The Victoria Regional Transit Commission, the City of Victoria, the Municipality of Saanich, BC Transit, and the Ministry of Transportation, seem to have wasted up to $3 million. Five years ago they started a project to create priority for buses along Douglas Street. They spent money but then due to there being no one to coordinate between the players, what looks like a simple matter fell through the cracks.
The equipment that was installed is now useless and out of date. The money wasted. Now there is a “new group” with representatives from “all jurisdictions” working to make the plan work, with additional costs and after years of delay.
So, if we were amalgamated, we would have one city, and the Ministry of Transportation. Two organizations working on this project instead of five.
We would not need a Victoria Regional Transit Commission and BC Transit can just transfer their mandate to the City, which would be able to run the busses as is done in many other cities. Even if BC Transit were to remain, we would still cut down on the bureaucracy which clearly in this case lost us all a great deal of money and delayed for years something that was presumably of benefit to the region.
2 comments:
Nice to see you blogging again James!
BC Transit has certainly been a loose cannon in the past five years and may had too close an association with the Ministry of Transport. Thus, we may have an explanation of why the E&N was not permitted in the plans by which our Colwood Crawl could be mitigated. Either CRD has a strengthened Transportation mandate or we have a Metro transportation authority. Of course that logic should prevail for policing and many other infrastructure programs of the region.
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