Surrey
Surrey’s Mayor thinks helicopter pads more important than transit
by daka_x
The City of Surrey has decided to leave the city’s transit commuters behind while putting members of the “1%” who want to commute by helicopter first.
From The Globe and Mail: People travelling the 40 kilometres between Surrey and Vancouver tend to drive or take transit. Surrey’s mayor wants to add a third option: helicopter.
…I have often shared the sentiment that Surrey’s transit future is in a bad shape as it is, but an announcement today by the City Mayor just took that sentiment to a whole new level. A network of helicopter take-off and landing pads to service business-men and wealthy commuters who can pay has just jumped the priority list over a rapid transit system to service all of the city’s commuters and the transit-dependent.
Yes, I said that right. The City of Surrey has decided to leave the city’s transit commuters behind while putting members of the “1%” who want to commute by helicopter first. If you don’t believe me, you can read her speech transcript for yourself.
Hepner between helicopters and LRT
The media still has yet to catch onto the ridiculousness and mismatched premise of this idea, but soon will come the rewatches and re-reads of the Mayor’s State of the City speech, during which this is bound to be uncovered. The announcement was made immediately after a segment of the talk that focused on the city’s transit ambitions (specifically, the City’s plan for an LRT system). The segment was very short and offered no promises on transit, was ended quickly, and then segued into the plan for helicopters and helipads – which did come with a solid promise to start construction by 2017.
Now, let me back up a little bit and tell, you exactly what is wrong here. First, Mayor Hepner stated that she could only “believe” that construction of a proposed Light Rail Transit network would be started by the year 2018. And, that’s after initially promising that it would be finished by 2018 in the last elections.
“[Ms. Hepner] said she hopes to have construction [on the helipads] under way by this time in 2017.”
Secondly, she announced that the City would potentially be spending untold millions of taxpayer dollars on a network of helipads (and the associated land) with construction starting in 2017 or at least a full year before anything on rapid transit begins.
As a young, transit-dependent person living in this city (and one among potentially thousands of others now and in the future) I think to say that I’m outraged would be a serious understatement.
To an extent it is kind of understandable why this ended up jumping the gun into first place. A rapid transit network for far more people might be a significantly bigger public investment with bigger risks.
No less, the City’s Light Rail Transit proposal been thrown in limbo due to major delays in producing the business case, a $500 million increase in cost and ongoing standstills in finding regional funding, no thanks to a serious lack of confidence in the establishment conveyed in the transit referendum “no” vote. Not to mention, the serious drawbacks of an LRT system and the significant opposition to LRT from a group which I lead (opposition that’s so strong that even the Mayor of the City of Langley announced his preference to have a SkyTrain extension instead).
However, to be unable to make a serious commitment on a transit network meant to service thousands of city residents, yet be completely able and willing to commit on something that will pretty much exclusively service the “1%” and let them literally fly over everyone else, really suggests to me that the Mayor’s priorities aren’t to ensure the best for the people that the city wouldn’t be without, if we’re to believe what she mentioned earlier in her speech.
What is a city, but its people helicopter-entitled 1%?
And what is Surrey but its helicopter-entitled Mayor. If there’s any tidbit of the proposal that we should all be looking at, it’s Mayor Hepner’s personal stake in desiring the service…
“She emphasized the city is looking beyond links between Vancouver and Surrey to flights to the B.C. capital of Victoria, which she said she would use herself.”
We already know this Mayor and Council to be relentless in billing taxpayers for the cost of trips. With the helicopters being said to cost $12 to $16 a minute I can’t imagine how much taxpayers will be paying to give the Mayor the luxury to fly over traffic to Victoria. And I certainly don’t think, from any feasibility perspective, that it is acceptable.
I must also seriously question the timing and viability of this proposal.
Sky Helicopters, a helicopter company mentioned by the Globe and Mail that is considering partnering with the City in delivering the service mentioned in the Globe and Mail’s article that they had been discussing this with the city for “several years”. This really makes me wonder why steps couldn’t have been taken earlier to implement this infrastructure within the City at a reasonable and low cost.
For example, the City decided to blow over $100 million on a new city hall that’s been put through significant criticism over its over-budget cost. For $100 million I don’t think it would have been too much of a stretch to include a rooftop helipad in the design of the new City Hall and within that cost.
This is the same Mayor who at the beginning of her term insisted that Surrey taxpayers should pay for a waterfront ferris wheel.
So why now? Well, only a couple of months ago, The Province came out with an article (“High-end Metro Vancouver real estate buyers commuting by helicopter” – March 14, 2016) discussing how real estate buyers, realtors and other business-people in the developer community are commuting by helicopter between Vancouver and expensive Fraser Valley estates.
“Usually we take six (Concord Pacific realtors) at a time, flying two of our smaller helicopters in formation,” Westlund said. “In one trip we covered about seven of their developments. They like getting the lay of the land.”
It should be noteworthy that the company that is mentioned in the article as facilitating these commutes is the same one that’s in talks with Surrey in establishing the heli-service.
I wonder which of the numerous developers, business elites and business associations who donated big bucks to the Surrey First election campaign is Hepner trying to feed from her hand.
(20-year-old urban planning/policy researcher in Metro Vancouver, Canada. Founding director of SkyTrain for Surrey.)