Now, it seems his hard-charging mayoral rival Suzanne Anton and her Non-Partisan Association team are guilty of the same kind of wishful, pie in the sky thinking. At least that’s judging by their opportunistic proposal to resurrect Vancouver’s old downtown streetcar network as a private-public partnership.
Now don’t get me wrong. Like most folks I love streetcars. I especially loved the gleaming Bombardier streetcars that, during last year’s Olympics, scooted along the 1.8-kilometre stretch of track from the Olympic Village Canada Line station to Granville Island. It was far less blah than riding a bland, boring bus.
For sheer nostalgia it’s hard to beat electric cars that hark back to the days when men wore hats and women weren’t always texting.
No wonder the City of New Orleans – which from 1920 to 1948 was home to the famed Desire Streetcar line – is currently expanding its historic tram system.
But the sad fact is that putting in a streetcar system these days costs great gobs of money, time and energy, which are in short supply at the City of Vancouver. It can also be highly disruptive.
In 2004, for example, construction of 6.8 km of the St. Clair streetcar line in Toronto was supposed to cost $48 million and be finished by the end of 2006. It was finally completed last year at a cost of more than $106 million.
“I had a full head of hair when I started this project,” Joe Mihevc, former vice-chairman of the Toronto Transit Commission, was quoted as saying in 2008, “and now I’m counting the ones left.”
Well, you may say, the NPA’s planned, $100-million Vancouver streetcar line linking Granville Island to Canada Place/Waterfront Station would be different. There’d be no cost overruns and no nightmare snarl-ups like those along Cambie Street while the Canada Line was being built.
But if you really think that I have a fast ferry to sell you.
Besides, Vancouver City Hall, still digging itself out from under the trainload of financial problems at the former Olympic Village site, isn’t immune to the prolonged economic slowdown the world is facing.
Vision Coun. Geoff Meggs is right: The NPA plan could easily wind up costing a bomb.
“It’s a very costly pipe dream, because the reality is it’s a very, very expensive proposition for a city that is still digesting the Olympic Village problem,” he told me Friday. “And it’s not something that is integrated into the regional transportation network, which is big mistake.”
No, city hall needs another rich, risky, multi-layered venture like I need another Nanaimo bar. It simply can’t afford it.
What the city does need during these tough times are back to basics leaders who’ll improve the value of the services it delivers by curbing its soaring wage bill and other crippling expenses.
It needs leaders who dream less and do more. Which is what this fall’s municipal election is all about.
jferry@theprovince.com
A modern TramTrain, operating on the mainline railway.
Ai??
A reply sent by Malcolm Johnston, a long time transit advocate in the metro region
The Editor;
Mr. Ferry, like Mayor Robinson has got it wrong about the modern streetcar, then just about every planner and engineer in metro Vancouver has got it wrong about the modern streetcar or tram.
Today, modern streetcars are the most powerful tool the urban designer has, to both affordably to provide public transit and mitigate traffic congestion and pollution in towns and cities.
The St. Clair streetcar project was actually a ‘road’ project as streetcars have been trundling up and down the street for about a century. The large price tag was due to cost overruns caused by road and street scape redesign being lumped on the streetcar budget. The raw cost for modern double track streetcar installation is about $6 million/km. to $8 million/km.
What makes modern streetcar the first choice of transit planners around the world is the inherent flexibility of operation. Example: Today, in Germany, one can board a streetcar on the outskirts of Stuttgart and travel 210 km. to Karlsruhe, with the streetcar acting as a passenger train (traveling at 110 kph), operating on the main line railways, as LRT operating on a exclusive rights-of-ways, and as streetcar, operating in mixed traffic in downtown Karlsruhe. Known as TramTrain, the service is so popular that today there are 12 TramTrain routes all funneling onto the main tram or streetcar line through the city. In peak hours, this line sees 45 second headway’s with coupled trams, giving a hourly capacity in excess of 40,000 persons per hour per direction.
Put another way, the main streetcar line in Karlsruhe carries over 10,000 pphpd more than the maximum theoretical capacity of the SkyTrain Expo Line, or over, 25,000 pphpd more than the maximum capacity of the present Canada Line.
Me thinks that mayoralty candidate, Susan Anton, is on the right track with streetcars!
The same TramTrain, operating as a streetcar
in downtown Karlsruhe.
Ai??
