Where does the $49 come from? I don’t see it in the linked report – could you share a table with the breakdown of your math so we can see what you’ve included.
For example, have you included all express routes from South Surrey & Scottsdale to Canada Line? What about routes that are partially in Surrey (ie 640 along River Road, and the many routes that connect Surrey & Langley)? What about SkyTrain service – I assume that’s not included.
And dont’ forget the money TransLink gives back to Surrey for MRN roadway upgrades (ie the painfully slow Fraser Hwy widening).

Not saying your numbers aren’t right, but it’s hard to know with all the variables at play.

Leave translink now. Create South of Fraser regional plans and encourage people to live closer to work and work closer to home. The fewer bridges travelled everyday the better.

Since Translink is responsible for both roads and transit, however, wouldn’t Vancouver be subsidizing Surrey’s roads at least as much as Surrey subsidizes Vancouver’s transit?

I’m in favor of much better transit for the SoF as well, but can’t help but see the mayor’s anti-Translink rhetoric as politicking pure and simple. Meanwhile, if I’m right, the city of Surrey continues to rubber-stamp a Vancouver/Translink-subsidized, car-dependent, sprawling mess of SOV-focused infrastructure – the new power centre adjacent to Cloverdale town centre, f0r example, or the Tynehead proposal adjacent to highway 1.

Tranlink builds Surrey’s road network, don’t they? Correct me if I’m wrong.

If you add all the cost up for all routes in the region, you’ll notice that the total cost is about 400 millions, far less than the actual expenditure of 600 millions for buses. Which means there are other costs that are not included in the total. If you use the average cost per passenger figure with the average fare per boarding of $1.216, you’ll find that Vancouver are almost revenue-neutral while other regions only require little subsidy, which also doesn’t seems to be right. Just for fun, if you scale the entire cost by 1.5 to match the “actual” cost of service, and then minus the revenue from boarding, you get 87 millions of subsidy for Vancouver and 46 millions for Surrey (49 millions if you count half of the 502). This gives ratio of 1.77. If you divide the populations, you get a ratio of 1.51. It actually gives very little difference in the subsidy received for transit alone.

As for where does rest of the $144 million go? We probably have to look into other regions for it.

Thanks for starting this conversation, Paul.

While on summer break from planning school in Toronto I am living in Surrey, and after a lifetime of taking transit in Vancouver and Burnaby it is a real eye-opener to be a transit user South of the Fraser. My two biggest points of contention are frequency and hours of operation.

First: frequency. Along my section of 152, at approximately 64th, buses are on a 30-minute headway schedule. This is too infrequent to be able to undertake a trip without prior planning. I’ve used Translink’s trip planner more in the last month than I have in years of living in Vancouver. I am used to 5-15 minute frequencies, which allow one to simply walk out their door, reach a stop and have a 2.5-7.5 minute wait, on average. Now if I miss a bus I am late for work.

Second: hours of operation. To be able to travel south on 152 I must leave downtown Vancouver no later than 9pm (and much closer to 8:30pm). The complete lack of options for southbound travel after 10pm is so far beyond my expectations for transit service that I simply did not believe it was possible. After a great deal of time trying every permutation of origin and destination in trip planner and consulting maps and printed schedules I reluctantly concluded that it is true.

Now, I do have some inconvenient observations to add. Even at rush hour the bus routes I use never comes close to matching the claustrophobia and unpleasant crush-loads of bus transit in the City of Vancouver. While my trip is long, due to the extreme 40 km distance I have to travel, the onboard experience of taking bus transit south of the Fraser is much more pleasant than it is in Vancouver. I have had a seat on each trip to date, and with the exception of the portion of the return evening trip that crawls along Fraser Highway along the part that is still only a one-lane-per-direction throwback to Surrey’s rural past, the trip is quick and traffic is light. Long stop spacing and the scarcity of intersections in Surrey results in a travelling experience that is mostly made up of actual driving instead of the jerky stop-start/pull in-pull out passenger experience on Vancouver’s trolley buses. Moreover, in my experience the buses are excellent at staying on schedule and the drivers seem more relaxed. None of these excuse the trade-offs of poor frequency and an early curtailment of service at night, but once one is on the bus we have a nicer experience by comparison to those in the City of Vancouver.

I have also observed little ‘churn’ on the buses I use and by this I mean people boarding and then disembarking at a destination en route, thereby freeing up space on the bus for new passengers and cycling the bus capacity multiple times in the course of a single transect of the city. This low rate of churn results in lower operating revenue for Translink than a route that loads and empties and reloads many times over the course of a bus’ route. Quite simply, there are so few trip generators along my 152 street bus route in Surrey that it appears nearly all of my fellow morning passengers are simply connecting to SkyTrain.

If this is the case, then the fare which I pay does not simply stay in Surrey, but rather it buys me access to the system. I then use service and occupy vehicle space throughout my journey in multiple zones and multiple cities. My fare is paid in Surrey and appears on the 300-series bus statistics, and it then also gains me access to SkyTrain for the entire length of the Expo Line, and the Canada Line for part of its length, and local buses in Vancouver. All in, it is close to 2 hours of travel time at the peak of system demand.

For $5 that’s a heck of a bargain! I am definitely consuming more than twice as much transit service in my 40 km of travel into town as someone paying $2.50 in Vancouver for a zone 1 trip that is likely only a couple of kilometres in length. Moreover, I am appearing as a ‘boarding’ on each leg of the trip, which has a commensurate boarding cost (annual operating cost divided by boardings). Until we have the sophistication of the Compass smart cards the Translink stats are going to continue to distort, or at least not illuminate, true travel patterns and fare allocations of transit users.

Regarding overall transportation funding, I have to respectfully disagree with the rhetorical argument that the South of Fraser is being neglected so far as transportation dollars are concerned. Yes, South of Fraser public transit is unacceptably infrequent and its hours of operation are inadequate. However, public transit is only part of the transportation picture. Billions and billions are being spent by municipalities, Translink, the Province and the Federal Government on roads, highways, bridges, and railway overpasses South of the Fraser to meet demand and desire for additional road infrastructure. A great deal of this capital project money has come from Translink, the Province and Federal governments, just as it does for rapid transit projects. However, with the exception of tolls on the new bridges and the relatively small Translink and gas tax portions of the price of gasoline, there is no direct user-pay component to road and highway infrastructure, certainly not at an amount that is commensurate with the externalities like congestion, pollution, and public health issues, that go in lock step with wear and tear and financing costs of that type of infrastructure.

Here are the major road, highway, bridge, and overpass projects I can think of that primarily benefit those living and working South of the Fraser.

-$3.3 billion (estimated) for the new Port Mann Bridge and Highway One capacity increase. The $2.5 billion budget for the new Port Mann Bridge is comparable to the combined budgets of the Evergreen Line and the public sector component of the Canada Line. (http://www.pmh1project.com/info-centre/faq/Pages/Project-Cost-Timing.aspx)

-$658 million for the South Fraser Perimeter Road, which includes $363 million from the Federal Government and $200 million in private sector funding from the P3 partner, which must be repaid. (http://www2.news.gov.bc.ca/news_releases_2009-2013/2010TRAN0051-000943.htm)

-$1 billion for the Golden Ears Bridge. Due to lower than forecast usage and revenue the rate of interest accrual is greater than principal and interest payments to the concessionaire, resulting in a deferred liability for the project that now amounts to $1 billion, up from the $888 million project budget when the bridge opened in 2009. $46 million in payments were made in 2011 but this still represents a shortfall of $19 million. For sake of comparison, the Canada Line receives approximately $23 million in subsidy from Translink annually in the form of the difference between fare revenue and the cost of the concessionaire payments to In Transit BC. It is also worth highlighting that Translink is annually spending nearly as much paying off the Golden Ears Bridge ($46M) as Paul Hillsdon found it is spending on its bus routes in Surrey ($49M) Lastly, it’s concerning to see that the annual combined principal and interest payments on the Golden Ears Bridge climbs to $70 million by 2016, which would require nearly four times the tolling revenue that is currently received in order to make the bridge cost-neutral (source pages 73 to 75, respectively, http://www.translink.ca/~/media/documents/about_translink/corporate_overview/annual_reports/2011.ashx

-$307 million for the Roberts Bank Rail Corridor (overpass) program. This is absolutely necessary infrastructure, but it still represents a large funding commitment from the many project funders (Feds, Province, four South of Fraser municipalities, Translink, Port Metro Vancouver, and four railways) Previous generations of City of Vancouver citizens built viaducts and bridges to traverse railways in our city and we have been benefitting ever since, just as citizens of Surrey, the City and Township of Langley, and Delta will benefit once this project is complete. (http://www.robertsbankrailcorridor.ca/home)

-Translink spent $97.1 million in 2011 on Major Road Network roads and bridges and cost-sharing with municipalities for their own respective projects. Paul, you quoted $4.5 million for the Major Roads Network but clearly that only represents a small portion of Translink’s annual road and bridge expenditures. A further $96.8 million of value depreciation was written down on the Translink balance sheet in 2011 due to wear-and-tear/age of the road and bridge infrastructure it owns and helps maintain. (page 33 http://www.translink.ca/~/media/documents/about_translink/corporate_overview/annual_reports/2011.ashx)

Back of the envelope, that adds up to $5.26 billion in project costs which arguably primarily benefit those South of the Fraser, and that does not include Translink’s annual road and bridge expenditures.

So, should Translink deliver a significantly increased amount of transit service south of the Fraser? Absolutely! Buses should be more frequent and run for more hours of the day and night.

Should rapid transit be planned and built? Absolutely! We need to know where rapid transit will go so that land use and policy decisions can be made now and in the immediate future, even if the project is a decade or more away.

Is Translink failing to spend money south of the Fraser at a rate that is commensurate to what it collects in taxes, gas taxes, fares, and tolls? I am unsure. Add up its local bus service delivery, the amount of service –including SkyTrain and local buses- that South of Fraser residents utilize on transit north of the Fraser, investments in the Golden Ears Bridge, SkyTrain capacity upgrades and network expansion, a commitment to replace the Pattullo Bridge, contributions to the Major Road Network and municipally beneficial projects like the Roberts Bank Corridor overpasses, and I imagine that Mayor Watts’ $144 million a year contribution from Surrey and the undisclosed amounts from the other South of Fraser municipalities may prove to be closer than she and others think. Does it skew into the South subsidizing the north or vice versa? I don’t know. But I don’t think that you have proven that 2/3rds of Surrey’s transit money goes to service in the City of Vancouver.