117 responses so far ↓

• 1 michael geller // Mar 13, 2010 at 4:37 pm

  I have always thought that it was unfortunate that the public sector pays for transit systems that increase the value of land around stations, but it is generally the private sector that reaps the benefit from the increased land values.

  I would like to see Translink given the authority to acquire lands around future transit stations to generate another source of revenue…namely from the sale or lease of development sites and land development.

  I am not necessarily suggesting that Translink start building shops or condominiums. But it could become a partner in developments, increasing land values through rezonings, and working with private sector developers.

  Of course, this will require cooperation from municipalities who increasingly are trying to share the gain in land values resulting from rezonings.

  To some extent, this is starting to happen. However in a recent discussion with the new CEO of Translink, I was informed that additional legislative changes are required to allow Translink to acquire lands other than for present or future transit purposes.

  This approach will not generate the hundreds of millions of dollars required for new projects; but it could generate tens of millions. Other approaches will have to be found.

  Furthermore, some might say it’s too late to start this-all of the land around future stations has been already acquired. While this might be true for some stations, in decades to come, many new transit lines will be built around the region, and elsewhere in the Province. Translink, and other transportation authorities should be benefiting from these investments.

  If they need inspiration, they should visit Hong Kong.

  Now as to where to find the rest of the money, I personally favour gas taxes, road tolls and congestion pricing as alternatives to property tax increases.

  Improvements in the relationships between the province, the Mayors’ Council, and Translink will also be necessary.

  Now over to you Urbanismo….

• 2 Anon // Mar 13, 2010 at 6:13 pm

  The thing about vehicle levies – they hit the areas that don’t have transit the hardest. I’m thinking Tri-cities and eastward. In the last 20 year plan, there was nothing for beyond the Pitt River Bridge – maybe a couple of new bus routes, but that’s it. So you’re forcing people who must rely on their vehicles to be contributing members of society to pay extra for that “privilege” while not giving them the infrastructure that these levies are supposed to fund. The same argument can be made for increasing property taxes, and to some extent, gas taxes. Vehicle levies are more problematic in that you’re giving people a reason to feel justified about using their cars – they are paying for that privilege, so why shouldn’t they use it?

  Clearly, there are needs to be some more creative thinking done.

• 3 Urbanismo // Mar 13, 2010 at 6:53 pm

  @ Michael G . . . Thanxz for asking. I am no expert but that has never stopped the flow of opinions on Frances’s blog has it?

  Inexperienced as I am Tx-wise, sin embargo, IMO Vancouver does not have the critical mass for a comprehensive integrated Tx system.

  Yet, the city of 580,000 +/- @ 114.67 km2 is really doing surprisingly well: especially No 10 Granville/Victoria and No 6 Denman/Davie that, of course, service the denser parts.

  South Vancouver and Metro sprawl service is, as expected, dismal.

  Skytrain is a vanity trinket: capital and running costs far out weigh its public amenity, bleeding resources from more responsive facilities. A surface tram-line, å la Toronto Queens Street etc, would have been far more cost effective and responsive.

  Reading your comments . . .

  ” . . . I am not necessarily suggesting that Translink start building shops or condominiums. But it could become a partner in developments, increasing land values through rezonings, and working with private sector developers.”

  You are in fact suggesting a neo-liberal approach to public amenity that has, no doubt you will disagree, proven time and time again to be disastrous: economically and amenity-wise.

  My only experience in big city Tx is two years Mexico City . . . and Distrito Federal, at, 28M is hardly comparable.

  Oh I forgot Buenos Aires has its Subte. I rode it a few times in 2006. London has its, mind the gap, tube and Paris, well, Paris is Paris . . . I always take a cab or walk in those places (Last time KingsX, waited one hour in a line up for a Taxicab to Paddington ‘cos the tube was broken down).

  But, and this is important, none of those systems were neo-liberal created: all are publicly funded. Indeed, Frank Pick, and old Peterite way before my time, set up the LTPB in 1933, in the era of Ramsey Mcdonald: Britain’s first labour prime minister: get my drift?

  Back to DF: Metro, servicing just about every quarter of DF, is excellent . . . except it closes down between 0100 and 0600 hrs and lesser hours Sunday.

  A finer grain DF Tx amenity is the Pesaro service. These are privately, sometimes driver, owned mini-buses. Green and white, impossible to miss, they will take you everywhere and if you miss one another pops up immediately.

  The little green bugs, taxi, taxi, are even more convenient, and inexpensive.

  Vancouver must become politically savvy before public Tx will take hold? Not enough crit. mass and some of us are still in thrall to neo-liberlism!

• 4 mezzanine // Mar 13, 2010 at 7:59 pm

  @urbanismo, i am not sure how you calculated skytrain’s net value to the metro area and came to a loss. Certainly one obvious benefit – frequent service at late hours possible due to automated nature of the line makes for a livelier city, moreso when evergreen completes, and eventually broadway, if we build with skytrain. that late night service makes for a livelier urban enviornment.

  there is appeal to surface rail, but that is in addition to toronto’s subway and GO train system, as with its buses. The olympic line and the future DT streetcar line are promising for vancouver, but it would help if vancouver didn’t rip out all of its tram infrastructure as TO did. But then again, TO took out all of its trolleybus infrastructure in the 1970s.

  WRT ms bula’s article, IMO any tax increase now (post-olympic afterglow for translink)would be more acceptible to the public if it was explicit that it would go to transit. this could be a car levy and a slight bump to propertytaxes. road pricing would be great to see, but we’d have to watch out for the law of unintended consequences (eg. increased traffic over toll-free alternatives, like ?the pattullo bridge).

  payroll taxes would be interesting, but it cannot go to operating expenses, just to capital IMO to avoid large swings in service like in portland, where they are cutting bus and max service due to the economy. but then again, a new payroll tax would go over like a lead balloon in victoria.

  Now over to you, zweisystem…

• 5 jesse // Mar 13, 2010 at 9:53 pm

  @michael geller: the buying up land approach for funding transit development was one of the few successful business ventures during the building of the London Underground. It’s worth a try but, unfortunately, may be too late. The suburbs are rife with land speculation already.

  I would encourage a transit authority to wait until land values are more reasonable before becoming land speculators. The transit companies in London made money because they bought low and sold high.

• 6 Keith // Mar 14, 2010 at 8:39 am

  I believe the best way to raise money for transit is with a sales tax. Just one percent of the PST nets $700 million, more than enough to cover Transink’s $450 million shortfall.
  Add one per cent to the new HST specifically for Transit, and distribute the revenue to all transit systems in BC based on population.
  Remember it was not long ago we were paying 2 per cent more for the GST.
  A sales tax is fair because everybody contributes, and the revenue will increase with future population growth and inflation.

• 7 spartikus // Mar 14, 2010 at 9:21 am

  A sales tax is fair because everybody contributes

  It might be a great way to raise money, but a sales tax is essentially regressive. Adding a percentage point to the HST would have more of an impact on those in the lower income bracket.

• 8 voony // Mar 14, 2010 at 11:00 am

  Read twice the Frances Bula article to see that the discussion is wrong headed.

  Sheila Bond explains, that because Province is investing 5+ billions in road and Bridge in Metro area, they cannot invest more than 400 million in rapid transit !! Is it not insulting?

  Come one guys… Wake up!!!

  Money is already there, it is just wrong allocation of it!

  Sheila Bond has first to explain how she can meet the Province target of double transit ridership in the region when the MOT allocate less than 10% of its transport budget to Transit in this region?

  Other region are starving for road and bridge? not us! Who is asking for South Perimeter Fraser Road and other Developer’s dream project touted by the Province? Not us!

  If the MOT doesn’t know how to spend our tax $, let’s take them back, and put it in the pocket of Metro Vancouver instead that we can spend them to address our region need instead to please some lobbies !

  Money is there, no need for new tax! We just need to see our current tax wisely spent first!

• 9 voony // Mar 14, 2010 at 11:59 am

  Mezzanine,

  To the risk to be off-topic:
  The opinion of Urbanissimo in the debate of Streetcar vs Skytrain seems more of the one of a westender taking a bus because there is no cab showing first on the curb, and seldom venturing south of Broadway anyway…

  …If so, he could have certainly noticed that route like 99 or 3 to name few are significantly busier than route 6, or that route 10 doesn’t go to Victoria

  And obviously, he could have a different vision that most of the rider you will see on the skytrain system, which could find silly the idea of a streetcar ala Queen street, more than doubling their commuting time…

  The Queen streetcar is a nice local transit mode, but as mentioned by Mezzanine, as soon as riders need to go farther than a couple of blocks, he gonna plebiscite the subway, which is the TTC backbone..

  In regard of the return on investment:
  A 1990-91 study of the province showed that the expo line had already attracted more than $5 billion of investment along its route by 89 (the Expo line was then not going south of New West and cost $800 millions)…sure it was “fat years” for real estate industry, but you can see it was only the beginning… if you can find better ROI with transit, let me know…

• 10 Paul // Mar 14, 2010 at 2:18 pm

  @Vonny

  First off I do agree that more should have been spent on transit instead of on roads.

  But at the same time that $5 Billion has already been spent. The projects are already started. We really can’t just stop a project and let it sit there.

  I still feel tolling every Bridge/Tunnel and putting a congestion toll around Downtown Vancouver is the way to go.

  For a situation where someone is driving from Delta to Vancouver and having to cross more than one bridge. The system could be setup so that you are charged on the first crossing but not on the second crossing.

  They could also make the tolls in effect during certain times of the day. Or maybe have different rates at different times of the day.

  The other option which would be better. But harder to implement. Is a fee based on the amount of kilometres driven. Maybe $0.10/KM. The hard part is figuring out what distance people have driven. Of course there could be different rates based on where someone lives. So anyone in the city of Vancouver would pay the most based on the fact that they have a better transit service than someone in Langley.

  Either way not matter what system is put in place it would never please everyone 100%. There will always be someone who gets screwed by the new system and others who don’t

• 11 Joe Just Joe // Mar 14, 2010 at 2:46 pm

  Translink’s shortfall seems to be concentrating on how to raise more revenue. Here’s a few ideas that would throw some money their way w/o too much hatred. Build on the Olympic success and add a transit surcharge to all ticketed events, an extra $2 per ticket but the ticketholder gets free transit the day of the event. Do the same with airline tickets. Add a couple of bucks to the hotel tax and provide free transit vouchers for hotel guests. Lots of these will affect people that already have transit tickets and some of them will overlap hence double paying but at the end of the day it would have minimal negative implications, and for the most part people would see they are getting something in return.
  The biggest issue is Translink needs to look at it’s current expenses and do some serious soul searching on where to cut. They need to look at the expense side of things and make sure they are making the best of the dollars they do have. This will be a much harder exercise and probably why it’s not getting the attention it deserves.

• 12 Urbanismo // Mar 14, 2010 at 3:39 pm

  @vooney . . I’m not sure why you thinq you are off topic . . .

  ” The opinion of Urbanissimo (sic) in the debate of Streetcar vs Skytrain seems more of the one of a westender taking a bus because there is no cab showing first on the curb, and seldom venturing south of Broadway anyway…”

  A healthy inter-modal includes, appropriately heavy rail, RER, commuter rail, Skytrain, light rail (tram), autobus, mini-bus, cab, bike and pedestrian. Vancouver is good for all except the first four.

  Skytrain is a very expensive trinket that subsumes all other modes. It gives Vancouver the sense that it is a big city, which it is not . . . it is big sprawl and that is the result of historic delusions.

  “In regard of the return on investment:” 


  . . . this is distressing because it is not investment it is, for the most part, speculation . . .

  “A 1990-91 study of the province showed that the expo line had already attracted more than $5 billion of investment along its route by 89 (the Expo line was then not going south of New West and cost $800 millions)…sure it was “fat years” for real estate industry, but you can see it was only the beginning… if you can find better ROI with transit, let me know…”

  Vancouver’s only industry is “the real estate industry” which is sort of like medicating an ingrown toenail.

  Much real estate investment in Vancouver is like a big blood funnel
  http://members.shaw.ca/urbanismo/2010.pdf
  sucking up all local financial resources and shipping it off-shore.

  Vancouver residents are, for the most part, mortgage paying clients, not wealth creating citizen. This bodes ill for the future because we are essentially deluded into believing we are a prosperous independent community, which we are not. When the offshore spigot is turned off, there goes the farm . . .

  We are no longer a wealth-generating city, we are a city awaiting someone else’s pleasure.

• 13 landlord // Mar 14, 2010 at 4:46 pm

  @Urbanitis : No community is independent any more. We’re all global now. USA needs our oil, natural gas, water, weed and a fair bit of lumber and China needs our grain, coal and potash. It is our natural resources we ship offshore along with our high-priced ideas.
  Want vast sums and greater demand for public transit? Double the price of gasoline. You might not get re-elected but people will thank you 10 years from now.

• 14 Urbanismo // Mar 14, 2010 at 5:20 pm

  @ landlord . . . Yup! “USA needs our oil, natural gas, water, weed and a fair bit of lumber and China needs our grain, coal and potash. It is our natural resources we ship offshore along with our high-priced ideas.”

  Makes me thinq of a few other place . . .

  Sucre Bolivia, used to be the capital resplendent in an opera house, legislative complexes . . . now crumbling!

  Belem Amazonia with its grand opera house . . . now a may-be-tourist attraction but too far out of the way to make traction . . .

  and

  . . . many other ghost towns I have not visited . . .

  “. . . along with our high-priced ideas.” Huh I don’t know where you got that idea?

  Don’t lose hope. Keep you nose to that grind stone . . .

• 15 Michael Geller // Mar 14, 2010 at 5:47 pm

  Voony, you make a good point. However, Shirley Bond comes from Prince George and there, and in much of the province, the private automobile is the only viable form of transit. That being said, I agree that we need to review the balance between $ spent on roads vs. $ spent on transit in the lower mainland and Fraser Valley.

  If anyone from Port Moody is reading this blog, I would certainly like to hear your thoughts on the appropriateness of spending money on the Murray Clark Connector vs Evergreen…I don’t know the situation well enough, but the Mayor certainly thinks the Murray Clark connector is very important, while others tell me it’s just another ‘highway’ along the waterfront. Any thoughts?

• 16 Michael Geller // Mar 14, 2010 at 5:49 pm

  Point of Clarification. I think we all agree the Evergreen Line is very important too….whether it should be a higher priority than the new line out to UBC is something Daniel Fontaine and others would like us to debate…However, I for one do want to see the complete funding package for Evergreen finalized, and the shovel in the ground…

• 17 landlord // Mar 14, 2010 at 6:44 pm

  @Urbanosis : “. . . along with our high-priced ideas.” Huh I don’t know where you got that idea?

  In a gay bar in Dubai.

• 18 voony // Mar 14, 2010 at 8:44 pm

  Urbanismo, I think it is off topic, because debate shouldn’t be about which technology is more appropriate but where the money is coming from.

  When you come to debate about technology A or B, it will be still some “technology fans” explaining you how their technology choice is cheaper than other and over promising …(and under delivering)…
  Beside dividing the “transit” side, it doesn’t help too much in the current debate.

  As you mention, to work efficiently, a transit solution needs to deploy several “mode” or “technology”: whether we start to deploy one or another one is another debate…at the end, if you target a 50% non car mode in the region (what could be necessary to achieve, the Province goal): you will need some form of mass transit (and I hope the Olympic experience give you an idea of what can means a 30% reduction of car in term of stress on the transit system).

  That being said. I don’t mind if 100% of transportation budget is spent on road and bridge in Prince George: it is may be the most efficient way to move people there.

  The problem is that it is not the case Vancouver and more generally in Lower Mainland, and it shouldn’t matter where you come from to understand this. So, Michael, I will not find any excuse of that sort to Shirley Bond…

  Also, I agree with the idea of road pricing/ congestion toll, and I don’t think that SFPR is really started yet (so the province could save $1 billion there, and PMB could be put on hold too: they are at a stage where lot of private deal are stalling,…because the big money has not been spent yet).

• 19 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 14, 2010 at 9:38 pm

  The fact is that $430 million dollars would be saved if the Evergreen Line technology was shifted from SkyTrain to Olympic Line Tram.

  Analysis shows the decision to use SkyTrain was made without due consideration of an important fact: The resulting urban quality is better with Tram.

  Here is the missing analysis:

  1. Urban Blight—Elevated SkyTrain is appropriate along highways, railway corridors, industrial zones, and farm lands.

  On North Road, SkyTrain will block the sky and the views from apartments along the east side of the street.

  Running at grade on Clarke Street—between parallel barbed-wire fences—SkyTrain will turn the Historic District into a “frontage road” suitable only for warehouses and industrial uses.

  On Barnet Highway, SkyTrain will service big boxes, strip malls, fast food restaurants, and car dealerships—all auto-oriented uses.

  2. Ridership—SkyTrain carries 2.5-times more ridership than Tram. 

  More ridership—and better service distribution—would result from implementing a second line. The $430 million saved would pay for half the cost of a new line.

  3. Station Spacing—Tram delivers better level of service with twelve stations. SkyTrain has six. Adding SkyTrain Stations is many times more expensive than adding Tram stops.

  4. Inaccessibility—Half of SkyTrain stations are beyond walking distance of neighbourhoods served (Port Moody, Ioco, and Coquitlam Central).

  Tram stations on Guildford Way and St. John’s Street are within easy walking distance of neighbourhoods served. Port Moody City Hall, the Library, a shopping centre, Eagle Ridge Hospital, and a number of schools, all lie along the Tram line.

  5. Faster Trips—SkyTrain outpaces Tram by 11 minutes travelling from Lougheed to Coquitlam Town Center. 

  However, SkyTrain’s isolated stations will force ridership to arrive by bus, or by car, giving up the 11-minute advantage.

  SkyTrain’s advantage of direct connection, without transfer, onto the Millennium Line at Lougheed Station will be lost to either bus transfer, or park-and-ride. Walking from parking lot to station can take as long as walking from home to tram stop.

  6. Road Space—Both systems usurp lanes from cars.

  Tram will take away the equivalent capacity of 20,000 car trips per day, then give back 28,000 trips. On St. John’s Street Tram will absorb half the volume while boosting revenue to local merchants. 

  7. Traffic Calming—Tram lines introduce tree medians, and centre-of-the-right-of-way tram stops. These “islands of safety” reduce pedestrian crossing distances.

  Taking road space away from cars creates safer neighbourhoods. St. John’s Street and North Road will be safer for having 20,000 fewer cars on the street. Threat to life presents at night when streets are empty, oversized, and drivers naturally speed up.

  8. Shaping growth—Street-oriented urbanism along tram lines creates safer neighbourhoods and walkable streets.

  Mayor Adams of Portland, Oregon, speaking in Vancouver last year, reported no trouble selling redevelopment along tram lines. 

  Municipalities are (probably) able to charge back CACs equal to the increase in land value from being in the station area, or for any up zoning triggered by transit.

• 20 mezzanine // Mar 14, 2010 at 11:35 pm

  I’ll (try) to avoid turning this into an LRT vs Skytrain debate. But wrt the olympic line, the lessions learned are great for the DT streetcar system in the future, but I am unsure how much we can extrapolate that to the evergreen line. (A free demo line with 2 stops, versus rail to connect regionally).

• 21 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 15, 2010 at 5:07 am

  A discussion of transit is probably what is needed. The Tram, we are told, can run on the street bringing about a better result in the urban quality of place, then it can run on the main trunk, like the interurban, pick up speed and connect locations more spread apart.

  We should also be discussing the fact that no one, not NYC or Portland, for example, government officials from both jurisdictions having recently spoken in Vancouver and in Langley, is considering SkyTrian as a viable option.

  Why? Costs. It’s the kindergarden math problem that seems to have us over a barrel. We need $4M… Oh, we can save $4.3M? The technology must be bad… Oh, its a better system and we build a better city?

  That Mezz, is what has me perplexed. What part of this rubric do people not understand??

• 22 Zweisystem // Mar 15, 2010 at 6:29 am

  The regions transit problems are two-fold: SkyTrain light-metro and a transit philosophy of cramming every bus rider they can on the light metro. TransLink has admitted that 80% of SkyTrain’s customers first take a bus to the metro.

  This makes the transit system unattractive to customers.

  These major problems are now abetted by the U-Pass program, which offer very cheap fares to students, riding a ‘premium’ fare light-metro system.

  Because SkyTrain and light metro has been continually forced on the region by the provincial government, there is now a complete disconnect with the public and if the public can, they take the car.

  Just the SkyTrain light-metro system is subsidized by over $230 million per year at the provincial level and now with the Canada Line, this may exceed $260 million, which is taken from the provincial treasury on top of other regional taxes and levies.

  But TransLink know the problem, ridership on transit has mainly risen with population growth, thus congestion and gridlock go on unabated.

  The Evergreen Line,like the Canada Line, will not take cars off the road, but will have its’ ridership made up of deep discounted U-Pass and concession fares. All TransLink wants is ridership numbers and do not care if it is made up of the poor, the elderly and students, the vast majority of them riding on discounted fares!

  It is interesting to note that Bombardier brought the two ‘Flexity’ streetcars or trams (light rail) to Vancouver to showcase for potential American customers because the upper echelons of management feel that Vancouver’s SkyTrain has retarded sales of light rail in North America.

  During a period of massive expansion of LRT in the USA, Bombardier has been barely a small blip on the RADAR screen, with Siemens, Alstolm Stadler, etc., which was due in part with Vancouver having SkyTrain! It is very hard to market LRT, when your competitors compare their product with our expensive, yet “Edsel” light metro system.

  Outside Lotus Land, SkyTrain is seen for what it is, a very expensive proprietary light metro that can barely compete with LRT!

  More money for TransLink, I think not and here is something else to contend with. The Fraser Valley taxpayer is getting very tired financing Vancouver’s transit mega projects and there is a growing call for the South Fraser Area to secede from TransLink and form their own transportation authority. Never say never, for if any provincial politician can smell electoral victory with having a South Fraser Transportation Authority, it may happen. Then what?

  Simple, the muni’s with SkyTrain will pay the full shot and I will guarantee if that happens, there will no more talk of SkyTrain or subways in Vancouver.

  There are many more problems with TransLink and light-metro but go beyond the scope of this post, but why should the taxpayer be forced to pay for a transit system that he/she have little say how its operated or funded. The provincial government has created this mess and they should pay up front and not download their mistakes on to us.

• 23 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 15, 2010 at 7:33 am

  “TransLink has admitted that 80% of SkyTrain’s customers first take a bus to the metro.”

  That jives with Point 4 in the analysis I offered in a previous post. SkyStrain stations are built too far apart, and in hard-to-reach locations (near railway right-of-ways; over industrial land; shopping centers; freeways; etc.) where they won’t blight the quality of the neighbourhood.

  It would appear that the way to make transportation “take cars of the road” is to put transit on car lanes. Point 6 in the analysis; precipitating the benefits of Point 7 in the analysis.

  No, this is George W. Bush urbanism all over again. “The Deciders” have spoken. And “The Deciders” are marching us straight down the road to fiasco.

• 24 mezzanine // Mar 15, 2010 at 7:37 am

  In fact, Evergreen initially was envisioned as LRT by translink and prelim planning was done. A collection of planning docs are here for transit geeks:

  http://www.llbc.leg.bc.ca/public/pubdocs/bcdocs/408594/

  -Planned cost = $970 million (2007)
  -Length = 11.2 km
  -Elevated guideway = 0.8 km
  -Tunnel = 2.8 km
  -Max capacity 4800/hr/direction
  -off-peak freq = every 15 min
  - 2 car trains 32 metres long (like seattle’s link)

  The MAE for different modes, including BRT, LRT and skytrain are here (2004):

  http://www.llbc.leg.bc.ca/public/pubdocs/bcdocs/368601/attach2.pdf

  -Travel time from Coquitlam centre to lougheed station: ST = 13 min, LRT = 23 min
  -Maxiumum capacity (pax/hr, AM): ST = 5900, LRT = 2600
  -Annualized capital cost+maintenance per pax: ST = $4.30, LRT = $6.95

• 25 mezzanine // Mar 15, 2010 at 7:51 am

  “[Translink does] not care if (ridership) is made up of the poor, the elderly and students, the vast majority of them riding on discounted fares!”

  That’s a good thing!

• 26 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 15, 2010 at 9:02 am

  Point 5 in the analysis takes care of the issue of travel time (SkyTrain 13 min; Tram 23 mn).

  We hashed this out over 100 posts at the Stephen Rees blog, where you an see how much of “my” analysis was in fact mine, and how much was contributed by Mezz, voony, David, and others:

  http://stephenrees.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/olympic-line-short-closure-notice/

• 27 Gassy Jack's Ghost // Mar 15, 2010 at 9:31 am

  Lewis makes an excellent point about Skytrain. I live a few blocks from Waterfront station and travel back and forth to Mt. Pleasant 3 or 4 times a week. But I still take the Main Street bus because the Canada Line has no stations between Broadway and King Ed, so it takes me 20 minutes longer on “rapid” transit, even though my destination is closer to Cambie than Main. Going downtown (not Gastown), it is faster to take the Main bus to Terminal and hop on the Expo line for two or three stops.

  I think the tax that should really be funding transportation infrastructure is already in place. The Carbon Tax was estimated to generate revenues of 1.85 Billion over the first three years, more than enough to cover LRT or even the Evergreen Line’s needed funding. Unfortunately, all that money went to tax cuts, including another massive corporate tax cut and a flat income tax cut that disproportionally benefits higher income earners.

  Vroony makes an excellent point too. To which I would add that the Premier’s recessionary “priority” of building a $470 million dollar retractable roof for BC Place, while benefitting his buddies at Jack Poole Construction, does little to benefit taxpayers. Apparently, “the cupboard is bare” only for charities, the arts, kids’ sports programs, environmental orgs, and “green” transportation infrastructure.

• 28 Zweisystem // Mar 15, 2010 at 10:02 am

  Gerald Fox, pointed out in his letter ‘shredding’ the TransLink business case for the SkyTrain Evergreen Line, “…..found several instances where the analysis had made assumptions that were inaccurate, or had been manipulated to make the case for SkyTrain. If the underlying assumptions are inaccurate, the conclusions may be so too.”

  Thus it seems any TransLink-spiel about the Evergreen Line has little to do with reality.

  TransLink has held that ‘gospel’ that SkyTrain will attract more ridership than light rail, yet has never produced any independent study to support this.

  “The Business Case report would have you believe that type of rail mode alone, makes a difference (It does in the bus vs rail comparison, according to the latest US federal guidelines). But, on the Evergreen Line, I doubt it. What makes a difference is speed, frequency (but not so much when headways get to 5 minutes), station spacing and amenity etc. Since the speed, frequency and capacity assumptions used in the Business Case are clearly inaccurate, the ridership estimates cannot be correct either.”

  Mr. Fox observed that SkyTrain was faster “…..on the NW alignment, the SkyTrain proposal uses a different, faster, less-costly alignment to LRT proposal. And has 8 rather than 12 stations. If LRT was compared on the alignment now proposed for SkyTrain, it would go faster, and cost less than the Business Case report states!”

  Also the continued falsehoods about LRT continue, as it is well known that LRT can carry more than 20,000 persons per hour per direction and does on many systems around the world !

  As well Mr. fox stated; “There is another element of speed, which is station access time. At-grade stations have less access time. This was overlooked in the analysis.”

  Finally Mr. Fox said: “It is interesting how TransLink has used this cunning method of manipulating analysis to justify SkyTrain in corridor after corridor, and has thus succeeded in keeping its proprietary rail system expanding. In the US, all new transit projects that seek federal support are now subjected to scrutiny by a panel of transit peers, selected and monitored by the federal government, to ensure that projects are analyzed honestly, and the taxpayers’ interests are protected. No SkyTrain project has ever passed this scrutiny in the US.”

  In Europe, before a new transit system is approved, the proponents must prove that it will take a substantial number of cars of the road. Despite over $6 billion of taxpayer’s invested into SkyTrain alone (add another$2.5 billion for RAV) TransLink can’t point to significant modal shift from car to transit and the metro system ridership is made up mainly of the poor, the elderly and students who flood the system with cheap fares and forced transfers (bus to metro), which is causing severe financial stress on the system. Throwing more money at TransLink is like giving a drunk another bottle!

• 29 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 15, 2010 at 11:10 am

  If we want to identify the “star” of the transit systems, it is not SkyTrain.

  It would appear that the real “star” is our 100-year-old and now long out of service interurban. Its ability to travel either on streetcar rails, as a commuter train on the SRY right-of-way, or on CPR right-of-way is what has is catching our attention today.

  Given the quality of the transportation decisions we are hearing coming out of Victoria today, it should not surprise us.

• 30 Zweisystem // Mar 15, 2010 at 11:26 am

  @ L.N. Lewis

  We may have some very good news about the interurban by the end of April!

• 31 mezzanine // Mar 15, 2010 at 4:58 pm

  @ gassy jack, i am glad that you find transit a good way to get to mt pleasant, although i would think it is due to your convienience of the #3 trolleybus service for local travel more than a deficiency of the c-line. they made a lot of improvements to the #3, such as running the artics and building bus bumps to avoid having the bus pull in and out of the lane.

• 32 Gassy Jack's Ghost // Mar 15, 2010 at 5:51 pm

  True, Mezzanine, #3 is better than it used to be. But the travel time isn’t so different, it’s the walk at the end that takes much longer from Canada Line. Until they add a CL station at 16th (and other points), it’s still faster by bus for many people who live between stations or whose destination is between stations.

  Sure am hopeful from your last comment, Zweisystem! There are some drawbacks to any system, of course, but an Interurban revival would certainly get my vote over Broadway Skytrain! Of all the legacy projects from the Olympics, expanding on the Olympic Line could have the most long-term benefit for Vancouver, Translink and BC taxpayers.

  I really wish we could have municipal plebiscite on building Skytrain vs. LRT in Vancouver and the Northeast (or anywhere in Metro Van). Let the taxpayers decide how these transportation billions should be best invested. How many would actually vote for Skytrain, I wonder?

• 33 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 15, 2010 at 6:27 pm

  Ghost, on the link I provided we discussed at some length putting LRT (tram) on Broadway. David suggested it was the only place in the GVRD where a new line would make sense since you would be moving off a significant number of buses and replacing with Tram.

  We also talked about LRT (tram) on Hastings, as a way of re-enrgizing the historic neighbourhoods, and the transportation folks didn’t seem to think that was too bad an idea either.

  They agree with you that extending the Olympic Line to VCC makes a lot of sense, and there was even talk of a maintenance yard for LRT on the east side of Main Street.

  Travel time, by the way, seems to be the universal measure of transit systems. However, it has to be door-to-door trip time like you are discussing.

• 34 mezzanine // Mar 15, 2010 at 7:49 pm

  “If we want to identify the “star” of the transit systems, it is not SkyTrain.
  …
  Travel time, by the way, seems to be the universal measure of transit systems. However, it has to be door-to-door trip time like you are discussing.”

  If anything, I would argue that the bus is the real workhorse of vancouver, with our trolleys allowing for zero-emission, hill-climbing frequent services on our old tram routes.

  “By the end of 2008, 48% of the Metro Vancouver population will reside within a five minute walk of the Frequent Transit Network (service every 15 minutes, 15 hours per day, 7 days a week). ”
  (From Paul Hillsdon’s blog, link to follow to avoid spam-filter delays)

  Buses linked up to the high frequency skytrain metro network nicely complement each other for longer trips.

  LRT does have a role in metro, (perhaps on an eventual KGH/SOF network, or the arbutus ROW), but IMO evergreen should be skytrain.

• 35 mezzanine // Mar 15, 2010 at 7:50 pm

  http://www.paulhillsdon.com/?p=434

• 36 voony // Mar 15, 2010 at 8:00 pm

  Gassy Jack comments are interesting:

  1/He complains the Canada line has not stop where he wants to go (16th avenue)
  2/He value travel time and exclusively travel time

  Gassy Jack doesn’t care if Canada line is in a sterile tunnel, when #3 allows more “urban” ride with windows shopping in the trendy “SoMa”…
  he doesn’t care about transfer at terminal/main: what he cares is to go from point A to point B in the most efficient manner—period—

  To be sure, that is how any rider behaves (including our friend Zweisystem)!

  Now, a transit route design is a 2 dimension problem: speed vs accessibility:

  the more station you have, the slower the line is…
  the less station you have, the less accessible it is

  It happens that the Canada line doesn’t save time to Gassy jack’s local errand, but it was not the purpose of the line either.

  The line addresses regional transit needs, not local ones: Adding a stop at 16th or elsewhere could eventually incommode more the current ~100,000s rider than accommodate the fewer one like of GassieJack…
  so we have to find the right balance
  minimizing the transit time of most people.

  Limited stop, fast ride, is the essence of the Vancouver Rapid transit system, and eventually the reason of its success.

  It is the Parisian RER paradigm…
  and like Parisians barely step on the RER (because limited stop means the Parisian for his local errand is often better served by the “traditional” subway), the Vancouverite barely need the Skytrain system…
  Skytrain like RER are both system geared to address primarily regional need, not local one!

  We could, as a voter, like some bucolic solution like the revival of the interurban, but as a rider, we gonna look at our watch—plain and simple—.

  and this schizophrenic dichotomy is typically what you read from the Gassy jack comments:
  .
  .
  .

  By the way, very capital intensive Parisian RER has existed for 40 years now, and no metropolis has really copied it yet(*): does it make it a failure?

  (*) Well the Londonian CrossRail project is equivalent to the Parisian RER…
  (and HongKong MTR is too in certain extend)
  …oh and by the way the purpose of CrossRail, like RER, and like any Parisian Transit Project of this last 40 years, is not to “take a substantial number of cars of the road”: they simply didn’t, don’t and will not!
  They just address saturation of the then and still now existing transit system…

  Should we also mention that not a single Skytrain line has been the choice of Translink, but all the one of the Province?

  So that is to give you an idea of
  how credible are the populist rant of some contributors on this blog…

  To complete my comment, Urbanismo rightly pointed out how busy are Vancouver routes:
  A recent report of APTA says that the Vancouver Trolley route carry 40% of all bus passengers in the Metro area!
  That is to say, that Translink probably break-even on its Vancouver network, and all the lost are SoF related…
  If you factor in the Property tax revenue significantly higher in vancouver than in SoF…you start to get the idea of who is subsidizing who…

  and probably could find out that UBC students are probably less subsidized as commuter of South Delta !

  I think that was needed to be said…anyway more generally transit is subsidized and for some reason: we could disagree with it, but it is something not specific to Translink, which is rather doing rather well when compared to its north American counter part (and even European one!)

  At the very end, the bottom of the problem is that the Province spend 3 times more per driver than per transit rider (as I have established here: http://voony.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/gordons-transportation-legacy/ )…and whatever you do with Transit, as long as this “market distortion” will exist: you will not be doing good….that’s it!

• 37 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 15, 2010 at 10:37 pm

  Mezz, I agree that we can use Vancouver as the case study for whether buses work or not.

  My problem with buses is that they do not get people out of their cars. I have no problem with BRT—buses running like LRT in the middle of the road and with signal control. That’s an improvement on the already successful B-lines.

  The idea you mention that the transit-served population is going to live within 5-minute walking distance of transit—i.e. in TODs—is key.

  However, because I know that I can get 10,000 people living in human-scale, fee-simple, street oriented housing in the catchment area of one LRT stop, that suggests buses would be underserving that population. Indeed, I believe buses are underserving the existing Vancouver neighbourhoods in everything except operation costs right now.

  The real reason that buses were put in, and streetcars were taken out, was to give more space to the private automobile. And I don’t think that calculus has changed.

  I’ve been impressing on voony Robert Venturi’s idea of “both-and” (Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1961). The Broadway line in NYC runs as both “Broadway Express”, and “Broadway Local”.

  On the same platform you can board either one or the other. However, you’re well advised to choose carefully. The “Local” gives you the milk run that Ghost is looking for; while the “Express” zips you into downtown in the manner voony is visioning. Both objectives are met with the same infrastructure and the same train.

  Canada Line could have done this. Adding more stations (yes, and cost), it would sprout more TODS (yes, and rocket ship increases in the tax base). Because we are not planning transportation and quartiers together (Transit Oriented Development or TOD), we are barred from the discussion that Michael Geller started at the top of this string.

  However, that’s not even the “big story”.

  The big story is that SkyTrain blights the urban spaces that it crosses. Evergreen SkyTrain will make North Road, Burquitlam, and Clarke Street degraded urban places.

  If you want “good” urbanism, SkyTrain is a problem, not a help. Not sure? Go to my favourite Millennium line intersection and judge for yourself: Willingdon and Lougheed…

  Asphalt and concrete wasteland.

  However, I am not sure yet that we have come to appreciate what “good” urbanism can deliver. Every time I think “yes” I flash back to the Olympic Cauldron, and Wayne Gretsky in a snow suit, riding in the rain to light the damn thing up.

  It’s a chicken-and-egg question. We will have to get the urbanism right before we can know what kind of transit we really want.

• 38 mezzanine // Mar 15, 2010 at 11:07 pm

  “The real reason that buses were put in, and streetcars were taken out, was to give more space to the private automobile.”

  I would agree, but they are long gone and the question is what do we replace them with. And at least with the trolleys, I am unsure what a local service tram will add to an existing that will justify spending tens-to-hundreds of millions of dollars.

  “Streetcars that replace bus lines are not a mobility improvement. If you replace a bus with a streetcar on the same route, nobody will be able to get anywhere any faster than they could before. This makes streetcars quite different from most of the other transit investments being discussed today.

  Where a streetcar is faster or more reliable than the bus route it replaced, this is because other improvements were made at the same time — improvements that could just as well have been made for the bus route. ” (1)

  “However, because I know that I can get 10,000 people living in human-scale, fee-simple, street oriented housing in the catchment area of one LRT stop, that suggests buses would be underserving that population.”

  but being close to an LRT stop is not necessary for higher density development – it helps with mobility, yes, but look at champlain heights or SFU’s Univercity.

  “The big story is that SkyTrain blights the urban spaces that it crosses. Evergreen SkyTrain will make North Road, Burquitlam, and Clarke Street degraded urban places.”

  You can also look at richmond’s guideway on how to address pedestrian effects (2). No3 rd has new life by landsdown and aberdeen stations (esp aberdeen).

  “If you want “good” urbanism, SkyTrain is a problem, not a help. Not sure? Go to my favourite Millennium line intersection and judge for yourself: Willingdon and Lougheed…

  Asphalt and concrete wasteland. ”

  I would think that it was due t it being a wasteland prior to skytrain being there. But even when they were planning the M-line as LRT, burnaby thought it best to grade-separate the line.

  “Due to the high traffic volumes at the Lougheed/Willingdon intersection and in light of the heavier surface LRT infrastructure relative to SkyTrain and existing grades with the Lougheed/Willingdon intersection being at the top of a knoll, it is essential for the LRT to be grade-separated at this intersection.” (3)

  IMO much of the wasteland appearance is due to the massive parking lot on the north side and the GM dealership on the southside, which hopefully will be addressed over the next several years.

• 39 mezzanine // Mar 15, 2010 at 11:09 pm

  1) http://www.humantransit.org/2009/07/streetcars-an-inconvenient-truth.html

  2) http://voony.wordpress.com/2010/02/15/a-viaduct-in-richmond/

  3) http://www.city.burnaby.bc.ca/cityhall/departments/departments_planning/plnnng_plans/plnnng_plans_brntwd/plnnng_plans_brntwd_dvlpmn.html

• 40 Urbanismo // Mar 16, 2010 at 4:15 am

  Following the debate makes me wonder: is there a will to go beyond good intentions?

  Evidently we all know the solutions. But is anyone listening?

  Lewis has, rightly, encapsulated the solution into “urbanism”. And, oh boy, he has made a compelling case against the blight of elevated right-of ways. Yup, everyone agrees!

  But urbanism is much, much more than fee simple row housing.

  Is it true that the demise of public Tx began with a continent-wide conspiracy in the ’20′s to, purposefully, do away with the tram? “What’s good for GM is good for the country”, eh!

  The tram barn was across Hastings from Pigeon Park: from there the interurban spread across all quadrants to, among other places, Richmond, a pretty efficient mode and much prettier than the elevated YVR Sky-train Canada line. In addition to frequent local stops the tram line can still accommodate ‘express’!

  So, its not as though we do not know what works . . .

  Nostalgia is pointless!

  Last year I was bitching about FCN’s isolation: cut off from the city by the “coming from, going to nowhere” Pacific Boulevard. Evidently Alan Jacobs was commissioned, so Michael says, to redress that: Michael seem to know a lot, so what happened?

  Now Concord is proposing replication of all FCN’s mistakes, http://members.shaw.ca/urbanismo/2010.pdf on NEFC. Concord has not been truthful in the past, and clearly isn’t in this coming anti-urban fiasco.

  Central Area Planning seems to be intoxicated by the Stockholm Syndrome, the public is too busy bringing home the bread and we, us, Bula-bloggers, are just happy, errrrr . . . well . . . blogging!

  In other words the car will be accommodated as much in 2010+ Vancouver, despite residual O-Juvenilia, as it has always been.

  Does the still extant “what’s good for GM . . . ” conspiracy needs a concerted, counter conspiracy . . . pronto?

• 41 Zweisystem // Mar 16, 2010 at 5:51 am

  @Mezz

  Quote: “Streetcars that replace bus lines are not a mobility improvement. If you replace a bus with a streetcar on the same route, nobody will be able to get anywhere any faster than they could before. This makes streetcars quite different from most of the other transit investments being discussed today.”

  Actually a simple streetcar is about 10% faster than a bus on the same route and route capacity greatly increases, while at the same time operating costs drop.

  When a streetcar uses a ‘reserved rights-of-way’, which can be as simple as an HOV lane with rails and with priority signaling at intersections, a streetcar thus becomes true LRT and its commercial speed rises greatly.

  In cities where streetcar/LRT replaced a bus route, ridership doubles or triples in just a few years.

  What slows LRT when compared to a metro is the number of stations or stops per route/km, with LRT streetcar having stops every 400 to 600 km, where metro, with its expensive stations, have stops every 1 to 1.5 km., the fewer stations per route km. the faster the commercial speed, but fewer stations deter ridership.

• 42 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 16, 2010 at 7:11 am

  For some other fine points of urbanism, urbie, check the posts we made on the link I provided in #26. But, you’re right, if we constantly keep talking about systems options, we’re not getting the word out.

  As for blogging, I have found it useful for preparing my presentations to CIP conference (Canadian Institute of Planners). It is otherwise impossible to “test” ideas in our society. You know, on the blog we actually “read” and we “write”. We didn’t do that in the 1960′s and 1970′s so much, did we? And that was a degradation in culture.

  The five quartiers I will be presenting for the third year in a row, this time will ALL show transit (last year was the first time SOME did).

  The message cuts two ways. If you want good urbanism, you need to plan good transit, and do it all at the same time–integrally. When’s the last time we did that, the Interurban?

  And, as it turns out, you need the right system choices. Our streets are choking with cars. The arterials in Vancouver, to say nothing of their suburban cousins, are unlivable. Yet, we can drive down each one of these pointing to single family after single family home.

  Trams in the center of the R.O.W. (Point #6 in the analysis) take away cars and return 40% more trip capacity. And, they are good urbanism. The medians and the stations can have trees.

  We all want to change the world. Here, we just get to practice articulating that vision. But let’s keep the focus on getting it right.

• 43 Urbanismo // Mar 16, 2010 at 9:06 am

  @ Lewis . . .

  In no way do I wish to down play the vital role of fee simple row housing in the urban panoply . . .

  Urbanism embraces a variegated typology of different residential forms: FSRH is a vital component . . . especially along an interurban route . . .

• 44 MB // Mar 16, 2010 at 11:42 am

  It is supremely unfortunate that these conversations on transit always get bogged down by the minutia of mode. There were some key points made above that cut through the myopia, but they got buried like nuggets in the muck. This happened years ago over at Rees’s blog, and it’s being repeated here.

  Let’s get back to first principles. The funding issue isn’t about SkyTrain vs LRT vs buses. It’s about funding transit to adequately compete with a humungous level of built-in car dependency in our cities, THEN building the city around transit.

  Noting has affected urbanism more over the last half century than road politics. Nothing contributes more to the tenuousness of energy security than cities built almost exclusively for the private car. No other entity sucks at the government transportation teat harder than road users — every one of us. Nothing is taken more for granted than we will always have neighbourhood gas stations flowing with cheap fuel for our cars …… and by extension for commercial vehicles, planes, trains, ships, sprawling burbs i.e. the entire globalalized economy.

  Well, indications are we will have to drop the “ever” from the “forever” contained in this assumption over the next decade, even up in Prince George.

  We can talk about cute trams and Hansel and Gretel Woonerf urbanism all we want, along with some Doomerist predictions of peak oil, and the discussion will still get ignored by Shirely, Gordo and Steve. Has been for years now.

  The real question is: How do we communicate to the decision makers that funding transit adequately in 2010 to 2020 is absolutely essential to our future well-being?

• 45 Urbanismo // Mar 16, 2010 at 11:53 am

  @ MB . . . don’t be stupid . . . URBANISM is not minutiae!

  There is plenty of tax money to provide for mature Tx.

  Its a grave matter of whose priorities and which crony has the big guy’s ear at this moment . . .

  Now go and have a nice cup of coffee and enjoy . . .

• 46 mike0234 // Mar 16, 2010 at 12:25 pm

  I’m still not convinced that it is impossible to do good urbanism around Skytrain stations, though it may be more difficult to deal with an elevated structure.

  Skytrain hasn’t generated good urbanism around its stations because the station areas that were originally developed along old interurban lines – the areas that already had a finer grain – have not been allowed to adapt to the station. Fee-simple rowhouse haven’t been legal. And it’s mostly the same with small shops next to those stations.

  I do not see how a new interurban line built under the same constraints, especially single-family zoning in the station areas, would result in better urbanism.

  What we need is a test case in which a previously-developed station area is allowed to adapt to a Skytrain station, and some more thought into how to adapt station areas to their stations, whatever technology is chosen.

• 47 Urbanismo // Mar 16, 2010 at 12:37 pm

  So about Urbanism . . . Concord is in the process of pulling off another scam with flashing lights, slip-sliding away, at NEFC (check, somewhere I’ve posted a link).

  They’re repeating FCN: and FCN is a real bummer, urbanism-wise, (excuse me I cannot resist that word).

  Central Area Planning is having fun at the races so Concord can bamboozle us into replicating all the bad things inherent in FCN and none of us will notice because we are too busy working our gig on the Bula-blog!

  So here’s the skinny: FCN/NEFC generate more auto traffic than your cute little neighbourhood, MB, because it is a wasteland void of urban amenity: Urban Fare, across the swamp, is too expensive and, anyway, has a lousy selection.

  So what does Mrs Twenieth-floor-with-View do when she needs a litre of milk? She buggers off to Metro Town of course in her bloody Jaguar: which my eldest tells me is pretty hard on the gas . . .

  Now hey! You owe me . . . capiché?

• 48 MB // Mar 16, 2010 at 1:18 pm

  @ Urbbie: Had my coffee ….. double shot at that ….. and with the turkey Swiss panino, replenished my energy.

  Now go back and re-read my post, wouldja? I think you’ll find we’re (mostly) on the same page, if you can get around my facetiousness.

  If Metro cities and the province would consider devoting max 60% of their transportation budgets to roads instead of the standard ~ 80%, then the freed up ~ 20% would be a great top up for transit.

  Still, the lack of long-term, stable and predictable funding from senior governments is a complete shame, especially from the feds who hide behind a clause in the consitution that downloads everything municipal to the little men we call provincial premiers.

  Priorities, eh?

  And I will not ever say that light rail automatically leads to good urbanism. That’s rediculous. Spend 5 minutes in Calgary and you’ll see what I mean. The little bits of good urbanism left there predates C-Train by 100 years.

  Good political decisions and appropriate planning processes leads to good urbanism, which will utilize a plethora of transit modes (amongst other instruments) to build resilient cities.

  I believe communities designed and built to the highest standards of urbanism will not require intraurban transit or cars. But as always, the massive blunders of the last century that are still being replicated today creep into the plans and we have to design for second and third best cause there ain’t no money nohow for nothin else. Fighting for crumbs is so demeaning in such a wealthy society.

  For this critic, that isn’t good enough, and if our leaders don’t care to illuminate the upcoming challenges to our economy, then we just have to shout louder. Waiting around for the ultimate kibosh that triple digit oil prices will bring to our cities and economy will just ensure that political cynicism is locked in even more.

• 49 MB // Mar 16, 2010 at 1:42 pm

  Correction: “Good political decisions and appropriate planning, ARCHITECTURAL AND URBAN DESIGN processes leads to good urbanism …”

• 50 Urbanismo // Mar 16, 2010 at 2:01 pm

  @ . . . mike0234 . . .

  “I do not see how a new interurban line built under the same constraints, especially single-family zoning in the station areas, would result in better urbanism.”

  Interurban doesn’t need “stations”! Just stops and termini . . .

  “Waiting around for the ultimate kibosh that triple digit oil prices will bring to our cities and economy will just ensure that political cynicism is locked in even more.”

  . . . amen MB . . .

• 51 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 16, 2010 at 3:07 pm

  “No other entity sucks at the government transportation teat harder than road users”

  Gee, MB, how pastoral…a metaphor from the barnyard. And a damn good one at that.

  Maybe government’s got more than one. Because, as far as I can see there is a slam-dunk attitude about the SkyTrain decision for the Evergreen that seems to have all the same markings.

  “The Olympic Miracle” was that planners wanted to reduce car use by 30% during the Olympics, and the first estimate I have seen reported the outcome as 37% reduction in private automobiles. Those of us who experienced Vancouver in the Olympic moment will carry the memory of what that looked and felt like for the rest of our lives.

  I see that as political capital.

  “I’m still not convinced that it is impossible to do good urbanism around Skytrain stations, though it may be more difficult to deal with an elevated structure.”

  Mike, you have to spend a little more time at Metrotown, or downtown New Westminster, or Surrey Centre… and you have to go there with a well developed understanding of what constitutes quality in urban space. If not, I guess, we could organize a walking tour and discuss it.

  There is just no way. There is nothing in these sites—and with New Westminster we are talking about what is left of what was once a superb platt—that is going to fix them.

  The elevated guideway blights everything.

  MB has it right, LRT is no guarantee of good urbanism. However, at least along an LRT corridor we have a chance to retro-fit if things don’t go well at first.

  With SkyTrain, the site is doomed forever. Examples exist in Paris and Chicago, places with histories and urbanisms far more robust than ours.

  The burning issue is that we are hearing throughout the media the chorus that we are short $400 million; and that the move is on to extract it from our dental work.

  However, the media—along with everybody else—is missing the fact that a shift in systemwill save $430 million according to Translink’s own estimates. So, the money currently committed is enough, and there are $30 million left over to cover some of the costs of the re-adjustment.

  Why aren’t we clamouring for the switch? Why is the question not being asked by every reporter holding a micro phone, or a note pad, while at the same time raising the collateral issue as follow-up that LRT results a higher quality urban space?

  The media, the Fifth Estate, not the blogosphere, was supposed to keep our politicians on the straight and narrow. Yet, we are seeing a media that for one reason and another are simply not up to the challenge anymore.

• 52 mezzanine // Mar 16, 2010 at 4:24 pm

  I do agree with mike that it is possible to do good urban design with guideway and elevated stations, and that the examples of poor skytrain station experience (surrey city, metrotown and New west) are primarily due to factors prior to skytrain. (eg. uptown new west stole a lot of activity from downtown NW, the sole library in New west is in uptown.) There is always room for improvement with the station experience, though (like the new renos to broadway).

  However, I do agree with MB that mode discussions are turning this into a talk on how many angels we can fit onto a pin.

  If and when gas reaches triple digits, I would think that people would like a robust and frequent transit system consisting of bus, trolleybus, LRT and skytrain, as with bike infrastructure.

• 53 Richard // Mar 16, 2010 at 9:33 pm

  @Lewis

  The estimate you are using for LRT is a few years old. The latest estimate $1.25 billion as opposed to $1.4 billion for SkyTrain.
  http://www.evergreenline.gov.bc.ca/documents/Business_Case/080219_BusinessCase_ExecSumm.pdf

  As I have explained before, switching technology yet another time will lead to further delays thus causing construction cost escalation. As well, tens of millions will be spent in redoing design, public consultation and environmental assessment work.

  The bottom line is that in the end, switching back will not really save money and just delay the line yet again. This rapid transit line has been debated for the last decade or two. It is time to “get on” with it.

  Regarding elevated lines, cheer up a bit. “With SkyTrain, the site is doomed forever” is just a bit over the top. With a bit of imagination and creativity, it is certainly possible to make elevated guideways work well in an urban environment. Again, check out #3 Road. While an elevated guideway may not be ideal, North Road is rather a horrible urban environment now. It is quite easy to envision possibilities with an elevated guideway and a bit of creativity that are much better than the current situation.

• 54 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 16, 2010 at 10:32 pm

  Richard, on objective terms, if you feel that No. 3 Road in Richmond is good urbanism, then we hold divergent views.

  “With a bit of imagination and creativity…”

  I’ve heard that one before. Another favourite is a planner once asking me to draw a certain way, then stressing his suggestion with a condescending, “trust me”.

  There are always too many facile reasons not to settle for quality.

  If built, the Evergreen line will be the last SkyTrain line we put up for the very reasons posted above.

• 55 voony // Mar 16, 2010 at 11:03 pm

  Lewis, in the discussion we had on the Stephen Rees blog you mentioned, you seem to came up with opinion:

  Skytrain=>bad urbanism
  LRT=>good urbanism

  and the whole discussion was revolving for me to suggest you that you do in my opinion a wrong causalities association (it looks I fail to convince you

  It happens that all of the case associating LRT with good urbanism tend to show picture of historic European cities (usually Translink and CoV folks show a picture of the Place de L’Europe in Strasbourg) where “good urbanism” is preceding the LRT.

  Again, I have mentioned that the USA are littered with LRT failures on this “urbanism” account like some others (the most successful of them, so far I know is the Calgary C train!)
  So the case that LRT generates good urbanism still need to be brought.

  Also, I will concur with Richard to find that “With SkyTrain, the site is doomed forever” is just a bit over the top.
  I have took the pain to gather some example showing that viaducts can be part of the urban fabric.
  ( http://voony.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/viaducts-in-the-urban-fabric/ ).

  What is certainly true is that viaducts are much more disruptive that at grade project for pre-existing urban fabric (and that is the reason why people will prefer an LRT), but they don’t prevent emergence of ex-nihilo “good urbanism”. Like mentioned by Mezzanine, the examples you point out don’t seem to need the Skytrain to pop-up in such urban form (here or south of the border, have I mentioned Long Beach, CA as an example of a condo tower wall? …or even in Nanaimo!)

  What is also true is that little attention has been brought to the integration of the Skytrain in the urban fabric (thought that the Canada line has brought significant progress on that front), but that doesn’t allow us to make a definitive conclusion on it (and again I would like point out that disused urban rail viaduct are rarely dismantled but more often preserved: think of the NYC highline and other) but certainly should bring us to think how to improve the things, more noticeably for the evergreen line.

  That said, I certainly agree with the MB post: the real urban blight are certainly inflicted by all the highway projects, rather than by one km viaduct on North road, and transit funding is the real issue…

• 56 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 16, 2010 at 11:53 pm

  Grade separation, voony, was long touted by the avante-gardes of modernism as being “The Solution”.

  Problem is… it never worked.

  “It happens that all of the case associating LRT with good urbanism tend to show picture of historic European cities”

  Nope. I quote Mayor Adams of Portland. That is not Europe, and it is most certainly not old.

  Besides, why step outside the footprint of our fair city? Surely, you’re not suggesting that South False Creek is a “picture of historic European cities”?

  The faraway winner in this debate is the Olympic Line.

  What grace, what noise less beauty! 500,000 rides since it opened, the Bombardier banner now proudly pronounces. It closes this Sunday.

  How could anybody in all honesty think that something like the Olympic Line on St. John’s Street, Port Moody, would NOT lend a greater service to that community and to our regional economy than SkyTrain?

  Running between parallel barbed-wire fences along—the not long to remain—historic Clarke Street, SkyTrain in Port Moody is going to be a neigbourhood break rather than a place maker.

  Was a time—and I am thinking of Leonardo da Vinci—when engineers were also great visionaries. Voony, we still use a French word to connote that period: the Renaissance. France in the 16th century seems to have had a sense of balance between culture and progress that eludes us today.

  However, I feel that the digital revolution is going to make it so that we can finally stop squabbling about things we cannot measure, and settle on the things we can all agree about.

  Elevated guide ways, and urban blight—and let’s include No. 3 Road in Richmond here, along with downtown New Westminster, Burnaby along the Millennium line, Surrey, and if it should come to pass, the Evergreen—will follow each other like fall, and winter.

• 57 Paul // Mar 17, 2010 at 1:43 am

  The problem is the Olympic line is a local line. It is designed to move people at the local level.

  People would get frustrated if they were on it and travelling in from Surrey.

  Which is why grade separation is nice. The problem isn’t with grade separation. It is with how the seperation was done. What if the entire skytrain network had been underground. Of course in Richmond it couldn’t have been. But would people be complaining about how it doesn’t look nice.

  Also the skytrain network was built as a people mover not as a way to make the neighbourhood look nice.

• 58 Urbanismo // Mar 17, 2010 at 5:41 am

  Well there’s one thing Bula-Blog reveals . . . we vindicate Prince Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord every time we tinkle the keyboard . . . “They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” . . . Huh!

  I am referring to . . .

  “However, I do agree with MB that mode discussions are turning this into a talk on how many angels we can fit onto a pin.” . . . á la mezzanine . . . well . . . errrrr . . . yes that’s right.

  Politics is about angels and pins: the angles entrance us and then stick it to us with their pins!

  It about the distribution of resources and right now lying is the name of the game because we have blown all our resources on the big O!

  Politics changes nothing: unintended circumstance changes everything!

  In our “first-past-the-post” electoral system we do not get what we deserve, we get what the machine
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbifrXX2Ltw foists upon us.

  Hence there isn’t much point discussing Tx and taxes unless we are prepared to get out there, put our vanity away, and start moving!

  As for elevated Tx v’s ground oriented: check the Chicago El! Read Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie”.

  You’ll learn all about the destructive machinations that brought about the demise of many a Chicago neighbourhoods.

  YouTube Stanley Holloway singing, “Underneath the Arches”. He’s being humorous but believe me living under the arches in 19/20/21th century UK was/is not fun.

  As for Skytrain! Well fortunately we are a population environmentally insensitive to chaos: we refuse to understand or react politically: too pusillanimous even when we do understand!

  Believe me, for the sentient human being, Skytrain is bad news, bad economics and bad UD.

  You’d have enjoyed the Arbutus interurban clickerty clank if you’d been there . . .

  I vote Lewis’s QUARTIERS even if we do quibble the esoteric details.

• 59 Urbanismo // Mar 17, 2010 at 6:02 am

  Underneath the arches . . .

  Sorry . . . Flanagan and Allen . . .

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3cBmfJEVn4&feature=PlayList&p=5A67B0963B585F10&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=19

• 60 Urbanismo // Mar 17, 2010 at 6:35 am

  Oh just one further thought re: distribution of public resources . . .

  We endure fractional reserve banking: in the order of 100/1 or, indeed, whatever the banksters decree is to their advantage.

  So taxes and resources are not the issue. The issue is were we apply the pressure.

  Ergo there is as much money as the digits on the screen decree.

  Spent wisely . . . (or otherwise!)

• 61 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 17, 2010 at 7:23 am

  “The problem is the Olympic line is a local line. It is designed to move people at the local level.”

  No, Paul. The experts tell me that the Olympic Line can run on railway right-of-way at greater speeds and work like a commuter train. For longer runs they add bathrooms and a café.

  The problem is that we already have the money to build Evergreeen, but the “Deciders” want to make it SkyTrain, and that costs another $430 million, and it will destroy the neighbourhoods it comes in contact with.

  However, that issue has not been raised with the Premier, the Minister, and the Mayors. I’d like to see them answer it on the six o’clock news.

• 62 mezzanine // Mar 17, 2010 at 7:34 am

  “No, Paul. The experts tell me that the Olympic Line can run on railway right-of-way at greater speeds and work like a commuter train. For longer runs they add bathrooms and a café.”

  You can do that to make it run faster, but then you would have to add more segregation to the line and reduce its pedestrian effects (ie like seattle’s link, or calgary LRT outside of downtown). To make it safe and pedestrian scaled, you have to run it slower.

• 63 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 17, 2010 at 7:39 am

  By the way, Richard is right. The cost of construction post-Olympics is down. So, the savings of building LRT are likely to be higher.

• 64 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 17, 2010 at 7:41 am

  No, Mezz, when the LRT becomes a commuter train it is no longer in a pedestrian precinct. It is on railroad right-of-way. It’s slow when it’s running on St. John’s, and fast when its on the CPR line.

• 65 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 17, 2010 at 7:48 am

  As regards cost, Mezz, the SkyTrain cost should include the cost of purchase, operation, and maintenance of the fleet of buses required to get people to these out-of-the-way stations, put as far away as possible from anything vaguely resembling a neighbourhood because the dang thing is such a blight.

  LRT replaces buses returning further savings.

  Spending more money to build a problem… that’s the issue that is not getting on air.

• 66 mezzanine // Mar 17, 2010 at 9:17 am

  But context is important. A big strength of LRT is scalability – if we run it on guideway, it is as fast as skytrain (seattle link from westlake to mount baker station) or have it in surface traffic (link on MLK blvd) or even have it with pedestrians (amsterdam).

  Paul is right though – the olympic line as is was designed for local, slower service. you can run the trains physically faster, but you need better segregation. (there was an accident with the tram and a jeep a month ago at an ungated intersection). it’s also less than 2 km long and is single-tracked for much of its route.

• 67 Gassy Jack's Ghost // Mar 17, 2010 at 10:22 am

  One thing I’m still unclear on: is the proposed 12km Skytrain on Broadway considered a local, or a regional solution?

• 68 Urbanismo // Mar 17, 2010 at 10:23 am

  Talking of the Olympic line: it extended beyond Johnson Street GI west to the Old 374 loco on Kits beach and east far beyond Cambie.

  Thougthlessly some condos were built over it on Kits Point in the early ’70′s and Starbucks at the entrance GI in the late ’70′s.

  Unfortunately this careless attitude to public amenity is pervasive today other than on Bula-blog..

  Its cars are star wars trendy but it has been castrated before it got orbital . . . anyway I’m not sure who would use it now the O rubber neckers have gone home.

  False Creekers, I suppose but they are all auto oriented and besides there are not many of them . . .

  So much for public Tx convenience . . .

• 69 mezzanine // Mar 17, 2010 at 11:46 am

  @Gassy Jack,

  Central broadway is has both local and regional importance. After DT vancouver, it has the highest number of jobs in metro vancouver. And of course, there is city hall, VGH (for those that are not coming by the c-line) and UBC.

  http://vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/cclerk/20100119/documents/ttra4.pdf

  IMO, skytrain-type service will serve regional riders, while our exisitng trolleybus lines along broadway can serve local travel.

• 70 MB // Mar 17, 2010 at 12:22 pm

  @ Urbbie: “False Creekers, I suppose but they are all auto oriented and besides there are not many of them . . . ”

  I lived in the South False Creek community for a decade and I didn’t own a car. My commute was first a 30 minute walk / ferry ride to a firm located on a barge in Coal Harbour, then a 3 minute commute from my door to my desk when they moved to GI from the barge.

  I once estimated that there were over 2,500 people living in the one block of low and mid-rise buildings bounded by Anderson Rd, First x Fir, Second Ave and the seawall. And there is also the unique mix of of light industry / commercial on two lower floors with two floors of residential above of the newer developments up to Fourth Ave.

  That area is ‘borderline’ human-scaled urbanism that I feel would be well-served by a False Creek – Arbutus streetcar. The rail corridors are already in place.

  But I also disagree with a streetcar on the surface on Broadway. Broadway possesses a higher scale of transit use with a very high proportion of through-travellers who have been frustrated for over 30 years by a lack of rapid transit. This is where I would make the distinction between a local or inter-neighbourhood streetcar line and a regional rapid transit network (@ GJG).

  To me, a fast subway on Broadway is the best solution coupled with measures that promote good urbanism. Lewis and Urbbie and I have promoted human scaled urbanism counteless times, but I for one don’t see that negated at all by an underground extension of the Millennium Line. An elevated guideway is a different story.

  Yes, in theory a light rail network could be adapted to various needs, travel times and urban form everywhere. But our reality is that a fellow named Bill Vanderzalm chose SkyTrain technolgy in 1983 when he was the BC transportation minister, and now the system has been largely built out. The system from a quality of service aspect is superb, even though it has not realized its full potential yet, possible only by buying more cars and making longer trains. But there are some significant gaps, the biggest is on Broadway. The Metro Vancouver rapid transit system remains incomplete.

  I liken it to a main artery circulation system in the human body, or an electrical system. Some circuits have yet to be connected. I believe ridership will increase exponentially once people can get to the primary destinations and employment centres via the rapid transit network. Beyond that lies neighbourhood streetcars and buses.

  Even after 100 posts over on the Rees blog, my query on the safety challeges presented by surface rail on Broadway weren’t even remotely addressed. It helps to have a relative killed by a light rail train (in another city) to bring this issue to the forefront. Dumping potentially 200+ passengers per train every 2 minutes during rush hour at stations positioned on a skinny median in the middle of Broadway just doesn’t cut it. In fact, it miultiplies the accident risk to pedestrians by several orders of magnitude. Risk management is one of the key criteria in any thorough transportation planning exercise, including the current ‘UBC Line’ study.

  Then you have the pedestrian cross traffic. The surface LRT line proposed for the Evergreen route by the UBC Design Centre for Sustainability I felt was quite reasonable, and that’s why I’m open to a switch to LRT from SkyTrain there. St John’s in Port Moody possesses 6 crossing points in 12 blocks, and the line would have respected four, if memory serves. Also, Patrick Condon et al promoted good urban responses as part of the package.

  Central Broadway (Main to Arbutus), on the other hand, has 23 signalized crossings in 23 blocks — 100%. 17 of them are activated by pedestrians alone. With surface streetcars you’ll either have a faster system in a barriered median, or a slow milk run, both with higher risks to pedestrians. Neither is acceptable in the case for Broadway, in my opinion.

  Overall, the transit response to the Lower Mainland — and all cities for that matter — must be very generous to meet the huge problems higher fuel prices will bring to cities soon, and ideally should be a symphony of modes, not a one note pop song.

• 71 Gassy Jack's Ghost // Mar 17, 2010 at 12:51 pm

  So, I guess my next question would be to the urbanists: since Broadway is more or less already an existing urban landscape (good or bad, it’s built up already), would a Skytrain tunnel through this route not be more appropriate than LRT (assuming you agree it’s an East-West people mover)? Would it make much difference to the development of good urbanism on this particular corridor?

• 72 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 17, 2010 at 1:34 pm

  If you have the ridership, a subway is always better… unless it’s going to be cut-and-cover construction.

  I am not an expert here either, Ghost, but it is hard to imagine that we would have the ridership for a subway on Broadway.

  Context is important, Mezz, but in urban design that means the quality of the resulting urban space. Not only is Evergreen—if it goes skytraian—the last SkyTrain we will ever see built, but it will be a spectacular demonstration for what not to do on Broadway.

  I see Broadway as Streetcar. Take away two lanes of cars; bring in design guidelines that push the streetwall back 10 feet on all new construction on either side; plant a double row of Coloseum Maples and call it Canada’s newest Great Street.

  One view is that Translink could do Broadway streetcar first, because the streetcar replaces all the buses and save a whack of operating and maintenance costs. The stations are within easy reach of local neighbourhoods, and the street revitalization it would trigger would be out of this world.

  If you stand by the Toys-R-Us sign (Bowmac) and look east you can see the Lee Building 1.3 miles away. Broadway has a concavity in this mile-plus section that sets it up to be an incredible urban site.

  I call this one Vacouver’s “Green Mile”.

  Running streetcar on the Green Mile would energize the whole city. It would also prove the perfect “collector” for streetcar running on the north-south arterials, taking buses off Fraser, Main, Oak, Granville, and yes, Arbutus.

  When you consider that high-denisty, human-scale, fee-simple residential would benefit from fronting arterials running a single or double streetcar track down the center, then we would be at the threshold of doubling Vancouver’s existing population simply by intensifying existing single family lots.

  Oh, and did I mention this population increase would be paying taxes and riding a transportation system that is cheaper to build, but far superior in its overall performance?

  But, we are not going to get there until we can get our provincial and local levels of government to make themselves available to answer a simple question: why are we looking for $400 million, when a shift to a better solution saves $430 million.

• 73 Joe Just Joe // Mar 17, 2010 at 2:19 pm

  To answer if Broadway has the ridership to support a subway…
  Current consenus is that the Canada Line has been a ridership success and the Broadway line if in operation today would carry more riders then it even without attracting a single new rider. In reality by the time it were built and with new ridership it should carry 40% more ridership then the Canada line begining on day one.

• 74 mezzanine // Mar 17, 2010 at 2:43 pm

  “Running streetcar on the Green Mile would energize the whole city. It would also prove the perfect “collector” for streetcar running on the north-south arterials, taking buses off Fraser, Main, Oak, Granville”

  But now you have replaced our local service trolleybuses with local service trams. In the process, you’ve spent hundreds of millions and no one can get anywhwere faster.

  Even the #3 trolley service improved with the bus bumps – ROW treatments and signal priority can be done with both buses and tram, if desired.

• 75 Michael Geller // Mar 17, 2010 at 3:08 pm

  I just hope that Fred Cummings of Translink, and all the members of the consultant team retained by Translink to study the technology and related planning and real estate considerations for the Broadway line are reading this fascinating discussion!

• 76 Urbanismo // Mar 17, 2010 at 3:29 pm

  Hey MB, no sweat . . . going west/south the line went all the way, up the Arbutus bluff, thru Kerrisdale, to Richmond.

  Between Broadway and bluff I thinq it has been well built over now: but I haven’t been up there for a while . . .

  Anyway its pretty difficult to calculate a base stat from personal experience.

  Go for it . . .

• 77 voony // Mar 17, 2010 at 8:05 pm

  Lewis, you mention the Portland streetcar, don’t know too much about it but while
  they did some in fill, they believe favored by the streetcar, the urban form of the district was preceding the streetcar. so it’s hard to see a causality effect…BTW their MAX doesn’t have any effect of that sort

  On the opposite hand, Vancouver did something different in DTES with the WoolWard building, and other towers proposal in chinatown: but again, it looks the things have more to do with some general view to how to “revitalize” the district than a consequence of the skytrain.

  About revitalization, I have already mentioned to you that I don’t see why Broadway need to be “revitalized”.
  I see there some unique neighborhoods working pretty well, and sure a viaduct could be a huge disruption, but a streetcar could be one too, smaller one, but still one: to be sure when you change one parameter of the urban fabric, and a busy thoroughfare is part of it, you shatter the outcome of it for the best or the worst…so considering the uniqueness of some successful but potentially very fragile neighborhood, you would like minimizing their disruption, that could bend toward the GJG question.

  MB, about streetcar and pedestrian interaction:
  I have carried out some french number (french statistic carries out number of casualties per crossing, so you could extrapolate to Broadway) at http://voony.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/subway-and-lrt-safety-in-france/

  they are not pretty… and french LRTs seem order of magnitude safer than their american counterpart…

  One reason could be that french LRTs don’t go much faster than 15km/h (average speed … they are “true” streecar): Should we mention how long time it could take to do Commercial-UBC at this speed ?

  At the very end, Lewis you seems to doubt about the Broadway ridership potential:

  Remember the canadaline doomsayers explaining that ridership was grossly overestimated, and now, the same doomsayer are explaining that the line is undersized !

  …

• 78 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 17, 2010 at 10:36 pm

  Just before we go changing topics, let’s reiterate.

  The Transportation Minister and the Premier, I presume, have been agitating for an additional $400 million that rumour has it is gonna come out of our jeans. However, by Translink’s own numbers, building Evergreen as an “Olympic Line” system would save $430 million. That’s ALL the missing money plus change left over to handle any inconvenience (estimates are quoted in 2007 dollars, construction will be cheaper in a post-Olympics market).

  To boot, building SkyTrain will blight the neighbourhoods of North Road, Burquitlam, Clarke Street and Coquitlam Centre.

  Mezz provided the link to the Evergreen LRT presentation on another blog, and it is stunning:

  http://www.llbc.leg.bc.ca/public/pubdocs/bcdocs/408594/

  Am I the only sentient being that looks at this and feels his hair’s catching on fire???

  OK. On Broadway…

  If Joe is right, then maybe it’s time to bore a tunnel under the street and build a subway. However, I wouldn’t discount the streetcar too quickly.

  Remember, transportation planning and community planning done at the same time (throw in a couple more moving parts and Urbanismo and I both would call it “urban design”), will shape the future form of the city.

  Toronto has its Bloor Line, but they also spent $1.2 Billion on Bombardier Olympic Line cars last year. In the Coast-to-Coast presentation that my group of Canadian urbanists made at World Urban Forum 2006 (in Vancouver), we showed the “grid” of new streetcars being projected for Toronto.

  It is—as Patrick Condon has suggested—an extensive network, relatively inexpensive, and quick to put up.

  We’ve been trying to agitate in these posts that it has another significant dimension: where SkyTrain delivers urban blight, streetcars shape street-oriented neighbourhoods. Ouch!

  The catchment of the Tram stop and the footprint of the “quartier”, or pedestrian shed, overlay the same land area. This gives streetcar the advantage. Skytrain must operate a bus fleet just to deliver ridership to the system. Folks can just walk to their nieghbourhood LRT stop. Then, like the Interurban of 100 years ago, when necessary, the trams can go main line and offer commuter service.

  However, it is the quality of the resulting urban space that should trump the decision of system choice.

  Trams and Skytrain both shape redevelopment, as will the Gateway project. The problem is what kind of city do we get?

  The street-oriented development of the tram corridor is heads and shoulders preferable to what we see in Metrotown, downtown New West, Surrey Centre, and Richmond. Gateway will get us just more auto oriented sprawl.

  This—and cost—has to be the reason why all other cities are turning down SkyTrain.

  On page 68 of the Evergreen LRT report linked above, they project ridership at 20 million passengers per year. The Olympic Line now has a big banner at Olympic Station boasting they provided 500,000 rides.

  If we assume same ridership every day (likely not the way the 20 million figure was arrived at) we get close to 55,000 trips per day. That has to be close to the vehicular capacity of Broadway. However, LRT delivers it in a road space 33% smaller, and of course, in a sustainable mode.

  That’s the nix, Joe.

  We are not just thinking “Broadway Streetcar”, we are also thinking that a line will link to VCC, ride on the Olympic Line R.O.W., and continue on along 4th Avenue to U.B.C. The point to keep in hand is the choice between a Canada Line, and a series of LRT lines spaced half a mile, or 800m on centre.

  The reason I bring this up is to tackle the issue of “taking cars off the road”.

  If we build a subway under Broadway, we won’t take any cars off the road. However, if we build an LRT down the middle of Broadway, we are going to take out two lanes of traffic for sure.

  Of course, we would still be providing 20 million trips per year right down the middle, between rows of Coloseum Maples… But that is just support for potential growth, and juice for keeping our economy buoyant.

  Think of how taking 20,000 cars off Broadway will enhance the quality of the urban space.

  Well, just think back to the “Olympic Miracle”. Broadway during the Olympics was a tamer version of its own bad self. That was a 37% reduction in automobiles, or about the same reduction LRT would precipitate. Down from six lanes to four, but with a capacity multiplier running down the middle of the R.O.W. (right-of-way) Broadway could become a fantastic urban spine. A place to see and be seen sipping laté without having to drink up all those urban fumes.

  Just a few lines to MB on the safety issue.

  On blocks with station platforms, the tram stop medians would measure 5m or 16.5 feet. I would not call that skinny (the blogosphere is an imperfect place to communicate design nuance). Market Street, San Francisco, has skinny tram stops (I don’t have a measurement, but look at a picture, it looks like 5 feet to me).

  I am suggesting that there would also be medians in the non-station blocks, and these would be 5 foot-wide tree medians as can be seen in the Rome link provided above.

  Pedestrians would use these medians as jay-walking opportunities during those times of the day when it would be safe to cross the street at any point.

  The second issue with pedestrian safety is “pedestrian crossing distance”. Or how many lanes one has to cross before standing on an “island” of safety.

  I am reasonably sure that Broadway’s 99-foot R.O.W. with a double line of rail in the centre separated by medians on the non-station blocks would result in pedestrian crossing distances of either 33-feet, or 22 feet. Half, or one third, of the pedestrian crossing distance today. That is an increase in pedestrian safety easily measured and tested.

  I really cannot address the issue of the speed of the streetcar and pedestrian safety. I’ve seen them the world over, and they seem to work. The Olympic Line had the disadvantage that it runs in a dedicated R.O.W. so it leaves the wrong impression. My best suggestion is to look at the linked Evergreen LRT document’s photos, and their stated estimated operating speeds, and decide for yourself.

  They got it right.

• 79 Paul // Mar 18, 2010 at 1:53 am

  “This—and cost—has to be the reason why all other cities are turning down SkyTrain.”

  Just because other cities don’t want to spend the extra money doesn’t mean we shouldn’t as well.

  Remember years ago cities were building massive freeways because it was the “right thing” to do. And yet in Vancouver we decided not to continue with that plan. Funny how we ended up going in the right direction.

  As for street car / tram vs Skytrain

  I view it as the difference between building a freeway (skytrain) and building a local arterial road (street car / tram).

  The local road (street car / tram). Provides easy access as people can at closer points (intersections are closer). They are better for the local environment compared to the freeway. But the negative is people are forced to drive slower and there is more congestion on them.

  Where as freeway (skytrain) is designed not for the local travel but regional travel. It allows you to get from point A-B faster. But you also loose the fact that there is not as many points of enter (on ramps / stations). But you also gain on the fact that you more than likely will go a greater distance in a shorter time.

  I realize that not everything is the same. Example the freeway gets congested and bogged down where as skytrain doesn’t.

  As for ridership on Broadway. It will easily be over 100,000 if were to open to day. And I could see it easily hitting 200,000 very quickly after it opened. First off the Evergreen line would be completed by then boosting the amount of people already. You will also gain a lot of people who may not takethe 99 today to get to UBC but the 84, 25,33,41,43,49 to get to UBC. Only because the 99 is over capacity. In other words the over capacity on Broadway has overflowed onto those other routes. And I would anticipate it going back onto Broadway.

  A better street for Street Car / LRT would be 41st and not Broadway.

• 80 Chris Keam // Mar 18, 2010 at 8:12 am

  I think we should create way more dedicated bus lanes, buy a lot more buses, take a deep breath, sit back, and wait a tick before committing to more large scale mass-transit schemes. I think we will see a lot more people working from home or small, neighbourhood-based wired-workplaces in the coming decades and much of our transportation infrastructure will end up being under-capacity most of the time.

• 81 mike0234 // Mar 18, 2010 at 10:55 am

  I agree that the choice on Broadway is between surface and subway. I’m not sure that I’m contradicting myself from an earlier discussion, but while I think it may be possible to build around elevated guideways in some places (or at least that we can do better than Metrotown, etc), there’s just not enough space on or around Broadway to accommodate a viaduct.

  Broadway and UBC have regional significance, so speed and connections to the Skytrain lines are important. Broadway has the potential to become a much better street between Main and Arbutus. This has been discussed already. Between Trafalgar and Alma, it is already a very good streetcar-suburban retail strip (and the street is narrower).

  VCC-Clark is a loose end in the Skytrain network. I think there is no way around extending it to meet up with the Canada line at City Hall. This extension will distribute transfers between the Millennium, Expo, Canada lines that now occur downtown to stations outside downtown, reducing the required capacity on lines into downtown. It is a large improvement in the network for a relatively short three-station extension.

  There is more of a choice in technology west of Cambie. Skytrain provides the fastest trip but at the greatest cost. Streetcars are slower and less reliable but may be more appropriate for west side neighbourhoods, and once the first line is built lines could be added incrementally.

  The problem with trams on Broadway is that they will be too slow for trips to UBC from across the region. The problem with Skytrain is justifying it despite the lack of development potential west of Arbutus. So here’s my idea…

  An Olympic demonstration line extended to Arbutus and Broadway along the abandoned Arbutus corridor, perhaps with some grade-separation, would be a faster and more reliable route than Broadway that could satisfy longer, regional trips to UBC. It is relatively inexpensive route that connects to the Expo line at Science World and to the Canada line as it does now. Broadway between Cambie and Arbutus still gets a tram (or Skytrain subway), and both continue continue along West Broadway to UBC.

  Regardless of technology, the station spacing along Broadway is likely to be the same: stations will be at Oak/VGH, Granville, Arbutus, Macdonald, etc.

  MB, there are no lights at Spruce or Alberta, and while there are buttons for pedestrians to press they only enable the walking signal at the next timed point in the cycle. They are not immediate, but are timed with adjacent intersections.

  Finally, here are some diagrams I drew a few weeks ago describing possible configurations for streetcar on Broadway.

  http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/2171/broadwaywithlrt2.png

• 82 MB // Mar 18, 2010 at 11:57 am

  @ Lewis: “If we build a subway under Broadway, we won’t take any cars off the road. ”

  I envision a subway project with an associated streetscape treatment that utilizes curb bulges at every intersection, bus stop and mid-block section. That effectively removes two travel lanes for vehicles Main to Alma, half the parking, vastly increases the space devoted to pedestrians, and improves pedestrian safety.

  Think of the octogenarian gramma in a wheelchair going to her opthamologist via public transit we discussed elsewhere. To offer her esentially double the pedestrian crossings that exist now with shortened crosswalks would address human safety. Now add some quality materials, ornamental planting, public art and at least one pocket plaza in every block on Broadway and you are well on the way to realizing human scaled urbanism from the public side of the ledger.

  The Vancouver Planning and Engineering departments were caught with their pants down WRT the Canada Line. Planning is now catching up finally on the zoning and urban form issues forced by a new rapid transit line. Engineering seems locked in the 60s when they felt six lanes of through traffic cannot under any circumstances be reduced to four in the Cambie Village (with, preferably, the above streetscape treatment; what we got was scruff at the edges of a river of cars) otherwise god will take you home and the sky will fall.

  The cost of twin bored tunnels (please, not cut & cover!) even with 100m station platforms and 5% added to the budget for a decent streetscape treatment would be 2.5 times a tram line in cost (with very negligible improvements in ridership — probably in reality only a replacement for the B-Line), but equivalent to the amount of public money that supports car dependency every year in Metro Vancouver.

  See what I mean about priorities? Much wailing about subways and SkyTrain, but hardly a peep about the economics of asphalt.

  @ Voony: Great info re: safety at crossings. The graphics on your blog post say it all.

  @ Mike, well, we’re down to 21 crossings out of 23 then that are properly signalized.

• 83 Urbanismo // Mar 18, 2010 at 2:37 pm

  If I may interject please . . . Vancouver is a medium sized conurbation with no import substituting industry so we cannot be choosy.

  Skytrain was a big mistake, not our only mistake, but we must move on . . . without repetition.

  We may not be big-city and we may not be opulent but we can be savvy and that includes an economically savvy Tx system responsive to our neighbourhoods: leaving the other blips on the screen for, maybe, social housing . . .

  THE TRAM with computer scheduling and switching will fit all purposes, express or local, interurban or tourism: i.e. SF Cable cars!

  RER may be appropriate in fifty years . . .

  There probably will be incidents between right-of-way users . . . the auto is no longer the priority . . . we must cope sin embargo . . .

  The issue is livable affordable neighbourhoods with affordable unobtrusive connections . . . i.e. Quartiers . . . this means re-jigging the city over time . . . but start now . . .

  Now reality . . . do we have the ear of decision makers to make this work?

• 84 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 18, 2010 at 6:19 pm

  MB and Urbbie are filling in the picture of a paradigm shift in decisions about design in the public realm changing from serving the car first, to a walking experience of place.

  And it is “re-jigging the city over time . . . but start now”. The shift will be complete, and all encompassing. These are heady times, in that sense.

  What is most striking to me is that we cannot agree on a simple set of numbers for a performance based classification of the transportation modes (BRT, LRT, Subway, and I agree with Urbanism, the mistakes of SkyTrain).

  If we had a common and consistent set of measurements, consensus would be building a lot faster. We would be talking more about the stuff we agree on, than the points where we find divergence.

  The “rule of thumb” that friends report for the cost increase between subway tunnel and surface LRT is 7x. If we agreed on that, or we had reason to trust this number, or another, then a lot of the discussion coming from JJJ and MB would fizzle, or coalesce.

  Confronted with the option of building one underground line, or seven LRT lines, I’m thinking there is no discussion.

  This shows transportation engineering in a state of disarray which is 180° from what I would have expected. Measuring trip capacity, trip time, and construction cost per k.m. for transportation should really be black and white; concrete and identifiable fact; almost fishing in a barrel.

  Yet, what we see quite often is the figures being presented to argue one system vs. another, rather than quantify and then classify “transportation realities” and options.

  It is refreshing to encounter that when we propose to look at systems choices from the perspective of the resulting quality in the urban space, there is a lot more agreement. One might say, a building consensus.

  Of course, the decision makers are functioning in much the same fog, plus there are political realities behind each major infrastructure project. The various firms that will work directly in the project, the developers that are already invested along one alignment or another, the suppliers of the various components, all these various forces are pushing the decision makers to keep going.

  Only one tool is left us. To make it as clear as possible that we will hold responsible the government that builds the boondoggle.

  However, even if a mistake is made, and the wrong system is built, we are still going to use the system, and learn from the mistakes.

  Urbanism is regenerative, and it marches on.

• 85 voony // Mar 18, 2010 at 8:56 pm

  “THE TRAM with computer scheduling and switching will fit all purposes, express or local, interurban or tourism: i.e. SF Cable cars!”

  Tranismo: Does it ill also serve Expresso and Latte?

  this one do, and at 200mph at that !
  http://earthworm.online.fr/photos/paris/Pict2115.jpg

  But in fact, I answer, because you seems to assimilate trams accident with auto conflict: it is a misconception: I have added a graph to show how pedestrian and cyclist pay a disproportionate toll (click my name, and scroll for “Subway and LRT safety in France” post).

  “one underground line, or seven LRT” …1024 buses or one LRT…2496 bikes or one bus…

  Wait a mn are we talking about Dutch bikes, or Walmart bikes?…I say it because the dutch are the one really used in bike oriented cities

  Why you want spend money on a LRT?

• 86 Paul // Mar 19, 2010 at 12:08 am

  “Skytrain was a big mistake, not our only mistake, but we must move on . . . without repetition.

  We may not be big-city and we may not be opulent but we can be savvy and that includes an economically savvy Tx system responsive to our neighbourhoods: leaving the other blips on the screen for, maybe, social housing . . . ”

  Skytrain wasn’t a mistake. The mistake may have been not spending the extra money to just put it underground. Out of site out of mind type of idea.

  Has for Vancouver not being a big city. Population wise you would be correct. But density wise we are near the top.

  There seems to be this idea that we shouldn’t have built skytrain because it doesn’t look like and a street car / tram / LRT would have been much nicer. I won’t argue with that. What I will argue is being stuck on a train that has to go slow just for safety reasons. Is not something I want to see. I like skytrain because it doesn’t have to contend with everything around it. Sure it may not look nice but it moves people.

• 87 Urbanismo // Mar 19, 2010 at 3:03 am

  May Jesus of Nazereth save us all! This conversation is going nowhere!

  What the hell does the Train à Grande Vitesse have to do with us . . .

  We are not going to Lyon . . . were going to Burquitlam for God’s sake . . .

• 88 Urbanismo // Mar 19, 2010 at 5:13 am

  Skytrain = inconvenient, infrequent stop: mucho expensive!

  Tram = convenient, frequent stops: economically viable!

  Jeezless, this is hard sloggin’ ain’t it Lewis!

• 89 Urbanismo // Mar 19, 2010 at 5:20 am

  What the hell . . .

  Bombardiére will invite the pretty boys and girls in Victoria to Val d’Isère and that’s that!

• 90 mezzanine // Mar 19, 2010 at 8:19 am

  “Tram = convenient, frequent stops: economically viable!”

  And how does that differ from a bus or a trolley bus?

• 91 Urbanismo // Mar 19, 2010 at 8:48 am

  Mezz . . . Electric vs gas

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulated_Light_Rail_Vehicle

• 92 Urbanismo // Mar 19, 2010 at 9:28 am

  Mezz . . . Trolly no sweat!

  Tram better: less volume and weight and runs on predictable line. Other R of W users know where it is . . . all the time . . .

• 93 Dave 2 // Mar 19, 2010 at 9:32 am

  Minor quibble: The old Steveston Interurban did not operate out the Hastings & Carrall depot, it operated out of a depot at Seymour & Davie, there’s a centennial heritage marker at the site:

  http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&q=Seymour+St+%26+Davie+St,+Vancouver,+Greater+Vancouver+Regional+District,+British+Columbia,+Canada&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=39.184175,79.013672&ie=UTF8&cd=1&geocode=FVXm7wIdO0Kp-A&split=0&hq=&hnear=Seymour+St+%26+Davie+St,+Vancouver,+Greater+Vancouver+Regional+District,+British+Columbia,+Canada&ll=49.276247,-123.125582&spn=0.007896,0.01929&t=h&z=16&layer=c&cbll=49.276314,-123.125471&panoid=NOQ3FIo1HG6IeqRdgXH4rw&cbp=12,98.67,,0,-0.41

• 94 Gassy Jack's Ghost // Mar 19, 2010 at 9:53 am

  I’m no expert, but from what I’ve read, Mezz, the operating costs of buses are much higher with buses than trams, mainly because 70% of operating goes to payroll: far less drivers needed on trams vs. buses. Tram cars also have a much longer life than buses, so replacement costs are lower and spaced further apart.

• 95 mezzanine // Mar 19, 2010 at 11:34 am

  @GJG,

  I would think that arguement is moot if you want to keep a frequent schedule. You have to get to a meeting downtown- would you prefer a trolley bus that runs every 15 minutes or a tram that runs every 20 minutes? A tram running at the same frequency as a bus would have no wage benefit.

  There is a benefit if a corridor is at capacity, instead of running several full buses a tram would be able to save on that. but IMO, aside from the broadway corridor, we haven’t gotten to that point yet. we only got articulated trolleys ~ 1-2 yrs ago and they only run on limited routes.

  @ Urbanismo:

  You can build a picturesque ROW for bus/trolleybus as well, for much less cost.

  And trolley versus tram? I am still unsure why it is a good idea to replace our trolleys with trams.

• 96 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 19, 2010 at 6:42 pm

  ““one underground line, or seven LRT” …1024 buses or one LRT…2496 bikes or one bus…

  Wait a mn are we talking about Dutch bikes, or Walmart bikes?…I say it because the dutch are the one really used in bike oriented cities

  Why you want spend money on a LRT?”

  Good question as usual voony. I want to spend money on LRT because Vancouver is proof positive that:

  (1) Buses do not attract the ridership in sufficient numbers (60+ years of data on that). And,

  (2) Because, rather than take cars off the road, buses free up space for cars in the street.

  Now, if you asked “BRT or LRT” I am happy with either. How’s that for ‘flexity’ in thinking?

• 97 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 19, 2010 at 6:45 pm

  (3) Translink can’t afford to run 1024 buses, as mentioned above, it it can do the same job with 1 Tram.

  Com’on voony! Get on the Peace Tram!!

• 98 Chris Keam // Mar 19, 2010 at 7:05 pm

  Buses are cheap. They are flexible and can be moved from route to route as usage patterns evolve. They don’t require new construction of tracks (huge GHG emissions related to construction as we all know). They employ people to maintain and operate them. They can be bought from a Canadian company, and even better, can be sold to other jurisdictions if we decide we don’t need them.

  Buses are an effective, economical way to get better transit happening nearly immediately. They use existing road space more effectively than cars.

  We need to look at what delivers the most benefits at the best price and pretty clearly for now, in Metro Vancouver, its buses.

• 99 Glissando Remmy // Mar 19, 2010 at 7:27 pm

  The Thought of The Day

  “I like to… B99- in Line! On France’s Broadway.”

  Record breaking number of commentaries here. Is this topic so hot? Go figure.

  We live in Vancouver and this keeps us busy.

• 100 Paul // Mar 20, 2010 at 12:31 am

  Lewis

  “Good question as usual voony. I want to spend money on LRT because Vancouver is proof positive that:

  (1) Buses do not attract the ridership in sufficient numbers (60+ years of data on that).”

  I’m curious by Vancouver. Are you talking about the metro region or just the city itself. If you are talking about the Metro region then I will and anyone who supports Skytrain admit that yes the per capita bus ridership is quite poor.

  Now if you are only talking about the city of Vancouver. Then I really wonder what gave you that idea. The buses are so full it is ridiculous. And it isn’t like the frequency level isn’t high. Most routes during rush hour are 5-10 minutes. Which I’m sure people in most other parts would dearly love to have.

  3) Translink can’t afford to run 1024 buses, as mentioned above, it it can do the same job with 1 Tram.

  Ok so are you proposing that on a route (doesn’t matter which one) where a bus comes every 5 minutes to put a tram on. Now only have that tram come every 30 minutes. The tram can handle it we are now saving money because of less drivers.

  If that is case I would never support it. Again frequency has a major role in what will attract people to transit. If people can just step out there door walk down a few street and only have to wait a few minutes they like that. They like it even more if they mission a connection and don’t have to wait 15-30 minutes for the next bus.

  It isn’t that I’m again a tram it is that if a tram is built I want the frequency greater than a bus on that route. If not I’d rather take the bus. Once you’ve done that the argument that running a tram is cheaper than a bus stops. As you know need more drivers than before.

• 101 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 20, 2010 at 9:42 am

  (1) Attracting ridership to the bus in Vancouver

  This one to Chris and Paul… Using UK numbers, because as you’ve heard me carp here before, apparently we can’t even agree about that, the catchment populations served by bus as very, very light density.

  Extrapolating from that, the populations in Vancouver which are mid-density are not being provided sufficient Transit service by buses. Buses just can’t cope (according to the UK numbers). BRT or LRT could… but, that’s my point.

  The number that sticks in my head, and it’s old and I don’t remember if its regional or not, is 12%. If we are getting 88% of people using their cars with a transportation system heavily dependent on a bus fleet, then buses are not getting the job done. It doesn’t really matter whether we like them or not, they are not working because people prefer to drive than ride a bus.

  I agree with all of Chris’s points. However, they are not the “critical” ones. We can keep hitting all those numbers and still have a transportation system that is crappy, expensive, and that people will not use.

  (2) Paul missed point 2. And I wonder if I am making myself clear enough on this one for folks to understand. For example, I think it drives Zweisystem’s post a couple of stories up from here.

  He is talking about 1978 as the point when LRT transit was planned. I remember a traffic jam at Lougheed Mall morning rush hour because drivers were being asked to stop and take a survey card. Good effort. Must have cost a king’s ransom.

  However, in 1978, I don’t think most people in B.C. were ready to contemplate that the solution to neighbourhood blight caused by “High Traffic Volume Streets”.

  Today, we can contemplate for the first time the solution of taking space away from the cars.

  High Traffic Volume has been shown to decimate the quality of the residential stock on a street. It has been measured as rental turn over, for example. You can just drive over the Knight Street Bridge and look on both sides of Knight all the way to 12th Avenue and see for yourselves. The single family residential is being ravaged by the traffic. Livability is not there.

  The exact same thing happens on all the N-S arterials in Vancouver, the ones that used to carry streetcar.

  I think this is the point even voony doesn’t quite get: If we put LRT or BRT on the center of the street, we “break down” the scale of the street into humanly-managable chunks.

  We also have a dramatic effect in the livability of the place by reducing the amount of stuff that gets kicked up by the tires, and on the quality of the air and the “sense of place”—especially after we plant a double row of urban-scale trees. Trees not only trap particulate matter, the tree canopies act like filters, but they also replenish the oxygen in the air.

  So, here we have two issues that responders thus far have not handled very well. Let’s put it on the vagaries of “blogging”.

  First, history matters. Those of you who agitate for buses (it’s hard to call it anything else, really) must have a historical explanation of sorts for what happened in Vancouver. We have to understand in simple, and material ways what happened here in Vancouver when the trams were taken off and the road space was given over to the car.

  [Hint: neighbourhood blight].

  It didn’t have to be that way. We could have built treed medians over the space of the tracks. Yet, I hear a lot of comments in the blog to the effect that “if we have to blight a street or two just to get SkyTrain going, so be it”.

  That won’t do. The economic viability of every plot of land in our cities is part of the economic viability of the whole.

  The reason we are designers, ladies and gents, is that we are supposed to be able to see our way out of a paper bag, and deliver two results at one and the same time. In this case: a functioning transportation system, and a healthy city.

  (3) I was deliberately lowering my guard because I think voony was snowing us with his bus numbers.

  I am not an expert in transportation, but people that seem to know what they are talking about, and demonstrate the courage to test their own base assumptions have pointed out that:

  - LRT can run two trains together to boost capacity beyond anything BRT can deliver.

  - LRT can run as RER, or commuter on railroad

  - LRT implementation on routes with heavy bus service (like Broadway) may not cost Translink any additional operating costs because of savings achieved from taking buses off the road.

  I don’t know what the frequency in service is. I buy the 30 minute number. It is not “argument” if we seek to win the day by proposing ridiculous premises. We have to keep it real, folks. The Olympic Line is running on 6 minutes, with two trams on the same single track, and there are so many volunteers helping us on and off the cars that loading times are overextended.

  Frequency may have a role in attracting people to transit, but ask yourself if you have all the balls up in the air you need to “to attract people to transit”.

  Then, look at your second pair of arms and ask yourself if you have all the balls up in the air you need to to create great neighbourhoods or quartiers.

  This string can run for another 100 posts, and unless we each try to make progress at seeing these two objectives together, we are not going to resolve anything. We’ll just keep typing past one another.

  A paradigm shift in urbanism has brought us to the brink of something that has not been possible to contemplate in our cities since at least 1942 (when most places raised the speed limit from 30 to 50 kph). For the first time in two generations we can think in terms of limiting the range of the dominance of the automobile over the places we call home.

  However, this is a call to design—and decision making at the local level—in a manner that has also not been in place for about as long, if not longer.

  Those wearing the iron rings will have to demonstrate what we see very little evidence of here in this blog. The ability to communicate in clear and simple terms, and the ability to listen. Not just to their other colleges in city design, but to the people of the place. The holders of the local knowledge.

  If we are to curb freedoms for the automobile, however, we have to deliver an effective and likeable alternative. A good transit system.

  Finally, sticking to the Transportation Planning side of the discussion, can we use LRT or BRT implementation to improve the quality of our neighbourhoods? Here, the polar opposite of “blight”.

  We have the opportunity today for the first time in over a half century to implement transportation in a manner that will both deliver a good system, create pedestrian friendly streets, and improve the livability of our arterials. Each of us does not have to be expert in all of these areas. However, if we are part of the city design professions in the new paradigm, each of us does have a responsibility to be aware of the issues, and how we can help achieve the results in our own sphere of influence.

• 102 mezzanine // Mar 20, 2010 at 12:59 pm

  ^And this my main issue, LNV, with streetcars. I agree that they are wonderful tools to re-invigorate neighbourhoods and the streetscape. But aside from that they offer no further mobility benefit than a bus. (You can add a ROW for buses too, and they are much more flexible; even trolleys can divert).

  I also would prefer to ride on a tram than a trolley or bus. But if it means that frequency is cut, then I would prefer the more frequent/faster option.

  From this perspective, a tram is less of a mobility improvement (negligible speed gains over a bus, less frequency if you are not able to provide enough drivers or tram cars) and more of a neighbourhood amenity/redevelopment tool that costs million and millions of dollars from regional/provincial and federal sources.

  That’s not to say neighbourhood regeneration is not worthwhile, but if a local service tram will provide the same mobility as a bus, you have to be clear about that and ensure that your regional partners are on board.

• 103 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 20, 2010 at 1:54 pm

  We’re getting closer to being on the same page, Mezz. ROW+bus or trolley=BRT. We’re both good with that, both BRT and LRT take cars off the road, and allow for improvements in the urban space, while at the same time providing a transportation boost over buses.

  We are still not clear on the density or catchment population for bus/trolley; BRT; LRT & subway.

  My suspicion—and here I lack expertise, but I’ll try to make up for it by narrowing the reference—is that bus service in the neighbourhoods along Granville, Oak, Cambie, Main, Fraser, Clarke & Victoria (spaced 0.5 miles apart) is underserving that population.

  That is a 3.5 mile by 5 mile urban footprint I am describing (Granville to Victoria; Burrard Inlet to Fraser River). That’s 70 quartiers or potentially 700,000 people after intensificaton. Every front door would be within a 5 minute walk of a tram stop on one of the arterials, and a 10 minute walk from a stop in a neighbouring arterial. Unlike SkyTrain on Evergreen, we would not need to provide a bus link to the station.

  My sense is that buses can’t service that population adequately.

  When I lived near Oak and 70th my neighbours were not using buses. We had them in droves: on Granville (7 mn walk); on Oak (3 mn walk). Yet, everyone I knew living around me was using the car.

  How about the historical perspective? In these neighbourhoods in Vancouver the “bus experiment” has had over 70 years to get it right. Yet, the number of people opting to drive means it is not working.

  Would you agree?

• 104 mezzanine // Mar 20, 2010 at 3:08 pm

  “bus service in the neighbourhoods along Granville, Oak, Cambie, Main, Fraser, Clarke & Victoria (spaced 0.5 miles apart) is underserving that population.”

  You’ve stated that you aren’t an expert, but what do you base that on?

  - I am unsure if there are bus capacity issues/pass-ups as you see on the 99B.
  -Artic trolleys just started running on Main, fraser and victoria, and I am unsure how trams would improve on mobility.
  -I am unsure if you would want to slow traffic down too much on knight st, which is the only truck route from richmond to the port.

  ” In these neighbourhoods in Vancouver the “bus experiment” has had over 70 years to get it right. Yet, the number of people opting to drive means it is not working.”

  Seattle prior to LRT being built had a transit mode share of 17%, and that’s just with buses only. Portland had a 13.3% mode share, with a multi-line LRT.

  http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/american_community_survey_acs/010230.html

• 105 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 20, 2010 at 7:32 pm

  Basing it on a calculation of overall population in the area; then taking a gross-density average. Taking into account catchment area & stop spacing we can reduce both calculations to total number of people,

  (The unfortunate bit comes from using U.K. numbers. I can come across that kind of information there packaged inside the urban design literature. Here, I can’t seem to find those numbers anywhere. I’ll check the link, thanks).

  When I do, I get a very low population numbers for a bus system, compared to a medium density population number for Vancouver neighbourhoods on the arterials. That sets my mind thinking.

  On the 70-year experiment of bus implementation, I don’t think that Seattle and Portland are more than just suggestive comparisons.

  There is an opinion being presented that buses are an optimum. I am asking those very folks a question:

  At whatever the mode share is for those Vancouver neighbourhoods (I’m putting it at 12% from memory), is that an optimum for the bus system?

  “The Olympic Miracle” was planning to reduce private vehicular trips by 30%. Indications are the numbers were closer to 37%. If buses are such hot service, why haven’t we seen that type of change over the last 70 years as the neighbourhoods intensified?

  As I have suggested before, i think that the north american bus system is set up as the poor sister for the folks that can’t afford to drive. I don’t agree with that, or the decisions of many drivers, however, we are just reporting what we see out there.

• 106 Paul // Mar 21, 2010 at 9:34 am

  Lewis.

  I’ve lived my entire life by 41st and Knight. So I have a good idea of this area. Which you in general included.

  From a few posts above you felt this corridor was urban blight. To me it is just a single family homes district. Even if there was a tram on Knight Street or 41st. I do feel it would change the look of the neighbourhood.

  According to the census data from my area which is defined as Fraser,41st,Argyle,49th. 25% of the people over the age of 15 take transit to get to work, 5% Walk or Bike. 68% Drive or are a Passenger in a Car. What it doesn’t imply is those people over the age of 15 that don’t go to work but to school. The post secondary students. I’d say there is a good chance if you included them the public transit percentage would increase quite a bit. The population in this area is 6132 with a density of 5137/sqkm

  Now if I look at the census tract directly south of me bordered by Fraser, 49th, Argyle, 57th. Of the people over 15 going to work 19% take transit, 1.9% walk or bike, 78% either drive or are passenger. Again that doesn’t include people going to school. So I would assume the public transit percentage would actually be higher. And the population in this area is 8341 with a density of 7531/sqkm

  In case your wondering why the percentage numbers don’t add up to 100. That is because a small group of people use “some other means of transport”

  Ok so from that I can tell in my area more people take transit than the “12%” number you have quoted. Which tells me that “12%” is for the entire Metro Vancouver. Not just the area you are referring to.

  The next part is even with all that bus service. along Knight, Fraser, Victoria, 41st and 49th. Why is the transit usage still low. Or at least that is assuming 19-25% is low.

  One aspect on the above state numbers is that the cost of using a car is not expensive enough to persuade people to leave their car at home and take transit. I used to have a car but recently decided to park it and just take transit. But for me to save money on transit I had to not have my car insured and just leave it in the garage. Once I’ve insured my car. Now it costs me more to take transit vs driving. So my thought is a lot of people in my area want to own a car for what ever reason. Once they start paying insurance. They are more or less are forced to drive because of difference in cost between taking transit and the cost of using the car (fuel). Of course if they go to an area they have to pay to park. Then depending on the cost of parking transit may become a better option. This is why I feel when looking at getting more funding for transit. Raising property taxes is not a good thing to do. But raising fuel taxes and putting up tolls is better. It gives a more direct incentive to those who drive to drive less. Property taxes increase don’t give any incentive to people to drive less. Of course there are those that decide they can’t afford to keep the car because of the increase in property taxes. Which is good in a way. But most households want to own at least one car for those times when they still need the car.

  Another point is that time wise it is still quicker to take a car than the take transit.

  Next part is the service level in this area. While the Fraser,Knight,Victoria corridors are busy. As far as I know they don’t get pass ups. The routes are busy and during rush hour it is quite common to have to stand.

  As for the 41st routes of 41,43 and 49th route of 49. Pass ups can be quite common. I’ve been passed up at least once on 49th and once on 41st. I do feel a lot of people on those routes are from outside areas going to UBC and or Langara. There is no doubt that Canada Line as put an extra strain on those routes. As it is quite common for the buses to be delayed a cambie longer than normal as half the bus empties and fills back up with new passengers.

  Would a tram bring better service possibly. But I also feel that if they were to ban street parking from 6am to 9 pm that would improve the service a lot as well. The biggest problem I see is the buses getting bunched up. Generally because one bus ends up stopping at every stop and takes a while to load and unload. Meanwhile the bus behind catches up because it doesn’t have anyone to stop for so it catches up easily to the bus in front. I’ve seen this countless times with the 41. It runs about every 5 minutes at rush hour. Sometimes you can be waiting for a good 15 mins and suddenly see 2-3 buses comming. I also feel to get better timed service. There should be more timing stops. In fact every cross bus route should be a timing stop. Right now on 41st. The time stops are Joyce, Fraser, Granville, UBC. When in reality there should be a timing stop at Kingsway, Claredon, Victoria, Knight, Main, Cambie (especially here) and so on. Sure if a bus is behind schedule it wouldn’t help. But it would help to keep the buses more on schedule. Another aspect to get better service would be to look at all door boarding. Get people on and off faster. Of course that is hard to implement. As there is no proof on whether people have paid or not.

  Back to the idea that the majority of people on the 41,43,49 are people from outside areas going to UBC,Langara. This is why I feel the skytrain along Broadway has to go to UBC. For the simple fact of getting these people off of these routes. While a tram might be nice looking along Broadway. The simple fact is the east west corridor needs something fast and frequent to just move people.

  Back to the idea of no street parking. I would also add that they should make the curb lane on those routes during the time of 6am to 9pm a bus only lane. Once you have a bus only lane that would be the same as having a Tram.

  I also would not want to have a Tram started along a route. Where the frequency of the Tram is far less than what the bus is. The 22 on knight during non peak comes ever 12-15 minutes. If a tram were to come only ever 30 mins that would upset me dearly. Even then 12-15 mins I feel is a long wait.

  So if you want more people on transit. Make it cheaper than driving. Try and make it as fast a driving. Or better yet make sure the frequency is high enough that transfers are not that long.

  Another aspect is where are these people going. If the majority are going towards areas that are poorly serviced by transit. Then chances are they will drive. Even if transit is good where they live.

• 107 Paul // Mar 21, 2010 at 9:36 am

  Edit on the above where I said

  “Even if there was a tram on Knight Street or 41st. I do feel it would change the look of the neighbourhood. ”

  I meant to imply that it would not change the look of the neighbourhood.

  For that to happen would imply that the homes all get knocked down and something else is built.

• 108 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 21, 2010 at 11:39 am

  “this corridor was urban blight. To me it is just a single family homes district. Even if there was a tram on Knight Street or 41st. I do feel it would change the look of the neighbourhood.”

  Well, here is a point worth discussing. And, Paul, since you represent local knowledge, we can probably get it right, giving a good feel for what we’ve been on-and-on about.

  The “urban blight” is limited to the homes fronting Knight Street. The school (on 49th), and the businesses on 49th, 41st, and between King Ed and Kingsway, could be much better served by good urbanism applied to the design of the Knight Street R.O.W. (right of way).

  A tram would do that. It would put a continuous double row of trees down the middle of the street on 5-foot medians that would act as “islands of safety” when it is safe to j-walk. Pedestrian crossing distances would be reduced, and the possibility of cars coming over the centre line for head-on collisions eliminated (nearly had one of those north of 27th).

  The tram would occupy either 2 or 3 lanes of traffic, removing between 20,000 and 30,000 vehicles per day. This reduction would mostly take place at rush hour, when the neighbourhood blighting is really at a peak.

  Knight would still be able to handle between 20,000 and 40,000 vpd, plus an additional 60,000 LRT rides.

  So far, we have made a significant impact on the houses fronting (do you know any residents that live in units fronting Kinght, it would be interesting to hear back from them). And, by removing vehicular over-volume, impacted the local streets as well.

  You report a 25% bus ridership. In your gut, does that go up with LRT? I think it might double!

  Your reporting is excellent. Using the lower number, the 5,137 people per km2 factors to 2,600 per quartier, or 22 persons per acre. If we assume 2.2 people per unit we are at a gross density of 10 units/acre or duplex housing. My Formshift entry for the Vancouver Arterials (including Knight) would increase density on lots fronting Knight to 60 units per acre, or a 6x increase.

  Perhaps a greater portion of that new population might use the service slipping along their front door. The FormShift street design also included local access lanes along both sides of the street, but we won’t get into detail with that.

  The “intensification” of Vancouver arterials that I am proposing—including Knight Street—would take place on a lot-by-lot basis. No land assembly required, construction could be by either small or large construction firms. The apartment zone between 63rd and the bridge we would assume might not redevelop because the profits would not be there.

  Your next point….

  “with all that bus service. along Knight, Fraser, Victoria, 41st and 49th. Why is the transit usage still low. Or at least that is assuming 19-25% is low.”

  I am assuming it is low at 25%. Perhaps others can enlighten us. And I agree that this shows that the 12% is probably my memory of a regional number published in the 1990s (I would guess about the time the HOV lanes were announced for the Freeway).

  I also agree with your cost for buying insurance by the year. However, I am supposing that if you had better service in the form of LRT, and you drove to work to a site within the transit network, once you had a monthly pass, you would use it for some evening and weekend trips, and still ensure your car year round.

  Depending on where you were going, signal activated LRT should beat the pants of getting to downtown Vancouver in a car during the rushes.

  Note that we agree, I think, that BRT on the arterials should bring most of the LRT benefits provided the demand doesn’t exceed system capacity.

  Frequency: “The 22 on knight during non peak comes ever 12-15 minutes”

  Olympic Line, running two trains on a single track had frequencies of about 6 mn and operators felt they could improve on it.

  “[to] change the look of the neighbourhood the homes all get knocked down and something else is built [fronting the arterials]”

  [words in brackets are mine]

  The whole idea of “good” urbanism is that we can do two things, maybe more, at the same time. Yes, Paul, this is the way to improve all of our neighbourhoods. Thanks for sharing you knowledge around your neighbourhood.

  I hope we’ve mad a cool post.

• 109 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 21, 2010 at 12:01 pm

  … made a good post.

• 110 voony // Mar 21, 2010 at 7:39 pm

  Lewis:

  High transit ridership is not necessarily a good thing:

  you will see it in city like Calgary or Seattle, and the reason is that there, you have basically a single purpose CBD where noone live and shutting down at 5pm and , so every one go to a park and ride before heading to work…and don’t go to the city for other reason…that bring you a kind the urbanism we all know: Is it a good thing?

  I think the goal of good urban planning is not to maximize transit ridership, but to minimize trip! and when those are necessary, have a spatial organization benefiting to transit…

  So in that scheme, most of the people walk or bike for their trip, and barely use transit:

  I think you will agree that France is not a land of disaster when come public transit, but still there, when you take the ~ 15 larger cities (outside Paris area), you get a transit share of ~12%, but car is 53% not 78%, because lot of people walk, and some other bike…
  (I have linked source for those number on my page http://voony.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/subway-and-lrt-safety-in-france/ )

  Amazingly enough, it is very similar number you will see in Vancouver DownTown…

  and for the GVRD area, is is a quite large area, the size of one county or 2 in US, so to make fair comparison.

  regarding 25% taking transit to go to work in the Paul neighborhood

  To give a matter of comparison:
  I think similar number for the Paris area with all this commuter trains, RER, subways, trams, buses are below 50%…

  at the end in the statistic, some exhibit the total trip, while the other only the commuter trip, and between the both you can have a significant discrepancy (commuter transit share for GVRD is close to 17%, link to source is in my “gordon legacies” blog entry).

• 111 Paul // Mar 21, 2010 at 9:24 pm

  “The “urban blight” is limited to the homes fronting Knight Street. The school (on 49th), and the businesses on 49th, 41st, and between King Ed and Kingsway, could be much better served by good urbanism applied to the design of the Knight Street R.O.W. (right of way).”

  There is no doubt that having a home along Knight street. Is not as nice as having a home one block in (which is where I’m situated). And could Knight street have been better definitely.

  When there was a “scare” of a toll being put on the Knight street bridge. I hate to say it but I was gung ho for the whole idea. Great make the suckers who don’t even live along Knight street pay to drive up it.

  “I also agree with your cost for buying insurance by the year. However, I am supposing that if you had better service in the form of LRT, and you drove to work to a site within the transit network, once you had a monthly pass, you would use it for some evening and weekend trips, and still ensure your car year round.”

  When I had my car which was an old junker. insured it with no collision, no theft and not comprehensive. Just the basic insurance and third party liability. I used it to go to work. I then want to see if I could put my insurance as pleasure only. What I found out was because I didn’t have those other categories. That pleasure use wasn’t any cheaper. That is when I discovered ok. So I own the car I only want it for pleasure. So when going to work. Even if I had a monthly pass. And I factored in the income tax non credit rebate for monthly passes. The cost of using that compared to putting fuel in my. It was cheaper just to drive the car. The only reason why I decide to drop the car was one it was starting to break down. Although I could have fixed it. But two on a personal level I was just tired of driving with all the other idiots out there. Either way it showed me how badly we need to make driving more expensive. I do feel the price of fuel needs to be up in the $2 – $2.50 range. Which would put it on par with Europe. But I also realize that I’m the exception to the rule. And most people just won’t get rid of their car.

  “Note that we agree, I think, that BRT on the arterials should bring most of the LRT benefits provided the demand doesn’t exceed system capacity.”

  And so once BRT goes past capacity at that point we then start to implement and LRT line of some sort. It is a logical progression. Do I think Knight street needs a LRT now. Probably not. On a personal level it would be nice. But for now a Bus only lane from 6AM to 9PM would do quite nicely. Although before that were to happen I would have the left turn bays at 57th installed first. That way you are guaranted 2 through lanes and one bus only lane.

  “The “intensification” of Vancouver arterials that I am proposing—including Knight Street—would take place on a lot-by-lot basis. No land assembly required, construction could be by either small or large construction firms. The apartment zone between 63rd and the bridge we would assume might not redevelop because the profits would not be there.”

  I was looking at the formshift designs. Not sure if you are the same person. But there was one by Simpson Villegas.

  If your doing it lot by lot . Then it would be easier. Trying to get two or three lots together is a major pain. And most likely will never happen. Which is why we never suddenly saw a major densification of areas around 29th and nanaimo skytrain stations.

  Also it would require a zoning change. In my area no house can be be at 3 full stories. It can be 2.5 stories. Although I do believe that might be changing and 3 stories might come about. Also there is of course the minimum distance a house must be from front side walk and back lane. So that would have to changed.

  In some indirect way though they are starting to build multi dwelling units on a standard lot. There is a house 3 houses from mine being built. I’m guessing it is a standard 2,000 sqft home. Top level is one dwelling at 1,000 sqft Accessed by the front door. Bottom level is split into two separate 500 sqft dwellings. Both accessed by two separate doors at the back of the house. There is a 250 sqft laneway house as well. Or at least I’m estimating it is 250 sqft. So what was once just one dwelling has no become 4 dwellings. Because there is only now one parking garage in the back. Most will have to park in the front street. What I do see happening as more dwellings like this are built. People will have less space to park. And some will just give up on having a car. Which is why higher density brings great transit use.

  “Frequency: “The 22 on knight during non peak comes ever 12-15 minutes”

  “Olympic Line, running two trains on a single track had frequencies of about 6 mn and operators felt they could improve on it.”

  What I’m saying is that if they do build an LRT line. They have to make sure the frequency of the LRT is very close to what the bus frequency was. To build an LRT which will have a greater capacity per train. And then drop the frequency because it isn’t needed. Is bringing worse service. Sure it might be a greater pphpd. But I’m having to wait longer.

• 112 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 22, 2010 at 12:46 am

  You have the FormShift entry correct, Paul. There would be zoning changes, and more importantly changes to the road standards.

  I am not a transportation expert. But, I don’t see adding LRT, then decreasing frequency of service. You may know something I do not. The BRT implementation is not just two bus lanes at the centre of the R.O.W., but also buses that trip the light signals. When they are taking up passengers, or off loading, the light is red. Every other time, the light is green for the BRT.

  It is interesting that you did the comparison of bus pass to “minimum cost automobile” and came up short. Were you paying for parking at the other end? That is usually the deal breaker.

• 113 MB // Mar 22, 2010 at 10:05 am

  A very interesting set of comments by people who obviously care.

  Designers do get it, Lewis. And yes, to the point our hair is set on fire with certain images of human scaled urbanism and beautiful architecture from Europe. We can learn much from that continent.

  But the central thrust of Frances’s original post was transit FUNDING. It’s obvious that no amount of articulation, imagery and ideation about redesigning our cities for human beings has attracted the attention Gordon, Shirley and Steve. Moreover, they are distracted now by dubious structural and planned deficits for the next few years.

  However, I believe the resiliency of our cities will be seriously put to the test when the cost of fuel skyrockets + collapses repeatedly, but generally trends way, way upwards over the next decade. No other issue will put our city-building precepts and economy on trial as severely.

  I predict the issue of whether to build transit at much higher levels of long-term stable funding will then be forced, but only after much wailing and gnashing of teeth predominantly by Gordo’s and Steve’s suburban commuter supporters.

  As much as we prefer our leaders to have vision and foresight, the reality is that they are followers of their lobbyists and are shackled by their ideology. Where is the national concensus-builder we need so desperately?

  It may take $3 per litre gas and $300 fill ups to pump the demand for transit alternatives to overflowing. By then, though, much damage to the economy will have already been done, as evidenced by much higher unemployment levels, a stagnant marketplace, and even less government revenue.

  It’s ironic that those who promoted and supported the Gateway project did so with the old saw that it will ‘improve the economy’. They did not do their research, or if they did they censored the results. Gateway’s feet of clay will crumble with escalating private vehicle operating costs and tolls. The debt charges on its $6 billion cost will just be settling in as the half-century act of commuting by single occupant car and all its attendant layers of public subsidy and suburban construction finally cracks and its folly is exposed.

  Perhaps worse for the premier and the former minister of transport is that their supporters in the suburban real estate industry will suffer greatly.

  It’s up to us to encourage decision makers at all levels to come to the table now, or barring that at least have a plan prepared for mid-decade. And that includes as a top priority a plethora of public transit options in all cities, and food and energy security.

  And it’s also up to us as individuals, families and extended families to prepare for the possibility that in harder times many politicians who don’t get it, or who are ideologically bound to do nothing, will absent themselves from the responsibility to help society and the conglomerations we call cities evolve into more resilient forms.

  I for one am looking forward to empty asphalt and see it as a blank canvas, a land base for better things, like transit, pedestrian streets, bike freeways, linear parks, allotment gardens, housing and a gigantic economic stimulus package. But I’m also worried about coping in the meantime. I’m hoping that my quartier ends up having everything I need within a 10-minute walk well into my 80s, or, as it may be, a 10-minute ride in a motorized wheelchair.

  2015. That may be a seminal, paradigm-shifting year.

• 114 Paul // Mar 22, 2010 at 12:57 pm

  @Lewis

  “It is interesting that you did the comparison of bus pass to “minimum cost automobile” and came up short. Were you paying for parking at the other end? That is usually the deal breaker.”

  In my case there was no pay parking at the other end. Of course someone who has to pay for parking will come up with a different set up numbers.

• 115 Lewis N. Villegas // Mar 22, 2010 at 2:13 pm

  MB 115 posts into this string, we are allowed to scale down to one-on-one discussions, don’t you think?

  I don’t see the empty asphalt. It may be covered by bikes or something else.

  I have long wondered in the Great Depression what role was played by the swift shift from horse drawn transportation to internal combustion engines. Think of the whole spectrum of infrastructure and supply lines that one day just went dead.

  Think of the economic displacement of that. Sure the farmers were hit. Especially the ones supplying horses, horse feed, and stray to spread over the street to cover up the droppings until they could be shovelled away.

  However, I do see a willingness to take back the dominance of the public realm from the private automobile emerging in our midst. And that is a “new” thing for me. Something I always felt was necessary, but something that has kind of snuck up on me with the “Olympic Miracle”.

• 116 Chris Keam // Mar 22, 2010 at 5:21 pm

  I don’t think straw was spread to cover up the manure, at least not in New York City. Here’s an interesting article about horses in NYC and the problems they caused.

  http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/when-horses-posed-a-public-health-hazard/

• 117 MB // Mar 23, 2010 at 11:25 am

  Lewis: “I don’t see the empty asphalt. It may be covered by bikes or something else.”

  It’s not very empty now, but, as I said, it could very well prove to be a blank canvas for better things than private cars in three or four years. Think of a land base equivalent to 1/3 of a typical municipality’s total area. That’s one big chunk of property, and it’s mostly owned by the people.

  “I do see a willingness to take back the dominance of the public realm from the private automobile emerging in our midst. ”

  Spot on! As I mentioned above, I think peak oil will force the issue. But there is a tremendous lack of knowledge about how the anticipated price spikes in fossil fuels will affect society. Portland wrote a report on it and is now acting on it. Metro Vancouver recently wrote a report on peak oil and so far only major Joe Trassolini (Port Moody) has spoken publicly about it (don’t have a link at hand at the moment). We really need to light a fire under the decision makers, otherwise we’ll all be caught unaware.

  I believe we can use the public realm — and the potential to plan it with more care toward the human scale — as a negotiating tool with the private sector and between various levels of government. Cities may not have much money, and they are hamstrung (or should I say have the advantage?) that they cannot run deficits.

  But one thing they do have a lot of is public land under the asphalt.

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