Parking
rights tax
4%
toll revenues
3%
senior
government
contributions
6%
Interest expense
12%
Depreciation
expense
11%
Roads,
bridges
& cycling
8%
Admin.
(includes
Compass)
7%
security
2%
total expenditures
total revenues
$1.49B
$1.44B
2014 transLink Expenditures and Revenues
38 BCBusiness August 2014
makes it sound like a zero-sum game:
if Vancouver wins, some other region
loses. But there are plenty of people
looking at the whole picture from
30,000 feet who say that a robust transit
system in the Lower Mainland has ben-
efits that extend to Chilliwack, to Hope,
to Kelowna, to Fort St. John, to Kitimat.
One of the biggest reasons: Vancouver is,
condos and latte joints notwithstanding,
primarily a port city, with Port Metro
Vancouver now the fourth-largest ton-
nage port in North America. The lives
of port cities depend on efficient distri-
bution inside that urban engine. And
just more roads can't produce that. At
some point, cities that need to get trucks
around have to find a way to get some
cars off the road.
As John Winters, CEO of the B.C.
Chamber of Commerce, observes with
restraint, the argument that the rural
areas don't need to be concerned about
bus-riders in the Lower Mainland might
wash except for one little fact: "Vancou-
ver is a primary distribution centre for
the whole provincial economy. You min-
imize the costs (of moving goods around
inside the city) and it benefits the entire
province."
Why Truckers Must Learn
to Love Transit
Dan Williams's day of delivering bits and
pieces of stuff all over the Lower Main-
land is an increasingly common sight.
More than 22,000 tractor-trailer rigs are
licensed for the Lower Mainland, 2,000
of which access the region's ports, with
another 50,000 trucks over five tonnes
and 19,000 lighter trucks used for local
deliveries. Add to that all the visitors—
trucks from Oregon, Kentucky, Fort St.
John, Calgary, Montreal and Dallas—and
it's clear that truck traffic is a boom-
ing piece of the movement pie in this
sprawling metropolis, as local and world
economies morph into new patterns.
The port plays a large part in that traf-
fic, with a third of the 27 million tonnes
of stuff that arrived here last year getting
trucked to a warehouse somewhere,
unpacked, re-sorted and then trucked
away—some of it delivered locally, some
put onto a railcar for a trip across the
continent, some delivered out of the
transit
operations
60%
transit
operations
36%
Motor
fuel tax
23%
Property tax
22%
Other
taxes
7%
sOuRCE: tRAnsLInk 2014
BAsE PLAn suMMARY
