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.
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