Get straight who owns what, who is doing what

Times Colonist

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Re: "Railway viability," letters, July 4.

Washington Group is not asking for a subsidy for the E&N. We, the people of Vancouver Island, own the railway. The Island Corridor Foundation with its title to the railway, land and track, has Island municipalities as its membership. The ICF declares that $30 million will get our railway in operating condition.

The Washington Group's Southern Railway of B.C., a company with a demonstrated track record, will operate trains on our tracks. As a landlord will offer a tenant reduced rent during renovations, so we through ICF are giving the operator a year rent-free while the line is brought up to standard.

Are the letter writers ready to pay back the subsidy they get as drivers?

First: The motor-fuel tax paid at the gas pump does not cover the full cost of our provincial highways budget. The rest is from income taxes.

Second: Municipal roads are supplied through property taxes. When a person leaves his home municipality, he is driving on roads he does not pay for. As a resident of Saanich, I subsidize all those drivers who drive through my municipality.

Third: Policing of highways does not come from fuel taxes, but again from municipal budgets.

These subsidies distort everyone's transportation decisions: Whether to buy a second car, what methods of travel to use, whether even to own a car.

The E&N rail line has the ability to move far more people than even a four-lane highway. And with double track, which can fit in the land already owned, the efficiency improves enormously.

To widen just the Malahat highway will consume a huge swath of land as well as many times the money needed to rebuild the E&N. It is obvious that a railway treads far more lightly on the land than a highway.

About subsidies to private companies: Our highway system is a huge subsidy to the trucking industry, the direct competitor of the railways. Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon has committed the Ministry of Highways to spending $3.5 billion on the "Gateway Project" so that truckers can move their trucks and trailers. We pay for the asphalt. Railways pay for their own rights-of-way.

Our Liberal government's division of "public" versus "private" does not fit the matter of moving people and goods. The compartmentalized thinking this mantra produces means that the "Gateway Project" will be built, even though in other places, more highway lanes are filled almost as soon as they are built, with no relation to population.

Here in the capital region, the western approaches "improvements" were full the day they were completed.

Transportation for people and goods is a unity. Right now parts are subsidized in several different ways. Who and what get subsidized should be viewed in terms of benefit to the whole province, not just for the benefit of select groups.

Bob Trotter is president of the Light Rail Promotion Group of the Island Transit Alliance Society.