I often say that Vancouver has one of the best transit systems in the world – to the sound of considerable scoffing. And indeed, I do need to qualify that I’m talking about mid-sized cities. But even compared to some of the subway-oriented major cities like New York and Toronto, we compare pretty well – as a just-out post by the Sightline Institute illustrates.
Sightline has published the results of “Transit Score” – a follow-up to the wildly successful Walk Score:
The Transit Score methodology rates a location’s transit-friendliness by its proximity to transit stops and the frequency of transit service. Rail, cable cars, and ferries count more than buses towards a location’s Transit Score. To score a whole city, the Transit Scores of individual locations throughout the city are weighted by nearby population, then averaged.
One of the consequences of this methodology is that a city can boost its Transit Score either by boosting transit service, or by boosting the number of people near high-quality transit.
By that weighted criteria, Vancouver does really well:
The 2014 Canadian Transit Scores are out…and Vancouver, BC clocks in as the third most transit-friendly city in the Great White North, narrowly bested by Toronto and Montreal. Pretty good, eh?
.
But what’s even better: when you combine Canada and the US, Vancouver comes in at number 6! The only US cities with a better Transit Score than Vancouver are New York, San Francisco, and Boston.
Looking more narrowly within the Cascadia bioregion, Vancouver’s Transit Score beats the pants off its nearest two rivals. Portland and Seattle both do pretty well within the US, with Transit Scores of 50 and 57, respectively. But Vancouver shellacks both cities, with a score of 74.
Sightline goes on to explain why Vancouver’s Transit Score outstrips Seattle’s and Portland’s so handily – here.
Initially I thought that was sort of embarrassing — we’re behind Toronto even with Rob Ford getting involved in their process? But then I noticed that the rankings are highly correlated with regional population, and if you factor that out then we’re ahead of Toronto and Montreal by quite a bit.
C’mom:
We have already one of the best transit in Canada (and if WalkScore was not considering the Toronto streetcars as superior to buses…probably we could be second to Montreal)…
So Why we need more Transit when study say we have already got more Transit than many others?
And more seriously:
Why such good transit, we are still hoovering at 11% of transit mode share?
An answer could be,
because Transit in Vancouver is still seen either as a social service or a development tool, but not as a mobility device (in competition with other mode).
A recent example has been provided yesterday at the Vancouver city council.
Translink is proposing to improve the service on the bus route 49 (shortening the ride by 5mn for 95% of the bus rider by removing the Champlain detour).
see http://voony.wordpress.com/2014/03/04/the-2014-bus-service-optimization-focus-on-the-bus-49/
The council has passed a motion against the Transit improvement.
Then I wonder, why should I vote to give more money to Translink,when our politicians refuse measures able to improve the quality of our Transit ?
David Suzuki makes some excellent points about Canadian cities (in particular Toronto) and transit funding.
http://www.straight.com/news/604726/david-suzuki-canadas-success-depends-investing-municipal-infrastructure
On the surface, it looks like this ranking system values transit priority for buses at zero, but “heavy/light rail is weighted 2X”. So a really slow streetcar stuck in traffic gets rated above a bus on a dedicated busway that is far faster and more reliable.
On average, rail is better than buses in North America. But the average does not tell you much useful when rating cities such as Ottawa with a network of busways.
You missed off the end of Sightline piece. “Translink has substantially increased per-capita transit service hours over the past decade (though there’s been a downward trend in recent years, and further cuts loom).” with a useful link to Translink’s 2014 Base Plan. To be fair, this is common trend across North America where even though cities and transit ridership are both growing there is usually no additional funding available for transit (check Human Transit’s tweets today for verification).
FYI, it’s just for the City of Vancouver.