Transit numbers after the Games:

You came, you rode, you kept riding

While TransLink earned worldwide applause for its performance as part of the Transportation Plan during the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, one question lingered: would that momentum translate into increased use of public transportation options once the Games were over?

Newly released statistics suggest the answer is ‘Yes’.

Revenue ridership during the month of January rose a respectable 3.1% from January 2009, and then in February, Games Time usage pushed that figure to nearly 22.9 million — almost 51% higher than the previous February.  Then in March, ridership hit 18 million, an increase of 19.3% over March 2009.  Some of the increase was due to the additional riders attracted to the Canada Line before and during the Olympics.  The newest SkyTrain line carried 2.49 million riders in March (not counting those transferring from South of the Fraser bus routes, which had formerly travelled into downtown Vancouver).  A sizeable amount of the remainder also likely reflects people who made the switch to other parts of the transit system during the Olympics and, finding that it worked well for them, stayed on after the Games.

“It was important for the future of Metro Vancouver that we do more than move enormous numbers of people during the Olympics.  It was important that local residents see what their transportation system could do,” says TransLink CEO Ian Jarvis.  ”Many found out that there are alternatives beyond driving alone in a vehicle; there’s walking, cycling, ridesharing and especially, that our integrated transit system is a surprisingly viable option.”

Levels of transit service have been growing steadily in Metro Vancouver over the past five years, reaching its current level – the highest ever – at the end of 2009.  TransLink’s current budget enables the Authority to maintain that number of service hours; the integrated system is able to handle these increased loads with the capacity added last year and flexibility.  The Service Rationalization Initiative currently underway over the next 18 months will identify ways of further optimizing TransLink’s resources, system-wide.

Maintaining ridership after the Olympics, coupled with the highly successful TravelSmart program, are key factors in achieving the region’s goal of increasing the share of trips by walking, cycling and transit to more than 50% of all trips by 2030.

But some wildly varying numbers were used (along with wildly varying analysis on whether it was all worth it or not), depending on what you decided to count as the total Olympic expense.

Some people used $729 — that was the total bill, according to the report, for everything the city did, but it got $175 million back in federal and provincial grants, plus private-sector payments (e.g. to put up pavilions at the live sites). The report put the final bill at $554 million. But that was counting in all kinds of things that the city was planning to do anyway, like fix up Granville Street and put in the public stuff in Southeast False Creek (seawall, bridges, manmade islands, district energy utility, etc.)

And the $554 didn’t include, strangely to my eye, the $24 million that Annette Klein in the budget office estimated was the staff time that went into planning the games for the past five years or into “volunteering” during the actual Games experience (a tab that is estimated at $2.5 million, not surprising when you have highly paid engineers and planners doing crowd control of pimply teenagers and crazed pin collectors at the live sites).

So what were the real Olympic costs, money that was spent that didn’t result in a new community centre or upgraded street or ice rink or all the other things that we will get to enjoy for the better part of a century.

I’d say all the operating costs — $30 million — plus the staff time — another $24 million, for sure. That’s $54 million. And then there’s an unquantifiable amount, the money that could have been saved if these new facilities weren’t being built for the Olympics. Vancouver did pay a premium to build at a time when construction costs were at an all-time high. And I’d be willing to bet money that there was a little bit of a premium paid because people wanted to make all the projects the best possible to show off for the Olympics.

On the other hand, the city also got a big chunk of money from the federal and provincial governments for several of the facilities plus $30 million for the social housing at the village. If you calculated the premium that the city paid for building in a frenzied period and deducted the contributions from other partners, would we come out about even? Hard to say.

As for $54 million in operating costs, was that a good expenditure to put on an event that made Vancouver look utterly fabulous to the rest of the world? I don’t have to tell you that opinion is divided out there.

But it seems like not a bad investment in comparison with some I’ve heard of. Did you hear that the B.C. government spent $17 million on an advertising deal with NBC during the Olympics that included getting the writers on the TV series The Office to put in a mention of Vancouver in one of the scripts? (Great find by Bob Mackin at 24 Hours on this.)

Okay, enough from me. Have at ‘er.

Thanks to them, we went into the Games with incredibly low expectations. And I think it’s what contributed to the emotional highs that people felt. They weren’t expected and so they had much more impact than if we had all been drumming our fingers for the past four years waiting impatiently for the greatest party of our lives.

(And also, thanks to them and their kicking up of such a fuss, there was hyper-vigilance about all of the above.)

If only they had predicted what a downer it would be afterwards.

That never happened. There was the odd piece here and there in the bigger newspapers, but it never really picked up steam. It just became one of the deck of predictable stories that media outlets did about Vancouver. The great restaurants? Check. Vancouverism? Check. Downtown Eastside and homelessness? Check.

There was coverage of the tent city camp and the various protests, but except for the window-smashing at the Bay on the Saturday after opening ceremonies, it was pretty perfunctory.

I talked to some of the usual suspects about why they think that was and what that means for the future.

Vancouver real estate developer strikes gold

$46.76 million sold during Olympics: $31.8 million to Olympic visitors
With the 2010 Winter Olympic Games now over, one of their most notable legacies will be a massive boon to Vancouver’s luxury real estate market.

Between the Opening Ceremonies on Feb. 12 and the Closing Ceremonies on Feb. 28, Aspac Developments sold seven suites at its luxury towers at UBC (The Wesbrook) and Coal Harbour (Three Harbour Green) for a total of $46.76 million. Three of those suites, including Three Harbour Green’s $22.3 million-penthouse, were sold to visitors specifically in town for the 2010 Winter Games.

“The Olympics were instrumental in putting our properties, especially our Three Harbour Green tower next to the International Broadcast Centre, on the world stage,” says George Wong, principal of Magnum Projects (Marketers for Aspac). “The weather really showcased Vancouver’s natural beauty and the Games brought an international flair and level of excitement to our city that, coupled with everything else we have to offer, made Vancouver extremely attractive. Add to that the affordability of luxury real estate here, compared to other world cities, and Three Harbour Green’s downtown waterfront location was an irresistible choice for our buyers.”

Sheesh. And it HAD to be the movie-star hero, Sidney Crosby, who scored the winning goal. You know, if someone submitted this screenplay to Hollywood, it would be dismissed as too mushy and unbelievable.

So, as an antidote, I headed downtown later to enjoy people taking over even more streets than before. Police were posted at the top of the escalators of the downtown SkyTrain, relieving the 18-year-olds of their six-packs of beer. Thank god they’re so dumb sometimes.

Best idea I saw of the night: Someone who brought a boombox down and set it up outside the mall north of Georgia on Granville, producing an instant dance party on the street. Now maybe that’s what we need every Friday and Saturday night to soak up all the excess youthful energy. Get them dancing and they won’t have any energy left to pick fights.

Next best idea: the wooden basis under the Chinese lantern trees, which people have been using as found soundscape devices. The builders didn’t intend to have them use as stamping pads, but that’s what they’re being used for (even though a few stampers have actually broken through) and it creates a great drumming sound down the whole street.

Further down Georgia, I ran into a posse from the Vancouver police: Chief Jim Chu, along with deputies Doug Lepard and Bob Rolls. Before I could ask any questions, a young guy came up, asked if the chief was John Chu and then thanked him profusely for making the Games so great for everyone.

Then they continued on their way getting a feel for what was going on in the streets. Apparently there’s a massive system of information loading that tells them how many people are arriving downtown on transit, how many are leaving, and, through CCTV, how big the crowds are so that they can tell if there’s a big influx of kids from the suburbs about to hit.

From there, through an empty Chinatown, accompanied only by posts arriving through Facebook on my blackberry, informing me of how atrocious all my friends thought the closing ceremonies were as they were unrolling. (“When they bring out the giant inflatable beavers, you know they’ve jumped the shark,” said one.)

And then a bus home,  as the traffic returned to the streets, with an inexplicable jam of cars headed … not away from downtown, but towards it.

Instead of promising that we’re going to stay friends forever and we’ll all get together every year and we’ll all go to each other’s towns for visits, we in Vancouver have gone wild with ideas for how to keep the Olympics spirit going. Let’s shut down Granville Street every weekend! Let’s have a streetcar line! Let’s keep the zipline going at Robson Square! Let’s ditch our cars and take transit forever! Let’s never go back to work and just walk around downtown with our red mitts and Canadian flags painted on our faces forever! Whoo-hoooo!!!

Well, sad but true, we are going to go back to the old Vancouver and then we’ll have to figure out what is really a good idea that can be embedded in the future and what, unfortunately, depends for success on having an international party in the city with 200,000 people a night. As well, one of the things we need to think about is what the Games showed us we’re weak in, what we should have had but didn’t.

I’m sure all of you have great ideas and some more profound than mine, but here are a few thoughts to get the ball rolling.

1. An aboriginal museum downtown. The Four Nations centre at Queen Elizabeth plaza was one of the most successful of the free activities, and the carving centre at the Vancouver Art Gallery plaza was a lovely thing. We don’t have anything like this permanently. I’m just stealing this idea from something I heard Rick Antonson at Tourism Vancouver a long time ago, but the province’s native population — so much more populous and with rich traditions than found elsewhere — should have a home somewhere in our downtown. And keep the food coming.

2. More street food and more sidewalk cafes. I said it at the beginning and I’ll say it again at the end. The emergence of New York or Hong Kong-like crowds made our lack of this kind of thing very apparent. 

Although some media produced cute stories about the Japadogs business, is it not pathetic that all we have for street food is hot dogs? And that the height of creativity is someone putting Japanese condiments on hot dogs? We have one of the world’s most polyglot cities, filled with people making Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches, Chinese pork and shrimp dumplings, inventive Japanese ramen soups, South Asian curries and dozens more. Can we really not figure out a way for them to serve some of that in stalls on the street that won’t bring out the health inspectors?  

(And I just got bonged with this excellent article on same from Andrew Pask at Public Spaces.)

And, although it’s a different regulatory issue — sidewalk cafes! Where were those places people could pause from time to time, sit at a table with a beer or coffee and watch the show go by?

The only place I saw that seemed to have those two elements was Mainland Street in Yaletown. There were all kinds of people at the numerous cafe tables on the loading docks, and then booths (including one selling Sanjay’s Indian curries, yay!) on the street below. It wins the award for best small urban space, in my books.

3. More innovations to get people taking transit to events. Much as I’d love to think we’ll all keep piling onto those buses and rapid-transit lines, I fear that we’ll snap back like a rubber band to previous patterns without the Olympics incentives to keep us going. (Though I do think that a couple of places in particular will benefit from the transit boom — Richmond, which thousands of people discovered was easy to get to from downtown, and Yaletown, which turned into a social, hanging-out spot for many visitors and which people from Richmond and south Vancouver now know if only 10 minutes away.)

What were the incentives? A million dollars a day from VANOC to run the system at top capacity, so that you could walk out your door knowing that a bus or SkyTrain car would appear momentarily. Free transit attached to every ticket. And warnings that there was no parking at event sites.  

Is there any way to replicate some of that? Free transit for the day that is incorporated into the price of various kinds of event tickets — a kind of temporary U-Pass? A well-advertised promise of that level of service to the kinds of events that typically draw car-drivers? Removal of parking outside of large venues?

Whatever it is, there needs to be something beyond just a wish and a prayer that the province will grant TransLink more methods to raise money to run a bigger, better system.

There, those are my first three ideas. Thoughts?

But I don’t get why even the NY Times can’t get some basic things right. The taxpayers are not carrying $1 billion in debt for the village, at least not the way the NY Times has written it, as though this is a bill we have to pay off over the next 30 years.

They may carry some debt if the condos don’t sell for enough, but not $1 billion. Likely not even $100 million. And why do they write that the real-estate industry came up with the plan for the Olympic village? That was the city’s dream from day one. The city assembled that land, committed itself to building a village for VANOC, and sold it off to the highest bidder.