Governments wasting money on public transit
Jon Lefebure, chairman of the CVRD, claimed in the Aug 4, 2017 article “there has been exceptional growth in local transit over the years”. How does he then explain the large transit buses traveling through our communities with one or two people on board, as rightfully pointed out by Donna Einarsson (“E&N rail lines better suited to reinvention as transit routes”, Citizen, Aug. 18).
The ridership, as we all know, on many routes does not support the so-called service, not to mention the need to bring the bus fleet from the current 31 up to 50 buses in the future. Has it never occurred to those in charge that maybe it would be a good idea to monitor which routes have significant ridership and which are a dead loss and adjust the frequency of service and size of buses to the need?
BC Transit is currently replacing the outdated fleet with new buses of similar size. This would be a perfect opportunity to replace some of the buses with much smaller versions and use them on routes that have next to no ridership. However the CVRD has other ideas and is totally inflexible.
We have our area directors to thank for this mismanagement. However, there are two possible solutions to this situation. (1) an attitude adjustment of some or all of the directors, or (2) voting them out of office at the next opportunity.
The left leaning federal and provincial ministers and local representatives recently announced this $15 million transit facility claiming that the feds are contributing $6.5 M, B.C. is contributing $4.29 M and Victoria’s contribution is $1.45 M leaving the CVRD to contribute $2.76 M. The politicians make it sound as if all this money from various levels of government is free money and a gift from heaven. Well it is NOT. Any money contributed by various levels of government is money confiscated from the taxpayers as income tax, property tax, sales tax, etc. And yes folks, that is you and me.
It just proves one more time that government officials are addicted to spending as much of your money as possible. Case in point, Lori Iannidinardo, the NDP candidate for the Cowichan Valley, spent $90,510 on her unsuccessful bid in the May 2017 provincial election, the most expenditure of any of the candidates.
Once again, aren’t you glad we are in such good hands of our elected officials?
W. Hufnagl
Cobble Hill