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TransLink cuts funding for the Transit Museum Society
The Transit Museum Society operates a fleet of about 12 historic buses, including this 1976 Flyer E800.
Photo courtesy of the Transit Museum Society
A nonprofit organization that maintains a fleet of historic Vancouver buses is looking for a new home. The Transit Museum Society has learned that budget pressures at TransLink will bring funding for the group to an end next year.
The society operates about 12 buses dating back to the 1930s as part of a “rolling museum” that’s used for community events, weddings, and movies. TransLink, which has been covering the cost of renting a warehouse to store the buses in, recently gave the group a year’s notice, until the end of September 2013, to find a new place to keep the vehicles.
“We’ve been renting a lot in Burnaby from a landowner, and paying that plus vehicle insurance and liability insurance has added up to more than $91,000 a year to TransLink,” Drew Snider, a spokesperson for the transit authority, told the Straight by phone.
“So with our current budgetary situation…we just decided that we can’t continue that support.”
Dale Laird, president of the society, said his group is concerned about finding a new location. They plan to look for private partners to keep the bus museum going.
“Our problem is going to be finding a place to store the buses, being able to afford a warehouse to put them in—that’s going to be our biggest problem,” he said. “We’ve got some ideas of partnerships…we’ve been making a list of who we could talk to and other museum groups that we could partner with.”
The historic bus fleet includes one locally built bus from 1937, while the majority are from 1946 to 1957. The collection also includes buses representative of each decade.
Laird, who was a bus driver in Vancouver for 36 years, added that he knows some of his peers support preserving the city’s transit history, but suggested the sentiment is being overruled by budgetary pressures.
Transit commissioner Martin Crilly challenged TransLink earlier this year to find cost savings of $40 million to $60 million over the next three years. The authority recently identified $98 million in annual “efficiencies” over the next three years, amid lower than projected revenues.
“It would just be sad to lose the history of these vehicles,” Laird said.
It's bad enough that the City terminated the operations of the Downtown Historic Railway to Granville Island this past summer. If Vancouver, and the Lower Mainland generally, truly aspires to be "world class," it has to get serious about preserving its heritage. That includes its heritage of public service vehicles.
While it would be far too costly for TransLink itself to preserve, restore or operate heritage vehicles, the service provided by the Transit Museum Society is a bargain by any standard. There is no advertising budget, no payroll--in fact the volunteers themselves pay to belong to the Society. These unpaid volunteers have managed to do something extraordinary in collecting and restoring some very significant and rare vehicles, all of which have historic connections to Greater Vancouver and the Lower Mainland.
TransLink has received a great deal of positive exposure through its funding of the Transit Museum Society: surely the cost of funding is less than the cost of comparable advertising! TransLink's executives should think again.
Transit has had an interesting past and only these vehicles serve as a reminder of where and what we progressed from.
So many properties across Canada have at least a half dozen vintage buses. Why not BC?
I've attended many boat, car, truck shows over the years and public transit is the one venue where the masses were served by vehicles that ran day and night, year after year, decade after decade, tirelessly.... Shouldn't at least one vehicle from every decade be preserved?