Monocle is a global affairs and lifestyle magazine, 24-hour radio station, website, and media brand – and, as part of its ‘radio’ programming, a podcast called ‘The Urbanist.’ Journalist Lucy Hyslop did a feature on Main Street for their program on ‘High Streets’ – the British term for a neighbourhood shopping street – including interviews with myself and Michael Geller.
Downloadable here. (Main Street segment starts around 13:17)
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Regular PT contributor Scot Bathgate heard the program, and had this comment:
Excellent blurb on Monocle radio about Main Street. It’s definitely a Stroad, I have a cure for it though. Reduce from 6 lanes to 4 lanes by adding a central planted median with trees or if the cross fall of the road will allow it, widen the sidewalks. The kerbside lanes are used for parking outside of rush hour so its only one lane each way of traffic, during rush hour no stopping gives the commuters two lanes each direction. Then interrupt the street as they have done with numerous pedestrian signals.
What Main really needs is separated bike lanes. It is already is a quite popular bike route and has one of the highest number of bike crashes of any street in the city.
I suggest Richard’s bike lanes be part of Gordon’s landscaped median.
Designating two lanes for traffic and two for parking would be a disaster. Between turns and parallel parking the single traffic lane would never move and the poor #3 bus would be useless. To solve that problem I suggest removing parking completely and designating the curb lanes as bus lanes.
Been a while since I travelled along Main, but….Bike lane seperated from traffic by parking, Bus bulbs for the buses.
I can’t picture a working design from that description Rico. It sounds to me like: sidewalk, then bike lane, then painted separator, then parking, then single traffic lane. The problem is the bus stops. You said “bus bulb” which I call a “bus bulge”. To me that means extending the sidewalk the width of the curb lane. Parts of Main Street, West Broadway and other streets already have those. But you can’t extend the sidewalk when you’ve already designated that space as a bike lane.
Every possible layout I can think of with a bike lane at the curb forces bus passengers to cross the bike lane. It also inevitably winds up looking like BRT with big concrete platforms occupying part of the roadway.
While it’s interesting to talk about remaking Main Street around buses, bikes and people, Canada Line is only 1km to the west so there will never be justification to make major transit investments on Main. What we have now may be all we ever get.
In an alternate universe LRT runs on Arbutus to YVR and Brighouse while a second line runs on Main Street. There’s no talk about replacing the Massey tunnel with an 8-lane bridge because extending the LRT from Main/Marine down the soon-to-be-abandoned CN rail line in Richmond and over to Ladner would be more efficient.
The street configuration would be sidewalk, bike lane, then parking or bus bulge dependant on location. The bus bulge would cross the bike lane just like it was an intersection it is done in many places. That said Voony is correct that a transit only lane would be best and serve the most people.
Median bike lanes tend not to be a great idea especially for children and new cyclists unless the medians are really wide. Maybe on Cambie but Main is really not wide enough. Anyway, medians just tend to make the street prettier to drive on while not improving the pedestrian environment. Separated bike lanes increase the separatation from traffic making walking much more pleasent. Dunsmuir is a great example of this.
There is an excess of 800 daily bus trip on Main (between Broadway and Hasting), and it is used by some of the busiest bus lines of the network, #3, #8, #19 carrying a combined 20 millions of rider/years. Needless to say, not only the lack of bus lanes on Main increases significantly the operating cost of those route, but it also imposes a tremendous economic burden to the region in term of lost time.
Certainly something need to be done on Main, and the first thing is to implement all time bus lanes.
The study frequently cited by cyclist advocates, http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/2012-10-measuring-the-street.pdf , more than justify the emphasis on bus first. …And certainly any solution slowing down the bus on Main should be a no/no
I suggested “Summer Sundays On Main” to get people warmed up to the idea of reduced access.
Streetmix: http://streetmix.net/neil21/14/summer-sundays-on-main Blog: http://stroadtoboulevard.tumblr.com/post/44843709750/summer-sundays-on-main
The idea is not to make it a one-day, crazy-party festival like Car Free Day, but to make it a perfectly functioning, but more pleasant, regular thing. Every Sunday July and August: keep the bus and bike access, give every business a Patio or parklet.
And for the record I disagree entirely with Scott’s median idea. Medians are for highways, for ‘roads’ in the stroad lingo, to stop fast cars in opposing directions hitting eachother. Main street should be a Great Street, a pedestrian dominated boulevard. First, great pedestrian experience, then transit, then bikes and a lane each way for cars at the end if there’s space.