Rail corridor must be preserved
I feel the rail corridor needs to be preserved as a transportation corridor.
Whether we get the tracks repaired, or ripped up and turned into a bus route that bypasses the traffic jams. We need a reliable, safe, and convenient transit route that gets people where they need to go, when they need to be there. It should be tied into the existing BC Transit services so that people can get to work, the hospitals, or any other services that requires someone to get to and from Victoria from north of the Malahat.
Successive governments of all political parties have missed the bus on this. I can remember the topic coming up when I was a teenager in the 1970s. The reason given has always been that it isn’t cost effective because it won’t pay for itself, which could be said of many things, including road expansion/improvements. Public transportation infrastructure doesn’t pay for “itself”, it is the goods, services, and people that use it that generate the tax revenue that pays for it.
Pouring hundreds of millions into trying to expand the current Malahat Drive bottlenecks, while not providing an alternative that would be usable in inclement weather, or when the route is closed completely because of an accident, doesn’t make any sense to me.
We have already lost most of the old rail beds on the South Island because of the shortsightedness of our politicians, I would hate for this one to join the list.
Calvin Slade
Cowichan Bay