The Evergreen line limbo should be a wake-up call for the City of Vancouver.

Tomorrow, Vancouver’s Special Standing Committee of Council on Planning and Environment will be presented with a staff policy report outlining the suggested terms of engagement for TransLink’s UBC Line Rapid Transit Study.

The study, which is a partnered project between Translink, the City of Vancouver, UBC, the University Endowment Lands, and Metro Vancouver, will identify a wide range of rapid transit options for the Broadway corridor including a preferred route, technology(ies), and general station locations.

Here is what Geoff Meggs told News 1130 about how such a line would already be able pay for itself:

“There already are more people riding on buses, jammed on buses, hanging on straps on buses, watching buses drive by them, than we need to justify the line.”

The evidence to support such claims is concrete and real, and Meggs is doing his job in advocating for Vancouver’s transit needs first and foremost.  However, with the spectre of the yet-to-be-started Evergreen Line hanging over Translink and their next steps towards progressing forward on regional transportation, these plans for the city seem extremely premature.

Most transit watchers in this region are at least vaguely familiar with the political hot potato that is the Evergreen Line – a project that was originally promoted as the second phase of the Millenium Line in the late 1990s.  And in spite of the construction of a third incomplete platform at Lougheed Town Centre station, the project was cancelled following a change in provincial government due to rising costs.  The Canada Line, which was a major component of the Vancouver 2010 bid for the Olympics, also displaced the Evergreen line in terms of priority and funding.

Since then, Translink has produced study after study of possible options on how to best upgrade links between Coquitlam and the rest of the Skytrain system.  In 2006, these studies morphed into a plan for a tram line – the Evergreen Light Rail Transit (LRT) project.  Then, on February 1, 2008, the TransLink revised plans and changed their minds, swithing gears towards Advanced Light Rapid Transit (ALRT), which is the technology currently used by SkyTrain.

Proposed start date?  Late 2010.  Expected completion date? 2014…supposedly.

However, one only needs to look to Frances Bula’s article in today’s Globe and Mail about the future of Translink, and more specifically the comments of action CEO Ian Jarvis, to understand how precarious this kind of assertion is at this point:

“We’ve put a lot of service out there in the last few years: the Canada Line, an expansion of cars in the existing line, Golden Ears Bridge, a 40-per-cent increase in buses. With that, and the economy, that requires us to take a bit of a breather.”

The state of the Evergreen Line’s funding is unusual in that there is already $800-million in federal and provincial commitments, but absolutely no figures, time frames or ideas on if, how and when Translink’s portion of the total is going to come to fruition.

So, with all of this ambiguity in what is still being called one of Translink’s “top priorities,” I can be forgiven for my skepticism about the Broadway corridor’s rapid transit future.

Mel Lehan also makes a valid point in comments made to the Georgia Straight when he questions the logic behind sticking to the antiquated and over expensive sky train system, which has been surpassed across the Globe by a number of different technologies:

“Now that they’ve made all the phony promises and reality sets in, they don’t have the money to build this.  It’s such a waste, because if Patrick Condon is right, we could have trams throughout the entire Lower Mainland at the same cost it would be for a 12-kilometre Broadway line.”

As pointed out by transportation economist and regional planner Stephen Rees, LRT is much cheaper than the skytrain system, and has far less impact on the bottom line, the environment and the business community.

Regardless, with the political implications associated with such cost and regional battles (check out the comments from Ray Hudson from the Surrey Board Trade in the abovel-linked News 1130 article), the Broadway line is currently little more than a pipe dream.

Broadway businesses might be weary of facing the same fate that befell Cambie Street businesses, but I would say they could very well have a decade worth of different politicians and officials to complain to before that fear becomes a reality.