Roz Kaplan, my colleague in Continuing Studies at SFU and Director of Liberal Arts and Adults 55+, just did some geobatching with the addresses of those who registered for her programs.
Here’s one map that reveals a not-unexpected pattern:
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I had a hunch that the majority of our students heavily utilized the transit system, and were more likely to live near the most frequent services. Roz confirmed as much:
In a Seniors Program Demographic Study completed in the winter of 2013 by 455 senior students, they reported that 94 percent either walked, road a bike or took public transportation.
That matches up with informal surveys the City Program does at lectures and classes. And why I say “ordinary stats:” the education institutions of the region are heavily dependent on transit services to serve their students, whether young, old or in between.
And why it makes so little sense to see new universities built on tops of mountains or greenfield sites on the urban edge. I’m thinking of you Nanaimo, Kelowna, Prince George and, of course, Vancouver.
Just to confirm, here’s another of Roz’s map where the connection to rapid transit couldn’t be clearer:
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Are you suggesting to close SFU and UBC campuses and move them off their mountain or peninsula location to New West, downtown, along Burnaby/Surrey SkyTrain corridor ?
Doesn’t the idea of a “campus” i.e. disassociated with urban areas or places of commerce conflict with that ?
What is more important: a campus style learning environment among leafy green spaces and mid-rise buildings or accessibility ? Or ideally both ?
I think the biggest benefit of a campus is that it provides a lot of flexibility for institutions to build as and when they need to. But I really don’t see all that much advantage in terms of the basic role of education.
First of all, it is very interesting just to see someone looking at the correlation of location and transit. By its very efficiency in moving large numbers of commuters relatively unobtrusively, the impact of existing transit service is often overlooked, or at least undervalued.
UBC and SFU now have a large enough daytime population (students, staff and faculty) that they can sustain a reasonable level of transit service, despite their somewhat remote locations.
To some degree UBC works effectively because much of the ridership is reverse to the downtown commuter peak. However. its off-centre location is a key factor in the debate about the cost and merit of extending high capacity rail service (SkyTrain extension or otherwise) all they way. UBC is big, but a daytime population of even 50,000 is still a relatively small node for a rapid transit system that is scaled to 15-25,000 passengers per hour per direction (pphpd), given that some of the UBC traffic would still be coming through the other parallel corridors, and that the university is trying to increase its on-campus accommodation for students. Given the space requirements for buildings and research facilities, what sometimes seemed short-sightedness in its more remote location, probably doesn’t seem so bad today or for the foreseeable future.
SFU’s “mountain top” location is perhaps still a bit more problematic (especially in winter when that threshold of snow reaches half-way down the hill). In its early days transit was limited (hourly) service from central Burnaby, and from Kootenay Loop via Hastings.
It has of course now achieved a critical mass of population to sustain good transit frequency on several bus corridors, with close proximity to the Millennium Line (which makes the westward Broadway extension in Vancouver more valuable on a regional scale, as it would improve travel options for commuters going east). And despite some skeptics, the proposed gondola from Production Way Station to the mountain is a serious transit option, that is applied in a few other cities, including Portland OR.
Other decentralized Institutions such as VCC (King Edward Campus), Langara, Kwantlen (Richmond), Douglas (New Westminster) have benefitted from being in line with SkyTrain corridors, and Douglas (Coquitlam) will in 2 years time be adjacent to the Evergreen extension, with the regional options it will provide.
It has been interesting to see the relatively recent addition and expansion of urban campuses for SFU, UBC and BCIT in downtown Vancouver, which tap into the hub of the regional transit network, and shows the practicability of some geographic diversity.
While there is some merit in trying to achieve shorter travel distances (live closer to work and school, or vice versa), a big positive feature of a metropolis is the diversity and highly specialized niches of activity, which lead to some long commutes. Yes, there are costs, but sometimes there seems to be a judgement that commuting is essentially “bad”.