The Vancouver Sun has started a series of articles on traffic and congestion under the ominous title “Waiting for Solutions…The Getting There Scare”. It is a rather surprising title and has a rather surprising slant-that for you, the Vancouver Sun reader, your commute by car is going to get worse, and that by 2041 there could be an extra 700,000 cars on the road. Never mind that there may also be enhanced transit, higher density dwelling areas close to rapid transit stations and car shares that would mitigate such a commute. This article buys into the rhetoric that the car is king now and forever.
The rest of the series which will be published this week include articles on Cars Vs.Bikes , traffic on the North Shore, How to stay calm while driving, and Driverless Technology. I was looking forward to seeing a well-balanced discussion on transportation, modal splits, and an update on some of the announcements that have just come out from the Mayor’s Council on Transportation. But no,this is motordom’s response on how to keep cars moving to and from the suburbs, questioning the expenditure of gas tax revenue and the slow expansion of car related infrastructure.
“Metro drivers, who paid more than $1 billion in gas taxes in 2015, are asking whether enough is being done to reduce lineups…Motorists contributed $357 million of gas-tax money to TransLink in 2015, subsidizing transit with their wallets. They paid even more by sitting in traffic.Some of that $1 billion could be spent to upgrade traffic lights all over the city; in this day of electronic devices there is no longer any reason for drivers to sit at a red light at an empty intersection”.
Encouraging transit use actually would mean that there would be substantially less cars on the road, and active transportation users also factor into increasing road capacity for vehicles. The Sun quotes a UBC engineer who states that planners should be “modally agnostic” — not favour the bike over the car, but judge individual situations on merit” and that Vancouver may have “overreacted” by favouring bikes too much… It’s a Canadian thing to root for the underdog. Some people treat bikes as a religion. They’re evangelizing it, But cars are in the future for the long term.”
And now for my personal favourite: ““Vancouver planners have a different attitude, which creates conflicts when vehicles from the car-friendly suburbs enter the city” . Kudos to Vancouver’s Director of Transportation Lon LaClaire for responding directly stating “There is only so much you can do with a car. Walking, biking and transit are the transportation modes I really care about. To think this is ideologically driven is kind of crazy.”
The whole article reads as a statement/react piece by frustrated motorists, and is indicative of the single car focus so favoured by the Province in their massive infrastructure overbuilds and their relentless pursuit of a ten lane Massey Bridge. It is a good wake up call that there is still much education that needs to happen at the citizen level, and also a call for a more balanced and researched communication about the future of moving in Metro Vancouver.
Crazy. They’re claiming that Vancouver is favouring bikes too much? What!? Cars get the bulk of the transportation budget and seamless infrastructure throughout the world.
Bikes have a few good sections here and there but are really in a ghetto only able to get around in a few select routes and subjected to abuse and marginalization if they dare venture outside them.
But I don’t expect much different from The Sun. They’re the voice of big business and of Detroit. I’m just worried that somebody who isn’t all quite there is going to read this BS and then go kill someone using their car.
There is wishful thinking on the part of the City of Vancouver and Lon LaClaire repeats this, as quoted above and in his interview earlier this year with the Metro newspaper, while he was in Montreal. He said; “Ce n’est pas possible pour Vancouver de se développer en misant sur la voiture. Nous accueillons 35 000 nouveaux résidants par années. Nous sommes entourés par des montagnes. Notre réseau routier est déjà tout construit. Nous n’avons pas construit de routes à Vancouver depuis 1997.”
He seems proud that no new road has been built in Vancouver since he arrived, in 1997. He does acknowledge that the city will be receiving 35,000 new residents a year and he explains that the target that is based on the 2040 Plan is to reduce car use and double walking and transit use from 2008.
Vancouver is just one municipality in the region. Some cities are growing faster than Vancouver. To expect to shift Vancouverites to walking is perhaps possible but for transit to double would require a rail construction plan on a level with what is done in Asia. In ten years another half a million will be living here and many more outside of the City of Vancouver. Vehicle sales are not going to stop. Rail to Surrey and Langley will be operating when? The Broadway subway when? No new crossing to the North Shore?
The idea that Vancouver can live and plan in a bubble of hope that somehow the use of vehicles will decline, so no new roads need to be built and no improvements either is willful blindness. The City is building an almost private community resort with bike lanes and increasingly smaller streets and parking for the nasty cars, and pretending that everyone will one day catch on and stay in their own suburb or bus or bike into town.
It’s an attitude very much like some other governments around the world that have recently had some shocking wake ups.
Eric, I’m certain that twenty years ago you would have said it is impossible for Vancouver to reduce automobile use. But here we are. Why would we build more roads?
Is Vancouver suffering as a result? Why are suburban councils whining that they can’t attract office related business? Why are old malls re-inventing themselves as mini cities less dependent on automobiles? Why are office towers sprouting in downtown Vancouver if we’re doing things so wrong?
There is no good reason the suburbs can’t learn best practices from Vancouver? If some want to remain belligerently married to motordom so be it. We’ll see which places do better in the long run won’t we.
There could be a few less vehicles downtown. Perhaps even in the West End and even the Coal Harbour resort. Maybe. I really don’t give much credence to the statistics. I read the modalities regarding the recent trumpeting of the transport modes statistics and they are baloney. Commercial vehicles were completely excluded in the count. Free gifts were offered to those contributing to the study and the east side was massively over represented when compared to a tiny group from Kerrisdale and the west side. The percentages are all there. The group was not representative and only reflected commuters, yet there are commercial drivers everywhere plus family members going shopping and taking family members around.
Traveling along Kingsway, 1st Avenue, Granville, Oak, etc., doesn’t convince me that there is less traffic. Quite the opposite. This is proved by the fact that BC Statists shows an increase in Vancouver of 40,000 (16%) passenger vehicles between 2005 and 2015. The growth of the Port and the massive new container port in Tsawwassen and the massive growth in garbage and recycling trucks also tells us all that traffic is only growing. And, the administration is asking for inevitable trouble as congestion is ignored. People will eventually get too fed up.
I hope you are correct about office buildings but If office properties are so successful then why were the Bentall towers sold to a Chinese insurance group?
Eric: “I hope you are correct about office buildings but If office properties are so successful then why were the Bentall towers sold to a Chinese insurance group?”
You have quite a lot to say about traffic downtown for someone who never comes downtown. If you haven’t seen large office buildings springing up I can’t imagine you’ve been here for quite some time.
If office properties weren’t successful who would buy them? Bentall wasn’t sold at a loss and I’m guessing a Chinese insurance group didn’t invest out of charity.
Hard to debate people who don’t give much credence to statistics and believe that Vancouver traffic studies are faked.
Who’s building these office towers? 745 Thurlow was the latest. 1155 Thurlow is residential. Telus and the building south facing Robson are two. There will be one maybe across Seymour where the parkade is. Metro decamped to Metrotown. That was another CDP sale. IBI have a proposal on Hornby where Il Giordino used to be but again, it’s residential as is their One Pacific that just finished. MCM have a proposal for the Landmark site, residential. Frankl has 42 stories going up on Alberni, residential. IBI’s proposal on Howe where the Quality Inn is is another residential project. I guess MCM’s Post Office plan has some office in it. Has anyone signed up yet for the office tower at Marine Gateway? Even the Masonic building on 7th has a plan for a tower that’s residential.
That study is here. They offered free Playland tickets.
http://vancouver.ca/files/cov/Transportation-panel-survey-2015-final-report.pdf
By the way, I was downtown last week and I’ll be downtown again tomorrow and daily all this week, including Saturday.
Yes Eric, lot’s of residential too. Isn’t that great? I listed a whole bunch of under construction and recently completed downtown office projects specifically to you in an earlier post on another topic. You are forgetful when it suits your needs.
Since restraining automobiles in downtown predates Vision Vancouver and has been policy for probably a quarter century one could confidently say that any office or commercial space built in the last 20 years shows business confidence in that strategy.
Yet in the suburbs where cars remain king, developers are not investing heavily in urban office space and often only move forward when a large government or semi-government institutions give it a kick start.
There could be a few less vehicles downtown. — Eric
A few? Try a 15% reduction at the same time the population doubled. Try on top of the 40% of West End residents who do not and never have owned vehicles.
Create a walkable community and the need for private transport erodes.
Eric wrote: “The idea that Vancouver can live and plan in a bubble of hope that somehow the use of vehicles will decline…”
And yet, commuting via car into the downtown core has in fact declined. It’s more than a “bubble of hope”, it’s been shown to be sound policy. If you don’t keep spending more and more money on roads to handle more and more cars and instead spend that money on transit and other alternative modes then guess what? Car use declines and use of those other modes increases. People gravitate to the facilities that we build for them. And those other modes have far less impact on the city – less congestion, less pollution, less space wasted with parking lots and parkades. Is that somehow a bad thing?
IMHO the problem isn’t that we can’t accommodate the people who want to come into Vancouver. The problem is that we have too many people who look down their noses at alternative modes such as public transit, believing it to be “beneath them” to use and thus not worth spending any money on.
Transit is a public good and, like schools, people should be glad to spend money on it even if they don’t use it personally.
“Transit is a public good and, like schools, people should be glad to spend money on it even if they don’t use it personally.”
Indeed it is and as such the debate is VERY MUCH relevant how much money we spend on services that some use but not others, such as subways, healthcare, housing, schools, police, roads, firefighters, beaches, bike lanes, roads etc as the budget is limited and the demand is always higher than available $s. Plus, the cheaper a service is the more it gets used, so if we charge $20 for a pool visit then we’d see less people in the pool than if we charged $5 or $1. Why not give away free eyeglasses too, or free medication, or free university, or free public pools, heck why not free housing, free cars or free bikes, too ?
==> The degree of subsidy and the degree of user co-pay is at the core of the debate !
Many on this blog argue that cars are too subsidized (free road use) while other argue that car use is a necessity as long as inadequate public transit is provided, i.e. bus with multiple connections that might require 90 min trip vs one in 30 minutes by car.
So, specifically, if we had a subway/LRT to UBC along UEL’s Block F, Jericho land and Broadway to Commercial (intersecting with CanadaLine and 2 SkyTrain systems) then loads of folks would use it. Ditto with a line along Marine Drive from W-Van’s Park Royal to Lonsdale Quay or to downtown. Loads. So the increase in car use fees / road tolls needs to go hand in hand with additional rapid transit.
As someone who on and off drives between Richmond and Vancouver I can tell from observation rush hour traffic has not gone down. So I would be very curious to see the detailed methodology of these traffic numbers. When and where they were collected and how.
No doubt the disappearance of the working professional class from the West Side as they are displaced in favour of millionaire housewives and students is a factor in traffic falling from within the city to downtown. The building of thousands of more residences on the downtown peninsula.
I’ve often thought that if the province really wanted to get vindictive with the city, they would move the provincial courthouse to Surrey along with the St.Paul’s replacement. After all shouldn’t jobs go where the workers can afford?
Please take the stadiums and the Granville mall vomitorium with you. Most attendees are from the suburbs anyway and maybe it’s time they paid for policing costs, amongst other things.
@Sean. No traffic has not declined. The study you are thinking of is highly selective and done by, primarily, east Van volunteers that are proportionally older than the median age group and rewarded with Playland tickets. Hardly typical of business people working for a living.
Transit is fine and wonderful. We all love to take trains in Paris, Rome, Lisbon, Athens, Hong Kong, Tokyo, London and New York, etc. but Vancouver doesn’t even have a train to the North Shore and the one that goes to Richmond dead ends before it gets anywhere near the main ferry terminal, another one suddenly stops in the middle of Surrey!
So, roadways need to be upgraded and the Vancouver is ignoring them. Kingsway, Knight, 1st Avenue, Marine, etc. need to be upgraded because more cars, vans and trucks are coming. Dems de facts. As the municipalities around Vancouver grow the traffic into and out of the city will increase.
Typical suburban nonsense Eric: Transit is insufficient so we need bigger roads.
How about this? Transit is insufficient so we need better transit.
(This is the part where Eric says, “Not everyone should be forced to take transit.” Because that’s what I said – right?)
How about this: we need more roads especially bridges AND we need more rapid transit. You ant just cram 100% more people into a region over a few decades and don’t invest in more people and goods moving infrastructure. An utter policy and planning failure.
Well, Thomas, yes you can. The downtown area doubled in population (that’s 100% more people) and no new roads were built. In fact we’ve been slowly nibbling away at existing road space. Is it more congested? Nope!
I get, of course, that there will likely be some road improvements required in the region. But almost all growth can be handled with smart planning and better transit.
Your brute force solutions are expensive, disruptive, environmentally damaging and won’t even work in the long run. While they might work better in places where near infinite sprawl is possible, it won’t make for efficient or vibrant cities.
Ah, the Trump Card again. Not building roads and adding transit has worked very, very well. It’s much of the rest of the region that’s stuck to car-centric development.), and now theyre the ones experiencing the bulk of complaints (let’s not call them real problems please). Somebody’s diamond shoes are too tight.
From what I can tell based on the city’s actions is that they expect the future to be multimodal which would include motor vehicles. They are expecting and designing for motor vehicles to exist in the future. Look at the north end of the Burrard bridge, they’re widening Pacific to add another travel lane so motor vehicles can have another turning lane. The Transportation 2040 plan includes motor vehicles.
So a handful of turning movements had to be removed for safety reasons. I see this as responsible and good. In all the other intersections where turning is safe they’ve kept them. If their motives were to “screw the driver” it would not be like this.
All of this has come from the people. People all over the world have said and are continueing to say that they would like more mobility options. They were given one option to use for ever trip and that might have worked okay for awhile but it’s no longer working. They have asked their governments for more choice. Governments are doing it. This is bottom-up and very popular.
It’s sad but not surprising that a newspaper that receives much of it’s advertising revenue from the automobile industry is framing things in another way.
Author
Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.
Hi Sandy, I apologize replying 1 month late as I was notified of this post recently and I do not read blogs often enough. But for the record, I guess i’m guilty as charged as the “ubc engineer” that spoke too objectively. However, that is what professionals should do: consider things objectively and not be a homer. And if you read the other stories in this series I explain my approach which is to look at everything fairly, appropriately and unbiased—is that not the prerequisite for truth? Further down the “series”, my assessment of autonomous technology is a sober one which I am neither for or against. It is not a pro-car bent analysis and I worry more about the disruptions it will have to the status quo. It is simply what I am observing as an outsider like most of us, but with some insights in how it will impact basic traffic engineering and planning assumptions we take too often for granted these days.
Sorry, but I find the title trying to add fuel to the fire. I agree reporters are not always correct and they tend to convey opposing views, pitting people unknowingly in a public argument. But after spending hours with Vancouver Sun staff, you can imagine they have lots of materials they can use and can only present a very abbreviated context behind quoted words. So I don’t blame them but I can definitely back my words.
As we are a large region, some solutions are more appropriate than others for the given context. For 40+ years I grew up all over this region from farm lands, to suburbs, and along the busy urban arterials of Vancouver. I took all modes of transport and I appreciate them all. I agree almost all locations can improve, but I don’t think we can treat every place the same. I think we need to have more respect for the identities of the various places in this region, which is a function of individuals who live there and have lived there. Meaningful dialogue starts with respect. And so lets’ not paint anyone pro-(choice of mode). If the future continues with the same level of cars as today, I think it will be because of environmental (electric), economic (shared), and technological (convenience) factors. If you look around, it seems things are going that way, so I can’t see how cars will not be in our future. What people fail to see is that they will probably evolve immensely and may not look like anything on the road today. And about the fact that (somewhere in the comments) it was observed that less cars entered downtown Vancouver while person trips increased (which Vancouver staff often mention and take credit for, but really I think it’s TransLink that should get much of the credit as the key driver I recall was increase bus and SkyTrain ridership), I did the analysis and wrote that 2004 Screenline Survey Board report (ask me for it if you want it). We should all be proud that Vancouver is one of the only cities with a positive correlation to their policies. It is a strong, evidence-based factoid that is used often because it stands on reliable data, which should be the starting point of planning assessments. We a did similar assessment during the 2010 winter games and it may have been the only documented Games to have met its sustainable transportation goals.
In downtown Vancouver, the bike lanes are definitely a good idea. Being a rider myself, I prefer secluded lanes over sharing the road (but I’m comfortable sharing the road because I grew up riding everywhere at a time there were no such things as bike lanes). However it is a challenge to implement these innovations in a situation which is new for existing motorists, and safety is always a concern for us engineers. UBC engineers are working to improve cycling and walking safety and we do have evidence of this, and I mean BIG DATA evidence beyond a few spread sheets. So I would hope that I did not do UBC engineers a disservice in how this article was written as engineers are not anti-bicycle (many of us actually are needed to design them). On the contrary, most of our recent publications are around active transport. There is also similar evidence that will back up my “provocative” quotes and that will come in due time, because I am not one to spew out half-baked research findings for the sake of a quick headline.
If we still agree evidence-based policy, planning, and decision making is a good thing, then I would ask everyone to start considering looking at the actual data beyond re-hashing quoted figures via blog grape-vines that probably are now out of context (temporally, spatially, demographically, etc). Let me know if anyone needs an objective hand in guiding you through the stuff.
To me this still reads as car-centric.
You have to imagine a place with absolutely no transportation options and then, knowing what we now know, applying the best solutions to meet our needs. That would absolutely be a place with far far fewer cars and far far more other options.
If we know that we should aim for it.
Clark’s post still sounds like the car is king and other modes may be able to offer alternatives. BIG DATA is tainted by the status quo. Again, as is always the case with those who support the status quo (knowingly or not), there is an inference that those opposed to the dominance of cars are trying to eliminate all of them: “…so I can’t see how cars will not be in our future.”
The numbers point to the car still being the majority (24hr mode share, region-wide, all trip purposes), so I guess you are correct to suggest the car is still king. However, we’ve been trying to reduce this figure down in this region for decades and this has become one of the singular metrics of sustainable transportation world-wide, if not a stubborn one to change.
The status quo I refer to are current jobs related to driving, such as truck, courier, and transit drivers to name a few. We can’t hold back change if it is inevitable (and we have the history of human innovation as proof). But morally I feel we should try and minimize the damage from a social perspective. And to do this we need to see both sides of AVs as a tainted view in denial does no one good.
The big data reference is not about automobiles but referring to the vast stores of computer vision data collected around the world the past dozen years that has been used to analyse cycling and walking safety. We can now feasibly obtain the speed, acceleration, direction of vulnerable modes 30x a second at the pixel level. This allows us to determine the degree of safety between all modes (i.e. conflicts or near misses) and that in turn helps us design better infrastructure that accommodates all modes. It’s at these road user interactions where the concepts of safety and congestion are derived.
I am not anti or pro-car but I simply cannot see within the numbers and projections how we will have less cars in the future with the advent of technologies just starting to roll out. Like most of you, I am not comfortable with the increasing speed of change that is occurring with every passing year. I don’t have a crystal ball…I can only consider the trends at hand.