C-Tran’s board of directors this week unanimously approved a 20-year vision that includes new bus routes, enhanced C-Van paratransit service and high-capacity transit.
Now, they just need to figure out how to ask voters to pay for it.
In adopting the first 20-year blueprint in the transit agency’s history, C-Tran’s board endorsed a package of improvements with a price tag of $170 million.
The biggest single chunk — $72 million — would go toward refashioning Fourth Plain Boulevard into a bus rapid transit corridor. Bus rapid transit, which uses elongated buses on dedicated lanes with fewer stops, would run from the Vancouver mall transit station into downtown Vancouver. From Clark College to downtown, the buses would share right-of-way with light rail tracks embedded within downtown streets.
To review C-Tran’s 20-year transit development plan, click here
Business owners raised concern about customers losing access by eliminating center lanes and preventing left-hand turns.
“You’re going to kill Fourth Plain,” said Jim Kurfurst, who has operated Butcher Boys for the past 41 years. “You should rethink this and help the businesses on this corridor survive.”
The situation is especially irksome for Kurfurst, who just recently purchased and remodeled a new building several blocks east on Fourth Plain for his business. Butcher Boys is due to reopen in the new location next month.
Kurfurst said Wednesday that if he had known about the bus rapid transit line when he sealed the deal, “I would no more stay in this Fourth Plain corridor than fly to the moon .”
C-Tran officials said they plan to meet individually with business owners and form an advisory committee now that the C-Tran board has approved the general blueprint.
“There’s nothing on paper that says, this is exactly how it’s going to look,” said Scott Patterson, the agency’s marketing manager.
Nor is there any money for the project, at least not yet.
Putting the first phase of the plan into motion will require boosting the sales tax 0.3 percent. Currently, C-Tran collects 0.5 percent on sales within a service area bounded by Vancouver, its urban growth area and Clark County’s incorporated cities. (The current sales tax rate for all government functions in Vancouver is 8.2 percent).
A third of the anticipated sales tax boost would go to high-capacity transit. That includes building and operating the new bus rapid transit corridor on Fourth Plain, along with $2 million to $3 million annually to operate light rail on the Washington side of the river.
C-Tran would not pay to build light rail; construction would occur as part of the multibillion-dollar Columbia River Crossing project.
C-Tran’s board must decide whether to strip out the high-capacity transit portion of the sales tax increase, or lump it together with enhanced local, express and C-Van service.
That discussion will begin no sooner than the board’s meeting on Aug. 10.
Voters soundly rejected a 1995 proposal to extend light rail into Clark County, although a recent C-Tran survey indicated public support for the agency’s broader transit development plan.
The C-Tran board approved the plan unanimously Tuesday night, although Clark County Commissioner Tom Mielke was absent. The board includes all three elected county commissioners, three members of the Vancouver City Council, and three representatives of smaller cities in the county.
Erik Robinson: 360-735-4551, or erik.robinson@columbian.com.
