With all of the TransLink apologists’ angst over massive cuts, I had to chuckle as TransLink planner (a skeptic might suggest that's an oxymoron!) Tamim Raad cut the legs out from under them over on apologist-in-chief Gord Price's blog. In an email to Price, Raad explains what’s really going on: 

Saw your post on Seattle. Not encouraging, for sure.

I did want to correct you on one thing, though. And I’m not being defensive or ‘spinning’ here. But service optimization is not a cut to service.

Seattle is reducing its overall service hours to reduce its budget because of funding shortfalls.

Service optimization is really different. Our total number of service hours for the system are not going down. We are simply taking the lowest productivity hours out of low performing routes (this can be a certain place, or time of day) and we are REALLOCATING those hours to times and places where there is crowding and/or higher ridership potential. We are moving more people with the same hours.

TransLink saves no money (or not much). But it does get higher ridership and higher revenue. There is a negative impact on some passengers though, for sure – the buses might not have been totally empty, just not very well used. We just have to decide what a reasonable minimum level is for providing service at certain times and areas and how best to service customers overall. Overall, more people benefit than don’t. And the higher revenue means we can support more service over the long run.

By optimizing the allocation of service hours towards more productive and higher potential routes while maintaining the same total number of service hours in the region, we strive to ensure that the region is getting the best value out of the investment in bus transit service.

Raad is right. These aren’t cuts – this is an agency starting to come to terms with how inefficiently they’ve been operating. What has been cut is the argument among the TransLink apologists that we need to raise taxes to stave off crippling transit service - the push for efficiency (as weak as it's been at TransLink) has not cut service.

There’s plenty more inefficiency where this came from.