Ian: This could be written about the expansions to Vancouver’s transit also.
From The Conversation:
…who’ll profit from the value uplift that will flow from the massive investment of taxpayers’ funds, both from higher land values resulting from the new density and from being snug up against a new Metro line?
…as each day passes, developers are doing their maths based on the existing scenario set out by the Department of Planning. Soon it will be too late to retrofit any changes.
… what percentage of the 36,000 new apartments and other dwellings along the renewal corridor has been allocated for affordable housing? We can be sure they won’t be pitched at the pockets of those who live there now.
And as new investment comes in, so rents will rise. Without a significant affordable housing component, many of the essential workers who live there today – the mechanics, care attendants and shop workers – will be pushed further towards Sydney’s periphery. That will leave the rest of the city struggling to get the lower-paid workforce it needs to function productively.
In comparable renewal projects in cities like London and New York, a significant proportion of new stock is set aside as affordable housing, precisely to avoid such problems. It’s accepted as completely reasonable that lower-income working families should also benefit from new housing delivered as a result of public investment.
The Baird government must make it clear to developers exactly what proportion of the new homes will be set aside for this purpose – and quickly. The case for a zoning policy that mandates a proportion of all new homes as affordable has never been clearer.
The government also needs to show us where it is placing services, such as the new schools that the expanded population will need. With the government’s zoning map not identifying where these services will go, land-owners will rightly question any subsequent proposal for a school or park that would diminish their profits from possible residential development.
Who is transit for?
That is a difficult question to answer and prove–and I contend that TransLink wouldn’t have it any other way. Obscurity, when it comes to facts and figures, is an art form at which non-accountable bureaucrats excel when it comes to transit in the :Lower Mainland.
Considering where the money is being spent, and where Vancouver City Council (and apparently the BC Liberals) want to spend money, one reasonable conclusion is that transit is NOT primarily about getting people from where they are to where they want to be.
Yes, the bus service mostly works, though with some glaring deficiencies.
SkyTrain, WHEN it works, fulfills its function adequately, but not indefinitely, and perhaps not even reliably. The cost of SkyTrain is largely a mystery that the average citizen is not supposed to question too deeply, but in terms of holes into which we pour public funds, no one has fully fathomed the depth of the SkyTrain hole.
The biggest budget item on the horizon is the Broadway subway project.
Many people have become convinced that this is the way to go, but few of these people seem to have much awareness of what is involved in building a subway.
In Europe, there is sufficient experience with subway building to establish some criteria to determine when and where subways should be built. There was a massive flurry of building in the 1960s, and while most systems have worked relatively well, many cities have regretted those actions, due to unforeseen construction costs and maintenance bills.
In modern practice, a subway isn’t considered before obtaining a level of 4,000 passengers per hour per direction. That’s the feasibility study level. To build a sustainable subway–one that pays for itself–the number is closer to 15,000 passengers per hour per direction.
The Broadway corridor currently has a ridership of 1,000 passengers per hour per direction. Does anybody see a problem here?
For comparison, the second most heavily used route is the #20 Victoria / Downtown trolley bus, which comes in at just over half the ridership of route #9 and #99B on Broadway.
However, the Broadway routes are actually drawing off ridership form other parallel routes, and one might reasonably guess that this is not by nature, but by design.
In addition, the #20 bus does not function alone on a single corridor. If function is considered, the real north-south ridership–including the #22 Knight and the #7 Nanaimo / Dunbar–comes in behind Broadway at just over 800 passengers per hour per direction.
Significantly, nobody is talking about improvement s on the #20 bus, arguably the most dysfunctional route in the city.
This leads to a conclusion.
Plans for the Broadway subway require a densification of at least 4 times what the catchment area is now–something most people would get on board with–but that is just to get to a study phase.
In reality the catchment will need to be something like 15 times the density, at which point the answer is strongly suggested.
Who is transit for? Developers.
This has always been the case. Wherever it’s easy to get to a place, that place will be more attractive.
I have no idea if developers are part of setting the direction of transit planning but it definitely serves them to find out and then buy up properties near future transit hubs.