the reality is, they will be sold off for pennies on the dollar. And either Schwarzenegger or his Royal highness the great Campbell could care less
BC Transit's $90M hydrogen bus fleet to be sold off, converted to diesel
- Thread starter Locutus
- Start date
There's great potential in teleportation as well. A fiscally prudent government would wait until the potential is, at least, realistically achievable before they throw money at it. Seems to me Liberals could have used the same argument for the gun registry....it had great potential you know...
No doubt and if there was a good chance of success, business would have been all over it and there would have been no need for the governments money.
Ya gotta love how some of the pretend conservatives support government intervention when it's their man doing the intervening.
Ballard has been working on this for a long time. It was worth seeing if it would work out because of the potential payback and bus fleets are a perfect test ground. Now they are spending bundles on NG powered busses. Is that also a waste of taxpayers money? Really a case could be made that public transportation is a waste of tax payer's money.
I work in industries that are constantly looking for new and better ways to do things. Some work, most don't. But every once in a while a game changer comes along.
Depends on location. Generally speaking, only fools would argue against public transportation in major cities.
Done with private money no doubt.....or are you being subsidized as well?
Depends on wether you can use it or not. It is rather frustrating to have to pay for your own transportation because transit does not work for your job and have your taxes used to provide cheap transportation for others. I'm not against public transit by any means but I have a problem with the way it is funded and operated. But I have spent my life dependent on BC Ferries as well.
There has been government money involved in some of the logging experiments. Federal as well as provincial. And no it has not always been wisely spent and there have been some scams. At times it seems like there is a pile of loot to spend and they just spread it around without thought or oversight.
No, it doesn't but you can take solace in the fact that you're not the first person to get that wrong.
ANytime you are forced to pay for something you can not use is a waste. Just depends on how much we all have to contribute to benefit the few. My tax dollars fund public transit in BC yet there is no bus or train within 8km of my house. Nor do any of them go where I have to go. But I don't pay a huge amount so it doesn't matter too much. I just like to keep the people running the show aware that we are watching.
Nonsense. I've never needed the fire department but my home insurance is less because we have one. It's silly to think you don't benefit from a transit system simply because you don't use it.
You are benefiting from the fire department because it lowers your insurance.
Explain how I benefit from paying for public transit I never use. Wouldn't it make more sense if the people that use it pay for it?
Well, the numbers would depend on how the system is run, the size of the city, how the routes are run etc....but generally speaking, I saw something recently where the cost of traffic congestion alone would cost the economy in the US 21 billion without public transportation. One can only imagine what the city of Vancouver would have to spend to improve major arteries if they did away with public transportation. I'm sure parking prices wouldn't drop.
Access to public transportation benefits businesses as it expands the available workforce.
Your problem is that you are looking for a direct benefit. That may or may not exist, depending on where you live. You are receiving indirect benefits regardless of where you live. I live in a rural area without public transportation of any kind. The Edmonton transit system reduces the amount of money needed for road construction and repair which means there is more provincial dollars for our municipality
Yep, coulda launched a fleet of derigibles; named them Hindenburg 1, and 2, and...........Das Biggy Bang !
Company XYZ bills a distribution warehouse in the city. Because the city has public transportation it can build the warehouse in an industrial park. It knows that the workers can get to the place of business easily. The city saves money because it can build residential areas and industrial areas. The standard for building roads is much lower in residential areas that it is an industrial areas. Waterlines don't have to be as large and they don't have to be as many hydrants in residential areas. Cities don't generally build sidewalks in industrial areas. This system allows the municipality to target its infrastructure where it's most needed and what types are most needed. The taxpayers get a better bang for the buck whether or not they actually ride the bus
We can no longer drive, cannot get on a bus nor have my power walker put into the trunk of a cab. In our region we have something public named 'handivan'. That makes it possible to have appointments at the hospital, family doctor, dentist and so on. Very cheaply though it obviously costs the region much more than we pay. Without something like 'handivsn service and subsidised too many disabled folk would be unable to have such essential appointments.
Unlike everyone else on this thread I have some experience of those hydrogen busses being as how I shared the road with them and even rode them a few times when I worked in Whistler.
The guy who thinks they'll be converted to diesel has No Clue you can't just drop a diesel engine into one without ripping it apart and spending more money than it's worth putting it back together-ditto NG-it ain't gonna happen.
The guy who thinks they'll be converted to diesel has No Clue you can't just drop a diesel engine into one without ripping it apart and spending more money than it's worth putting it back together-ditto NG-it ain't gonna happen.
You should have kept that on the QT. Some heartless bas*ard will make it his mission to privatize it to wring profit from it
There are pros and cons alright. The two big cons in BC are Provincial money going to finance public transport in Vancouver while we can't even get potholes patched and have zero public transport. Then there is BC Ferries. Now I chose to live on the island and don't care that much about the ferry schedule and cost, except for freight. We have two systems, the interior ferries which as far as I know have always been free, and the coastal ones which are getting rather expensive. The tourism people claim the cost is cutting into their business but most of the rest of us feel that if your business model depends on taxpayers getting the flock to your door to be fleeced you are in the wrong business. I don't have a problem with some tax dollars being used to make transportation less expensive for residents and their freight but I fail to see why we should carry the tourism businesses as well. If tourism produced $100000/yr jobs might be different but they don't. They do low pay no benefit part of the year jobs. That is not something to base the economy on.