This past Monday, two days after being elected Mayor of Vancouver, Mayor-elect Kennedy Stewart suggested he would be inclined to support Surrey Mayor-elect Doug McCallum’s bid to convert the 10 years in the making, approved & funded 40-year light rail plan for Surrey to the orphan SkyTrain technology, as he told The Vancouver Sun reporter Jennifer Saltman …
“I just have to wait and hear what the details of (mayor-elect) McCallum’s plan are and see what other support he’s been able to build, and also to make sure that he’s familiar with my push to get the Broadway subway built all the way to UBC,” Mayor-elect Kennedy Stewart said.
If Kennedy Stewart were to vote in favour of exploring building SkyTrain in Surrey, McCallum would need only 10 more votes on the Mayor’s Council to make his dream of a Surrey to Langley Skytrain line a reality.
Of course, there’s the issue that costs for a Surrey Skytrain line would double the $1.65 billion in monies already allocated for the approved light rail plan for Surrey-Langley, Surrey-Guildford & Surrey-Newton-White Rock, the latter two lines that would be sacrificed in favour of the former.
As UBC urban geography professor Patrick Condon was saying to VanRamblings earlier in the week, “This is Kennedy Stewart’s first huge mistake. Why he would throw his support to McCallum beggars belief.”
No sooner had former Vancouver Mayoral candidate Patrick Condon uttered those prophetic words than Vancouver Mayor-elect Kennedy Stewart was walking back his support for Skytrain in Surrey.
From an Ian Bailey story in Wednesday’s Globe and Mail …
In the aftermath of last weekend’s municipal elections in British Columbia, (Kennedy) Stewart has said he backs the transit upgrade efforts of Doug McCallum, elected in Surrey, which is B.C.’s fastest-growing city. But Mr. McCallum’s position threatens to undo years of painstaking compromises to come up with a 10-year plan for the region because other mayors are worried that if Surrey takes a more expensive route, it will cost all of them more money.
After voicing hearty support for Mr. McCallum’s position on Monday, Mr. Stewart added a caveat Tuesday: “At the same time, we cannot put in jeopardy any infrastructure dollars that have already been committed, including funds earmarked for the Broadway Subway line,” he said in a statement released to the press … “Replacing the approved light rail with an extension of an existing SkyTrain rail line, mostly elevated above ground, would double the cost from the planned $1.65-billion for light rail. Some leaders re-elected or elected last weekend are saying they are wary about supporting more money for Mr. McCallum’s transit agenda.”
In fact, one of the few returning mayors in Metro Vancouver, re-elected to a fourth term in office this past Saturday, has some advice for Surrey’s mayor-elect, Doug McCallum: Switching from light rail transit to SkyTrain would be throwing away money and time already spent, while delaying expanded rail transit by years …
“The plan is approved, implemented, money has been spent on it,” Richard Stewart, re-elected mayor of Coquitlam told The Globe and Mail. “We’re well down the path.”
The Mayors’ Council, established by the B.C. Liberal government and then Minister of Transportation Kevin Falcon in 2007, is comprised of 21 municipalities, the electoral area that includes UBC’s Endowment Lands, and Tsawwassen First Nation. It’s the governance body that assembled the current transportation plan in conjunction with the communities affected.
The Mayor’s Council approved Vancouver & Surrey rail expansion (SkyTrain on Broadway in Vancouver, light rail transit in Surrey) along with bus and other expansions. About $50 million has already been spent on LRT, according to Translink. Surrey has spent $20 million in pre-construction.
“I don’t think it’s a case of just switching technologies, from light rail to SkyTrain in Surrey,” Mayor Richard Stewart told the Vancouver Sun. “It will be interesting to see the argument put forward. I worry, though, that if someone succeeds in getting the current work cancelled, it could result in another decade of work to get SkyTrain for Surrey. It took a decade to get the current plan.”
Without a doubt the most informed and dedicated member on Vancouver’s newly-elected City Council when it comes to issues of planning, urban development and transportation is Councillor-elect Colleen Hardwick.
Vancouver Councillor-elect Hardwick, currently completing work on her PhD in urban studies at the University of British Columbia, studying with founding Chair and professor at the Urban Design programme at UBC’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Patrick Condon, is the one current elected official in our region who is the most passionate, well-informed and well-studied proponent of light rail across our region.
Many the hour VanRamblings has engaged in lengthy discussion and debate with Councillor-elect Colleen Hardwick, who does not exactly hide her bright light under a bushel — nor should she — our region’s most fervent proponent of slow-growth, human-scale, community and neighbourhood consulted urban development, a key component of which is a low-cost, environmentally-sound, readily accessible, easily expandable, respectful of neighbourhoods region-wide light rail infrastructure programme.
Something else about Councillor-elect Hardwick? Ms. Hardwick also demands the best from those around her. During the course of the 2014 Vancouver civic election, at 4:30pm one rainy summer’s afternoon in July, VanRamblings received an irate call from our friend and supporter …
“What is this crap you’re publishing every day on VanRamblings? Your blog has devolved into little more than a scurrilous gossip rag. I know you. I know you can do better. Given your wide readership and your outsized influence in the political sphere, do yourself and the voters of the city a favour, and get serious. Do better. When I wake up tomorrow morning, I want to read something you’ve written where I can say, “That’s my friend Raymond Tomlin. He done good. Now get started!”
Who were we to refuse Colleen Hardwick (note. for the record, no one refuses Colleen Hardwick, a force of nature if there ever was one)?
VanRamblings immediately got to work on At Issue: Form of Development, and the Livability of Vancouver, which we published at 6:30am the next morning, probably the best piece we published during the 2014 Vancouver civic election cycle. At 7am, we received a text from Ms. Hardwick …
“Good. Better. Now get to bed!”
When the newly-elected Vancouver City Council takes office next month, know this: Vancouver City Councillor Colleen Hardwick is going to come at Mayor Kennedy Stewart like a freight train for his ill-considered faux pas on the transit file, with a reasoned and thoughtful evisceration of our new Mayor. Kennedy Stewart? He won’t know what in the blue blazes hit him.
