skytrain-expo-line-e1426727437976-984x500.png
Voting Yes means less time stuck in traffic, less pollution, and investing just $0.35 day to reduce our overall transportation costs.
Voting No means no new transit service and therefore more traffic gridlock, more pollution, and higher transportation costs for many residents due to heavier car use. As some have pointed out, this option “really sucks.”
It’s a choice that will have enormous impacts for our region, and voting No is not a vote for the status quo. It is a vote to cut service per person, because there won’t be any funding for the current system to grow as the population increases.
Regardless of how we vote, we need to make room for a million new neighbours on our buses, SkyTrains, SeaBuses and roads. Even now, residents and visitors are already stuck in traffic on a daily basis, facing unreliable commute times and overcrowding on transit.
http://www.vancitybuzz.com/2015/03/yes-for-better-transit-plebiscite-vancouver/
We will freely confess that a sales tax is the second-best way to finance public transit. In an ideal world, the costs of building and operating transit would be borne by transit users themselves — through the farebox, not the ballot box. Private operators would raise funds for expansion schemes in the same way they do in other sectors, in anticipation of the revenues to be collected from willing customers. This would provide a truer test of demand, ensuring routes were built to meet the needs of transit users, rather than bureaucrats and politicians.
But we don’t live in an ideal world. If transit is to be built — and no one disputes Vancouver needs more and better public transit — it will for the time being have to be done on the public dime. And of all the ways to raise revenues governments have at their disposal, a sales tax is the least distorting (entailing neither the disincentives of the income tax nor the inequities of the property tax), the most accountable (everybody pays the tax), and at least in this case, the fairest. Fair, both because the poor can be rebated any increase in costs, and because the tax increase will apply only within Metro Vancouver: in effect, a municipal sales tax.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/03/20/national-post-view-vote-yes-vancouver/
transit_infographic5.jpg
Metro Vancouver workers ride transit more and have a wider range of incomes than those in many other West Coast cities, according to data compiled by Bing Thom Architects.
Bing Thom planner Andy Yan and principal Michael Heeney created the ridership portrait using Statistics Canada’s 2011 National Household Survey and the 2011 American Communities Survey. They’re using the results of their analysis to support the yes side in Metro Vancouver’s ongoing transit tax plebiscite.
According to the data, a higher percentage of workers — 20% — take transit to work in Metro Vancouver than other major West Coast cities; the next-highest city was Calgary, at 16%.
“We’re total leaders on the West Coast. Now we’re not [when compared with] New York City, which is 40%,” Yan said.
“But at 20% you’re light years ahead of Calgary, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles.”
Women and young people represented the highest proportion of transit riders: 60% of workers who commuted via transit were women and 60% were under the age of 40.
http://www.biv.com/article/2015/3/who-takes-transit-work-metro-vancouver-info-graphi/
No one likes to pay more taxes, and saying “yes” means regional residents will pay an additional half per cent on the existing seven per cent sales tax to fund sweeping transit expansion plans across the fast-growing region.
“No” means keeping more money in your own pocket – a powerful lure for the 1.5 million voters living in the country’s most expensive urban centre, and particularly so for younger adults, many of whom are under-employed and struggling to keep financially afloat.
But Barrett, 32, believes firmly that a vote against the tax is a vote against her generation. Indeed, without the proposed improvements, people her age will be unfairly doomed to a lifetime of clogged roads, choking pollution and a public transit system that can’t possibly keep up with projected growth.
Heck, with a million more people expected to move to Vancouver and its surrounding cities by 2040, it won’t just be the Millennials who suffer.
It will be their children, and maybe even their children’s children.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/dailybrew/yes-or-no-vancouvers-future-at-stake-as-regional-191330503.html
Up close, the sight of this referendum is not so awe-inspiring. And after it’s over, it’s likely to become a case study in what happens when you don’t have the time to properly lay the groundwork for such a vote: Bad strategies are devised. Panic sets in. Blunders are made. And eventually, a colossal opportunity is wasted.
Recent polls have shown the No side with an almost unsurmountable lead. Vancouver’s Yes supporters can only hope that the pollsters are as wrong about the outcome of this ballot measure as they were about the provincial election in 2013, when all predicted that Premier Christy Clark’s Liberals were going to be crushed by the New Democrats and it turned out to be just the opposite.
Somehow, though, I don’t think the pollsters have it wrong this time.
Last year, I took a look at how these types of transit referendums are conducted in the United States, where they are common. In virtually every case, successful campaigns are conducted over a period that spans a year or longer. Carefully strategizing takes place to design the best possible “Vote Yes” operation. Deep consideration is given to obvious vulnerabilities and measures are taken in advance to address them. Careful plans are put in place to ensure that the opposition doesn’t get an insurmountable head start in the debate, enabling it to define what the vote will ultimately be about.
The Yes side in Metro Vancouver’s transit plebiscite enjoyed no such luxury of time. It literally had a couple of months. And that is entirely the fault of a willful provincial government that insisted on the referendum and its ridiculously short time frame. It then backed off to watch the Yes side mostly falter with the entirely avoidable mess of a situation it was handed.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/how-not-to-conduct-a-transit-plebiscite/article23545970/
No comments:
Post a Comment