An open letter to Malcolm Johnston of Rail for the Valley

Dear Mr. Johnston,

Hello again!

It is quite hypocritical of you to be categorizing many who have different options as “lobbyists” and “anti-LRT’ crowds, when that is most certainly not the case.

Personally, I support making our cities more resilient and sustainable through innovative and thoughtful progression. Skytrain for Surrey is supported and managed by engaged and concerned citizens of the community, and neither I nor any other group contributors are members of any “SkyTrain lobby”.  Your quick assumption that we form part of a paid lobbying group is nonsensical, and your immediate use of criticism is deprecating and derogatory, and is not something that we are able to take lightly.

Through our extensive research, we collectively recognize that at-grade, on-street, driver-operated Light Rail in Surrey (as supported by the city) is not the best choice.

A light rail system, implemented as envisioned, will provide little increase in corridor transportation capacity. It will disrupt communities through increased congestion; lower the quality of living for community residents and stall economic development; have little capacity headroom; ultimately cost similarly to a SkyTrain extension; and will ruin TransLink’s excellent credibility for providing a reliable transit service, as a single accident on any light rail corridor could shut down both directions of track with no reroute opportunity.

Your words and statements have several missing links. I nearly stopped reading your vehement topic when I came upon the rhetoric that “light rail” makes what you term “light metro” obsolete.  Obviously, you have failed to make important considerations of the differences in implementations, markets and location-specific occurrences that make these systems work.

One of the key problems that we have found with a new on-street light rail implementation is that it would not be particularly less expensive than a SkyTrain-type elevated implementation in Surrey. It will cost approximately just 20% more to construct and provide a SkyTrain implementation based on existing technology when comparative cost values are used. Note that SkyTrain’s use of automatic train control also allows for lower operating costs (as opposed to manned implementations of rapid transit), and through that lowering of operating costs also allows for a much more frequent off-peak transit service.

SkyTrain is a pioneer of modern automated rapid transit technology & implementation, and has been deemed the superior option in most other categories of consideration, including speed, operating costs, long-term maintenance, integration ease, passenger capacity, on-time performance, frequency of service, and service level flexibility. Today, millions of people are being moved by several automated rapid transit systems around the world, with enormous success to the point where cities such as Honolulu are electing to go with ART technology for their new transportation networks.  Major cities all over the world such as Tokyo, Madrid, and New York City have opted for and implemented or are planning to implement the train automation technologies that Vancouver pioneered with SkyTrain onto existing transportation networks, for the sake of the several advantages brought forward in doing so.

A time will arise in the near future when Surrey outgrows the capacity of an at-grade LRT network, and given the current rate of growth (as Surrey is one of the fastest-growing cities in Canada), this can be expected to occur well before the system itself would become technically outdated. At that point, replacement technologies able to cope with the additional passenger volume would need to be installed, and the initial investment in LRT would be for naught.

Infrastructure is expensive to construct, and a thorough consideration of the realities is a necessity when planning for it. I believe that whether a rapid transit implementation type has a somewhat more specific or a broad market, it shouldn’t be excluded from consideration. In modern cities, I believe there is a well-defined place for at-grade Light Rail networks; I also believe that there is a place for heavy-rail metros/subways, as well as grade-separated, automated rapid transit solutions such as SkyTrain. I do believe that LRT implementations have a place in a complete plan for transit accessibility improvement in Surrey, but the current proposals on the table are placing way too much emphasis on LRT as a sole solution. This, as other group contributors and I have found, can and will be a problem.

There are many types of rapid transit implementations, and light rail is just one of those types.  It is not the solution for every corridor and to every situation, and it’s about time that light rail supporters like you grasp this concept and figure out what is really needed.

Sincerely,

Daryl Dela Cruz
skytrainforsurrey.org – Founder