Lower Mainland Mayors Approve $2B Phase One Transit Plan (Critical Care Shortsight)

Lower Mainland Mayors Approve $2B Phase One Transit Plan, and once again, the LRT plan is revived; again without oversight or review as to whether LRT is the right choice for a growing city such as Surrey.

Skytrain For Surrey, run by Daryl Dela Cruz, has on quite a number of occasions shown with research just how ineffective LRT would be for Surrey's development as a major city within the Lower Mainland. However the City Hall has plowed on ahead with its LRT plans heedless of the safety concerns; almost to the point of criminal negligence. My question for Linda Hepner is what is she going to say to the families of those pedestrians and drivers mowed down by her LRT when it isn't grade separated, there are no safety measures visible in place to prevent LRT/Driver/Pedestrian collisions. And frankly, practically 95% of LRT collisions are accidental.

When infrastructure such as LRT is put in place, there is no training time to acclimate drivers and pedestrians to the change in traffic flow and collisions are bound to occur. In this case, pedestrians are the most vulnerable as they will be put in a fatal situation should they be hit by a LRT going at 50km/hr as they would be if hit by a car. But unlike a car's responsive brakes where if slammed on, a collision can be avoided, however with an LRT; it will take some time to stop as their mass is much greater than that of a passenger car.

Linda Hepner's plan if implemented, will hem in Surrey's only critical care hospital with LRT lines. Should there be an accident at King George Highway and 96 Avenue, the ambulances will not be able to get through to the hospital and traffic will be backed up all the way down King George Highway. Arterial routes for Surrey Memorial Hospital are 88th, 96th, King George Highway and 140th Street at Fraser Highway. Even the Jim Pattison Day Surgery unit on 140th will be affected.

Linda Hepner, as mayor, owes Surrey a safe transit system, not one that will cause more safety problems than currently viable. It is apparent that no-one has thought this through since they haven't realized the ramifications of an accident on any of the L system on LRT and the Fraser Hwy connector route will impede access to Surrey Memorial Hospital by those who need it.

King George Boulevard Burger King in London Square - Undergoing Renovations

Evidently, the King George Boulevard Burger King at London Square has been undergoing renovation for a while now. I know it's not the healthiest food in the world, but I like the occasional burger once in a while and I don't have a whole helluva lot to spend on fast food. If I want to eat healthy, I'll eat at home. Anyways, these shots were taken with my iPhone 4s as far as the progress a couple nights ago when I went to pick up my wife from work. I'm gonna take the DSLR tonight, I'll see if I can get some better shots and update the blog.

Letter to Surrey Now & Surrey Leader

As a Surrey resident I am unimpressed with the continued persistence of Linda Hepner to promote at-grade Light Rail Transit over grade-separated SkyTrain.  Does the Mayors Council and Surrey City Hall continue to think that at-grade LRT will not cause havoc on the streets of Surrey?  At-grade LRT has been responsible for many accidents and traffic stoppages in many of the cities (Calgary, Portland, Atlanta) that have implemented this mode of rapid transit.  Yet Linda Hepner persists in the viewpoint that LRT is the right choice for Surrey.  There is a jarring video on Atlanta's LRT system that shows multiple collisions with LRT trains.  Pedestrians have been severely injured if not killed by LRT trains in the past in places like Calgary and Atlanta as well as several European cities.  The amount of time for accident investigators to clear up such an accident would take two to three hours thus delaying traffic on an already congested 104th, King George, or Fraser Highway corridor, not to mention plague the hospitals with injuries.

LRT has always been faster grade-separated but there are no dedicated corridors through residential areas of Surrey that do not involve interaction with either pedestrian or vehicle traffic.  And considering after all the money that Surrey will put into LRT ($2.1B), that the end result of all this expenditure is only one minute faster than the current BRT that we currently have in place is laughable and reprehensible.  This is a prime example of wasting money on an inefficient system that will not get drivers out of their vehicles.  To get efficiency out of a rapid transit system, it must be grade-separated from the rest of the traffic (for safety); it must not have to stop for stop-lights (for speed) and above all, it must demonstrate value for cost.  The LRT transit system touted by the Mayors Council and Surrey City Hall fails to meet those requirements on all three counts.

I am voting "NO" on this plebiscite precisely for those reasons.  The LRT is not efficient enough for Surrey.  It will cause more problems than it solves.  It is not the right transit system for a growing city, It will fail to do as promised (in terms of time saved and conversions from "driver to transit user") and Surrey will have a traffic safety issue on its hands if we choose LRT over SkyTrain.

The Safety Factor LRT (Driverless Versus Driver-Operated)

The debate of driverless versus drivered LRT is a crucial one to consider when talking about LRT for the South Fraser. Since it appears that all LRT implementation images involve the visual of a driver, it is safe to assume that Surrey Council is opting for driver-implemented LRT meaning that there will be someone to drive the light rail train. Both sides of the Yes/No Transit Plebiscite have to look at the safety issues involving street-level LRT.

Driverless LRT though able to increase the volume of trains on existing tracks will only serve to increase the danger of interactions - mainly due to a situation where a computer is still not able to process the information fast enough to prevent a collision unless complicated and expensive collision avoidance systems are implemented. This is especially so at street-level. As Robert A. Heinlein said, "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." You have to factor in "human decision-making process" in understanding how train/pedestrian/automobile accidents happen and do what you can to reduce the potential of injury/death.

Driver-Operated LRT is probably the safest LRT situation where human response will be crucial in preventing train-human-auto collisions though in many cases with LRT it hasn't mainly due to human reaction not being quick enough. If given enough time to see a track incursion, the train with human driver intervention should be able to stop. The problem is when pedestrians (at the last second) thinking that they can make the crossing without realizing that the train is travelling at a higher speed than they originally thought steps into the track area thus causing a fatal train-pedestrian collision and likewise with a car. Is human reaction quick enough to prevent such a collision? No. Neither are track-brake triggering systems. This is even more important to consider as all evidence points to Surrey not implementing a grade-separated LRT but street-level. This means that "accidental" interactions with passengers and other road vehicles will be considerable.

Compare this with the track incursions on Skytrain, where people deliberately put themselves in harm's way with a track incursion; deliberate suicides. But there are considerably less fatalities on Skytrain than on LRT by someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Will the Mayor's Council be able to justify its choice with the citizens of Surrey and Langley when the accidental interactions with street-level LRT and pedestrians/automobiles increase potentially tenfold over the next few years after implementation?

Rail For The Valley - Light rail – The safest public transit mode! is already trying to justify this. Maybe the Mayor's council can look for excuses by reading this article.

The City of Surrey has plunged head-long into this without proper research, relying on unsubstantiated slander of Bombardier's ALRT system, blatant disregard of public opinion and substantiated un-biased Surrey Rapid Transit Report, and pushed an emotional sales-pitch for it's pro-LRT stance "by hell or high water". One can only hope that they are not making a colossal mistake and compounding it by trying to justify the worst possible solution to transit South of the Fraser.

Mayor's Council Advocating For LRT (To Detriment of South Fraser)

The Mayor's Council continues to push Light-Rail Transit as their vision of Rapid Transit on the South Side of the Fraser River, regardless of the findings of the Surrey Rapid-Transit Study. As well they have flouted the impartiality of the plebiscite by continuing to push forward on Rapid Transit as their sole solution to Surrey's transportation problems despite evidence to the contrary.

Their singleminded promotion of LRT on their web-site.



We find it reprehensible that the Mayor's Council is pushing forward a non-impartial vote by tying LRT to the Yes side of the Transit plebiscite when the ballots state clearly that no one form of transit solution should be considered for South Fraser. However the clique of Mayors have determined that an inferior mode of "rapid"-transit should be implemented for South of Fraser despite forecasted and proven problems in both Calgary and in Portland, OR.

 Surrey City Hall is also campaigning hard for LRT on a sign-board just west of the Surrey Sport & Leisure on Fraser Highway.


The Yes side has become so desperate that it is resorting to highly expensive full-page ads on behalf of the Mayor's Council to push the LRT agenda as seen here in the advertisement in the March 5, 2015 Surrey Now. On top of that it persists in continuing to push the false impression that LRT will be able to outrun the same traffic that it purports to share the road with and also matching Skytrain times while the Skytrain runs at over 80km/hr on a dedicated track.


Mayor's Council Ad in Surrey Now, March 5, 2015

This defeats the "fairness and impartiality" of the Transit Plebiscite and should be overturned.

This comes even as the Mayor's Council ignores what citizens south of the Fraser River want in terms of their transit requirements. 54% of respondents to a poll in the VanCity Buzz wanted Skytrain over LRT for rapid transit south of the Fraser. Only 27% of respondents voted for LRT. So evidently the Mayor's Council, even seeing the majority of the proponents for Skytrain have opted to think that their populace is too stupid to warrant even considering their viewpoint.

The Surrey Rapid Transit Alternatives Study...

Here is a copy of the Surrey Rapid Transit Study done in March 2013. In the report, it stated clearly that: Alternative 4: RRT on Fraser Highway, and BRT on King George Boulevard and on 104 Avenue: This alternative meets forecast 2041 demand on all three of the corridors and provides transfer-free service on King George Boulevard as well as from the Fraser Highway corridor to the Expo Line. Capacity on Fraser Highway can be expanded to meet growth in demand well beyond 2041. Alternative 4 is projected to have 200,000 daily boardings (2041) and generate 24,500 additional daily transit trips in the region. It has the highest ridership and provides the greatest travel time savings. It also generates the most quantifiable transportation benefits at the highest lifecycle cost.

Light Rail advocates keep insisting that LRT will meet the needs of Surrey right now which is fine, well and good, but we all know that rapid transit brings growth to a community and the major question mark would be if LRT would be robust enough to manage more than a certain amount of trains on one line. Portland and Calgary have shown that the LRT cannot cope with urban growth and increased ridership to the point of saturation. LRT proponents will say "add more cars" to make up the difference - well the more cars you add to the LRT, the longer it gets thus creating congestion slowing down the traffic around it from cars having to wait for six or more LRT linked-cars to go past in order to make a lane change or longer light changes favoring the LRT while pedestrian traffic builds up at the intersection. Also lengthening the LRT trains will end up having to have work done on the train stops in order to allow passengers to board thus increasing downtime. All of this becomes a logistical nightmare. Skytrain on the other hand can link more cars without affecting traffic flow. Rapid transit is designed to grow communities and create jobs as well as opening up pockets of communities around the SkyTrain stations. All of those will increase ridership. Most would note that many families move into bedroom communities such as Langley and Abbotsford just so that they can afford something cheaper than the astronomical rates for housing prices in Vancouver/Burnaby. And the farther out they go, the more problems that crop up such as taking two hours to get to work downtown. Even more so, rapid transit will help to create jobs in the areas, but only if the rapid transit concept makes sense in the long term as well as the short term. When one looks at the Skytrain Lines (Millenium, Canada, and Expo), one sees communities growing, condominiums and high-rises popping up around those stations. These are due to the proximity of efficient rapid transit.

...and such would be the same with Surrey. People move where its economical to do so; and economically means both logistical economics as well as pocketbook economics (it has to make sense; which means that rapid transit has to be "rapid" and "efficient"). And if house prices are $mid 400s out in Surrey for a five bedroom; 4 bath home; then granted, that's where the families will move to in order to keep money in their pockets. And these families will want efficient rapid transit to get them from place to place or they will just get in their cars and drive to where they want to go. If Translink's intent is to get people out of cars, they need to consider how much time it takes for transit to get those folks from place to place without running into problems.

Skytrain over LRT makes the most sense as it is not prone to traffic problems such as car accidents which would block sections of roadway which LRT would get snarled up in major accidents of the sort that have been seen in Portland, Calgary and other locations with LRT where the entire line has been blocked with 3-4 hour delays while accident investigators comb over the accident.

In terms of urban growth and moving people; Skytrain makes the most sense...

Surrey's Central Square At Night

The City Hall and Surrey Public Library have an adjoining square - aptly named "Central Square". Went to find a place to park and go take a few shots prior to picking my wife up from work.



Took a shot looking down 135th Street from the northeast corner of 103rd Avenue.