My bitching about BC Transit’s plan for Victoria got me an invitation to participate in an (open) survey about plan priorities. Similar to the City of Victoria’s prioritizing survey, BC Transit is running a “planning game”. I guess HTML forms weren’t up to the task, because it’s a on a Web 2.0 website as locked down as a Flash app: the back button is broken and there’s no way to see data without stepping through it. That being said, it does show you the average opinion after each step.

I believe that I should express what would personally benefit me and allow BC Transit’s planners to find the maximal utility for the population. Living and working downtown, I don’t use transit very often but I appreciate a good system waiting for me when I do.

The survey works by dragging options into an ordering. Some of the options do not have intuitive names (“economic growth” = jobs created by running transit operations) and the descriptions appear in an easily ignorable right pane.

Step 2 involves prioritizing the major edges in BC Transit’s planned network for Victoria. For each edge, you can specify whether you prefer frequent bus or mass transit. I neglected to “add a custom” options for better coverage of James Bay, Cook Street Village and Ross Bay Village. I did appreciate that the network edge enhancements were competing with whole-network options:

• Increased frequency
• Increased coverage
• Extend service day

The coolest section was Step 4: “How do we pay for this?”. I’d love to have a debate about all of these options:

• Passenger Fares
• Property Taxes
• Local Gas Tax
• Advertising
• Provincial Funding
• Road Tolls
• Parking Tax
• Community Pass (bus passes given to every household in exchange for property tax increases)
• Vehicle Levy