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Look at the big transit picture

Everyone wants it, but nobody wants to pay for it.

Everyone wants it, but nobody wants to pay for it.

And so goes the perpetual debate over funding transit in Greater Vancouver, with the Evergreen Line and other improvements proposed by TransLink being the latest to undergo the third degree from regional politicians last week.

All the usual cards - vehicle levies, increased taxes on gas, property and parking, tolls and higher fares - are thrown on the table as disagreements continue over how to finance the projects most agree we desperately require.

Make no mistake, whatever is chosen will be unpopular, but if we deem the infrastructure necessary, we need to find a way to pay for it. Having said that, rather than seeking out the fairest, or least politically damaging, way to extract more from overburdened taxpayers, shouldn't greater attention be paid to the rapid transit system itself?

The biggest problem I see is the province and the transportation authority are married to the prohibitively expensive SkyTrain system, which has expanded about as quickly as a supermodel's waistline. It's taken a quarter-century to build three lines on a network that doesn't even begin to service the whole region, keeping thousands and thousands of people in their vehicles every day because rapid transit doesn't come anywhere close to their homes.

I know I've beaten on this issue before, but if we continue to hitch our wagon to SkyTrain, it's inevitable that we're going to have these funding predicament discussions for decades to come.

That's not to say any type of rapid transit comes cheaply, but the one we've got ourselves wed to is one we don't appear to be able to afford. If we could, we'd have a heck of a lot more track in place than what we do after 25 years.

Rather than trying to extract more blood from a stone in this and what will undoubtedly be subsequent debates over transit funding, I think Lower Mainland mayors, as well as our provincial politicians in Victoria, need to take a critical look at the bigger picture.

SkyTrain is fantastic if you're lucky enough to live near it, but this elevated system is just too expensive. If we keep up the current pace, and it appears we might not have the cash flow to even do that, we'd add a whopping three lines in the next quarter century.

Fifty years in and we're not even close to bringing rapid transit to all areas of the Lower Mainland? That hardly seems like the road, elevated or not, we should be following.