With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/347582
I 36 BCBusiness August 2014 "It's rush hour all day long now, 24 hours a day," says Wil- liams, 58, a compact, sandy-haired man who's been driving trucks for 23 years. It wasn't the job he planned to do when he was young, growing up in North Van, but here he is, still doing it all these years later, in his dark-green Argus uni- form and a sheaf of papers that lay out his delivery route for the morning. He doesn't see the driving ever getting any better, not the way everyone keeps building. Giant condo towers, malls, office buildings—all adding more traf- fic all the time, always with worse driv- ers every year. The new Port Mann has helped a bit, but if you have to go much farther into the valley, it just starts back- ing up there. Abbotsford, Aldergrove: "It's nuts out there now. It's the urban sprawl thing." As Williams inches down No. 3 Road later that afternoon, en route from the FedEx distribution centre in Surrey to a no-name operation in an industrial mall near Capstan Way, the concrete shelf of the Canada Line hovers above his truck. He barely glances at it, this once-contro- versial line that many predicted would be a dismal failure but now carries about 122,000 riders a day, its toy-like cars gliding noiselessly above the traffic. Transit, he says, has nothing to do with his job. Doesn't help him do his work. There are still as many people on the roads as there have always been. "You'll never get people out of their cars. Only people without money take the bus." His opinion is not an uncommon one in British Columbia, though it's expressed in different ways. The gen- eral subtext of the naysayers: transit in dense Vancouver is something that only a rarefied group of people use—city slick- ers who think they should get whisked around town on billion-dollar subway lines. It's an indulgence for them, but we need money for roads because the real economy of the province happens on the roads, not some dinky monorail. It's the kind of thinking that creeps into what feels like never-ending politi- cal tussles with the province over how to pay for the major new transit projects that the region's mayors and its regional transportation authority, TransLink, have been begging for going on five years now. One transportation minis- ter after another has floated across the stage, scolding the mayors, reminding them that it's not up to the good people of Prince George or Kelowna to pay for transit in the Lower Mainland. It's not the only argument that the province has used over the years, as its ministers have shot down vehicle levies, road-pricing plans and, in the most recent go-round this spring, a conversion of carbon-tax revenue to transit funding. But the "it's not fair for you city people to take money from the hard workers elsewhere" argu- ment has appeared with regularity. The good people of Prince George and Kelowna echo that in various ways, although with more nuance and expla- nation of the other side of the question. Heather Oland, the CEO of Initiatives Prince George, agrees Vancouver needs better transit. "At the same time, over 80 per cent of the products B.C. exports come from the rural land base. Yet Highway 16 west, from Prince George to Prince Rupert, is predominantly a two-lane road. There is $140 billion in resource development here. There's a lot of movement along these highways." In Kelowna, Mayor Walter Gray also acknowledges that the big city needs good transit to function. But so does Kelowna. "We can't be the ones that fund the increased costs of transit. We have our own challenges. Transit's start- ing to get some legitimacy in Kelowna." So he needs money too. That first pass at outlining the debate DENSITY DOWNER Driver Dan Williams only sees a future with increasingly congested roads.