Mayor Shari Green calls it a good conversation to have but there's a better phrase to describe the work being put into a 25-year transit plan for the City of Prince George.
Waste of time.
The forecast to 2039 calls for city transit offering 5.4 million rides per year, compared to 2.2 million rides per year in 2011-2012, using a fleet of 82 vehicles, compared to the 35 buses on the road at present.
What are these future numbers based on?
The mayor herself sounds suspicious about what the point of guessing what the city's transit situation will be a quarter of a century from now, since the city certainly hasn't seen major population growth in the last 25 years.
"I don't anticipate we're going to see that plan look the same 25 years from now as what we saw today."
If that's the case, what's the point of the exercise?
There was some good that came of it.
There were short-term recommendations for actions to take within the next five years, including providing service on stat holidays, improving weekend service, developing a plan for a downtown transit hub and looking at the feasibility of providing paratransit to Blackburn and Beaverley.
The plan also identified long-term improvements, such as a connection to the airport, a rapid transit system, expanding the Pine Centre transit exchange, building a transit exchange at Westgate, and increasing the size and capacity of the operations and maintenance facility.
The short-term recommendations are worth examining from a cost-benefit analysis but the long-term improvements at this point read like a wish list and should be treated as such.
The only point to looking ahead 25 years is to give the present council a taste of what the city's future transit system might require but that shouldn't influence current or short-term future decisions to any degree. While natural resource development opportunities across the region look promising, there are no guarantees about how much development will actually happen nor how much Prince George will benefit. The population of Prince George has been mostly stagnant for the past 25 years, a contributing factor in the significant aging of the local population during that time. It's likely that community leaders and city planners back in 1989 cheerfully expected Prince George's population to grow by about two per cent annually. If that happened, nearly 125,000 people would live here. Even if the city had grown by just 1 per cent annually, there would be 96,000 people now living in this city, but anyone who would have had the nerve to suggest one per cent or less population growth in 1989 would have been dismissed as negative and unable to appreciate the city's potential and imagine a successful future for Prince George.
That's the problem with looking ahead more than about five years. Since the past is an unreliable predictor of the future, the only thing we are left is our wishes and our desires or, as the politicians and planners like to call it, our "vision."
The other problem with forecasting as far ahead as 2039 is there is really no idea what the demand for public transit will be. Just because the population might grow steadily over the next 25 years doesn't mean the demand for public transit will grow at the same rate. It might grow more or it might grow less or it might not grow at all.
The early developers of what is now Prince George had vision, too. When the first train arrived in Prince George 100 years ago yesterday, community boosters saw Prince George as becoming B.C.'s version of Edmonton., a northern capital to rival Vancouver. Unfortunately, it took 70 more years for Prince George just to reach the population Edmonton had in 1914.
This is not to say that Prince George will continue to underachieve and disappoint.
Prince George has the ingredients already in place to fuel incredible growth and prosperity over the next 25 years.
It will take more than wishing for it in a long-term plan, however, to make it come to pass.
