meets several benchmarks they have set.
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2) The BC Transit budget issues for Greater Victoria Transit come as a surprise to me.   In the fall there was no indication I could see of such a big gap between expenses and revenues.  Both were down by some, but down equally and the projection to the end of the budget year was for a 2% budgetary shortfall.  

I am not sure what has happened since the fall to make such a big difference.   Certainly in the plan presented there is a huge gap between revenues and expenses.    Most of this seems to come from BC Transit projecting large increase in costs in each of the coming years, 8.5%, 7.6% and 4.5%.   At the same they are projected very slow growth in revenues, 2%, 2% and 1.2% in the coming years.

This means an accumulated deficit of over $33 million over the next three years.   In 2013/14 the shortfall is projected to be 15.7% or $15.6 million.  

There are three options for how this gap can be closed:

• Higher fares
• Less service
• Higher property taxes

I am not a fan of any one of those three.  If passenger revenues are to remain at about 35% of the total revenues, BC Transit needs to raise the fares by 15% over the next three years.   To do this you would have to raise the standard fare to $2.88 - call it $3.   Youth/senior fares to $1.90 - call it $2.00.

The biggest way the gap can be closed is through higher property taxes.   Even with the projected 32% increase in transit property taxes and increased fares, there is still as shortfall in 2013/14 in the order of $4 million.

BC Transit has suggested a reduction of 10,000 hours of service as a way to save more money, but the dollar amount is not dramatically high.



The 32% increase being talked about in the media is only dealing with next year, it is not addressing the problem of 2013/14.   There is a bigger gap projected with nothing in place for how to deal with it.

I do not have access to the full financial picture of the Greater Victoria Transit Commission, but outwardly there seems to be something odd to see the operational costs rising so much for the next couple of years.   The projection for next year is 3 times the rate of inflation and this is without any increase in service.   As I said, I am not privy to the details, but something seems wrong that the costs are rising so much in the next three years.

There but for the Grace of God

This building is in Christchurch, but
it is very similar to many Victoria buildings

Christchurch was hit today by a second large earthquake in less than six months.   The city is very similar to Victoria in size and in style of buildings.

I have looked for some pictures from today's earthquake to show how close the two cities look and feel.   Some of the building facades could be somewhere in Old Town.

The first earthquake was bad but did not devastate the city.   There were no deaths though some buildings were destroyed.   The city was spared because the 7.1 magnitude quake was some distance from the city.   The total estimated cost of that earthquake was around $3 billion (Canadian now Kiwi dollars)

This is the probable fate of buses in Victoria's Old Town

Today at just before 1 pm New Zealand time there was a second quake.  It was weaker than the first but closer to Christchurch.   It was also in the middle of the work day.   This time the city saw a lot more damage and there have been a fair number of deaths, 65 is the number quoted in the media though only 32 are confirmed at the moment but some reports are talking of several hundred possible deaths.

For Victoria this earthquake has to be a wake up call.   Are we ready for an earthquake?  Could we really cope?

It is highly probable that we will experience a major earthquake in Victoria within the next generation or two.  We last had a major earthquake on the island in the 1940s and in the region in 2001.

There has has been a lot of work locally to try and get us all prepared for when the earthquake happens but I am not certain most people have taken it to heart.   I know there are many sets of emergency supplies around the city in shipping containers, most of them on school grounds.   I have a rough idea of what I have in my house but I have not gone through it specifically to ensure it is quake proofed as much as I can and I do not have an emergency kit made up.

There is a source online of mapping done by the provincial government that assessed the relative risk of damage in an earthquake.   My home is located in an area of the lowest risk in the region.  Much of Old Town is located in a high risk area for amplification of the shaking.

 I look at the pictures of Christchurch and see damage to a lot buildings that are very similar to what we have here in Victoria.   The more I think about it, the more I would not want to have an office in Old Town, the risk is too high of the buildings collapsing.  

Meeting to discuss amalgamation tonight at 7 pm

The location is 2915 Douglas Street in the meeting room off of LiquorPlus.

Please drop by if you are interested.

The goal tonight will be to form a steering committee and find champions for various specific issue areas such as transportation, policing, homelessness, planning and more.

I would write more but I have a bad cold thing with a wicked headache, I am taking lots of drugs so I can chair the meeting tonight

New park space in Burnside Gorge

The City is leasing a space from the United Church located on Balfour Street

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The location is a single lot that connects the Chown Place United Church seniors development with Balfour Street.   It will be nice to have this vacant lot become a play space for kids, though it will encourage more people to walk through Chown Place to get there.  What should be noted is that there is an existing kids playground park only 600 metres away on Davin.   There is second one that is 450 metres away as the crow flies, 850 metres on the streets, on Cecelia.

I have not heard if this is intended as a replacement for the lost park land on Ellice.   I am still hoping for a connection from Maddock Street to the Galloping Goose as this would attract a very high degree of use and would mean the existing kids park on Cecelia would get a lot more use.  Getting that connection would allow people to walk there without having to be in Burnside or Gorge and would save several hundred metres in distance.

The play park on Cecelia is dramatically under used because of the lack of decent walking access.  

The lack of a walkable route through to the Galloping Goose means that the Burnside Gorge Community Centre is under used.   For the amount of funding the community centre gets, and all the money spent on the building, it does a very bad job of being relevant to the community.   Frankly there should be serious consideration given to closing the community centre and focusing closer to the heart of the community and in a location accessible by the general public.   In an ideal world it would be connected to Tillicum school.

Light Rail - again

Greater Victoria Transit is doing well at the moment.   We use transit 38% more per capita than comparable communities in Canada.   Our cost of operation per service hour is 7% lower than the Canadian average and 21% less than the US average.  This means our cost per passenger trip is much better than the average in the US or Canada.

The best average estimate for the operation of a light rail system in North America is $240 per service hour.  This is 2.6 times as much as it costs per service hour of buses in Victoria.

For LRT to make sense when compared to buses we would need to move 85 passengers per service hour on the LRT.   If we have 15 minute headway on the LRT, two cars per train and a half an hour trip time.  You need to have 8 railcars operating in any given hour to achieve that schedule.   Operating for 12 hours a day means 35,000 service hours per year and an annual ridership of around 3,000,000 to achieve operating costs comparable to buses.  This is 8200 passengers per day 365 days a year or 4100 return trips.   

If one assumes that passenger volumes on weekends and holidays is 45% of a normal day, this means a normal weekday needs to move 10,000 people, 5000 roundtrips.  

Currently there are about 7800 total passenger boardings on buses running from the Westshore to downtown of which roughly 7000 are unique passenger trips.  This is done in about 43,000 weekday service hours per year for a cost of just under $4,000,000.  The current number of passengers per year is 2,100,000.

The current level of traffic is at about 70% of the volume needed to make the LRT comparable to buses on the same route.   At a 70% traffic volume, there is a $2.5 million shortfall.   Given the shorter day I am projecting for the LRT and the fewer departures - 48 LRT trips versus 89 bus trips per day - it is optimistic to assume 7000 passenger boardings per weekday can be achieved.   

If we assume there will still be 18 bus trips per day during the evening hours, this would be about 500 passenger boardings and leaving us at 6500 weekday daily boardings on the LRT and a short fall of $2.6  million.

If one could achieve a 10% increase in transit use right away, optimistic but possible, we are looking at a shortfall of only $2.5 million.   If we then see an ten year rise of another 25% due to growth on the Westshore and people choosing transit, we are at 8750 weekday boardings and still $1,000,000 more expensive per year than using buses.   This is an accumulated $17.5 million extra in costs over ten years.

To achieve a savings of $2 million in a given year, there would have to be the loss of 60 service hours of buses per day, something in the order of a 3% reduction in daily bus service.

UVic really should be the focus of transit in this region.  It is a daily destination for 25,000 people of which a very high percentage do not own cars.   The passenger boardings are also more spread out through the whole day which is much more ideal for an LRT.   A line from UVic along Mackenzie to Uptown and then downtown from there would attract about 11,000 boardings per day right from the start on a scope and scale of a Westshore service though it could be more frequent because of the shorter length and provide 60 trips in a 12 hour day instead of 48.

A line from UVic to downtown would also be cheaper to build, $300,000,000 versus $450,000,000 for a line to Langford.  The interest alone on the extra $150,000,000 would costs us $5,000,000 to $8,000,000 per year more.

Gorge Waterway with very high water

I was driving to pick up Ben at 11 am this morning and I was amazed at how high the tide was in the Gorge I am going to figure out the best time to see the falls this week.

Uptown Centre

Intersection of Oak and Saanich

Current state of concrete in the new section

I have not been at the new Uptown Centre in some time, there is honestly very little there for me any longer, I find the WalMart less useful than before.   I dropped in there today because I needed to buy some new cheap casual shoes and WalMart does that well.

I like the styling of a lot of the buildings but I remain completely unimpressed with the traffic flows for cars and people.  I can not see how they are going to avoid perpetual gridlock on the surface streets.   This being Victoria, few people are going to park underground.

I like what I am seeing for landscaping on the southeast corner of the development, it may actually be pretty.   The southwest corner remains monolithic.

The "Grand Staircase"

Looking at the WalMart Plaza

The Craigflower Bridge

So the word is out that the Craigflower Bridge is coming to the end of its life.   The bridge was built in 1933 and certainly is showing some age.   The current estimates of a repair job would only give the bridge another 15 years.

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Looking at the bridge, it is narrow for the sort of current traffic using it and the sidewalks are not adequate for what they are used for.   This is hardly a safe bridge to cycle over.

A new bridge is estimated to cost in the range of $10 million.   This being a very early estimate, it should be taken with a grain of salt.   I suspect $15 to $20 million is much more likely what the final cost will be for the bridge.   Keep in mind there is no design to work from and no real details on the work needed to be done on the approaches.   If we assume this is a Class D estimate, then the number we are looking at is only indicating the order of magnitude of the project and nothing that one could budget with at this time.

Personally I would love to see a four lane bridge in this location with Admirals being four lanes all the way through to Hwy #1, but given the current mood in greater Victoria, I do not see that happening.  I expect the replacement will be the same capacity as the current bridge.  

There is also a problem on the Saanich side with expanding the road because of the location of the Craigflower school and the old Craigflower schoolhouse that already is too close to the edge of the road

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I would love to see any new bridge include some fishing stations on it.   The Craigflower bridge is a popular location for people to fish from, we should accommodate that activity.

Interestingly Saanich is referring to this as a regional project and one that needs federal gas tax funding.   Given that no one came to the table for the Johnson Street Bridge, based on traffic a much more important regional bridge, why should anyone come to the table for this bridge?

Since I am in the neighbourhood, Saanich should do more to encourage swimming and boating from Craigflower Park.    Given that this location has some of the cleanest water around, it would be nice if there was a formal swimming area with a float anchored in the water.   Our kids need to get out of the pools and and swim in real water.

Panama Flats purchased by Saanich

The property has been sold by Island Berry Farm to Saanich for $910,000 and two small properties that can be developed for housing.   Drained it is good land for farming, but I suspect this is land that Saanich should have purchased it decades ago to deal with the water management issue.  It is good to see that is has happened now.

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The property has a very important role as a floodplain in the winter months and it is the right thing to do for Saanich to buy the property.   For far too long the municipality offloaded their responsibility and costs for flood control onto the farmers.   Farms are not there to provide flood control, they are there to be farmed.

The decision to develop the property for berries that brought the issue to a head.  The owner was building berms to protect the fields from flooding and Saanich was not amused and even took him to court.  The courts quite rightly sided with the farmer.

Panama flats has not been in long term food production.   The area was purchased by Geoff Vantreight in 1978 - 44 acres from a private landholder and 20 acres from Saanich.   Vantreight purchased the land so that he could grow potatoes.   The golden nematode in Central Saanich precludes growing potatoes there.  Through the 1980s the Vantreights grew about 1200 tons of potatoes on this land each year, which were all consumed locally.

Panama Flats was not good land for growing as long as it was not drained.  Saanich had zoned it for farming and the land was within the ALR, but becuase of the swamp like nature of the land, no one had farmed it before.  To deal with this the Vantreights set up a drainage system, but did so a bit quickly and ended up dominating Victoria news in late 1978 because the work was done before there was approval for it.   Ultimately the work was allowed by Saanich and 1979 saw the first potato crop.

When Geoff Vantreight died, this was one of the properties of the farm that was sold.  That would have been a very good moment for Saanich to buy for less than they are paying now.  It would also have saved Saanich all the money they spent on legal fees dealing with the dispute.

Saanich is considering what could be done with the land, I suspect the best option would be to back off of farming on most of the land and restore most of it to being a wetland.   There are areas on the western edge that might be OK for farming, but the area would be too small to be economically viable.   The tenure would be a lease which means only one of the significant farms in the region could take it on s they have the equipment needed to farm.   Something smaller than 25 acres is unlikely to be worth the hassle of running your equipment all the way to Panama Flats.

Another option under consideration is allotment gardens.   I suspect that is the best choice for land that is to remain in some form of production.

Please help if you can

I am involved as Scout leader with 3rd Douglas Scouts - we meet at 505 Marigold.


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Running the outdoors program for youth in Scouting takes a bunch fundraising. The youth have some sailing courses, first aid courses and a Provincial Jamboree coming up.

On Saturday from 9 am till 2 pm we will be having a bottle drive - if you can, please drop off any bottles you have at 505 Marigold.   When you do so, you will be able to see the youth working hard on the fundraising so that they can take part in all the activities.

Stanhope Farm

Once again people that have chosen to live next to agricultural land are upset that a farmer is farming.   The Stanhope Farm is developing a new compost facility and neighbours are upset that there are trucks coming in during the construction.

What made me pay attention was the rant this morning by Burton Cummings on CBC Radio 1's morning program On the Island.  He seems upset at the trucks going to the farm - how does he propose they get the material to the farm if not by the roads?   Complain to Central Saanich for not making the road adequate for the needs, do not crap on the farm.   He was also ranting about composting on a farm - seriously????   Farms have always composted, he chose to live close to farms, did he think all the farms would disappear and be replaced by rock star mansions?


ALR land is there to keep farming alive, it is not intended to make a bucolic landscape for public enjoyment.   Agriculture is an industry and it includes smelly and noisy practices.    The quid pro quo with the ALR is that farmers will then not be hindered from farming.   For farms to survive, they have to be able to make enough money to be viable.

Composting is a good idea, it means less fertilizer and water will be used by the farm.  It also means that less waste material needs to find a home in this region.   This one of the more important environmentally positive projects in this region.

People are concerned that the farm may sell some compost, the farmer says he is not going to sell any.   The rules are clear cut, he is not allowed to sell it, not that the rules are being enforced.   If you drive around peninsula you can see numerous people selling bags of manure - no one is cracking down on them.

So what would be the downside of compost being sold by the farm?  None that I can see other than the people living next door may see more composting going on.   If they do not like composting, imagine the smell or liquid manure being spread on the fields or the sound of propane cannons.   Farmers on the peninsula have long gone out of their way to be good neighbours and farm in ways that are not intrusive, not that they credit for this.

Either we are serious in this region about having agriculture and people quit complaining about farming or we admit that farming is not acceptable in the CRD and local food is unimportant to us.    It is not fun for a farmer to made to feel like a pariah when they are simply doing normal farming.   This added stress to the farmer is a cruel joke on them.

The biggest threat to farm land in our area comes from people buying 5 to 20 acres lots and building mansions on them.   North Saanich has had the biggest loss of productive farm land to residential use of anywhere on the south island.  It is then the height of hubris to have people that have build their houses on ALR land to complain about people farming.

I have no sympathy for people that buy a house near farms and then get upset when the land is farmed.

So how crazy are our municipal boundaries?

This is the street I live on, one side is Saanich and the other is Victoria.  

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There is nothing to differentiate one side of the street from the other, we are all neighbours.  We use the same stores, walk on the same streets, and go to the same rec centre.  I am a short distance from my neighbour, but I have different police force, a different fire service, different bylaws and different planning.

There are numerous examples of neighbourhoods that are divided by municipal boundaries in this region.  In total there are more than 82 kilometers of boundaries between local governments in the CRD.   If you look at the border areas of municipalities, the area within 250 meters of a a neighbouring municipality, there are 41,000 hectares of land in this region that is on the border of a neighboring municipality.   This is an area as large as Langford or Central Saanich.

Border areas of all local governments are treated as being on the edge and a major impact of this is that planning.  Local governments draw up their plans as if the border is the end of the world and is not the core or focus of the municipality.   This means that we have lower quality planning in an area that is more than four times the size of Oak Bay.

Any planning done for my neighbourhood should be done as if their were no municipal boundary at all.  Instead the planning is done as if the world ends at the border - you could almost put "Here be dragons" on the white spaces at the edges of our local government planning maps.

And if this is not bad enough, imagine living in a house that falls into to two municipalities.    You have two sets of by-laws, two planning department, two fire departments and more.   And the really wild thing is that you may live in two municipalities, but you are not allowed to vote in both.     There may not be many properties like this, but the very fact that there are any simply highlights the fundamentally screwy way the boundaries are drawn in this region.


View Larger Map - the house on the left is in Oak Bay and Victoria

If not amalgamation, how about just make sure that all municipal boundaries follow some sort of natural border?

Next Meeting on Amalgamation

On Monday February 21st at 7 pm there will be the next meeting in this group of citizens interested in advancing the issue of amalgamation of local governments in this region.

If you are interested in coming, please email me at bernard@shama.ca

Bus Stops

Why does BC Transit not have a bus schedule at each bus stop?   And why does it not have this is on a large and easy to read board?   The current small plastic spin things are hard to read and all look old and run down.  Easier to read schedules will mean more casual users.   Nicer looking signs will also make existing users feel better about the whole system.

Ideally BC Transit should have electronic bulletin boards at major bus stops letting people know exactly how long till the next bus.  This innovation would also increase the number of people taking buses.   It would also reduce frustration many people feel when trying to take a bus in this city.   Too often you go out to a bus stop when the bus supposed to be there and it was either early or it is late.   It would be nice to know how long the wait is.

BC Transit should also actively improve the bus shelters.   They need more shelters and in many areas they need much larger ones.    Rainy days are a disincentive to bus use at the moment.   They also need to have an ongoing program to make sure they are spotlessly clean - ideally there should be a hotline people can call to report less than clean bus shelters.

It is small things like this that will improve the public image of buses and will pull more people onto transit.

Oak Bay Gordon Head Recall fails

The organizers have announced that they will not achieve their goal of 15,368 signatures.  They have said they managed to get half that number , a total of 8818 signatures.

This result is quite a failure as there were 11,316 people that voted for the NDP in the riding in 2009 and they ended about 2500 signatures short of this.  Even more surprising is that the recall campaign could not even reach the same number of signatures submitted during the Anti-HST petition process which was 8997, though only 7266 were verified.

What is most interesting is that the campaign did manage to collect half their signatures in the first two weeks, this is even more front loaded than I thought the process would be.   The 25 days seem to only have brought in another 1800 signatures, less than either of the first two weeks.

Elkington Forest - an interesting marketing campaign

The Elkington Forest project is off of the Malahat and looks like an attempt to sell a new greenfield suburban development as a something new and different.  I am not at all convinced that their idea is good one and it certainly is not a sustainable one.

In February they will be offering tours of the site and I may go there this weekend for a tour.

The project is on a 1000 acre property with most of it being left in some form of wilderness, though they speak of agroforesty being done on site.  What is meant by agroforestry on this site I have no idea.   With  an mean annual increase of 3 cubic metres of timber per hectare, the property has a theoretical annual allowable cut of around 1000 cubic metres, though the plans are from a harvest of around 140 to 150 cubic metres of wood a year, about four logging truck loads.  As far as I can tell from everything I can see, the property is second or third growth timber, on the site they say most of the land was logged in 1928.

The project calls for only 77 houses, all located on the southeast corner of the property, interestingly they have chosen to put the houses on the part of the property they harvested.   This is not a lot of houses for a development and will mean there will never be many people in the area.    I have doubts that the project will house more than 150 to 200 people.   It is clearly a community aimed at people between 45 and 65 with their kids out of the house, an early retirement community in some ways.

A typical lot on the site is large. very large, about 1/3 of an acre of which about 7000 to 8000 square feet is available to be built on and developed, the rest is in a protective conventions.   This means the buildable area is larger than a typical lot in the City of Victoria.

A sustainable community would have a mix of people from different socio-economic classes, the prices of the houses in this development do not allow for anyone to come at the entry level.  The bottom end of the market is $475,000 for a 1150 square foot house  - in Kettle Creek Station you can get into a similar house for $85,000 less.   The top end of the market is $700,000 with a house of 2500 square feet.  

The project lies about 13 kilometres from the nearest shopping, which is the big box stores in Langford.  Mill Bay and Shawnigan Lake are about 20 kilometres away.   It is a long drive to buy a litre of milk and some bread.    It is an even longer drive to get to work.   The people living in this community will own an average of one car per adult over the age of 16 in the household.   You will have to have a car to be able to live in this community.

In looking around the area, this project is the furthest intrusion into the forests of any development in the Malahat area.   The south Shawnigan Lake area is extending southwards, but it has not gone this far.

All that said, the developers have done a good job of selling this project as a sustainable and livable community, even though it is neither of those.

Rail crossing as part of the Johnson Street Bridge

The Johnson Street replacement project is already a very expensive project, the biggest capital project in the history of the City of Victoria.   Adding a rail crossing as well does not make sense for residents of the City of Victoria.

My friends over at johnsonstreetbridge.org are arguing for a rail bridge to be built, I can not agree with them on this.

The existing E&N line has way too many problems for it to be make sense for transit use.  As I have noted in the past, the terminus is not a useful spot, the line has too many level crossings, the right of way is too narrow, and there is not the scale of demand for transit to make it close to as cost effective as buses.

The obsession with rail transit in this region is reaching seriously delusional levels.   There are still no business cases to indicate that any form of rail transit in any part of this region is a reasonable use of transit resources.    The cost of rail transit will be huge, really huge.

Back to the bridge, since it is those of us who are taxpayers that are expected to pay for it there has to be some indication of a benefit.   As far as I can see use by people in the City of Victoria would be almost nil.   In fact if it is used for transit, it would mean bus services being cut for people in the City of Victoria to pay for the very large operating costs of rail, there are numerous examples in the US of transit systems that have cut bus services to manage the operating costs of rail lines.

The rail line has been available over the bridge for decades and decades but there has been no move by the public to make use of the trains.   It is a piece of infrastructure that no one wants to use.   If there were say a list of 30,000 commuters from the Westshore that committed to use rail and signed a commitment to pay for it through an obligation to buy transit passes for several years, that would be an indication of support on the ground for the idea.

This point is very, very important.   There is no indication of large numbers of people currently driving to work now that would change to rail transit.   Virtually no one is coming forward and saying they want to stop driving their car and get on a train.   People all over the region are saying "if you build it, they will come".  That is not the experience of cities in North America.

If the rail line is important for Langford and Colwood, let them pay for the rail bridge.   They choose not to amalgamate with the City of Victoria which means the the City of Victoria should not be building infrastructure for their needs when it has much more important infrastructure needs within the City.   Langford can afford to make Goldstream Avenue beautiful, it could afford to build the rail bridge.

The argument is that rail travel is much greener than cars or buses, but this only works when the trains are full and the line is used a lot, neither of which could happen in this region.   There simply are not enough people living on the Westshore to fill the trains.  

A much more effective way for the City of Victoria to improve the general environment would be to increase the density within the city.   Allow more condo and apartment buildings.   Allow buildings much smaller set backups so more can be built.   Allow almost all subdivisions of residential lots and in fact give people a tax holiday if they subdivide.  Allow more home based businesses.   Set a goal of having the City of Victoria grow by 3,000 people per year, effectively taking all the population growth for the region.

Also, why would we be trying to keep this rail bridge when it is not slated to be part of the transit system?   The BC Transit rapid transit project has chosen a route and it is along Douglas Street.    There is no possible justification to keep the E&N line when there is a different rapid transit line being developed.

It would be a financially stupid decision for the City of Victoria council to agree to pay for the rail bridge, my hope is that financial reason prevails on Friday when they decide on this.