I’ve noticed that those who wish to see through traffic stay on Point Grey Road (or at least not transferred to McDonald) have coloured their arguments with a specious shade of green: The proposed plan, they argue, would result in more congestion, more greenhouse gases and therefore be bad for the environment.
There’s a truth and an assumption here. The truth: congestion produces more pollution from non-electric auto engines than freely flowing traffic. The assumption: traffic should be constantly free-flowing. Therefore anything that induces or worsens congestion is environmentally bad.
We have spent most of the last century building a road system based on the assumption that the traffic must be kept moving. (They call them freeways, after all.) Congestion is defined as the enemy, and, to defeat the enemy, we spend billions – most recently at Port Mann – to overcome it.
And not just freeways. All the arterials we use to get around our cities should ideally be as free-flowing as possible. Ultimately every stage of the transportation network should lead, without congestion, to the garage in every home or the parking space near every business and destination.
To ensure smoothness in the vehicle flow – and the higher speeds that result – means, for safety reasons, keeping other modes not able to reach those speeds off the vehicle rights-of-way. (They call them rights-of-way, after all.)
That’s Motordom – or car-dominant design. We’ve been doing that for more than half a century: giving one mode priority over the others and designing almost every aspect of our cities for that purpose . The result: almost everyone drives, almost everywhere, for almost everything. And because driving is so prevalent in the absence of alternatives, it follows that drivers deserve the greatest recognition – and the budget allocations which follow.
And they have.
So when the assumptions of Motordom are questioned and car-dominance threatened – particularly if it causes inconvenience for drivers – it feels for many that there is something inherently wrong with this, that the natural order of things has been disrupted. Arguments are then assembled to make the world right – even if it means turning it upside down.
By encouraging cycling, we increase pollution. By encouraging healthy activity, we increase accidents. By making the city a better place, we make it worse.
The argument that keeping traffic on arterials (McDonald and 4th Avenue) designed for that purpose and off the one (Point Grey Road) that was never meant to handle large volumes of cars because it might cause congestion and therefore create more pollution is particularly insidious. First, because transportation engineers believe the arterials can handle the additional volume. But secondly, you’re left with the conclusion that no intervention should be made anywhere where it might add to congestion – and the stated transportation priorities of the city are meaningless.
It doesn’t stop there. If traffic is to be accommodated without congestion as volumes grow, why shouldn’t Point Grey Road be redesigned as an arterial, especially since the City already owns sufficient right-of-way to widen the street? It would, after all, reduce greenhouse gases!
The message of a decision by Council to turn down the Seaside Comopletion would be clear: We want to maintain Motordom for Vancouver – and reverse a half century of policy from all Councils. Priorities for walking and cycling would be discarded if at any time there was a danger of increasing congestion.
All in the name of fighting climate change.
The reality is a bit more nuanced than: congestion produces more pollution from non-electric auto engines than freely flowing traffic. It is true that slowing down and speeding up will usually take more energy than just staying at a constant speed, but that situation isn’t always a good mirror of a busy urban road. If the congestion on the road just slows the traffic down, that will save energy because it requires acceleration to the maximum speed and because it requires less energy to overcome air friction. So in the end it might be that vehicles on a congested road traveling at variable speeds up to 40 kph have the same emissions profile as vehicles traveling at a constant 60 kph. And what is definitely true is that cars traveling at a constant 40kph are using less energy than cars traveling at a constant 60kph. And the energy savings of slowing down becomes more pronounced at higher speeds because the drag of air friction rises exponentially with speed.
You have clearly missed the entire point, yvrlutyens. You can’t see the forest for the trees. Automobiles will always equal pollution, and at least in our part of the world, automobiles will usually always equal congestion, especially if they are catered-to heavily as they are today. Autos have a place on our roads, but it’s not their current position of pure dominance. We support democracy at an idealistic, social level; why not democratize our public spaces?
I am mystified by this comment.
Suggesting that those who would impede the free flow of cars are contributing to pollution and climate change is hostage taker’s reasoning. “If you don’t maintain or expand the road network,I’ll gas the hostages” My response is “get out of your car now and improve your chances in a plea bargain” It’s your exhaust.
Amen! I will share this widely. Thank you.
Congestion is actually a constant. Overall, traffic speeds in urban areas tend to fall back to around 10 mph. At that point people make the rational decision not to add themselves to the traffic stream, because there are better things to do than sit in traffic. This topic has been studied widely and is well documented – yet somehow the message fails to get through. It you remove a link from a network, gridlock does NOT ensue. Because gridlock is purely temporary. Frustrated traffic simply evaporates. The system resets itself, over time, to a just about bearable awfulness.
Phil Goodwin has made a career out of this simple observation. Start here and follow the links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_traffic
If you increase capacity to reduce congestion, the number of vehicles will rise to meet the new capacity. Congestion will still occur, and this time there will be more pollution and greenhouse gases emitted because more vehicles are involved.
The bald-faced truth is that to reduce pollution and GHG you have to reduce the number of cars, and to reduce the number of cars you have to reduce capacity, increase the cost of driving, or make the alternatives more attractive (such as by improving transit or installing bike lanes). But most motorists don’t want to hear that.
Isn’t the root source of this problem (increased pollution and congestion) more people living in the region to begin with? So applying what we know about managing traffic, what if we simply stop up zoning our city to accommodate more people? Would’t that choke of demand? Keep population more/less constant and as a side benefit you get developers out of city politics…Because frankly, if 30K people are added every year to the region whether or not you make one or two roads every few years more bike friendly makes zero difference in grand scheme of things…
Dejan, aside from affecting traffic congestion, one of the consequences of limiting development in Vancouver would be to drive up housing prices. That would also exacerbate the divide between rich and poor in Vancouver. Likely not worth the improvements in congestion, in terms of overall quality of life in the region.
Adam. I do not believe that we were very successful at providing housing affordability though unlimited development. In fact the combination of city policies, speculation and immigration has created one of the most un-affordable cities to live-in in the world. You could make the case that west of Cambie there is no affordable SFH for not just average wage earners, but anybody below 150K/year salary mark. So, if we cannot build our way out of congestion I do not believe that we can up-zone our way out of present affordability predicament either…Neither is feasible…
My point is that CoV and media love to have this great drama over bike lanes as if some minor adjustments to traffic patterns and construction of a bike lane will have any significant impact on the big picture and make us the “greenest city” in the world…In the meantime the one real chance we have to address congestion – Transit – is being put on the back burner over squabbling about so called “new” sources of revenue when a simple decisive action of raising property taxes could have solved the problem half a decade ago.
Dejan, where do you think those people are going to go if they can’t live in Vancouver? Are they just going to disappear? No, they’re going to move to Langley, or Saanich, which means they’re going to be living in much less dense environments, paving over farmland and emitting far more Co2 per capita than people who live in Vancouver. Density makes people more environmentally friendly – what you’re proposing would greatly increase our per capita Co2 emissions.
And if we choke them out the whole province with skyrocketing prices, they’re just going to be in another province or country, and they’re just going to emit Co2 there, and it’s not like the atmosphere stops at borders. So what good does that do?
I and a colleague have developed an emissions model to evaluate congestion and impacts of vehicle traffic reference case outlines my assumptions of Pt Grey Cornwall
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/43564219/Pt%20Grey%20Vancouver%20Traffic%20Diversion%20v2.xlsx
It is simple physics that an object at rest will expend more energy to be set in motion than one which is in constant motion (why do you think so many cyclists blow through stop signs?). So instead of free flowing traffic along Point Grey Rd. you now have vehicles forced to stop and start repeatedly thereby creating more emissions, simple. Add to that you create a whole host of potentially more dangerous car/pedestrain interaction points in order to favour one mode of transportation and it seems the bike lobby is throwing pedestrians under the proverbial, er, bus.
Did you read the article? This is simply not how the real world works. You can’t reduce emissions while at the same time encouraging people to drive, or not building alternatives, as you can’t reduce emissions without reducing driving. How are we ever going to reduce driving if we decide that it’s impossible to reduce the space available for cars?
Bob, that simply is not true. Pt Grey is really difficult and to walk across especially for children, seniors and people with mobility challenges. There are not signals or stop signs. Many motorists don’t stop as required by law at crosswalks and intersections for walkers.
As well, the aggressive speeding traffic on Pt Grey forces many people to cycling on the sidewalk instead of the road. This is neither safe for pedestrians or cyclists. Closing Pt Grey Rd to through traffic will make it much better for people walking and cycling.
Richard, there are now going to be many more right turns from both Macdonald and Burrard to 4th and to Broadway. These are already high crash intersections with many pedestrians. How does that make anybody safer? Point Grey Road on the other hand has a negligible crash rate according to ICBC.
Yes, the obvious objective of the Pt Grey Road plan is to favour some mode of transportation (cycling and walking) over another (cars). I wish that they Vancouver City Council would just come out and say that straight – which I expect they will when they vote. It is just one street in Vancouver, after all.
I spent a few days in Saigon and LOVED the way traffic moves — cars, taxis, bikes, scooters, pedestrians moving in and weaving through, all without stop lights or signs. The best way to travel!
Gordon, you write (presumably, sarcastically): “If traffic is to be accommodated without congestion as volumes grow, why shouldn’t Point Grey Road be redesigned as an arterial, especially since the City already owns sufficient right-of-way to widen the street?”.
It is worth recalling, for those that do not have a long memory of the planning history of Vancouver, that there was a plan to build a Freeway to UBC. That is why Tatlow park and the other small parks along Pt Grey Road were acquired by the City in the first place.
When it became apparent how much it would cost to acquire all the land, and on top of that, the movement against freeways, the plan was abandoned and those lands developed into parks. Maybe if the Pt Grey Road plan was called a bike freeway, it would have better success.
“Speed humps cause atmospheric pollution from the speeding up and slowing down of traffic between the humps (see TRL report No. 482 on this subject). For example, TRL reports a 59% increase in CO, about 50% increase in HC and about 25% in CO2 from petrol catalyst vehicles averaged over all types of traffic calming measures, with even higher numbers over more “severe” measures such as speed humps.”
Source: The Objections to Speed Humps (Submission to the London Assembly)
Published by the Bromley Borough Roads Action Group (B.B.R.A.G.), October 2003
It is quite amazing that the “raise the drawbridge” mentality continues to be used in discussions about managing City and/or regional growth. It’s the I’m alright, Jack mentality at its most extreme. This approach cannot solve Vancouver’s rather obvious income disparity. Indeed, it would greatly worsen it. Further, in practical terms, it simply cannot be done. Moscow (!) tried limiting in-migration for years, with the net result of exacerbating corruption, overcrowding, raising rents and driving housing prices up significantly.
It’s a problem not a solution.
OK I am going to rant a little bit (off topic)
So the answer is the endless expansion of population? Show me one city that has built it’s way out of affordability crisis? But of course without construction and real estate Lower Mainland and BC in general would be in severe recession. Nationally, real estate is the biggest contributor to GDP at over 12% with additional 7% contributed by construction industry. In BC and especially in lower mainland those percentages are probably drastically higher (although I don’t have the local stats – in BC some Frankenstein-ian amalgamation of finance, insurance and real estate accounts for 25% of GDP )
So here we are building our sustainable green city though endless population growth and cramming more people in less space. To spice it up we throw in a park here and there and perhaps a green-way or a short bike lane every few years. Than we pat ourselves on the back and claim how awesome and forward looking we are. In the process we have devoured most of our industrial land (to the point that Feds had to step in through Port of Vancouver and start buying the industrial land to protect it) and we continue to have less end less children because it is too expensive to have them (and schools take too much valuable real estate). But never fear – we will import more people (preferably rich, or else how they are going to contribute…after all, all barista jobs are taken buy exchange students). So than those people will buy more of those glorious glass tower condos suited perhaps for California’s or Blessed Realm’s climate that are of course at least Silver LEED rated because they come with a a tree on the roof (never mind that they have no insulation and will leak in 10 years – leaking is good as it creates jobs). So back to sustainability…We have eco-density…But we manufacture nothing except real estate…We export raw materials while adding next to no value in the process… Our Lower Mainland’s ALR that we are so proud, if used entirely for food production, can feed maybe at best 15% of people living in the region (btw, half of the land is presently not used for food production and most of the rest is used for hobby farming and high value crops – as in things that do not sustain life but cost a lot)….Oh we also recycle – by exporting our junk to China (we do not process plastic, glass or Styrofoam in this province – we, and I was shocked, export Styrofoam to China)…
And don’t take this wrong – I actually like living here…What I don’t like is pretending that we are doing something exceptional or really sustainable. We are just playing the old real estate game (hey Ancient Rome had eco density!) and putting the lipstick on a pig for some entertainment and to give plebs something to argue about.
What do you suggest?