Category — Transit

In the perennial debate between “really fast” rapid transit advocates — the Skytrain people here in BC — and the “fast enough but much cheaper” light rail crowd, I’ve tended to lean to the fastest options for a simple reason: it puts more personal time into the lives of working families.

Saving six minutes each way on a daily commute may not sound like much, but it adds up to an hour a week or four hours a month to be spent as you wish, but probably relaxing with your family. Is this so bad?

Yes, the cost of the infrastructure may be $1 billion more. To many, however, the benefit would be priceless. This social gain is not factored into transit purchase decisions.

Now a new study shows that “inequality of well-being” is even more badly distributed than income. Basically, the study examines how much time and money families have at various places on the economic scale.

No matter how hard young families work, their incomes are stagnating and their personal time is declining. Not so for those at the top of the scale, who have both more money and more time. [Read more →]

It was one of those “you’ve got to be kidding” moments when you’re sure something has been lost in translation: a guide on Guangzhou’s brand new 22-kilometre rapid transit line in 2005 solemnly declaring that a further 220 kilometres of underground rapid transit would be completed by 2010.

Wasn’t there an extra zero there?

No. In China, where community consultation is an empty category and money is plentiful, things move quickly.

The lines were done by 2010 and Guangzhou keeps on building. Here in Metro, meanwhile, we’ve finally just greenlighted another 11 kilometres on the Evergreen Line, which won’t roll for another four years at the earliest.

I was staffing Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell on a tour of Guangzhou’s gleaming  German-built underground system. Vancouver’s sister city was vaulting, along with the rest of the country, from a city of bicycles in the 1980s to an automobile gridlock zone in the 1990s and then a rapid transit city 10 years later.

In 2005, Vancouver had just ground out the decision to complete the Canada Line, a fractious regional debate that itself took many years. Still to come: a decision on new funding sources for Translink, without which some rrapid transit relief for riders on the Broadway Corridor is impossible.

With provincial transport minister Blair Lekstrom promising to have Evergreen Line construction under way “within months” as a result of Friday’s Translink Mayor’s Council vote on funding, the struggle for Translink’s future shifts to the backrooms.

That’s where a joint technical committee of seni0r provincial, municipal and Translink bureaucrats are working on proposals for alternate funding sources that will take further property tax increases off the table.

If they can’t find a solution acceptable to all by early next year, property taxes will rise in 2013 once more to pay for transit. This is precisely the scenario predicted by Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan and Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie, both former Translink chairs, who Friday voted against the new funding formula for precisely this reason.

(Note to drivers: fares have already been raised the legal maximum and are scheduled to rise another 13 percent in 2013, meaning riders will still pay the largest share of the overhead.)

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson has proposed an increase in the carbon tax on a regional basis to pay for transit.

Surrey Mayor Diane Watts added two more suggestions to the debate on Friday: an “area benefitting tax” that affects properties seeing values rise due to transit investment, and a regional bridge tolling scheme that would put crossings like Lions Gate Bridge and Ironworkers Bridge on an equal footing with tolled crossings like Port Mann and Golden Ears.

Most agree the final package could include “all of the above,” but achieving agreement will not be easy.

With city council again considering the future of Northeast False Creek — where a proposed park reconfiguration butts up against the Georgia Viaduct — the current ideas contest for a new vision for the area takes on added urgency.

Freeway removal is becoming so commonplace in the United States that the Urban Land Institute has created a “top 10 list” of Metro Highway Removal Projects.

It’s increasingly clear that elimination of one or both of Vancouver’s viaducts is not only possible, it’s consistent with what many cities have done with great success. This Seattle study of a range of removals concluded traffic can be absorbed and city benefits can be significant, provided careful planning comes first.

That’s the premise of Vancouver’s Viaducts and Eastern Core Strategy.