Price Tags contributor Scot Bathgate of the Daily Scot sent this CTV news article reporting on the increase in the dreaded “Bus Pass Ups” in Metro Vancouver.As reported by Jon Woodward , those people left waiting at a bus stop while the bus passes by have increased by 50 per cent over the last five years. The reason? Increasing ridership and delayed infrastructure investments, like the Broadway subway extension.
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“Every time a bus leaves someone behind, bus drivers press a button that logs the incident. In 2010, bus drivers pressed that button 211,184 times.In 2011, after the Canada Line opened, that number actually dropped to 199,743. But in subsequent years that number increased again, to 259,994 in 2012, and 317,276 in 2013. As TransLink was pressed to reorganize its routes for efficiency, bus pass-ups dropped in 2014, to 297,217. But that improvement was short-lived: last year, the number rose again to 313,744, and this year it was at 214,080 in August – putting it on track to be around the 320,000 mark by the end of the year.” The most crowded routes are no surprise-Four of the five most crowded routes travel east and west through Vancouver: the 49, which heads from Metrotown to UBC; the 41, which heads from Joyce Station to UBC; the 25, which heads from Brentwood Town Centre to UBC; and the 99 B-Line, which goes along Broadway from Commercial Drive to UBC. As people move to the region, they use the bus. Unfortunately those newcomers are also using the most popular, well serviced routes. Ridership increased 2.8 per cent since last year, or approximately 6.6 million rides. And some of those routes, like the popular 99 B-Line is at capacity, with a three-minute service at stops along the route. The answer-Resources. The Broadway subway has been on the table since 2008 with a promise of connecting to the University of British Columbia. That plan was nixed by the current Premier Christy Clark who wanted a regional vote on a sales tax to fund transit improvements, including a shorter Broadway line that would terminate at Arbutus. The Federal government has offered transit project funding but it is dependent on provincial and municipal governments matching contributions. It is time now to start that conversation so that the region can move forward efficiently and sustainably in its transit services.
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I was once passed up by three buses – I complained to Translink and they wrote back that they had only one recorded pass-up at my location and times. I don’t trust these numbers as all and think they are a magnitude larger.
I share the same experience when I use to take the 9 or 99 on Fraser and Broadway. 2-3 buses would pass by on a regular basis and Translink would always suggest there was less.
The problem is that the powers-that-be have always prioritized Transit into the downtown core over other routes. For as long as I’ve lived in Vancouver, it’s always been a pain going east-west, or actually going anywhere that’s not downtown.
And while Broadway gets all the headlines, the 49 is really the worst, because it serves mainly students and school kids, who have no alternatives to the bus. And there is no sense of urgency on Translink’s part to do something about it. If you’re a student at Langara, transferring from the skytrain, or a school kid at any of the many schools along 49th, good luck. 45 minute waits are the norm, in either direction.
If TransLink were to increase the frequency of the 49 bus they need to take away buses from other routes (without additional funding). Perhaps that’s the right thing to do, but other routes will suffer.
There are some more creative possibilities. Don’t run all the buses all the way from Metrotown to UBC. Loop around near Cambie, for example.
CREATIVE possibilities./ Another one is to use some of the existing buses during rush hour for a NON STOP UBC _ skytrain service More return trips with better customer service.
Students and school kids do have an alternative to the bus. It’s called a bicycle and it is astounding how many young people opt for the bus.
Spoken like someone who has neither young kids, nor has ever attempted to get from Metrotown or even East-Van to Langara for school or work. Take a look, there’s a world outside downtown Vancouver.
If only the evil students and school kids would just ride bicycles, all the world’s problems would be solved.
Sheesh, the issue with transit on the 49 corridor is real and serious, and requires a bit more depth of thought than those glib statements. You wonder why people get so riled up by the bike lobby when real people’s real issues are dismissed so off-handedly.
Yes and no. I remember UBC figures that showed a drop in students bike commuting to UBC when the U-Pass was introduced. Some people seem to prefer to wait for a bus than to ride a bike. Of course if bike infrastructure improves more people tend to bike, especially if they are not already paying for a U-Pass.
Riled up? Whatever for? It was just a suggestion. If somebody who lives 15 blocks away from school and usually takes a crowded bus is given a nice AAA bike route to that school they’ll take it for much of the year. Others will not find that works for their trip and do something else.
No one thing is going to work for all trips. That’s why we need multiple choices. Right now we have two. Car and bus. They work okay but are now filled to capacity. We need to add to those options with more options.
If there were decent bike routes to UBC, then bikes could be an option for many and e-bikes could be used by many more. The head engineer for CoV often rides to work from New Westminster. I know a person who often rides from Deep Cove to GF Strong and occasionally to UBC. With an e-bike, these kind of trips are open to everyone.
Also, TransLink has plans to create safe and convenient cycling routes to transit hubs but keeps putting this off due to lack of funding. I believe they should prioritize this plan in order to free up some buses.
Already about 15% of trips by people in Strathcona and Graneview/Woodlands are made by bike. Now imagine a cycling highway from East Van to downtown and how that would relieve pressure on Skytrain.
With regard to kids cycling or walking to school – we do need a city wide (or even province wide) safe routes to school program. We are creating sick children and clogged streets by driving them to school.
Cycling offers the least expensive way of providing mobility along with huge benefits to society Why do so many people dismiss this out of hand?
Look at weather forecasts like that for the next week and see why taking the bus is preferable. The school year coincides with Vancouver’s wettest, coldest and darkest months.
I think there needs to be multiple things to solve this. To start with more buses of course and the funding for that. New routes too that go down some different streets.
In addition cheaper things would be more cycle routes to and from UBC. (Currently there are very few and those ones are of low standards.)
There should be good AAA routes to all the schools as well.
I agree with bike routes to UBC. I have a vision for Jericho lands where a bike route goes on site between 4th/Highbury and 8th/Coutenay. This would reduce both distance and grade and could be entirely separated from motor traffic.
Didn’t they just add fancy bike lanes all the way along SW Marine Drive from Granville to UBC ?
200 bicyclists rejoice while 5000 car users fume.
Missing is rapid transit ie Broadway subway ( perhaps surface past Alma ) via Jericho and UEL’s Block F.
No. The city of Vancouver has done the first part of their upgrade to SW Marine (eventually Granville to Camosun) That doesn’t reach to UBC, we will need the Ministry to upgrade SW Marine from Camosun westward for that.
What do you base your count of 200 on?
What is the impact on the vehicle drivers, given that no vehicle travel lanes were impacted? Are they fuming just because the shoulder was repaved?
Thomas, can you please explain why car drivers would fume?
If I were to drive on SW Marine, I would rejoice in the newly paved road with more separation from those riding bikes. The previous configuration was not great for anyone. Now more people will cycle on SW Marine. I can see lots of people using e-bikes to get to UBC. More bikes means less cars and less bus pass-ups. This is a win-win all around.
UBC and the mall monstrosity in T-Town have something in common.
They are both at a terminus.
People keep rabbiting about moving bodies back and forth quickly. It’s more logical to consider how to stop wasting time and money on travel – period.
To wit: build more accommodation at this education resort; or move significant parts of it to central areas.
If the new parts of BCIT and Emily Carr, and maybe St Paul’s Hospital as well, were built beside UBC instead of the centrally located False Creek Flats, the “waste billions of our money on a Skytrain/Subway” refrain would reach a crescendo.
Metrotown Mall is logically located. Central. SFU is logically splitting up elements of its business to different locations.
UBC’s location is illogical unless you live there. It’s a great money maker; all the more so because the transportation costs of its customers and employees are externalized.
Plenty of student and resident housing being built at UBC. Aplenty !! 25,000 already and well over 40,000 on build out. Have you been there lately ?
A perfect spot for UBC expansion would be around the Commercial Drive Skytrain station. The first building should be on the Safeway site. This could also revitalize the entire area.
Moving just a fraction of UBC assets off campus would cost the equivalent of many Broadway subways.
There are excellent reasons to maintain a large core campus. Walking proximity to classes is one. Energy use efficiency is another. There are more. Travelling off-campus for one or two of your half-dozen electives or splitting programs between two or more sites is just too inefficient to get beyond the first lightbulb flash of this idea. Satellite campuses make a lot more sense. But they also require a certain critical mass to be viable. UBC accommodates about 60,000 employees, residents and students on the Point Grey campus alone. That could reach 90,000 in another generation.
IMO, the subway is long overdue all the way to the UBC transit terminus. The current transit ridership % split between Central Broadway and UBC is about 65:35. It is the economic attributes and geometry of Broadway that justifies funding a subway; UBC adds substantially more impetus. So punch a couple of keyboard buttons and reverse 60% of the trains at Arbutus back to Commercial Drive (or even Lougheed or Surrey). Tweak the split as ridership builds over the 100+ year life of the subway. It ain’t nuclear physics.
How on earth could moving parts of UBC to central areas cost many billions of dollars?
Have you been eating Beyer’s Purple Kool-Aid Peanuts?
Higher education has changed. The stone edifices and campuses of yore are as anachronistic and irrelevant as the priapic towers banks were so fond of building. When was the last time you went to a bank.
Bricks and mortar; and ivy covered buildings – are moribund.
Universities as a physical entity are like cruise ships – not necessary.
There’s an excellent article in the Dec.1st 2012 Economist: “Not what it used to be” on the unbundling of a university education resulting in huge savings to students; on MOOCs (open online courses); on crippling student debt.
The bricks and mortar model of the university is a dinosaur. Unless that’s where you get your paycheck. Then it’s dandy.
I’m flabbergasted by the foolish courses foisted on students for credits. What a crock. For a degree. For a career as a barista.
Take architecture, for example. As fascinated by this subject as I am, I couldn’t imagine paying someone to prattle on about material I can more easily access in books or online; let alone waste my time commuting to this end-of-the-road enclave.
Curious to know what other universities are stuck out at a terminus.
Or commuting to study Shakespeare, or sociology, or foreign languages, or theatre … These should be stand alone entities. They shouldn’t even have anything to do with the UBC Behemoth.
“Going to university” is one of those phrases with desirable overtones that has been drilled into gullible heads.
On-line courses will never replace the immeasurably valuable teacher-student and peer-to-peer contact. This is especially true of design studios, well-equipped labs and, of course, the billions of printed pages found in physical libraries that will never be entirely scanned and placed in digital archives. Then you’ve got administration costs for more than one campus.
There is also great social value in educational campuses. I have a spouse and many friends who I met 30+ years ago during my UBC days. The courses I took also involved extensive group site tours that convened in physical studios or classrooms out of necessity where samples were studied and results debated. A doctor trained on-line instead of in special med labs, classrooms and under years of guidance in a teaching hospital will never find employment in the developed world. An architect who was never subject to trial-by-fire group critiques over several years of studio presentations (often with a guest practicing architect to comment) will have received an incomplete education and probably wouldn’t progress beyond being an associate in a firm.
An average university building costs about $6,000 a square metre to build and equip, probably a third more when land acquisition is included. Replacing some of the hundreds of thousands of university m2 with digital teaching is possible, but I doubt the fraction will ever rise above single digit percentages. To suggest most of it can be replaced requires evidence. The relocation of about 375,000 m2 of campus buildings (about 45% of all campus gross floor area) will cost the same as one subway all the way to a campus terminus, not including the cost of the relocation itself and additional administration.
And no, my pay “check” [cheque] does not come from UBC.
Yes I saw the teaser for this on tv…they ask, without any sarcasm in their voice ‘what can be done about this issue’. Well, I’ll give you one guess.
delayed investment can be one reasonbut, but it is not the only one:
Translink is still putting new buses on the road but their buess could carry much more passengers, with little change in their length
https://voony.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/bus_capacity.jpg
but mostly change in the bus design starting by 100% low floor bus with rear door behind the rear axles (to improve circulation and occupancy of the bus) can go a long way
https://voony.wordpress.com/2012/11/09/bus-capacity-some-remarks/
…not counting that bus only lanes, can dramatically improve the productivity of a bus. Something the city has refused to consider so far: We will see what happen on Commercial drive, where we remember the city was asking you to throw money there for a B line bus…
BUS LANES Can dramatically improve productivity. I made a similar statement to Jerry Dobrovolny at a board of change event .He replied that buses are as fast without them. I was the only one in the room laughing. THE problem lies with the so called VISION administration
What do you propose as a solution for right-turning vehicles, stopped waiting for pedestrians, and consequently holding up buses in the right hand lane? How about when a bus is stopped and loading/unloading, what happens to the buses behind? Increased productivity comes with buses skipping over stops (using every second stop, for example), and having two bus lanes so that buses can overtake each other and pass right-turning vehicles.
What capacity increase do you calculate for a single bus lane without overtaking capability? Or are you proposing dual bus lanes in each direction? Perhaps the engineers weren’t laughing because they know the answer.
JEFF (1)Single bus lane overtaking capacity? See for yourself WEST bound on Georgia (2).Skipping stops ? It would cost nothing to give it a trial(3).It would cost little to give bus lanes a trial
Why are we not digging the Broadway tunnel for the subway yet ? With high density Block F at UEL already approved, UBC building like crazy for both academic, students & residents and Jericho land rezoning coming the next few years a subway is a complete no-brainer.
Or is CC waiting for an opportune time just prior to May 2017 election ?
KPMG study of the economic impact from 3.5 years ago here: http://vancouver.ca/files/cov/KPMG-UBC-Broadway-Corridor-2013-02-26.pdf
Perhaps VISION road use policies are make it impossible for translink to run their buses efficiently to get senior governments to pay for a subway
Beyer wants us to trust KPMG – a massive tricky dicky European accounting firm – as trustworthy as Wall St.
Check out the list of their Accounting Improprieties: admissions of criminal wrongdoing; fradulent tax shelters; a billion or so in fines. Peanuts to some who want to spend billions of other people’s money digging a hole.
KPMG games the system and is not to be trusted any more than the Lehman Brothers were trusted.
The Oakridge Transit Lands were just sold for 450m – what’s that – a piece of a peanut? That land should have been bought by UBC to expand their empire – on their own dime – instead of trying to stick the rest of us with paying for infrastructure to bring them customers.
UBC is a provincial entity. So either subsidize them more and they pay or province pays. Same end result. But yes looking at the cars parked on Marine Drive, W 16th or in Point Grey during university is in session UBC certainly exports their transit & parking needs to society more than it ought to.
KPMG is one organization with thousands of employees. If you cast a cloak of illegitimacy over the entire staffing structure, then you need to check out the terrible employment standards imposed by corporate management on employees in the foreign factories that make your favourite Apple products too. And MEC products. Not to mention bikes and runners. And jeans. Or the honest workers in every large company who do not agree with every action by their bosses.
A cabal of KPMG management manipulated the international system so some wealthy clients could secretly wire their money out of several jurisdictions to avoid paying taxes. That’s not excusable and needs to be taken to court. But that does not negate the facts backing the report on Broadway. The researchers at KPMG looking into Broadway got their data from legit sources – or do you think Stats Canada, city and TransLink staff are all corrupt too? What do these sources have to do with tax shelters on the Isle of Man? What do honest, cubicle farm dwelling researchers have to do with corrupt policies by a faction of management working in secret out of London towers?
Always check sources. Take the good, toss the dreck. Give the workers a break.
Translink is a hammer looking for a nail – which will always means more transit. Never trust a vested interest.
StatsCan is a wagon following a horse. They don’t think laterally.
Does KPMG need to be taken to court? It was taken to court – several times – and fined in the region of a billion dollars. This is a rotten apple not to be trusted.
The Dilberts were “just following orders” – “getting data from legit sources”. What sources? Sources with fingers in the public pie speak with forked tongues.
KPMG is an accounting & advisory firm in Canada. Let’s not confuse a few rotten US apples with 98% honest hard working folks in Canada ! It promotes DENSITY and less cars and more walking.. so heavily loved here on pricetags .. and unlocking economic potential by fostering innovation and more cooperation between government, universities and private firms – specifically in healthcare – along the corridor with hospitals, doctors’ offices and research facilities. What is wrong with that ?
Would it make you happier if the report were by the Broadbent institute, or heaven forbid, by the Fraser Institute, or UBC, or the City of Vancouver ?
A subway beats a (wobbly, often congested) bus doesn’t it .. or maybe even a 10 lane bridge ?
Re: Dilberts. All supposition and opinion, no evidence.
I mostly cycled to UBC for almost 10 years during my masters and PhD. It’s not that easy a trip, so I don’t think that expecting many more people to do it is very realistic. First of all, there isn’t that many students (not to mention staff or faculty!) that live near it unless they live on campus– point grey is not really student price range — so trips tend to be quite long. I was regularly biking from downtown or main st, which is 45 minutes or more each way. Fun to do in the fall, but no so fun in the winter rain, when it’s dark out. And there no approach besides SW marine drive that doesn’t involve a big hill. It’s not really about better bike lanes at this point; If you are fit enough and dedicated enough to do it, the semi OK bike lanes that currently exist are not the impediment. The distance and hilliness is.
Secondly, “creative” solutions like a bus lane or a direct bus to commercial skytrain don’t make much difference. There is/has been a direct bus to the skytrain, but that doesn’t cut that much time off the trip, and since many of the passups happen at Main st, etc., or other spots on the route. They also do have a bus lane on broadway, but that doesn’t help much either, with cars in it all the time to turn right, etc.
These pass ups have been happening for 10 years at least, through big budget times and small budget times. Nothing has changed. I’m not sure how many of you remember the 98 B line, and what a beast that was to ride on. The Canada line has now relegated that to the dustbin of history. Why shouldn’t transit users be able to ride in comfort and outside of traffic? Broadway needs a train! It’s needed a train for quite a while.
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Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.
The other probability with pass-ups for those of us who experience them frequently is that they totally destroy the dependability of the system. If you can’t somewhat accurately determine via the published schedule, transit apps, google maps, how long it will take you to get from point a to point b, then you can’t depend on the system at all. If you don’t know if you will be able to get on the bus, or the next bus, or not uncommonly, even the bus after that, then you can’t accurately plan accordingly and the system doesn’t work.
Furthermore, I’d also really like to see some independent verification of these numbers. How do bus drivers accurately count folks while driving when there can be 30 or more waiting at a stop? What is the accuracy rate?
Wobbly congested man is a proudly unrepentant poor-basher but, like all MBAs who worship at the altar of big business, excuses a corporation that is found guilty several times for illegal activities and fined $1,000,000,000.00+. Who knows what they actually got away with.
Anyway, Billy Bush loves the hat; reminiscent of his idol: Despot J. Drumpf. Bushy wants a hug.