Category — Transit

Vancouver’s False Creek bridges, which link 250,000 people and jobs in the downtown peninsula with another 100,000 along the Broadway Corridor, are in for a series of upgrades in coming years to make them safer, more accessible to pedestrians and easier for cyclists.

City staff spelled out the work plan in a report to council today on implementation of Vancouver’s Transportation 2040 plan.

Memo to drivers: stay calm, you should like the results. Impacts on existing traffic will be carefully assessed.

(The numbers reflect jobs and population in a three-kilometre radius from the downtown peninsula.)

My favourite: improvements this year at the north end of the Cambie Bridge to resolve the miserable connections to the bike route at Beatty St.

But in future years, Cambie will see extra attention for seismic safety and increased capacity for pedestrians and cyclists. The popular east-side sidewalk will be at capacity in 2020.

Work is proceeding to evaluate a proposed bike and pedestrian lane down the middle of the Granville Bridge and planning is under way to improve intersections at each end of the Burrard Bridge, which is scheduled for significant remediation work during the next capital plan.

Translink’s recently-released 2011 Trip Diary Survey, a study of travel patterns based on reports from 20,000 Metro Vancouver households, shows trips increased 9.2 percent to more than six million trips between 2008 and 2011.

That’s growing pressure for transit that transportation decision-makers will have to confront with a new Translink investment program, because car is still king in Metro except in Vancouver, where car trips make up about 40 percent of the total.

In fact, car use remains relatively stable across the region, staying at 57 percent of total trips since counts began in 1994. Transit trips have grown from 10 percent of trips in 1994 to 14 percent in 2011, but make up 22 percent of trips in Vancouver.

An expanding population is growing that number, but each traveller is also taking more trips, up to 2.77 trips on average per day in 2011 from 2.68 in the previous survey.

Last year, while auditors scoured the books for waste, routes were “optimized,” capital projects shelved and the Translink commissioner gruffly turned back Translink’s plans for a fare increase, passengers riding the system liked what they found.

Ridership rose two percent, probably a small share of the real demand given the overcrowding on key routes.

Yet according to Translink’s year-end financial and performance report, released yesterday, passenger satisfaction soared to a record 7.7 out of ten and the number of complaints per million passengers dropped to a five-year low.

Members of the Strathcona Residents Association are resuming their angry protests on Prior St. tomorrow, despite the city’s repeated efforts to meet their concerns as recently as March 27.

The rally poster, complete with insults against Mayor Gregor Robertson, who last year called for immediate traffic calming on Prior, leaves out a number of the changes and commitments made in the last year to meet community concerns.

They included, in line with Robertson’s direction, increased parking on Prior and longer crossing times for pedestrians, measures which residents have acknowledged to me have made a difference.

The entire issue only came to the fore with the city’s consideration of the possible replacement of the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts, creating a new neighbourhood east of Main with more park, better connections and improved amenities for thousands of current and future residents.

City engineers have met with the Strathcona Residents Association to confirm that traffic will not increase if council approves removal of the Viaducts and, in fact, should decline. Longstanding plans to move traffic out of Strathcona and across the False Creek flats, along a right of way on Malkin Ave., would be brought forward as the next phase.

As recently as March 27, senior city staff met with SRA reps and agreed to a safety audit of Prior, including consideration of a reduced speed limit. They walked community leaders through a detailed road plan which showed how four lanes — not six — would be linked to Prior at Gore.

Nonetheless, the rally is going ahead. [Read more →]