This is Richmond – or more appropriately, the New Urban Richmond. More particularly, it’s here, where the blue arrow points north:
If you look closely, you can still see now-developed parking lots lining Alderbridge Way and Westminster Highway. All gone, replaced by highrise buildings in the Vancouver Style: point-and-podium towers with streetwalls of townhouses and commercial storefronts. The towers are lower and fatter than you’d find in Vancouver because of airport restrictions on height, but the effect at the street is the same.
You, like me (until this weekend), might have thought ‘downtown’ Richmond looked mainly like this:
And it’s true, there’s a lot of post-war, strip-commerical, box-in-the-parking-lot, auto-dominant sprawl. But it’s changing fast, partly because of the arrival of the Canada Line whose guideway, as you can see on the right, now dominates No. 3 Road. But more importantly, because of this:
This is the vision of a new urban Richmond, expressed as the framework map in the City Centre Area Plan. (Overview and map here.) And before you click away at this point, let me try to give you some sense of what they’re anticipating.
Imagine taking the build-out population of the entire Downtown Peninsula of Vancouver – everything from the West End and Coal Harbour to Downtown South and Yaletown (all 120,000 people when finished) – and accommodating them around the five Canada Line stations with No. 3 Road as the spine. That’s what the map above shows.
It won’t all be in highrises. Richmond is using the ‘transect’ model, promoted by New Urbanist Andres Duany, as a template:
I was pretty sceptical when I first heard a briefing on the proposed plan some years ago. But when I came across the redevelopment already occurring, and the profoundly different feel it gave to just this small part of the urban core, I was impressed. Richmond does seem committed to taking advantage of the massive investment in rail transit to transform their car-centric community into something truly transit-oriented, and doing it with some sophistication.
There are still doubts and disputes: Is an island partly below sea level in an earthquake zone really the best place for such density? Is an overhead rail line really compatible with pedestrian-friendly urbanism? Will an immigrant population infatuated with automobility really want to give it up?
We’ll see. But what I see already suggests Richmond will in short order be another regional centre linked to the metrocore through high-capacity rail. In other words, downtown dwellers in both places may have more in common than they will with their suburban neighbours.
Here again is what the section between No. 3 and the Olympic Oval looked like a few years ago, outlined in the blue circle on the Google-Earth aerial above:
Next: why I was in Richmond.
I was in Richmond yesterday, and man what an automobile paradise! BMWs and Mercedes as far as the eye could see – all stuck in traffic from Garden City over to No.3 road. For a culture that demands you drive a luxury car to be seen as successful, I personally have little hope that many people (read: Chinese) are going to hop on a bus. Some may be persuaded to take the Canada Line for trips to downtown, but buses within Richmond will be tough to fill in my opinion, except with those too poor to drive. And that unfortunately is a reinforcing cycle, as people who consider themselves (or at least strive to been seen publicly as) “upper crust” will be even less likely to take a bus if they see it as “poor man’s transport.”
Now a streetcar might be a different story… 😉
Of course not forgetting the fact that there are many in Canadian and every other culture as well who consider a luxury car as the ultimate sign of success…
Cory, I don’t think it was warranted for you to single out a specific ethnic group and associate the entire group with a particular behaviour. Please wake up — this is the 21st century.
Why not? The Chinese do it all the time.
Corey, your opinion that buses within Richmond will be tough to fill because Richmond has a lot of Chinese people is really ignorant. Perhaps you’d realize how ignorant it is if you simply got on any bus in Richmond and noticed that they’re all full of Chinese (and various other Asian) people. You don’t need to have “little hope” that many Chinese people will ride the bus, because they already are and have been for years!
I’m guessing you’ve never been to China or Hong Kong, but if you had, you would make the amazing discovery that people ride the bus there too.
Besides Amish people and Pygmies living in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, pretty much every culture on earth demands you drive a luxury car to be seen as successful, so why do you single out Chinese people? Likewise, I’m not aware of any non-Chinese culture that considers riding the bus to be a symbol of success, so again I don’t know why you would single out Chinese people in thinking that busses aren’t exactly the most prestigious form of transportation.