Posts from — March 2011

An arbitration panel has awarded South West False Creek residents living on leased city land a 26 percent cut in monthly fee increases sought by the city, saving them as much as $6 million.

The city will still achieve a significant increase under the complex award, but well below its original goal. The head of the three-person panel was former Chief Justice Don Brenner, who died suddenly just days after the award was handed down.

The decision clears the way for an even more important debate about what happens to the award-winning community between the Cambie and Granville bridges at the expiry of the leases in the next 20 to 25 years. Hundreds of homes in the area are on leased land.

Created in the 1970s to rehabilitate what was then contaminated industrial land, the South West False Creek community plan used leased land and co-op housing programs to provide a mix of one-third social, one-third mid-market and one-third full market housing. Cars were discouraged, transit was provided and 5,000 residents built a strong, successful, sustainable community.

By leasing the land, rather than selling it, the city achieved affordable housing and retained the land value in the city’s Property Endowment Fund. [Read more →]

Removal of Seoul’s 1970s elevated freeway to daylight Cheong gye cheon, the city’s sacred stream, literally cooled the city down, according to the traffic engineer who made it happen.

Dr. Keith Hwang, who is on a speaking tour in Vancouver, told a gathering of Vancouver planners, architects and engineers Wednesday that restoration of the stream through the heart of the city, where 14 lanes of traffic roared for more than 30 years, dropped downtown temperatures several degrees.

(Translink’s Buzzer blog had the best summary of Hwang’s comments here.)

Among the other findings three years after the $400 million project concluded:

• only 1.3 per cent of downtown residents reported more congestion;
• land values rose sharply in the neighbourhoods near the stream, sparking new development; and
• there was a 2.3 percent reduction in traffic into the Central Business District.

Perhaps even more significant was the impact across South Korea, where many cities undertook similar programs to daylight streams and create downtown green spaces. In every case, business has improved, property values have risen and congestion has not worsened.

More than 150 attended Hwang’s public forum Tuesday night and Gordon Price, of SFU’s Urban Studies Program, is looking to see if he can squeeze more people into his upcoming panel discussion April 7 on the prospects for tearing down the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts.

Dr. Keith Hwang, who helped transform the heart of Seoul by removing an elevated expressway to daylight a stream, toured the Georgia Viaduct today with CBC On The Coast reporter Matthew Lazin-Ryder. You can hear their discussion here.

Preliminary conclusion: Vancouver could live, even flourish, without the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts. You can hear him yourself tomorrow night at Simon Fraser downtown.

Vancouver’s dismal “D” grade in an international comparison of city transportation networks, highlighted in this weekend’s Globe and Mail, is a good backdrop to Metro Vancouver-wide consultations on future funding for Translink scheduled to kick off early in April.

That’s when North Vancouver District Mayor Richard Walton, chair of the Translink Mayor’s Council, begins shipping out binders of technical information to his colleagues as they wrestle with ways to fund new expansion of the region’s transit and transportation system.

Metro Vancouver’s average commute time of 67 minutes probably sounds like a dream world to Fraser Valley commuters who must challenge the Port Mann every day, but it’s a far cry from Milan (53 minutes) or Barcelona (48 minutes).

Will the new emphasis on “family-friendly” policies at both the federal and provincial levels lead to transit investments that get people out of their cars and back to their homes for more family time? We’ll see.

Meanwhile, Walton is fending off suggestions from Delta Mayor Lois Jackson that her municipality may break away from Translink and use its share of federal gas tax money to build its own transit system.

Clearly, this consultation could take a while.

Metro Vancouver is not alone in commuter hell.

[Read more →]