Vancouver’s 2040 Transportaion Plan Will Fail
With great fanfare and hoopla, the Vision Vancouver controlled city council has approved a rather vision-less transportation plan for the future. The plan is fatally flawed as the one tool with a proven record of reducing traffic, light rail or LRT/streetcar (tram for our European friends) is absent.
Pretty pictures of people crossing on a pedestrianized Granville St. Bridge, just won’t sell in the winter months, where wind and snow, will force people back into cars.
By the way, in yesterday’s rainstorm, how many cyclists did one see?
Vancouver’s planners have convinced themselves that a $4.5 billion subway under Broadway to UBC will make the plan work only demonstrates that Vancouver and its politicians are wearing a very deep shade of rose coloured glasses.
For a cost of a $4.5 billion SkyTrain subway under Broadway, we could easily build a 50 km. LRT/tram network for both Vancouver and Surrey, plus the RftV/Leewood full-build Vancouver to Chilliwack TramTrain and still have money left over!
But don’t mention this to Vancouver types as they believe that in Lotus land, they are the centre of the universe and that allAi??regional taxpayers should pay homage (as well as taxes) to Vancouver’s subway planning
2040 is doomed to failure, brought to you by a city and a city council that lives in a bubbleAi??which a transportation reality will soon burst.
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Instead of a pedestrianized walkway that would only be used about 6 months a year
at best, would not a LRT/streetcar line be better providing service all year long?
http://www.news1130.com/news/local/article/417592–council-passes-ambitious-transportation-plan
Sadly, top planners and engineers at the COV keep telling taxpayers to support SkyTrain and this is because they have “built their careers on the lie of SkyTrain” being able to solve gridlock – it does the opposite here. Too bad they are too corrupt to admit it.
Express B-Line service (99 B-Line) was created by TransLink to set the stage for SkyTrain to UBC – it operates the same way as SkyTrain, distant stops with plenty of empty or nearly empty buses moving up and down Broadway to keep the B-Line humming. It is inefficient and costly. Rather, it would be better to do away with the 99 B-Line to set the stage for LRT to UBC; at least it is affordable and efficient for Broadway.
With the 99 B-Line service, currently, literally 50% to 75% of the seats on the other buses to UBC are empty at peak times due to bad connections to UBC (riders, instead, hop on the 99 B-Line with good connections to UBC) – I’m not kidding at all. The B-Line is over crowded by design to make a case for SkyTrain to UBC, while there is presently too much transit supply that is simply not being used efficiently to UBC.
Express 99 B-Line service despite the hype does not save any appreciable time and goes through 50 traffic lights over 14 kilometres. It can be ended at any time to fill up the other buses going to UBC, and SkyTrain is not necessary.
A light rail or a tram line would be handy to remove the diesel buses (which would still operate with a subway to UBC) on Broadway rather than a subway extension of the “SkyTrain” to UBC – as proposed by COV Transportation Director, Jerry Dumbrovolny. COV Transportation Director, Jerry Dumbrovolny and his TransLink friends are doing citizens in Vancouver a disservice and Jerry can resign, right now, if his ego is getting in the way of admitting that SkyTrain is stupid and not necessary to UBC.
If one wants to reduce car trips, then one must provide an attractive alternative to the car. I see nothing that will do this.
Tube or subway lines are notoriously expensive to build and one needs a lot of daily passengers to make a tube line feasible. London’s Central Line, believeve, carries over 700,000 passengers a day and it still costs a lot to operate and maintain.
Is a tube under Broadway going to carry 700,000 persons a day? Not from what I have read.
I tend to agree with the article, Vancouver politicians and planning authorities seem to want very expensive Tube lines, which are very expensive. Smaller cities like Vancouver, Portland comes to mind, should invest in cheaper transit and build a network first then start building high capacity lines when demand warrants.
It is very foolish indeed to invest in very expensive high capacity Tube lines before one has the transit network to sustain them. I fear for the Vancouver tax payer, as they are being taken for a very expensive ride.
Though I would very much like to ride a train to work in Abbotsford at some point in my lifetime, I’m afraid I can’t get behind critique of the Broadway Line. I’m a big fan of LRT and a little puzzled why Vancouver isn’t at least including it somewhere in the picture, but Vancouver isn’t Portland, and Broadway isn’t the place. Vancouver is well on its way to being a major world city, and a subway along Broadway is the missing piece in its transit puzzle. The B-Line is slow, crammed to inhuman levels, and won’t manage more than a few more years to keep up with the incredible levels of development along the corridor. Whole towns worth of people are being added along Broadway, from UBC’s endowment lands, to the Arbutus corridor, to the Olympic Village which has more cranes working right now than I have seen in all of Portland on all of my research trips combined. In addition, there is no connection between the Millenium Line and the Canada Line, which is pretty bad subway planning. The real problem here isn’t misplaced priorities; it is years of neglect that has left the entire region hugely short of transit. UBC generates 80,000 trips per day, which, I will concede, could be met with really good light rail, but the problem is every inch of the line is being developed at breakneck speed. They are going to need the subway, and let’s hope they build platforms big enough to cover a few decades of expansion (ie. not the Canada Line).
What I’m trying to say is that fighting over a tiny pie is silly. What the Lower Mainland needs is a bigger pie. The fact that we don’t have commuter rail is mindboggling. At the very least we should have two way lines to Mission, Chilliwack via the South shore of the river, and a high speed corridor down to White Rock to connect up with the line to Seattle. What do we have? Nearly nothing, a one way train to Mission. China is putting 600 billion dollars into rail; if we can’t scrape up 20 billion to bring our gateway region to Asia up to international standards, we are going to really pay for it down the line.
Just a thought. for the cost of a UBC subway, we could build at least 5 (yes 5) or more light rail lines with a combined capacity of over 100,000 persons per hour per direction!