Doing Nothing

TransLink recently spent 18 months informing everyone who would listen what would happen to the area if it wasn’t able to do its job.

“We did a lot of educating of what this region would be like if we didn’t do anything. We call it the Do Nothing Option,” says Jacobsen.

Using its data system, the agency programmed a computer with the planned city growth plans and port growth statistics and asked people to take a look at how their daily trip would change in 20 years. While discussions of how many billions of dollars improvements would take over the next two decades often fell on deaf ears, showing people that their daily commute may double in the same amount of time got their attention and primed them for a solution.

Combining a series of advertisements with a Web site and a circuit of public appearances, Jacobsen and other TransLink officials were able to get the word out to more than 100 groups and even more so, it got them thinking.

“It really paid off in terms of an understanding of a need for an investment. And I think it created a momentum for our plan,” says Jacobsen.

Modern History

As most major transit agencies will tell you, their beginnings can almost all be traced back to the trolley lines of yesteryear and the transition from them to buses and more recently to light rail lines. But for Vancouver, those halcyon days of the trolley never really ended.

TransLink’s fleet contains 250 trolley buses that were put into service in 1948 as part of the Rails to Rubber program, which gradually phased out streetcars. That fleet served until 1978, and this second fleet is still in service today as the agency plans to transition to a new generation of emission-free, electrically powered trolleys.