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Editorial: Serve customers

Pretend for just a minute that you own a transportation company with many vehicles. Your profits are up by nearly half from the past fiscal year and you’ve identified the weakest links in your fleet: a couple of old jalopies that keep breaking down.

Pretend for just a minute that you own a transportation company with many vehicles. Your profits are up by nearly half from the past fiscal year and you’ve identified the weakest links in your fleet: a couple of old jalopies that keep breaking down.

Brand new, start-of-the-art replacement vehicles are already in the plans, but your customers are suffering now because these unreliable junkers are still in operation.

What’s your next move?

That is exactly what BC Ferries is considering as Powell River area’s Queen of Burnaby and North Island Princess ferry vessels continue to show their age. The Princess has reached the point where it has to be followed around and sometimes even towed by a tugboat when one engine is unavailable, a laughable forewarning to yet another mechanical breakdown.

Meanwhile, the Queen of Burnaby, which appears to be rusting from the outside in and was set to be replaced in November by the slick-looking Salish Orca, probably won’t be out of operation until spring 2017; assuming it can last that long.

In the latest in a long line of Queen of Burnaby-related mishaps, the ship is being taken out of duty for another five days beginning Saturday due to a seemingly irrepairable oil leak.

And we thought BC Ferries sold the Queen of Chilliwack to Fiji at a pittance. How much will it possibly get for this latest lemon?

Meanwhile, the ferry corporation reports that its profits are up more than $20 million dollars this year, at almost $70 million made in fiscal 2016 compared to $49 million the year before.

Vehicle traffic is up. Passenger traffic is up. Ridership levels are higher than they have been since the global economic collapse in 2009. All wonderful news for BC Ferries.

Back to our original scenario. You have this transport company and your fleet is aging. A couple of vehicles should really just be taken to the scrapyard. The new vehicles will be operational next year, but your customers are suffering in the meantime. You have made a pile of money compared to previous years.

So, what do you do? The answer is so infuriatingly simple. You find a couple of replacement vehicles immediately, wherever and however you can get them. Consider those ones your backup vehicles for when the new ones are finally ready. Then you get back to serving your customers.

Jason Schreurs, publisher/editor