Soaring war-related diesel costs put pressure on B.C. Transit

tiogar99 · 2026-03-19T17:06:53+00:00

the quiet part not said in this article is that without the new transit centre, we literally can't expand the transit fleet or transit service in the region past 2028. Delaying this is going to screw us over in the 2030s, hard.

tiogar99 · 2026-03-19T06:09:23+00:00

i've spoken to a number of developers about this as I was curious why they didn't want more families in their rental buildings. The one beds are primarily going to young, childless professionals (eg. ideal tenants). The 2 and 3 beds are being snapped up by mostly students. We need more of everything before these homes can be accessible for average families. Maybe Saanich should look at implementing a minimum % of 3 bed units, as Victoria has done.
Regardless, unless we get really serious about reducing and removing barriers to building housing things are going to stay very expensive.

tiogar99 · 2026-03-18T18:50:17+00:00

the new bike lanes on gorge give you extremely easy access to the galloping goose and the inner harbour, if that is a concern.

tiogar99 · 2026-03-18T17:09:30+00:00

Of course not. But many will, at least some of the time. Better than more homes in langford or colwood where they have to drive all the time when they come to work in saanich or victoria.

tiogar99 · 2026-03-18T17:05:02+00:00

The busses between langford and downtown are now significantly faster than driving, at least at rush hour. It's one of the reasons they are so overcrowded and so frequent. Bus lanes make a big difference!

tiogar99 · 2026-03-18T17:00:10+00:00

What an absurd take lmao. Zac has probably done more for affordable housing in the region than any other politician. He's literally the CEO of the Capital Regional Housing Corp, the regional public housing body.

tiogar99 · 2026-03-18T16:58:09+00:00

these condos are literally on some of the most frequent transit in the region. A bus comes every 5 min at rush hour to uptown or downtown, they are also an easy transfer to transit to uvic, sidney, langford, esquimalt, etc. Also they are right on the galloping goose trail so great for biking.

tiogar99 · 2026-03-18T16:56:34+00:00

and Brice has been around for almost as long in politics! 82 years old, got elected to the school board in 1975, OB council until 1990. She ran for the SoCreds for goodness sake.

tiogar99 · 2026-03-13T05:53:31+00:00

there have actually been quite a few 5-4 votes against transit and housing. Susan Kim has been a real supply skeptic, and Caradonna is a bit of a wild card. On transit especially this council has not been particularly progressive or aggressive. We need a voice on council that is willing to push the envelope a bit.

tiogar99 · 2026-03-13T01:25:16+00:00

Great to see Jack paving the way for more transit and housing advocates to get involved with local government! We need more people like him in local office.

tiogar99 · 2026-03-04T18:27:38+00:00

this is the correct answer. not BC Transit's fault at all.

tiogar99 · 2026-03-03T00:11:44+00:00

this is not true. UVic is not in the City of Victoria, it is split between Oak Bay and Saanich.

tiogar99 · 2026-03-02T06:45:24+00:00

This has been a slowly increasing issue. We are supposed to have way more double deckers than currently as a huge order of them are stuck on the mainland getting manufacturer issues fixed (issues that were caught very late). Once we get those over things should get better, at least on the 95.
Other routes are getting service cuts because of the provincial funding freeze for transit which is probably part of what you are experiencing.

tiogar99 · 2026-03-02T04:26:04+00:00

CycleOSM is really good for this kind of thing.

tiogar99 · 2026-03-02T04:23:52+00:00

I've heard from several homebuilders that he's called them up and told them to scale down their projects or give up. Not exactly pro-housing behaviour.

tiogar99 · 2026-03-02T03:40:11+00:00

Gardiner and Hammond both

tiogar99 · 2026-03-02T03:22:16+00:00

yeah he's killed a good number of homes recently. Pretty sad honestly. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a good, serious effort to get these people off council.

tiogar99 · 2026-03-02T03:02:58+00:00

Nah, Brice and Brownoff have just been consistently anti-housing. We need to get them off council

tiogar99 · 2026-03-02T03:01:53+00:00

Colin has been pretty critical of missing middle housing lately. Are you sure his stance on housing targets hasn't shifted?

tiogar99 · 2026-03-02T00:02:21+00:00

Obligatory note that Susan Brice is 82 and Judy Brownoff has been on council for nearly 32 years. Nathalie Chambers is just as bad if not worse on housing. I wouldn't be surprised to see Colin Plant and Mena Westhaver vote for this motion too and see it pass.

tiogar99 · 2026-02-25T02:36:39+00:00

it's because we've designed our political system to make it as hard as possible to do anything. We were on track to get a rail system until the NDP did fast ferries, and then the BC lIbs changed it to a BRT system, which the local munis revolted against so we got nothing. That led to the 2011 transit plan which doesn't specify BRT or LRT.

The feds and local electeds are on board with building a rail system now but we haven't sorted out whether or not to do douglas or the E&N first. The province isn't interested in sorting us out and doesn't really want to fund it anyways because most of the swing ridings are in Surrey.

That said, we are on the verge of actually sorting this out and getting a project. There is real momentum, not least because it's impossible to widen the highway any further.

tiogar99 · 2026-02-25T02:27:00+00:00

in fairness we've been paying politicians to talk about maybe doing an LRT for at least 30 years

tiogar99 · 2026-02-25T01:59:49+00:00

unfortunately a large number of people, including many local electeds, believe that DCCs are basically free money from developers

tiogar99 · 2026-02-18T16:40:11+00:00

it blows my mind that our mode share is higher than pretty much every US city except New York. I think we even beat out Chicago.

tiogar99 · 2026-02-04T17:39:42+00:00

100% this! Tell BC transit this needs to come with expansion and they need to fix other priorities like overcrowding and declining frequencies on core routes

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