Traffic Sucks! – North Vancouver Traffic and Transit Town Hall
How long does it take you to get home from work? To go to the doctor or to the grocery store? Traffic in North Vancouver is worse than ever, and it impacts each person in our city.
On February 25th we want to hear your stories about how traffic, transit and transportation issues are impacting your life.
A panel of transportation experts and influencers will be there to hear your stories and provide their insights.
Anthony Perl, PhD – Professor of Urban Studies and Political Science (SFU), Transportation Policy Advisor
Ruth Armstrong – Unifor Local 111, representing over 3700 Metro Vancouver Transit Operators
Heather Drugge – Cycling Activist HUB North Shore
Saturday, February 25
1–3 pm
John Braithwaite Community Centre – Shoreline Room, 145 West 1st Street, North Vancouver
Register here.
I used to suffer commuting to and from the North Shore – some of the worst times of my life – existential angst. Now it’s no problem. I stopped commuting there.
Met an architect there who worked out of the studio in his back yard. The commute didn’t bother him at all.
There are some pretty sophisticated areas on the North Shore – like West Van – the richest postal code in Canada. Seems like a shame these folks have to sit in their fancy cars in traffic. Something must be done asap. Maybe the Guinness family can cough up the cash for another bridge.
Or maybe people that live there should work there. It’s quite developed. If the Guinnesses don’t have the guineas, we must take up a collection. Do the right thing.
The problem could be solved by charging market driven bridge use fees with HOV exempt
The bridge was built in the 1930’s for 1930 traffic volume and 1930’s # of people on the N-shore. Today, we have 20 times more people and 20 times the traffic BUT THE SAME BRIDGE. That is the problem.
Common sense therefore suggests to increase capacity, for cars, for bikers, for buses, for walkers AND for rapid transit. But then, common sense is not so common.
Thomas ;The reason for so much traffic is because the bridge is free.No incentive to use transit or carpool. Transit fares are at market which is why translink can”t increase them without sending riders back to their cars. So charge high enough car user fees & shift the the SOV drivers to transit.
Yes that is true, but 10x more people have an impact.
10x more people fit easily in existing road and bridge capacity if fewer people drove (alone) in cars. The relatively few buses you see on Lions Gate Bridge carry about 30% of the people crossing the bridge. Bikes also take up much less space than cars.
Well, there goes that theory that having a freeway inside your city solves congestion.
I’ve never had any delays while traveling to and in the North Shore – when traveling happily by bike. When I traveled by car, I suffered soul destroying congestion. I wonder if there is a message here?
An aspiring politician invites suburbanites to complain about traffic? One fears the vapors dreaming of the gentlemanly and solicitous discourse sure to engulf the very forum. I hope they go easy on Ms. Drugge when it’s inevitably suggested that participants simply not drive so damn much.
Am I allowed to laugh?
Sure. Into your commuter mug.
A better connected east-west grid above the freeway would take a lot of the load off the freeway, which has to serve too many purposes, including that of a local road. If that grid was also served by transit and had suitable biking facilities, all the better.
yeah, but…where’s that supposed to go? That would inevitably mean lost park and forest land or knocked down houses or more traffic on existing streets along with redesigns to handle it. And North Van already has semi-cross town bus service above the highway which always turns down to connect to the water – I’m not sure another service would be more heavily used.
Tessa – a high level connection to the very large part of the DWV that lies east of the Seymour River would do wonders
for community connectivity, but is fraught with political baggage.
Frank would your proposed grid above the freeway be funded by tolls or property taxes ?
So, we should build a new bridge over Lynn Canyon? I guess “fraught with political baggage” is one way to describe this idea.
Here’s my anecdote. I know a family in the north shore who have one car. They can’t afford another one (and don’t have a place to put a second one if they could.) They spend a lot of mental energy figuring out the timing of their day so they can share the one car. Some of the places they go to regularly are within ten blocks of their house but because of the built environment, the sole way to get there is to drive.
If there were a few neighbourhood greenways (or even sidewalks) they could easily and gladly walk there in a short time. But they don’t have that option.
This is what all these recent movements in 21st century transportation are all about. People want more choice. People are willing to walk or skateboard or cycle to places that aren’t far away. For short trips driving can often be a burden. For some people it’s beyond their budget. Having only one choice of travel mode for all trips is a hardship.
What neighbourhood do they live in then? Maybe west van? Most of North van is very walkable in my opinion, as long as you can handle hills.
Whether North Van, especially the District, is “walkable” is a matter of opinion. If you measure by looking at sidewalks it isn’t, with the majority of streets lacking even that basic level of amenity. In a place where it rains half the year, and snows off and on for a couple of months the rest of the time, not having a clear, safe place to walk makes travelling on foot impossible for many people.
Add to this sidewalks that start and stop at random (29th Avenue), a lack of crosswalks, and a pretty much complete lack of decent street lighting and you’ve created a community that encourages people to drive.
The cycling community has done a decent job of building profile, and there’s ongoing work to develop bike infrastructure, but pedestrians are more or less the forgotten part of the transportation mix, getting whatever crumbs are left over.
Even more bizarre are a group of homeowners up around Montroyal who actually appeared before District Council this month to argue AGAINST building sidewalks in their neighborhood, by a developer, at no cost to the taxpaying public.
Yes, West Vancouver. Around Highway 1.
There are short (but interrupted) bits here and there parallel to the highway but they don’t connect. You have to walk on the highway. Not pleasant.
If the bits were all connected making a nice attractive path that connected destinations, people would use it.
That sounds very reasonable. Unfortunately too much of the discussion is framed around “solving” this problem as if “congestion” – however that’s defined – can be made to simply disappear with just one or two moves. In reality it’s about finding ways to stop forcing people to have to drive all the time for every single errand. Improved greenways would help your example family. Instead of having to take 20 trips/week in their car, they’d only have to take 14-15. And with tens of thousands reducing their trips by 10%-25%, there goes most of the problem most of the time.
Unfortunately, making smaller moves makes it more difficult to blame foreigners and/or the government for your life’s problems. And to be fair, ribbon-cutting ceremonies are more commonly staged around new public works projects; not the improved emotional states of middle class families.
The headline needs a fill in the blank. Traffic sucks on ….. the way to work; to school; on the the TranceCan; on King Ed/41st/33rd/Marine; Upper Levels/Lower Level/Taylor Way; pick a bridge, any bridge …
Choose your poison. Where does traffic not suck? And how do you keep it from sucking? That’s rhetorical. Traffic sucks. Period. That’s the nature of the beast. Build it and they will drive. Why are people so addled about that?
So many of us are besotted by motordom – or is that motordoom. I am, paradoxically, fascinated by things vehicular; even knowing how destructive they are to life limb environment and wallet. There’s not an episode of Jay Leno’s Garage I haven’t seen at least once. To listen to his Bugattis is intoxicating.
That’s the problem. We are drunk on motordom. The dichotomy between cycling and walking vs driving is vast. I’ve had a multitude of peak experiences cycling. It is so fun when you are not terrorized by motorists. And walking is amazing – more contemplative and visionary than the stream of consciousness that comes with cycling.
But driving … omg. It is so blindered; so negative; so hostile; so frustrating. No wonder drivers turn into such raging maniacs. Ever see cyclists raging against each other? Ever see walkers yelling and beeping?
The thrust of the questions in the article is disingenuous. The dirtiest word in transportation is not there. Commuter. There’s a namby pamby question about how you get home from work, but nothing about how you got there in the first place. There are gentle queries about going to the doctor, or shopping – trips that have very flexible timelines.
Joel Salatin posed this question: What catastrophic event is the US sewage system designed to withstand? Earthquake? Asteroids? No, it’s the halftime flush during Super Bowl. It’s the same way road infrastructure is designed – except there are two flushes – one to work, and one home.
Love his Datsun 510 clip. What a great little car!
How will this Town Hall play out? There will be lots of whining and finger-pointing with plaintive cries that something must be done. There will be lots of jealousy towards boondoggles like the masive Massey. “They got one. We want one too.”
No commuter will take responsibility for being the problem. They won’t stand up and say: “We are traffic. We are the problem.” Like an Alcoholics Anonymous: “Hi, I’m Bob, and I have a driving problem. My SOV is like a 40 pounder. I can’t give it up and I can’t take it anymore. Enable me with more roads and bridges.”
Talking about traffic without a laser beam on commuters is like talking about sewage pipes without saying s**t.
The organizer of this whine and point therapy event is a civil engineer that wants to be a politician – a heady combo. Guaranteed the non-solution will be to build tons of infrastructure.
Remember when the civic loonies wanted to fill in False Creek? Or when they considered filling in Burrard Inlet just past the Ironworkers? They’ve even considered using atomics to blow up mountains to release water for the southern states.
It would be honest to title this engineer’s shindig: Commuting Sucks – just stop. That gets to the root of the problem. But this NDP wannabe is using Rob Ford’s old election strategy – sucking up to commuters.
You need to attend the meeting to find out what the NDP candidate wants. Since the current Liberal MLAs focussed on widening highways and building more bridges the NDP is unlikely to propose exactly the same.
Arnie isn’t reading between the lines at all in this case. The 3 speakers are a urban planning prof, a transit union rep, and a cycling advocate.
I’d also trust that Bowinn probably knows a fair bit more about transportation infrastructure than you do Arnie.
FWIW – I’m not the first person to suggest a high level east-west connector. But I do think it might be time to bring it back into the conversation. There are far too few east-west through links in DNV, and probably DWV as well.
The lack of east/west connecting routes is something that the emergency planning people have identified as a serious problem in the event that The Big One arrives. The presumption is that different parts of the North Shore will wind up isolated if the bridges go down.
The North Shore jurisdictions have been doing seismic upgrades on bridges and highway overpasses. I think all major creeks have at least one upgraded or new crossing now.
Two problems. However much you trust the engineers and contractors you don’t know if the upgrades are successful until after the quake. There are just too many variables. Even if the bridges appear unharmed they’ll be closed to traffic for days or weeks until the engineers can certify them as safe
Patullo & Massey Bridge are not the only bridges that needs upgrading / replacing. Subway to northshorth and under Marine Drive from Dundarave to Lonsdale Quay and downtown missing. Is this being addressed this century ? I do not comprehend how north shore residents allow this political leadership to force this mess upon them. More and more towers for 20+ years and ZERO capacity upgrades for mass transit or bridges/tunnel (except one new sea bus in the 2040 plan woopeedoo)
I can see how an east-west Skytrain (or whatever) line halfway up the hill (about Keith Road height) would be great. If it went from Horseshoe bay to the Second Narrows Bridge (and ideally onto it) people would find it useful.
If it was elevated giving a great view some people would ride it just for that alone.
But hey, who am I kidding?
According to Inrix, a transportation analytics firm, Vancouver ranks 76th for traffic congestion worldwide. Vancouverites spend 33% less time in congestion than the average US city commuter. LA commuters spend a whopping 3.5 times more time in congestion that Vancouverites.
I spend no time in congestion.
I guess I help bring our average down.
By cycling I bring your time down too.
Not so long ago the shipping industry was wringing its hands – ships were lined up endlessly – loading took forever. Predictions were dire.
Then someone thought, ironically enough, out of the box, and into the box. Containers were born and ships sailed happily ever after.
Besides the usual suspects – roads, bridges, buses, tunnels, …what else can be done? Why does traffic suck? Because too many people want to go from A to B and back again. If you reduce the need or desire of people to move their protoplasm around, esp. when encase in a metal cocoon, you will have taken real steps to desucking traffic.
This is not a job to be handed over to a traffic engineer – a hammer for whom roads are nails. Certainly they know more about building than us lay folk about building, but that is their bias. Look at how Robert Moses wielded power. He played road god. Knew better than the rest of us.
Remember what GBS said about professions – that they were all a conspiracy against the laity. Moses didn’t know better than the rest of us. Finally, he couldn’t part the waters and continue with his megalomaniacal projects. He was brought down by we the people.