Figures released by TransLink today show average weekday ridership exceeded 104,000 for three months in a row.  In May, an average 104,682 people rode the Canada Line every Monday through Friday.  In June, it hit 106,320 per day and July’s total was 107,198.  Daily averages (for all seven days a week) were 94,223, 97,969 and 99,210 for the same three months.

Original ridership projections forecast that the line would reach an average 100,000 passengers every day, including weekends, by 2013.  According to TransLink’s CEO Ian Jarvis, should this strong ridership trend continue we will easily beat the targets set when the line was approved the annual breakeven point will be reached earlier than 2025 as originally projected. The business case for the Canada line assumed that the additional system revenues it generated plus the savings from bus runs that it replaced would cover the operating and TransLink capital contribution over the 30 year agreement. .

I had a hard time keeping track of what was actually happening, but it appears from this morning’s announcement as though things really are moving along in that direction. News releases not my preferred mode of communication, but I know the transit junkies will love this.

TransLink selects companies to propose Smart Card / Faregate
system for transit

Three consortia that supply smart card electronic fare payment systems and faregates to some of the biggest transit operations in the world have qualified to submit proposals to supply a Smart Card and Faregate system for TransLink, to be in operation by the target date of first quarter of 2013. The three groups are:

Thales/Octopus International Projects – creator of the ‘Octopus Card’ used on Hong Kong’s transit service and supplier of similar systems in the Netherlands, Norway and Dubai.

Serco/Parkeon – who introduced a complete smart card program for Perth, Australia and have provided related systems to transit operations in Belgium, England and Dubai, as well as to the French national rail system, SNCF.

Cubic/IBM – whose systems include London’s ‘Oyster Card’ and systems for US transit agencies in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami-Dade, San Francisco plus Brisbane in Australia.

The three groups were among 10 that responded to TransLink’s ‘Request for Qualifications,’ a process that identifies suppliers with the technology and the track record to provide the systems and services needed.  The next stage in the process will launch in June when these groups will be asked to develop formal proposals based on TransLink’s specific requirements.

The proposals received will be evaluated against qualifications, technical and financial criteria to identify the most cost and technically effective system for TransLink.  A contract, that will include operations and maintenance of the system for 10 years, could be awarded later this year with work beginning in 2011.

Funding for the Smart Card / Faregate project includes $40 million from the provincial government and $30 million from the federal government’s Build Canada Fund.  TransLink will cover the remaining costs.

TransLink CEO Ian Jarvis says, “Smart Cards will make our transit system easier to use for the customers and provide invaluable information that will help us maximize the efficiency and productivity of our fleets.  Faregates will address the public’s long-standing concern with fare evasion on SkyTrain and will promote a greater sense of security,” he says.

TransLink’s smart card will be modeled after electronic fare payment systems in use around the world.  Transit customers use a card with an electronic chip that they ‘load’ with funds to pay for their transit trips.  In many of the world’s leading systems, customers tap their cards on special readers when they enter a transit vehicle or station and some systems also have customers ‘tag-off’ as they exit.  The fare charged to their card can be based on the distance they travel, the time of day, the specific route or other factors.

In fact, smart cards will give TransLink more flexibility to structure the transit fare system to achieve a number of goals including increases in efficiency and ridership.  In addition, smart cards generate a significant amount of valuable data on how customers use the transit network – information that TransLink will use to refine routes and schedules, or even to help determine the size of the buses needed at various places and times.

The introduction of an electronic fare payment system provides the opportunity to install Faregates in SkyTrain and SeaBus stations.  Adding a gate or barrier to a Smart Card process is relatively simple and, in fact, the two systems complement each other.  However, because most of the original Expo Line SkyTrain stations were never designed with the necessary space for Faregates, the overall project includes station modifications that will begin next year.

CEO Ian Jarvis says it was particularly gratifying to have all of the world leaders in Smart Card and Faregate technology express interest in putting TransLink’s new system in place.  He adds, “We’re especially grateful to yet again have the financial support of the provincial government and the federal government in a project that will contribute so much to our ongoing drive to deliver efficiency, effectiveness and greater customer benefits.”

Transit numbers after the Games:

You came, you rode, you kept riding

While TransLink earned worldwide applause for its performance as part of the Transportation Plan during the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, one question lingered: would that momentum translate into increased use of public transportation options once the Games were over?

Newly released statistics suggest the answer is ‘Yes’.

Revenue ridership during the month of January rose a respectable 3.1% from January 2009, and then in February, Games Time usage pushed that figure to nearly 22.9 million — almost 51% higher than the previous February.  Then in March, ridership hit 18 million, an increase of 19.3% over March 2009.  Some of the increase was due to the additional riders attracted to the Canada Line before and during the Olympics.  The newest SkyTrain line carried 2.49 million riders in March (not counting those transferring from South of the Fraser bus routes, which had formerly travelled into downtown Vancouver).  A sizeable amount of the remainder also likely reflects people who made the switch to other parts of the transit system during the Olympics and, finding that it worked well for them, stayed on after the Games.

“It was important for the future of Metro Vancouver that we do more than move enormous numbers of people during the Olympics.  It was important that local residents see what their transportation system could do,” says TransLink CEO Ian Jarvis.  ”Many found out that there are alternatives beyond driving alone in a vehicle; there’s walking, cycling, ridesharing and especially, that our integrated transit system is a surprisingly viable option.”

Levels of transit service have been growing steadily in Metro Vancouver over the past five years, reaching its current level – the highest ever – at the end of 2009.  TransLink’s current budget enables the Authority to maintain that number of service hours; the integrated system is able to handle these increased loads with the capacity added last year and flexibility.  The Service Rationalization Initiative currently underway over the next 18 months will identify ways of further optimizing TransLink’s resources, system-wide.

Maintaining ridership after the Olympics, coupled with the highly successful TravelSmart program, are key factors in achieving the region’s goal of increasing the share of trips by walking, cycling and transit to more than 50% of all trips by 2030.

MEETING NUMBER ONE: VPD PUBLIC FORUM
 
The Vancouver Police Department is inviting the public and the media
 to an open community forum to explain and discuss the VPD’s planned move this fall
 to the Vanoc building at 3585 Graveley.
 
 
Hastings Community Centre
3096 East Hastings Street
 
Thursday, May 13th
6:30 p.m.
 
 
The public’s participation is welcome and encouraged

MEETING NUMBER TWO: TRANSLINK AGM

TransLink will hold its Annual General Meeting Tuesday, May 11, aboard the MV Burrard Pacific Breeze.
 
The ferry will leave from Waterfront Station at 10am and sail around Vancouver Harbour until 12 Noon, calling in briefly at Lonsdale Quay at 10:50am to pick up the featured guest speaker, Mr John Furlong, the CEO of VANOC.
 
This meeting is open to media and the public; however, due to space limitations, those who wish to attend should arrive by 9:30am to avoid disappointment. 
 
If there are enough people who miss the meeting and still wish to receive handout materials and take a short trip on the newest ferry in the SeaBus fleet, the Pacific Breeze will make an additional sailing from Waterfront at 12:20pm, returning at 12:35. 
 
We look forward to seeing you there!

Here’s my Globe story today, which has a bit more reaction and commentary from various observers and TransLink’s new planning guy, Mike Shiffer, the public point man on this.

TransLink held its first quiet stakeholders’ meeting Thursday to introduce the tentative six options for Broadway rapid transit. As people kept reminding me, these aren’t fixed in stone. The idea is to put preliminary ideas out there to get public feedback and weigh the pros and cons of each, as well as possibly making changes.

The public meetings will be starting soon (check the TransLink website for dates and times to be put up imminently, I’m told).

There are a certain amount of policy talk, but boiled down to the essentials, TransLink has promised to do a “multipe account evaluation,” which means they’ll score each possibility in several different categories: environmental, financial, social/community, deliverability, transportation goals (i.e. which would catch the most riders), and urban-development matching (which would mesh with existing development nodes).

Now, drum rolllllll, here they are:

1. A bus rapid transit route (BRT) that would essentially follow the existing 99-B route, though with many more mechanisms (priority lights and so on) to make it a real rapid bus

2. Light rapid transit 1, which would also essentially follow the existing 99-B route, though there are two options to consider at the eastern end when it comes to how to hook into the existing system (go along Broadway or dip down to Great Northern Way to meet that orphaned VCC station just west of Clark, built back when city council was convinced the flats were going to explode into a high-tech cauldron of invention)

3. Light rapid transit 2. Same thing, but with a branch that would use the Arbutus tracks from Broadway over to Science World

4. Rail transit. Something like SkyTrain. I presume. Also on the B-line route, but would have to be fenced or separated in some way from the street in the way that LRT doesn’t.

5. Rail transit on Broadway, with the LRT branch on the Arbutus line, same as #3.

6. And finally, last but not least, the “best bus alternative” — a look at what TransLink could do to provide the best possible transit service using only buses (but which is somehow different from bus rapid transit in #1). This will give everyone the lowest-cost comparator to measure all the other options against.

I didn’t get to stay and hear how the different stakeholder groups (city staff, business groups and resident groups were thee, from what I could see) reacted to all of these, so I’m dying to hear what the preliminary reaction is.

By the way, in case you’re wondering when this will all come about, don’t hold your breath. TransLink planner Mike Shiffer wouldn’t even hazard a guess as to a date for me, since, as he rightly pointed out, it’s hard to set dates when you don’t have any kind of funding mechanism defined yet.

It’s difficult to imagine what is getting cooked up in Victoria, given how many options the province has already rejected, so people have taken to guessing and worrying. Here’s the latest chapter in what appears to be the never-ending TransLink drama.

These days, that feeling is running high because of the continuing stand-off over who’s going to pay for the Evergreen Line in the region’s northeast sector. (I have to say, sometimes it makes me long for the days when the provincial government would just unilaterally pay for everything. Sure, they made all the decisions and not always in the best interests of the city. But we didn’t have to hear this back and forth about whose little pile of tax money should be depleted more to pay for these things.)

It’s taken me a while, but I think I’m finally beginning to grasp what the essential disagreement is: who is going to stick it to which taxpayers. (Here’s my MSM version of all this.)

Yes, all the money eventually comes from taxpayers in one way or another. But the local mayors are worried about hiking taxes throughout the region only to pay for the Evergreen Line, which will not be a pretty thing to explain in Delta or West Vancouver. (At least Burnaby, Vancouver and Richmond won’t gripe too much because they’ve had massive spending on transit in their areas.)

So they’d rather see the province put in the missintg $400 million or get it from something besides property taxes, which always creates ill will at the voting booth.

And the province doesn’t want to put in more than the $400 million it already has, because it’s not a pretty thing to explain in Nanaimo or Kamloops or Prince George that all your capital money went into transit projects for latte-swilling urbanites.

So each side is trying to make the case for why the other group should pay. Mayors would like it to be either everyone in the province or, at least, drivers in the Lower Mainland (through road tolls and vehicle levies) — which, in the latter case, is not the same as property-owning, tax-paying, voting residents. The province would like Lower Mainland residents to pay, which is why Transportation Minister Shirley Bond is sounding feistier with every interview and why she’s trotting out more arguments every time I talk to her about the low taxes that people in Metro Van pay.

The province is supposed to be making some kind of announcement by the end of the month. What I’ll be waiting to hear is — will it be something that will really resolve the issue of mega-transit-project funding forever? Or can we look forward to another five-year squabble over who pays for the Millennium Line extension in Vancouver as soon as the five-year squabble over the Evergreen Line ends.