inane Posted March 7, 2013 Share Posted March 7, 2013 Your argument that we have no money and can't afford anything is ridiculous. Until you toll all the major roads, your point makes no sense. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronthecivil Posted March 7, 2013 Share Posted March 7, 2013 Tax payers can't afford all these new roads! Who is going to maintain them? And again, you completely ignore the social, environmental and health benefits of transit. That has economic value no matter how much you want to pretend this is nothing but direct $$. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronthecivil Posted March 7, 2013 Share Posted March 7, 2013 Your argument that we have no money and can't afford anything is ridiculous. Until you toll all the major roads, your point makes no sense. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inane Posted March 7, 2013 Share Posted March 7, 2013 Nobody is maintaining the roads. Hence bridges falling down all over North America (and right here in home with the Putella section randomly dropping out). If the direct dollars don't work out it doesn't matter what other benefits they have. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inane Posted March 7, 2013 Share Posted March 7, 2013 Your argument that we have no money to afford roads is ridiculous. Until you require every bus and sky train service to work on a for profit basis and direct all the transit subsidies back to road maintenance your point makes no sense. See how inane it is to suggest politically suicidal ideas that would never be taken seriously by even the most ardent of dictators? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronthecivil Posted March 7, 2013 Share Posted March 7, 2013 Dictators, now you're sounding really rational... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inane Posted March 7, 2013 Share Posted March 7, 2013 My point is that the ideas presented are so far from being politically viable that no government would implement them due to risk of public backlash. Even a dictatorial one..... Let alone the democratic one we live under. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronthecivil Posted March 7, 2013 Share Posted March 7, 2013 Sure sure. Raising taxes or finding a funding mechanism to pay for transit is just so wild it has never been done, anywhere. It's crazy talk. Just crazy. I mean the fact that we have a carbon tax, or bike lanes downtown, or the ALR, or all these things that people said would be political suicide is irrelevant, this time it's just crazy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronthecivil Posted March 7, 2013 Share Posted March 7, 2013 So we have a problem with the fact that we don't have money to maintain the roads we have (not talking about bridges you can toll), so the solution is to build more roads so we have more to maintain. That makes sense. Ron, when you purchase something, do you base that purchase 100% on the direct cost of that thing, ignoring all the additional benefits it brings you? Or do you factor those things in. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inane Posted March 7, 2013 Share Posted March 7, 2013 Do you ever listen to what people have to say about translink and it's funding ideas? Do you think it's a co-incidence that every politician wants to point the finger at another when it comes up with funding ideas? This all started with you idea of tolling ALL the roads. Road pricing. That would be far too extreme. Congestion pricing for downtown? Maybe. Putting tolls on fraser crossings that are the books to be upgraded/replaced anyways? Maybe. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inane Posted March 7, 2013 Share Posted March 7, 2013 Unless it has a good possibility of return on investment via dividend income or capital growth it's probably not going to look very good on my biweekly graph of debt, savings, investments, and net worth..... So ya.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
silverpig Posted March 7, 2013 Share Posted March 7, 2013 The government of course. Drivers will say that the gas taxes they pay more than covers all the provincial roads. Municipal governments have no choice but to cover the cost of their own road maintenance and construction. Translink on the other hand requires subsidies in the forms of gas taxes, property taxes, and a host of other things just to keep the status quo. Expansion, even if you get money from the heavens for capital costs, requires greater amounts of subsidy. In fact over the years the provincial and federal goverment have stept in several times with billions of dollars to build the Canada line, the Millenium line, and the soon to exist Evergreen line. But the thing is that every time they put in an expansion you need more subsidies to keep things going. Ergo the never stopping requests for a greater and greater share of the tax pie. Right or wrong, people aren't going to take any arguments to further that adgenda, no matter how much you reason, belittle, shout it out, cry, plead, bargain, nothing will do it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aGENT Posted March 7, 2013 Share Posted March 7, 2013 I never use the Canada Line. Maybe they should get rid of it. Because I never use it. Who the hell cares if you use it or not when 30,000 other people will be using it daily to go to UBC. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aGENT Posted March 7, 2013 Share Posted March 7, 2013 That's because people keep wanting more highly subsidized service out to the suburbs. "Extend skytrain to Langley!" "Put B-Lines down King George!" "More buses in White Rock!" Those areas have some of the highest subsidy rates per route in all of Translink. A few lines come close to breaking even, and those are on Fraser, Main, and Broadway in Vancouver. Transit works well where density is high, but people want to live with a house and a yard and 2 cars and a skytrain station across the street and a bus that will take them wherever they want to go. To get Translink the the point where it can pay for itself, they need to densify and add more lines closer together. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inane Posted March 7, 2013 Share Posted March 7, 2013 Not sure why it is up to me to come up with an alternative...? This is a we problem. If we agree that transit is a good thing, then we have to find a way to fund it. Just like we find a way to fund all sorts of things that we think are important. This is a much bigger picture question about what are our collective priorities, not all this squabbling about how to pay for it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aGENT Posted March 7, 2013 Share Posted March 7, 2013 Not sure why it is up to me to come up with an alternative...? This is a we problem. If we agree that transit is a good thing, then we have to find a way to fund it. Just like we find a way to fund all sorts of things that we think are important. This is a much bigger picture question about what are our collective priorities, not all this squabbling about how to pay for it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inane Posted March 7, 2013 Share Posted March 7, 2013 "We" have come up with a funding solution. Tolling bridges (plus the already existing gas/carbon taxes, property taxes etc). "You" don't like that first option. "You" are putting forth the argument that it's not a good enough option. Hence the onus is on "you" to come up with an alternative. "We" already have a solution. And "squabbling" about how to pay for it IS pretty much ALL that matters as it's not going to happen with out the dollars. By the way that post wreaks of giant cop-out. It's freaking dripping in it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronthecivil Posted March 8, 2013 Share Posted March 8, 2013 Translink is disfunctional, I'm not arguing pro-translink. Road pricing is an option, one of many. My point is we need to rethink the way we allocate money, I don't care where it comes from because as you said, it all comes from us in the end. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aGENT Posted March 8, 2013 Share Posted March 8, 2013 Cause while it does all come down to money, there is money for the things you want. There are countless examples of that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inane Posted March 8, 2013 Share Posted March 8, 2013 What I want is to be able to take transit from my home in North Delta to my place of work in South Richmond and have it not take three times as long as it would for me to drive. As there's pretty non-existent density between North Delta and South Richmond (Hwy 99 corridor, Burns Bog etc may be teaming with wildlife but not 400 Sq.Ft. sky boxes), I won't be holding my breath... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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