Traffic congestion in Metro Vancouver as bad as Los Angeles. A report that TransLink will ignore!
Oh yes, TransLink is on the right path in providing an affordable public transit alternative – NOT!
Vancouver faces many transportation problems, but TransLink and its very unconventional transit planning must rank as number one.
As I have said before, “Transit is to move people and not money“, yet TransLink still bumbles along planning hugely expensive metro projects thatAi??are built toAi??subsidize major development (densification) along the route. It is thought (or hoped) that major densificationAi??will provide ridership for the very expensive metro line because the metro has done poorly in attracting the motorist from the car. In the end, densification increases auto use, creating more congestion and gridlock, which TransLink, municipal planners, and academics (particularly at SFU)Ai??do not have the wit to solve.
Densification may increase transit ridership, but it also increasesAi??private and commercial vehicle use, which in the end, despite investing billions of dollars on expensive light metro, little is achieved!
So after investing nearly $9 billion over the past 33 years, on three mini-metro routes alone, Metro Vancouver has achieved traffic congestion as bad as Los Angeles.
Traffic congestion in Metro Vancouver as bad as Los Angeles: report
By Tiffany Crawford, Vancouver SunJanuary 8, 2013
Vancouver’s traffic congestion is just as bad as Los Angeles and the worst inAi?? Canada, says the latest congestion report from TomTom, a company thatAi?? manufactures GPS devices.
The company, which released its third quarterly congestion index on Tuesday,Ai?? uses its own navigation technology to rate traffic congestion in 57 NorthAi?? American cities with a population of more than 950,000.
Metro Vancouver tied with L.A. as the top congested city, followed by SanAi?? Francisco, Honolulu, Seattle, Toronto and New Orleans.
Between July and September, Metro Vancouver’s congestion increased by one perAi?? cent to 34 per cent over the last quarterly index, said TomTom, making it equalAi?? with LA.
During that period, journey times were on average 34 per cent longer duringAi?? peak times than when traffic is flowing freely.
Put another way, Metro Vancouver motorists waited, on average, eight per centAi?? longer in the morning and evening rush times than their counterparts in greaterAi?? Toronto, and 10 per cent longer than those in Montreal and Chicago, according toAi?? TomTom.
The company uses real travel time data captured by vehicles to compare travelAi?? times at rush hour with travel at “low-flow” times.
However, a traffic consultant in Ottawa has cautioned that the index is aAi?? “pretty shallow analysis,” probably tied more to marketing GPS devices.
Barry Wellar, a former geography professor at the University of Ottawa, saysAi?? it’s nearly impossible to do a fair comparison of cities.
TomTom says its traffic database contains more than six trillion dataAi?? measurements and is growing by five billion measurements every day.
With files from Postmedia News
The top ten most congested North American cities between July and SeptemberAi?? 2012, according to TomTom, were:
1. Los Angeles (34%)
2. Vancouver (34%)
3. San Francisco (33%)
4. Honolulu (31%)
5. Seattle (27%)
6. Toronto (26%)
7. New Orleans (25%)
8. San Jose (25%)
9. Montreal (24%)
10. Chicago (24%)
Ai?? Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
It is really hard to see how City of Vancouver transportation engineers and planners can stand up in front of the public with a straight face to ask for more money to keep funding transit by TransLink when SkyTrains and Bee-Lines aren’t reducing traffic congestion – at all – 57% of the trips were by cars in 1999 before TransLink and in 2011 after 12 years of TransLink expanding SkyTrain, 57% of the trips were by cars, no change:
http://habilisblog.com/cycling-and-transit-use-see-big-gains-in-metro-vancouver/#comments
At the busiest time of day, you have fewer than 80,000 people on transit and if you put them in cars, you’d have about 53,000 more drivers on about 10,000 kilometres of roads with one to four lanes. This works out to about one more car every kilometre on the major gridlocked roads with four lanes. So what? What exactly does transit by TransLink achieve as far as a reduction in commuting times or carbon emissions? Let me answer, virtually nothing.
TransLink is controlled by detached and obtuse individuals at the Ministry of Transportation in Victoria. These guys who are far removed from life in Metro Vancouver are making decisions about transit in Metro Vancouver to expand SkyTrain under the mistaken notion that spending $2.5 billion to integrate the Evergreen Line into the existing SkyTrain debacle is a good idea.
TransLink in essence is run by mindless automatons acting on some silly decree by supposed transit gurus who in the 1980s adopted SkyTrain to transform society into one where we all take transit. It is sickening to read article after article in the media from Professor Gordon Price (in mind blowing economics) and Councillor Geoff Meggs (journalist turned know it all politician) who won’t shut up about how just a little more money squandered on SkyTrain will turn things around here. It won’t.
Any rational person would say forget it, no more money thrown away on SkyTrain; spend $500 million on a separate tram line “at grade” from Coquitlam to Vancouver, instead. Am I the only one who sees the logic behind the switch to trams costing a fraction of SkyTrain and moving more people faster than SkyTrain?
Every transit expert, who lives outside the Vancouver Metro area I have talked to for the past 25 years has come to the same conclusions. The lack of any scientific approach to our regional transit planning has left us in chaos. With likes of Bill Good and Francis Bula and other milquetoast media types, abetted by sill academic types supported by downright corrupt bureaucratic and political types, the situation will not change.