An occasional update on items from Motordom – the world of auto dominance.
WHERE’S MY FLYING CAR?
From Transport Newsletter #167:
Moon colonies, personal robots, death rays, four hour working weeks – science has failed to deliver a whole lot of awesomeness. That said, the greatest let-down has got to be flying cars. Where the hell are they? Why are we still using roads like suckers?
The idea of a flying car goes all the way back to 1905 and a short story titled Sultana’s Dream by an Indian feminist writer (fact). By the 1950s the flying car had become a symbol of the ‘Glorious Future’ that awaited us and science fiction magazines were all ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s totally coming. Just give it a couple of decades’.
It’s now 2010. Does your car fly? Maybe General Motors and the other automobile giants wouldn’t be in such craptastic financial straits if they had invested in stuff people wanted (flying cars) instead of boring family sedans.”
Ref: Mikolai Napieralski, The Vine, 29/1/10
PS: Note the paper shopping bag in the picture.
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LESSONS OF FORT LANGLEY
Township Councillor Jordan Bateman makes a good case on his blog that the Golden Ears Bridge and the accompanying roads have significantly benefitted Fort Langley:
The Albion Ferry, for years, wreaked havoc on Fort Langley’s village life.
Noisy trucks, rumbling motorcycles, and platoons of cars whipped through town, to and from the ferry. They rarely stopped, and hardly ever slowed to see what the Fort had to offer….
Today, a year after the opening of the Golden Ears Bridge … Fort Langley village life is far better. There are more tourists than ever before. The amount, and the speed, of traffic on Glover has plunged. People are waving pedestrians across the street. Sidewalk life is teeming with energy. Coffee shops, restaurants and patios are full.
And then he draws the larger conclusion:
That’s all thanks to putting the arterial, crosstown traffic where it belongs: on arterial routes, away from our neighbourhoods. The Golden Ears Bridge allowed us to follow Vancouver’s model: moving a freeway out of our Fort Langley village.
One of the reasons to support the twinning of the Port Mann Bridge, beyond enabling proper transit service, is to take the crosstown, regional traffic out of neighbourhoods like Cape Horn (my old neighbourhood in Coquitlam) Surrey’s Fraser Heights, and our Willoughby and Walnut Grove, and put it on the freeway where it belongs. …
So the roads will always be with us, and we need to make sure that infrastructure is properly placed and sized to handle the loads. It’s not a question of “or”; it’s a question of “and.” And we need it all–good jobs close to home, pedestrians, cyclists, transit and, yes, roads.
Gotta agree with Jordan. It’s not a question of ‘or’ but a question of ‘and.’ Problem: Gateway is not about ‘and.’ Gateway is about building out a vision from the 1960s. Gateway is about Motordom.
There is no budget for transit in Gateway, no money for the buses that the signs say may come at some unspecified time in the future. As Jordan notes, “Transit is the second best option, of course, but that is wholly dependent on the network available–of which the South Fraser suffers greatly.”
And why is there no network for transit? Because the money is going into the roads, and only the roads. (See below.) And once the roads are built and the land-use follows, it’s designed, logically, to be auto dependent. Transit doesn’t come second; it doesn’t come at all.
Or at least not as something that can be affordably integrated into a frequent transit network. Indeed, Translink is already proposing to rationalize the transit system, to transfer resources away from those places where service demand is low to those places of higher demand where it is needed. Why should these scarce resources be allocated to a place that deliberately built itself out to be part of Motordom?
But not to worry, South of the Fraser. You’ll have new roads, new bridges, new interchanges and new HOV lanes. And a few places, like Fort Langley, to get some relief.
I grew up in Langley and somewhere, deep down, I do love it. However, I hate it so much that I’m willing to dedicate the rest of my life to learning how cities can avoid being like Langley.
I voted for Jason when I lived there but I’ve kind of regret doing so. He was/is a fairly strong proponent of the Gateway project and was generally against the densification of Langley . . . but somehow pro-street car.
The City/Township continues to allow sprawl with winding cul-de-sacs that don’t allow for a interconnected road network – we have 200th street as a result and a By-pass that doesn’t by-pass anything but looks like a major free way.
Transit isn’t an option because Langley refuses to make it one.
Since Jordan mention the Vancouver model: one of the lesson of it is you can’t have it all: freeway and transit.
if you want follow the Vancouver model, one of the lesson of it is you can’t have it all: freeway and transit.
freeway could provide temporary relieve but they command a certain landscape development where any public transit effort is doomed while requiring still more freeway: that is something you call “motordom”
so yes it is question of “or”: you can’t have both. On the topic I invite you to read the great piece of Alderman Harry Rankin on my blog:
http://voony.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/the-case-for-rapid-transit-in-1970/
(note also how insulting to human intelligence can be the argument to build more freeway or twin a bridge because it will allow to put a bus on it)
So you have to choose, and SoF have chosen to pour more than 4 billions to date and still counting on road, and nothing for transit.
It is their choice and we have to respect it: but they have also to accept the consequence of it, and don’t be surprised of suffering of poor transit afterward.
If anyone passes through Langley, you should see the ludicrous new developments on the Highway 1 interchange.
My daily commute experience from downtown Vancouver when I worked for the Golden Ears Bridge project.
http://thirdwavecyclingblog.wordpress.com/2010/05/22/biking-to-work%e2%80%94in-more-challenging-or-isolated-work-areas/
For the record, I think we can ditch flying cars and never get them in my lifetime and I would be happy so long as we get that four-hour work week.
Langley is these days a very sad and depressing place for me as a person who lived there for 18 long years. It is a cookie cutter copy of many american cities and has every big box retailer imaginable. Transit is poor at best considering buses frequency is on a hourly bases. I fear when we run out of oil that Langley and Surrey(where I was born into this world) will fall and become the detroit and flints of Canada/British Columbia. It was a much nice place when I was a kid only a few stores and the odd car now its just to much to bare and I don’t plan on raising a kid in that town ever.
Bateman: “So the roads will always be with us, and we need to make sure that infrastructure is properly placed and sized to handle the loads. It’s not a question of “or”; it’s a question of “and.” And we need it all–good jobs close to home, pedestrians, cyclists, transit and, yes, roads.”
A true “and” scenario would have involved building the jobs closer to home, the pedestrian, cycling and transit facilities, exploring how goods could be better moved by rail and river (and more importantly, reducing their need for movement) and when the “and” were truly in place, then see how many more roads are still needed. There is no credible “and” in Gateway.
Funny, is it a coincidence that Ft Langley is so charming and that it was built before the Freeway?
Why do Vancouverites frame the Gateway Project the “choice” of South of Fraser residents? Its the BC Liberals who pushed that project through. They didn’t ask anyone about it. They imposed this on the South of Fraser at the worst time. Any effort to get the Gateway money spent on traffic would have met the same results of trying to get the Canada Line built as surface light rail.
Let’s not demonize those who live in suburbia because they can’t afford to live in Vancouver. Half a million dollars for a 800 square foot box is not affordable to the average family. The burbs were built in an era of motordom and do cost less to live there because of that. Real estate prices have outpaced wage increases by tenfold or more. A lot of people live in the burbs because they simply can’t afford better. I don’t see anyone in Vancouver raising their hands to do anything about that. Its far too easy to simply look down your nose I suppose.
John,
For your information, in BC there are some election from time to time, where you can voice your opinion. and be at the provincial or municipal ones, SoF resident have clearly given a plebiscite to the Gateway Project (Delta provincial result is the only happy outcome). People could have choose otherwise, like Vancouver did when they killed the freeway project.
Not only the Gateway didn’t got imposed to SoF, they have more than welcomed it.
…I understand that sometimes, it is not easy to face the consequence of his irresponsibility…
I don’t demonize people in Langley – my family lives there and so do a lot of my friends. I spent 20 years of my life there.
I can guarentee that a lot of Langley residents would ‘like’ to have better transit, however, many of them would also support the Gateway project because they see that bigger bridge = less congestion = better for the environment (less idling) = better commute. In reality, none of that is true (in the long term anyways).
Langley is a city of congestion. If you drive up and down 200th street (you don’t have a choice in many respects), you’ll see that it’s a fact. 200th street is 6 lanes wide (or more?) in some parts. I find that people see themselves as stuck IN traffic but never as PART of traffic.
I can also guarentee that I spend less money living in the ‘expensive’ city than if I were to rent an apartment of equivilant size and ammenities in Langley. In Langley, my car cost me $350/mo for the lease (tiny, non-fancy, Yaris) plus $2600/year in insurance. That’s $6800/year – not including gas and maintenance. I was working full-time and going to school full-time ($100+ for a semester parking pass).
My transportation costs are now negligable. $110 for a transit pass and whatever maintenance I have to do on my bike. I live 5min walking distance from 4 major grocery stores, 2 walk-in clinics, a movie theatre, across the street from a major library, many parks, and a bunch of great local restarurants. That is what I call a great quality of living.
The CMHC has some great info for people looking for sustainable neighbourhoods to move into.
http://www.cmhcschl.gc.ca/en/co/buho/sune/sune_007.cfm
City living isn’t for everyone but sometimes the ‘cost-savings’ argument of living in the suburbs is over-played and sometimes not true.
//end rambling