Members of the downtown Vancouver entertainment industry are renewing calls for TransLink to operate late-night SkyTrain service on the weekends.
It comes after an official with the transit agency appeared to suggest to a CTV reporter that all night service, along the lines of that in other major world cities, was “feasible.”
But speaking with CKNW’s Steele & Drex, a TransLink spokesperson said the situation isn’t quite so simple.
LISTEN: Could TransLink actually run SkyTrain late at night?
“If you’re running a world class transit system and you’re not able to supply the people that use the system with safe transportation for an extra hour-and-a-half or an hour-and-45-minutes on Friday or Saturday nights… I don’t buy it in the least,” said Curtis Robinson.
He’s a former Vancouver police officer, and currently the chair of BarWatch, an association for safe bars and nightclubs in the city.
Robinson said he’s been told for years by TransLink that the system can’t operate at night because crews need that time to do maintenance on the tracks — but he has his doubts.
“This is absolutely not true, it’s garbage.”
And he says a lack of transit options late at night is a major contributor to drunk driving and violence on the Granville strip.
“They just mingle, and that’s when fights start and problems start around the pizza joints and the hot dog stands and things like that, and it’s very difficult to police.”
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It’s a perspective shared by Charles Gautier, president and CEO of the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association.
He says the current lack of transportation options is a contributing factor to problems in the Granville entertainment district.
“We wouldn’t have that issue of people trying to get cabs or people trying to find a way to leave the downtown to get back to their respective communities,” he said.
“I mean, we’ve seen this in the news about how ridiculous it is that people have to be fighting for cabs, literally and figuratively when the bars close.”
LISTEN: TransLink says it could run SkyTrain all night, but there’s a catch
But TransLink says it’s not so simple.
While it might be technically possible for TransLink to get trains running late at night, it’s not going to happen any time soon said spokesperson Chris Bryan.
“I think it’s safe to say it’s on our radar, we continue to think about it, and explore it. We don’t have any plans to change that now, to be frank.”
That’s because ongoing maintenance really is necessary for the aging Expo line, where crews are called in every single night to do work, Bryan said.
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Crews have to move more than a dozen pieces of equipment into place to do that maintenance, then get them back to storage — a process Bryan said leaves just two and a half hours per night to work.
If they were to keep the trains running on weekend evenings, crews would have to disrupt daytime service instead, he added.
“So far we’ve said it’s not the kind of trade-off that we want to make, we don’t want to shut down the system on a Sunday afternoon or Sunday morning.”
Bryan also disputed the comparison to other major cities like New York and London that run all-night service.
He said in those cities, the transit network is so vast that when crews shut down one or two lines for work, commuters can just walk to another station on another line.
“We unfortunately don’t have that luxury in Vancouver.”
Bryan said in Vancouver’s case, TransLink runs night buses along both the Expo and Millennium lines, and is working to set up all night bus service along the Canada Line.
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