That’s a lot of zeros, isn’t it? I can’t help but chuckle every time some government rolls out a grand sweeping plan to Save The World^(tm) by spending a shitload of money over more than a decade, because usually it’s someone else’s government. This time, I’m the one getting repeatedly kicked in the balls pocketbook, and so are my fellow British Columbians. Seriously: can you even imagine a universe in which a multi-billion-dollar government programme with glorious but ill-defined goals and no reasonable chain of causation — let alone a functional plan — turns into anything but a cataclysmic clusterfuck?

Yeah, me neither. But Gordon Campbell, our Great Leader, sure can:

• Campbell unveils $14B transit upgrade for B.C. (CBC.ca)

Well, when the headline says “for B.C.”, what it really means is “for the greater Vancouver area, and maybe some of you other pissants who are sufficiently blessed to live nearby”. But that’s okay: you see, the plan is really to get British Columbians to drive less, and most BC drivers live in Vancouver. It’s for the planet:

The aim of the plan in Vancouver is to increase the percentage of people using public transit on weekdays by five per cent to 17 per cent by 2020. It also aims to increase transit ridership across the province to more than 400 million trips a year.

The plan will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a cumulative total of 4.7 million tonnes by 2020, said Campbell. That would be the equivalent of parking all the cars and light trucks in Metro Vancouver for a full year by getting British Columbians out of their cars and onto transit, he said.

“As more and more British Columbians live and work near transit, urban form will shift, which will lead to lower energy use, increasing energy efficiency, and a lighter environmental footprint,” said Campbell.

Well, that’s awfully nice. How? What mechanism will cause “urban form” to “shift”? Is there a causative relationship between “spending more money on public transit” and “progressively more people using public transit”? If so, where is it documented? Which studies have tried, and failed, to disprove it? You can call me a nerd for this — and you’d be right; and yes, it does mean that I’m better than you — but if it ain’t published and it ain’t obvious I don’t fucking believe it.

Here’s my objection: I don’t just live and work near transit, I live and work directly adjacent to transit. There is a well-trafficked bus stop right outside of my apartment building, and a major transit hub right outside the building in which I work. Sure, I take transit every day… because I can’t afford a car. If you gave me an extra five grand a year, I’d buy, park, fuel, and insure a car — probably the most disgustingly consumptive gas-guzzling SUV I could afford, just to spit in the face of every asshole out there who doesn’t take the bus but is morally certain that I’m obliged to do so. If I could afford to do so, I’d happily spend as much on a car as I do on rent, if it would get me off of the goddamn bus.

I’m fairly secure in the understanding that I’m not a precious and unique little snowflake; thus, I imagine that there are other people out there who hate transit as much as I do. I submit that this group covers well over ninety percent of the population — or would, if those ninety percent were forced to take the bus.

Even living right on top of one of the most frequent bus routes in the Lower Mainland, it takes me at least twenty-five minutes to get to campus by bus. If (as is usually the case) one or both of my buses is delayed, it takes me at least thirty (and since I can’t count on the timing, I tend to allow at least ten minutes slack in my schedule; we’re up to forty). In the not-at-all uncommon circumstance that one of my buses simply doesn’t show up (the driver of the next scheduled bus — usually ten or more minutes late, since s/h/it must deal with the previous bus’s passengers — never seems to know why that bus disappeared into thin air), I can easily spend an hour on each direction of my commute.

When I’m fortunate enough to catch a ride with a friend, it takes between five and ten minutes, each way. If I had a car, I’d get an extra one or two hours in each day.

If you blanketed my part of greater Vancouver with buses, ran the goddamn things every two minutes on both of my bus routes, you might be able to get my commute down to twenty minutes each way. There is a certain necessary overhead in public transit: one must constantly stop to embark and debark passengers.

While we’re on the subject of necessary costs: you don’t get to choose with whom to share diseases when you take public transit. Buses and commuter trains are second only to passenger airplanes when it comes to packing a distressing number of people, several of whom are likely to be sick and infectious at any given moment (and particularly so during flu season), into a small sealed container in which germ-laden air has no choice but to recirculate. I suppose it must keep one’s immune system from getting bored.

And, oh, those people. In four and a bit years of taking the bus four times a day, six days a week, I’ve seen three muggings, been offered drugs five times, and been solicited for drugs maybe twice. (This is in a region where the transit system has its own police force. I have yet to actually see a cop on a bus.) If you feel safe enough on a bus to whip out your PSP or immerse yourself in a book, that’s great, and I hope you do it on my bus: you’ll make a more appealing target than I will.

Of course, even if I’m not the juiciest cheeseburger on the bus, I’m still on the bus. Which means I can’t reasonably buy my ground sirloin, crushed tomatoes, and kidney beans in bulk from CostCo — I get to buy them at 30% higher prices from my local supermarket instead, twice a week. I can’t reasonably transport the materials to build my own desks, tables, and bookshelves, so I buy furniture designed in Sweden, half-built in the PRC, and shipped across one ocean and several highways — and I still lack a proper excuse to buy a bench-mounted vise. I can’t easily wander around interesting parts of town: any exploration has to be meticulously planned and synchronized to bus routes.

Basically, I find it hard to believe that increasing transit ridership is simply a matter of throwing money at the problem. Most people who take transit don’t do so because TransLink provides relevant, convenient, and affordable commuting mechanisms between their place of residence and their employment opportunities — they do it because they can’t afford to drive. Those who don’t take transit mostly don’t have to — they can afford to drive. Dropping more money on public transit will never make it a reasonable alternative for most commuters, unless you use it to buy up most of the city’s parking lots.

Factor in the environmental cost of several huge road-work projects and fifteen hundred shiny new buses, and the “lighter footprint” benefit of this work becomes somewhat obscure. (Of course, the province doesn’t measure the whole environmental impact of the project, only the reduction in “greenhouse gas emissions” from its predicted increase in transit use. That makes the whole thing useless from a practical perspective, but great propaganda for the Premier.)

On the other hand, if I was planning to stick around after getting my degree, I’d probably be at least mildly grateful. Once the construction upgefuckery subsides, things like the Evergreen Line should make commuting around Vancouver’s suburbs’s suburbs mildly less gutwrenchingly painful. Running more buses seems like a generally useful idea. Based on what the city’s been doing with the new SkyTrain line out to the airport, I expect the construction of even more light rail lines and dedicated bus routes to be a goat rodeo of epic proportions, but when it’s done it’ll probably produce a marginal — perhaps even noticeable — improvement in the public transit system.

As with most things expensive, ambitious, and not including the space programme, I expect Campbell’s great Twelve-Year Plan to go off not with a bang but with a whimper.  My commute — if fate fucks me over and I still have the same one in 2020 — might come down from 30 minutes to 20.  Vancouver’s transit system will expand to handle more passengers, but the city will expand at a sufficiently similar rate that few people will notice.  The project will go way the hell over budget, but no-one’s likely to care.

Wait a minute; budget.  Who the hell’s paying for this, anyway?

Oh, right.

Fuck!