Category — Transportation

Vancouver planning director Brent Toderian has provided this useful review of the re:CONNECT winners – and the judges’ comments — in the city’s recent contest to reimagine the Georgia Viaducts and the East False Creek flats.

Work is continuing at the city to integrate the contest proposals with in-house work that will inform public consultation on a new transportation, scheduled for release in the spring.

Response to the City of Vancouver’s invitation to imagine a new future for the Georgia Viaducts and East False Creek Flats has generated an overwhelming response, with more than 100 responses from 13 countries.

Now it’s the public’s turn to vote on their favourite proposal — including the “do nothing” option — before the city unveils the winners picked by a panel of eminent judges. The “people’s choice” award and the judges’ verdict will be revealed Dec. 1.

Although 60 percent of the competitors are local and 75 percent from Metro Vancouver, others weighed from as far afield as Hong Kong, Mexico and Slovenia.

According to planning director Brent Toderian, “submissions range from the beautification of the viaducts, to their re-use as open space or other uses, or their partial or complete removal and replacement.

“The visions range from the practical and pragmatic, to the futuristic and whimsical. Submitters appeared to be inspired by everything from water and nature, to our urban past and current housing challenges, to volcanoes, horses, corn-dogs, and knitting yarn!”

Remember, voting closes in one week: please cast your ballot and invite your friends to do the same.

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.