The Future Lives Here! – A Panel on the Future of Surrey as envisioned by UBC Master of Urban Design Program
- Linda Hepner Mayor, City of Surrey
- Andy Yan Director Cities Program, Simon Fraser University
- Mike Harcourt Former Premier of BC, Former Mayor of City of Vancouver.
Presentation of student proposals by Patrick Condon and Scot Hien, Professors, UBC Master of Urban Design Program.
What happens when the region’s largest “suburb” is the “centre city”? How does the role of this huge and poly-centric city change? What does a city look like that grows not primarily from internal births but rather from wave after wave of immigration? How does an archetypal suburban city, one organized around the needs of baby-boomer era families, adapt itself to the wildly cosmopolitan demographics of today, of tomorrow, of four decades from now? And how does a city organized around the car become a sustainability leader, where living, moving and working are all contributing to making a better world?
All of these questions and more were taken up, and in depth, by the students of urban design in the new UBC Master of Urban Design Program. For three years, and in partnership with the City of Surrey, UBC students explored what this city would look like when, by 2060, the city will house over one million souls; when English will no longer be the first language of most of its citizens; when most of the jobs in the region are to be found there; where housing is hopefully still more affordable and where large families are still the norm.
We are clearly looking at a different city, a different region, and even a different world.
Wednesday February 7
6.30 pm
Westminster Savings Theater, Simon Fraser University Surrey Campus, 13450 102nd Avenue, Surrey BC.
Really? That should be interesting.
Considering so many people are questioning why Hepner keeps wanting 3 LRT lines for Surrey instead of a combination of SkyTrain and Bus Rapid Transit I’m surprised she’d be doing this.
I wonder if this urban design exercise for an entire city with an integrated regional, economy contains any economic analysis by neutral economists? Genuine urban design — especially if concerned about the future — encapsulates many disciplines, and economics is a very important component. An economist could counter the urban form biases of designers, and their combined effort would therein offer a well-rounded and balanced conceptualization based on reality. I would also look for solid input by civil engineers who are charged with designing the infrastructure that underpins all urban design, and who would identify where the design will likely fail without decent urban systems.
These are serious concerns in light of the fact Patrick Condon has devoted an enormous amount of time and effort into a highly selective published narrative on public transportation, building heights, energy and so forth at the expense of an adequate understanding of urban economic forces and the civic infrastructural rebuilds required to support many of his ideas (e,g, relocated underground utilities to accommodate surface light rail, the absence of full life-cycle accountability, removal and redesign of failed surface drainage structures…).
I can’t imagine how much of Jan Gehl’s following would have abandoned his ship had he devoted entire chapters in his intelligent and prescient books to trashing Copenhagen’s “bloated” driverless subway. Similarly, the limiting effect if Ken Greenberg’s ‘Walking Home’ devoted an entire chapter to striking blows against the Toronto subway system using ludicrously amateur cost comparisons to light rail. Balanced transportation planning is required in these efforts.
Getting back to economics, Vishaan Chakrabarti’s ‘A country of Cities’ illustrated how the beautiful heritage of central Paris was saved by allowing powerful urban economic forces to manifest themselves at the periphery rather than the centre, like a safety valve. In essence, the towers of La Defence and other financial centres located at the ends of the Metro and RER lines saved historic central Paris from Houstonization, and was instrumental in the success of hard-won Parisian heritage preservation policy. Given Condon’s well-known antipathy toward towers and SkyTrain, I wonder how much of the urban design conceptualization of Surrey, which is already towering up in places served by SkyTrain, will actually present workable ideas to Surrey’s particular challenges over the long run?
This is not to say that the UBC SALA SUD will not surprise and delight, notably with suburban infill and the conversion of auto-saturated malls to urban villages, and with variations on the green zone. But given what I’ve seen in previous grad class work and in the writings and op-eds of one school leader who holds a significant influence over his student’s work, I suspect there will be a certain sameness and some rather formulaic solutions. You could tell there was a difference between classes led by Condon and those led by Scott Hein.
Surrey is said to have an influential future, and that is absolutely true, though there may be debate over the potential extent and its quality. Surrey was off to a great start (probably more aptly described as a departure) with the decision to retain the brilliant Bing Thom to plant and nourish the urban design seed for Surrey’s high density core. Population alone does not make a city if it maintains its status as a bedroom community. The job forecast needs some real fleshing out and evidence based on solid economic principles and research. Currently, its employment and local GDP amount to a fraction of the Broadway-UBC corridor which, unlike Surrey, is not yet served by rapid transit or its architecture (with a few notable exceptions). However, between downtown, the Broadway-UBC corridor and the density of population and jobs along its arterials and on the port and industrial lands, Vancouver’s gravitational pull is undeniably the sun with 20 moons in orbit around it. It will take a long, long time for any one city to outdo that.
SkyTrain and subways encourage a certain kind of sprawl that Trams/LRT do not. This is clearly evident in the dual justifications of leaving our roads for cars and in time savings over the entire length of the line.
Over the build-out of a city, utilities need to be replaced and they can equally be relocated and upgraded. Surface rail discourages long commutes across the region and moves people efficiently over shorter distances where walking and cycling can add resilience and neghbourliness to the transportation system. It also spreads, within walkable neighbourhoods, the land available for denser housing such that it is not limited to high density nodes around fewer stations marketed to the most wealthy and/or those who spend little time in the city. Nodes of towers are, in their own way, as antithetical to city building as towers in a sea of parking a la Houston. Nothing wrong with nodes if there are also mixed-use, missing-middle neghbourhoods better served by missing-middle transit.
Furthermore, we have wide arterials dominated by SOVs that would be better used by a form of transit that has been shown to improve the economic well being of the corridors it serves than do buses. Even at close, two-minute frequencies it opens the public space for pedestrian use in a way that the constant flow of cars cannot. If there were guarantees that a subway would automatically ensure the reallocation of two roadway lanes for pedestrians and cyclists you could make a better case. But the almighty car always wins.
Blaming Condon for dissing SkyTrain is as bad as dissing LRT/trams as so often happens on this blog. Clearly we need both. Always pushing grade-separated rail, at double the cost, slows the implementation of the network effect that is so important, not just for transit itself, but for the cohesion of the urban fabric.
Some good points, Ron. But you missed one of my main points: We need it all when it comes to transit. I would not and never have dissed LRT, buses, SkyTrain, subways or any other form of public transit. In fact, I am a very strong advocate of displacing autotopia with a plethora of transit initiatives over time. If you paid any attention to previous posts, you’d also see that my support and vision for the Broadway subway is accompanied by the removal of the two curb lanes for through travel for a significant expansion of the pedestrian realm (i.e. a diminishment of road space for cars) and big improvements to the Number 9 bus service.
I get that Condon has his fan club, of which you are obviously a subscriber. I prefer to expand my horizon and read and follow a number of urbanists like Gehl and Greenberg who have a more well-rounded and mature experience of cities and who don’t succumb to myopia regarding urban form and transport. I also am open minded to economic explorations of cities by those who have actually done the math.
Where we also agree is advocating for walkable neighbourhoods and the Missing Middle. But where we depart ways is pretending high density downtowns do not exist, or do not matter. Both the tower form and infill / low / mid rise models are valid and can support human existence well as long as they are walkable, assume the richness of mixed use and an effort is made to realize quality design at the human / street scale. And the Almighty Car is put in its place.
Where we truly part company is actively limiting transit mobility. In this area you and Condon really need to stop rejecting diverse transit planning while promoting a certain urban form. If human scale urbanism automatically followed light rail, then Calgary would look much different. Urban form zoning should not be confused with the designation of transit mode; both need to be considered together
Transit is one of the most powerful tools we have to counter the near-absolute subsuming of society by car and fossil fuel dependency, and to succeed we must compete head-to-head with freeways AND local roads. Why it’s not obvious that regional-fast-limited stop transit is as necessary as local-slow transit with greater stop density is a mystery, as is ignoring the dynamics when they support each other in a balance.
If eliminating regional transit mobility doesn’t work, then what’s next? Passing laws that if you live in one city in the Metro you cannot work, be educated or recreate in another? In a perfect world we’d have all life’s necessities with a 10-minute walk. I’ve come close to that in many of the past 30 years, but sometimes opportunity or life / family necessity pushes the distances farther out. Life happens.
We haven’t parted company. We have a reasonably extensive grade-separated rail system. We have zero urban surface rail. It’s time for the latter to catch up and bring with it the very valid points that Condon argues. I’m in no fan club. I’d like to see more balance and if you re-read you’ll see that I leave all options open.
We’ve been on the cusp of building other forms of rail transit many times but we always fall back to SkyTrainish systems. Surrey seems to be a great place to try something that works very well in similar sized cities and also creates the stickiness of a transfer in a strategically important node.
We are then on the same page. Frequency is probably the most important element for successful transit. It’s more important in higher density areas with higher ridership, like downtown Broadway and the dedicated town centres. SkyTrain excels at frequency even under its current distinction of running at least 30% under capacity due to a lack of rolling stock.
Surrey’s light rail initiative will offer some real world comparisons, and I am totally supportive especially since senior government funding finally dovetailed into transit. If LRT can help urbanize the suburbs without resorting to high rises, and create new human-scaled walkable neighbourhoods, then all power to them.
SkyTrain’s also faster and more reliable, since it doesn’t have to deal with speed limits or cross-traffic, nor does it shut down for hours after a car crash.
Let’s get the whole region connected with an RRT backbone, then we can talk about a surface rail network to supplement it.
The whole region already is connected with an RRT backbone. The parts of the region beyond that service are not at a density that supports it. Some parts are dense enough to support LRT – including Surrey where it is proposed.
“Faster” is only one component of a quality service and it can be detrimental. The grade separation required puts passengers out of reach of the spaces between stations and out of sight most of the time. They are the travelling zombies that have zero connection to the places they pass through. The result is not unlike the highway bypass that kills the town. And like the bypass, it encourages – perhaps demands – that people travel farther. For example, Cambie Village sees no benefit from the Canada Line. Maybe surface rail would have created more jobs and housing there in a more vibrant mixed use neighbourhood. Now we have the linear development of Cambie based on a nodal transit system. As a result, many more will drive from their medium density condos.
Urban rail surface transit should always be in its own ROW and MV crashes should rarely impede it. By removing MV lanes and providing double the rail transit (for the cost) and quadruple the stations (at a tiny fraction of the cost) the system becomes more accessible to more people and quicker and cheaper to build out into a network. It reduces road space and increases frequent, reliable rail transit access. It is likely to reduce the number of MV crashes making the entire transportation system more reliable.
Furthermore, LRT can continue, transfer free, through less dense areas running at SkyTrain speeds. SkyTrain makes no sense where there are long distances with low density. One could imagine LRT on the Arbutus corridor running from downtown Vancouver to Tsawwassen replacing the direct bus service that was lost with the Canada Line. But running the CL through long stretches of farmland is a non-starter.
Slow LRTs make no sense anywhere in MetroVan (incl Surrey), as they hold up cross traffic. It’s like a very expensive bus really, just as slow but less wobbly. Look at the mess in Edmonton in their new NAIT line or even the one past UofA on the surface. Massive traffic gridlock to save a few million. Or the one in downtown Calgary. Bad choices.
Under- or above ground is the way to go. Or if volumes do not warrant it, use an express bus.
Missing trains are everywhere in MetroVan: to UBC, to N-Van and W-Van, further into Richmond, to E-Van .. until the esteemed mayors realize that we will choke in traffic chaos. This region is VERY poorly traffic managed. With the new road tolling and congestion we merely get more expensive gridlocks as the choke points aren’t being reduced for decades, yet we continue to build at Jericho lands, at UBC, at UEL, in E-Van, in N Van, in W Van, in Richmond ..
Thomas, you are always quick to point out the shortcomings of rail transit in car-centric Calgary and Edmonton while ignoring the European systems that have been implemented well. No doubt corners were cut funding transit in oil country.
For reasons of wobbliness or otherwise, rails attract riders that buses do not. LRT can be city-building and flexible, reducing the need to travel as far. Speed becomes less relevant.
Hold on, I’ll split this into two for “easier” reading.
//The whole region already is connected with an RRT backbone. The parts of the region beyond that service are not at a density that supports it. Some parts are dense enough to support LRT – including Surrey where it is proposed.//
There’s no backbone for many places: the West Side, the North Shore, Hastings, Langley, Delta, White Rock, Maple Ridge. The plan was always to eventually connect the entire Metro Van region with RRT, regardless of density or population.
Remember that Burnaby and Richmond were suburbs too, before SkyTrain. Density isn’t because of transit, it’s because of rezoning accelerated by transit. So the question is less “is there enough density now to justify this line?” and more “is this line going to meet the needs of additional density?” For Surrey, whose own numbers estimate 4,080 pphpd when fully built out (the Canada Line can do 15,000), the answer seems to be No.
//“Faster” is only one component of a quality service and it can be detrimental. The grade separation required puts passengers out of reach of the spaces between stations and out of sight most of the time… For example, Cambie Village sees no benefit from the Canada Line. Maybe surface rail would have created more jobs and housing there in a more vibrant mixed use neighbourhood. Now we have the linear development of Cambie based on a nodal transit system. As a result, many more will drive from their medium density condos.
Urban rail surface transit should always be in its own ROW and MV crashes should rarely impede it. By removing MV lanes and providing double the rail transit (for the cost) and quadruple the stations (at a tiny fraction of the cost) the system becomes more accessible to more people and quicker and cheaper to build out into a network. //
True (unfortunately), there is no station at 16th for geographical reasons. And for some reason, City Hall decided to spread mid-rises out all along Cambie, rather than bunching up high-rises at the stations – not a good idea.
So that’s where the bus comes in – local service to cover the places express service can’t reach. And the #15 should indeed come more frequently once there’s funding for it.
Our Yankee counterparts remind us that medians don’t solve anything as long as there’s crossings and intersections – a simple Google/Youtube search will reveal countless videos of clueless drivers/pedestrians/etc either not seeing the the train or trying to beat it (and failing).
Using the Cambie route, a $500M-$2B streetcar would simple duplicate the #15 and reduce rapid service to near-useless, and a $2B-$3B LRT with a median and better stop spacing would still have to slow down to 20-30kph to coexist with traffic and jaywalkers, reducing it to a very expensive version of the B-Line it just replaced (not to mention the tracks splitting Cambie in two). The phrase “you get what you paid for” is very much relevant with transit.
In the case of Surrey, there’s a few odd GTA5-type turns that would undoubtedly be better elevated or buried for safety reasons: http://i.imgur.com/3Mc6y5N.jpg?1, several studies that reveal LRT is one minute faster than its BRT equivalent, and a steadily climbing budget ($2.7B at last check). By contrast, SkyTrain to Langley and a better 96 B-Line costs slightly less money and generates more ridership.
//Thomas, you are always quick to point out the shortcomings of rail transit in car-centric Calgary and Edmonton while ignoring the European systems that have been implemented well. //
Note that Europe’s got ample metro networks to do the heavy lifting; light rail supplements the rapid network rather than substituting for it.
And as you said, this is oil country. While Europe’s enjoyed compact streetcar cities for the last hundred years, North America abandoned such planning half a century ago in favour of car-oriented sprawl. So you can swap car lanes for LRT lanes, but those 70+ years of sprawl remain, and so you’d get what America gets: nobody takes the tram because it’s slow, the tram’s slow because it has to coexist with cars, it has to coexist because everybody’s driving rather than taking the tram. Replacing the car isn’t about replacing space for cars, it’s about replacing the necessity that the car provides.
To quote Jarrett Walker, light rail competes with bikes and pedestrians, but metros compete with cars.
//Furthermore, LRT can continue, transfer free, through less dense areas running at SkyTrain speeds. SkyTrain makes no sense where there are long distances with low density. One could imagine LRT on the Arbutus corridor running from downtown Vancouver to Tsawwassen replacing the direct bus service that was lost with the Canada Line. But running the CL through long stretches of farmland is a non-starter.//
Again, it’s gotta slow down to comply with speed limits and prevent collisions. 40-50 kph SkyTrain speeds require grade-separation.
As for service to Delta, neither Ladner or Tsawassen is likely to densify, so the only rationale for rapid transit is the ferry terminal; for an LRT or SkyTrain, that’d be crush-load ridership for twenty minutes followed by near-emptiness for the remaining forty until the next ship arrives. Much better to have a rapid bus or commuter rail line.
//For reasons of wobbliness or otherwise, rails attract riders that buses do not. LRT can be city-building and flexible, reducing the need to travel as far.//
Because the train is often faster, more frequent and more reliable. I don’t know if the bus is early or late… or how bad the traffic is up ahead… and it’ll probably stop every three blocks for one passenger… but the train will be here every 3 minutes and spit me out in 10-15.
Residents of Portland, America’s LRT mascot, often say that it’s better to walk if you don’t see the streetcar. Between that and the #99, I know which one I’m picking (hint: not the train).
//Speed becomes less relevant.//
Speed is ALWAYS relevant. We’re one city. Metro. Vancouver.
Somebody in North Van needs to get to YVR. Somebody in Burnaby needs to get to Horseshoe Bay. A student in Coquitlam needs to get to UBC. A family in Surrey wants to visit the aquarium. A consumer in New West needs to go to Metrotown… sold out, but hey, looks like there’s one in Richmond.
If you want to end car dependence, if you want to grow the city as a whole rather than a series of segregated utopian villages, that means connecting parts of the city to other parts in the fastest way possible, not the slowest.
Let’s not confuse streetcars built 100+ years ago (much like Vancouver did also) with newly built ones.
Because LRTs close off perpendicular traffic frequently they offload their throughput speed onto cars and frequently slow them down dramatically, as we see today in Calgary or Edmonton, or LA or any other city that built them the last 20 or so years. Multi-minute waits to turn or cross a road with streetcar corridors in them is not the way to go. Also, expensive to operate light signalling or barrier systems for cars, trains and pedestrians have to be built thus nixing many gains of the cheaper construction costs !
Munich or Berlin, for example, had many many street cars pre WWII. They tore them mostly out and replaced them with a subway system. Only in socialist East Berlin did they keep them, even after the wall came down in 1989. There are 0 streetcars in W-Berlin. Ask: why is that ? And we think building more in Surrey is the right answer ? Did they study the mess in Edmonton, for example ? [ I bet they did not ] Did they look at E- or W-Berlin ? [ I bet they did not ]
Justin: “Speed is ALWAYS relevant. We’re one city. Metro. Vancouver.”
Speed creates sprawl. There would be no sprawl without it.
When a city is big and dense enough to justify grade separation or there is good expectation it’s coming and a plan to get there then by all means build it.
It’s absurd to think that grade separated metro should sprawl out to all those far flung places you mention while there is so much under-utilized space much closer to the city or near regional town centres.
I ride my bike to work and to most places I go. I add life to the streets; shop, dine and drink locally. I get there in no time at low speeds. I often walk at even lower speeds. I meet neighbours and friends. Speed is NOT relevant most of the time. Speed is relevant for people who choose to live a sprawly lifestyle. I don’t think we should encourage that. I have no problem with grade separated fast transit, but it shouldn’t be built as a way to encourage people to sprawl farther away. It should be used to encourage people to live closer to amenities. Surface transit does that at the scale of the missing middle. You can argue for buses but Trams/LRT attract more riders and tend to add more vitality to neighbourhoods.
Too late – we’ve already got sprawl. We can either fit a square peg into a no-longer-square hole, or improvise.
We’re big enough (2M+ people and counting) and dense enough (fourth in North America behind Mexico City, L.A. and Montreal), and we definitely have a long-term strategy to go for it; why NOT build out to UBC, Langley, White Rock and North Van?
Burnaby and Surrey are already competing for Vancouver’s condos and office space and big, fancy skyline; it’s not like they’ll stay small and isolated forever, and I’d rather they connect to the rest of the city by riding, not driving.
As for the missing middle, we’ve already got it: buses. Biking and walking let you access your neighbourhood, the metro lets you access your city, the frequent network lets you access everything in-between (though frequency could be better) – really, at the end of the day, a streetcar is a slightly-bigger trolley bus on rails.
Justin: “why NOT build out to UBC, Langley, White Rock and North Van?”
Why on Earth should the taxpayer spend tens of billions of dollars to build the most expensive transit systems out to places where people are fleeing the city and all the good transit that comes with it? They choose big lots and easy parking. They’re the last people who will ride transit.
You get better bang for the tax dollar by making transit even more attractive in places where people might use it.
The regional town centre strategy is finally beginning to take hold. Let people who want fast transit live close to fast transit. It’s already there. The taxpayer should not be funding an upsurge in land prices for the benefit of people who just want to drive anyway.
In theory a bus and a tram may be almost indistinguishable. In practice people who won’t get on a loser cruiser will happily ride rails. Go figure.
Alex, I’m pretty certain that by the time our streetcar system was being dismantled all the areas it served had water and sewer service. I get that other utilities may have been added but the two most important ones should not interfere over most of the route. I get that there will be places that they do. Ditto when you build a subway. And you save upwards of $50 million per station no matter what.
Ron:In theory a bus and a tram may be almost indistinguishable. In practice people who won’t get on a loser cruiser will happily ride rails. Go figure.
that is when people tend to focus on the rolling stock, but usually the upgrade from bus to tram goes much beyond rolling stock:
https://voony.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/tramway_t3.jpg?w=480
(and I don’t talk about the NA LRT with load of overpass, and viaduct…like in Seattle).
Jarret Walker theory is that in the long term everything resolve to a question of “geometry” of the line ( it doesn’t matter to the customer if it is a tram or a bus as long as the service is the same), and it is probably right:
That has been essentially proved in Vancouver with the introduction of the 99B, and is regularly proved everywhere else such as Nantes where you can compare directly high level of Bus service* and tram:
https://img.20mn.fr/YSSY_gXAQs29y9-J-PphiA/960×614-54x70_nantes-26-08-2010-la-ligne-4-du-bus-way-est-renforcee-pour-la-rentree-2010
that is a BRT (notice the attention on the alighting), the previous typical bus was patronized by 20,000p a day, 10 year after introduction, it is patronized by ~40,000p a day…that is a very similar increase observed over the the introduction of a tram line (and ironically, doubling the transit rider is what is expected with the Broadway subway introduction…the above number suggest that is rather conservative, like the projection for the Canada line was)
In the meantime, I notice that at the difference of a tram in Europe, the Surrey LRT will not translate into a reduction of road capacity, quite the contrary, the Surrey LRT is hugely expensive because it involves many real estate acquisition in order to not affect the road capacity…in fact the price has skyrocketed so much that it becomes more expensive to build than a skytrain… but still geometrically speaking, the service will be one a BRT built at a fraction of the LRT price, such as observed in Nantes, could provide
Of course the 99B gets most of it’s use from UBC students who get a super sweet deal on a transit pass.
//The regional town centre strategy is finally beginning to take hold. Let people who want fast transit live close to fast transit. It’s already there. The taxpayer should not be funding an upsurge in land prices for the benefit of people who just want to drive anyway.//
Ron, we’re both fortunate enough to have a home near the downtown core, to be able to afford it, and to have everything in life within walking/biking/transit distance; I don’t know about you, but I’ve met people from outside my “bubble,” and I have the empathy and understanding to realize that many of them don’t have the same privilege.
See, there’s a little thing called a “housing crisis” happening right now. People leave for the suburbs because they’re affordable, and they avoid the luxury condos popping up around the SkyTrain because they aren’t.
Build a SkyTrain out to them – and get Victoria to let Vancouver rezone for rental-only – and they will use it. I’ll gladly pay for it just as sure as they’re paying for mine.
//In theory a bus and a tram may be almost indistinguishable. In practice people who won’t get on a loser cruiser will happily ride rails. Go figure.//
Voony’s got it right – because they’ve had bad experiences with buses and good experiences with trains. You change that perception with faster, reliable, more frequent buses, not by spending billions to reinvent the wheel.
Actually, only 44% of 99 riders take it all the way to UBC. 7% disembark between Blanca and Macdonald, and 48% between Arbutus and Commercial (along the M-Line extension route): https://broadwayextension.ca/Route
The housing crisis should be fixed with tools aimed at the housing crisis. I’m not a believer in fixing a bicycle with a tile saw.
You don’t need to live in an expensive new tower at the town centres. The town centres offer amenities that allow people to access jobs, shops, services and fast transit nearby even if they have to ride a bike or take a short transit ride to get there. Expanding SkyTrain to create new town centres is an expensive way to repeat a vicious cycle of expensive new towers and undermines the investments already made in a SkyTrain system with very broad reach. Improving surface transit to feed existing/developing town centres while creating a more robust network is a better use of transit dollars.
For most it is a choice to hold on to their car-centric way of life rather than live smaller, closer and car-free. Ditch one or more cars and live in a smaller older house or older apartment within reasonable distance of a town centre. Or get that shiny brand new house waay out farther and keep your big SUVs and have taxpayers build you a spanky new SkyTrain to your door to entice you out of the decision you’ve made. Ya, I get why some people want that.
Agreed that there must be more affordable new housing built into the town centres. Burnaby has allowed too much luxury redevelopment too quickly but there are still lots of opportunities for lower cost housing nearby.
Vancouver is no longer a small town. If you want to live that lifestyle it comes without SkyTrain. Nanaimo doesn’t have it. Kelowna doesn’t have it. Langley shouldn’t have it either… yet. There will come a day… Probably around the time Kelowna gets it too.
I knew I was exaggerating (slightly) about the UBC students. I’ve always held we don’t need a subway to UBC because ridership drops by more than half beyond central Broadway. We’re better off getting density higher closer to the city than more big huge nodal developments way out to a dead end point. We’re also better off having policies that make it affordable to live closer to UBC. This idea that a subway to UBC opens up student housing opportunities in Coquitlam is just plain absurd.
Never said it’d fix the housing crisis, only that we need to accept that it’s happening. Given the job and housing market for many people, “live where you work” is a luxury.
That’s the point: you zone/develop housing and amenities at stations so that anything you can’t walk or bike to is reachable by bus or SkyTrain. I’d hardly call Renfrew or King Ed “town centres,” nor would I say that wanting greater access to the entire metro is “car-centric.” Can’t build a pool or zoo or cineplex near everybody, after all.
As for car obsession, that’s mostly everyone west of Park Royal and Shaughnessy. North Van, Langley and the Tri-Cities are pretty receptive to transit-oriented rezoning, they just need better connections to the rest of the city.
//Vancouver is no longer a small town. If you want to live that lifestyle it comes without SkyTrain. Nanaimo doesn’t have it. Kelowna doesn’t have it. Langley shouldn’t have it either… yet. There will come a day… Probably around the time Kelowna gets it too.//
I don’t follow. Metro Van becoming a big town means that we need big town transit.
Again, Burnaby started out as pretty “small” when SkyTrain came along, and just look at it now. Transit can shape density just as much as the other way around.
//I’ve always held we don’t need a subway to UBC because ridership drops by more than half beyond central Broadway. We’re better off getting density higher closer to the city than more big huge nodal developments way out to a dead end point.//
Right, which is one of the reasons why it’s only going to Arbutus (the other half being the “No” vote back in 2014). Connect the Millennium to the Canada, grow density in the core, come back and extend later when demand increases.
//We’re also better off having policies that make it affordable to live closer to UBC. This idea that a subway to UBC opens up student housing opportunities in Coquitlam is just plain absurd.//
No, what’s absurd is the idea that university students should only live near the university, and that they should stay for their entire semester and not go anywhere else. Given the high cost of residence in general, it’s natural that some students choose to live at home and commute in. Given the lack of amenities and “buzz,” it’s natural that they head downtown to grab dinner or have fun.
If you can somehow predict every want or need that every student might have, and build it all within walking/biking/local bus distance of each student residence, all near UBC, then more power to you. Otherwise, you might as well be asking the sun to go backwards.
How about this: We build up the catchment areas of the existing SkyTrain stations to something that gives them justice. Not just King Ed and Renfrew but those ridiculous ones, 29th Ave and Nanaimo, among many others. Ensure a good mix of housing affordability and add a robust mixed-use component where none currently exists. That will house new people for a decade or two without having to spend more on expensive extensions. Lower cost transit (LTR.Trams/BRT?) can be improved in a network to tie it all together and give even more housing options all cross-tied back to the existing system. When that is half built out start planning extensions.
No need to extend SkyTrain further (besides Arbutus) until a couple hundred thousand or more new residents can move into walkable neighbourhoods within the SkTrain’s current reach.
Many here rail (pun?) against the high cost of LRT but happily want to spend double or more on SkyTrain extensions.
regarding the 99B, it has been proven a resounding success well before the introduction of the U pass:
https://voony.wordpress.com/2013/10/15/before-and-after-the-99b-line
I think that’s the plan: stop at Arbutus and Langley, rezone all the houses around the station for mid/high-rise (preferably with rentals/co-ops) until there’s enough money, draft the next set of projects. Expand, halt, consolidate, repeat.
We’re already seeing such area plans for Joyce-Collingwood and Commercial-Broadway… but the NIMBYs seem to have made City Council scared of trying any other stations. For once, I don’t blame them.
Absolutely, LRT can be a cheap RRT-lite alternative in the gaps that SkyTrain isn’t covering. Problem there is that a B-Line provides the same service for a way lower price… and SkyTrain is not only more likely to recover its capital cost, but also has lower operating costs (no driver salaries); the Expo Line is one of the only metro lines on the continent that’s profitable!
So as far as TransLink’s concerned:
BRT – $ to build, $$ to operate, $$ service, $ benefits
LRT – $$ to build, $$$ to operate, $$ service & benefits
RRT – $$$ to build, $-$$ to operate, $$$ service & benefits
Meaning that LRT’s a “master of none” on all but ex-rail corridors – Arbutus or the Surrey interurban, for example – where it can outperform an express bus.
How about this: NO SkyTrain to Langley! They demanded and unfortunately got a whopping ten lane bridge and expanded freeway. They don’t get both. They have not matured to deserve fast urban transit. Furthermore you’d just be adding to sprawl and putting more people further away from the city. Without the Port Mann expansion you’d have a better case.
Take the $4billion+ for a Langley ST extension and put it towards a suite of housing policies and subsidies that improve affordability around existing Town centres and SkyTrain stations. That would be city-building. SkyTrain to Langley is far far too premature.
Ron says: How about this: NO SkyTrain to Langley!
beyond his principled view points, that rises an interesting question: how far the skytrain can/should be extended? (and
the ancillary question: how Vancouver centric the transit network should be?)…all this
is well connected to “where the future lies”?
I personally don’t believe it is in Surrey, a Vancouver suburbs where the horses have already left the barn. but the Fraser Valley in general it is…
So far all the discussion for Surrey has been framed in a way ignoring everything East of Langley (or out of the Translink jurisdiction, and it look the advised discussion will also just do that).
I tend to believe all our transportation network should derive of a much more holistic vision, including Abbotsford, and beyond Chilliwack, and then local choice done for Surrey should be a consequence of a more regional network vision, which could look like below:
https://voony.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/fraservalleyinterurban.jpg
so no Skytrain for Langley, but a “real train” (read european style commuter train running at 160km/h) irrigating the Valley…which obviously need to be connected to Skytrains and other local transit route.
more here on the feasibility of it:
https://voony.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/the-ill-conceived-surrey-lrt-and-the-missed-regional-transit-opportunity/
^ There’s an idea. A second WCE to Abbotsford would do the job nicely for now.
That said, King George Station and the subsequent track are already aimed toward Langley. SkyTrain to Newton would probably mean bulldozing King George and rebuilding it pointing south, which is probably why TransLink, SkyTrain for Surrey et all ignore the RRT2 option.
If we don’t want to have the valley paved over and we do want to save the remaining farmland we’d have to be very careful about such an investment. Before any heavy rail system is run up the valley we’d need to see a legally enforceable development containment plan that ensures dense nodes at stations and not just a bunch of park-and-rides. If that can be achieved then I’d be way more open to that kind of transit serving the valley than extensions of SkyTrain.
But I’m highly doubtful that you’d get the political buy-in and support to build vibrant villages/towns from the dominant demographic in the valley. Until then I’d say no to another WCE. It would put way too much pressure on the ALR. By and large, the current WCE is not as disruptive of the ALR and was specifically routed north of the river to encourage development away from it.
Just to be clear, when I say “dense nodes” in this context I am not talking about highrises but medium-density, mixed-use walkable centres.
Good discussion, Justin, Ron and Voony.
Ron, a couple of points. You refer to the capacity and efficiency of LRT in a dedicated median. This is correct. However, on Broadway something will have to be sacrificed. The most likely thing will be shutting down the crossing signals of all the intersections between major arterials. Every single one of these intersections has a pedestrian activated signal. Without doing this you will never achieve the expected speed, frequency and per hour service capacity as the trains will be interrupted by red lights at every intersection. You will greatly diminish the pedestrian environment on Broadway by fencing the median to achieve uninterrupted service between stations. In fact, you will eradicate the ability of people to cross the street on foot in one km sections all along the length of the corridor except at stations.
Don’t believe me? Then stand at Broadway x Heather or Ash or Willow or any other secondary crossing in central Broadway and visualize trains sailing through at speed every minute in both directions without a fenced median.
This is where lightrailers pull out their incomprehensible response: give trains signal priority! There you go, you’ve just cut off half the crossing time for elderly pedestrians and allowed trains to be disrupted in one move. With one crossing every block, that just isn’t going to work. It would be better to consider a dedicated median on 41st Ave, 200th St or somewhere else without the crossing density of Broadway.
Another incomprehensible response: run trams with more frequent stops. In that case why spend a billion bucks just to replicate the Number 9 bus?
You also mentioned an urban containment device in the Valley WRT commuter rail. One already exists: the ALR.
One last comment on the cost of relocating underground utilities to accommodate surface light rail. It’s easy to make generalizations that utilities need to be replaced anyway, but that is in the absence of even cursory engineering analyses. Some utilities last over 50 years and it may be deemed wasteful to replace them prematurely. In some locations you have a cluster of very large regional utilities that cannot be relocated without impacting the entire road allowance. Turn on the VanMap utility layer for West 16th Ave and you will see why civil engineers will have conniptions over running a tram there over a 90 cm Metro water line, a 30 cm regional gas line, all the typical local services and a large conjunction of utilities at Blenheim.
The engineering departments I worked with on many projects over the years pegged an average cost of installing one utility at $1,500 / linear metre based on years of handling utility contracts. That includes trenching, shoring, the pipe, connections, backfilling and repaving. Relocating a utility requires two trenches, and additional lateral trenches when the invert elevations of laterals are recalculated and services extended appropriately into the side easements. Several utilities require isolation, such as large gas mains which should never be placed in the same trench as water or sewers. You’re up to at least $4,000 per LM per utility right there, or probably $20,000 per LM of rail in additional costs in many locations, and perhaps an average of $12,000 / LM per line overall.
Conservatively, that’s an additional $84 million for the ~7 km Vancouver stretch of Kingsway alone, perhaps spiking to $150 million should utilities be especially dense. That works out to about $250 million, or a range of $150M-$350M, of potential additional costs for the 20 km stretch of a Kingsway tram between Main and the new Westminster waterfront. The disruption to relocate utilities will also add the better part of a year to the disruption of building the line itself based on fairly recent utility work on several blocks of Kingsway.
You will never read about these costs when Condon bandies about numbers on the capital costs of light rail. Perhaps it’s worth it. Perhaps not. We won’t know until all the ducks have been lined up and counted. But one thing is certain: It won’t be as easy in a mature city as it would be to start with surface rail from scratch, like with the Interurban and neighbourhood streetcars of 115 years ago, or with new opportunities in the low density suburbs.
Skytrain to Newton ( future loop to 22nd station via North Delta ) then rail to Chilliwack (if BC govt still has passenger rights)
Given that, and given that Kingsway would make a great future LRT/tram line it would make sense to plan all necessary utility replacements with that in mind. We need longer term visions.
I’m also curious why a vehicle loaded onto lengths of rail that would tend to spread loading over a larger area exerts more force than a vehicle on four relatively small small points.
It also seems to me that you could build something akin to SkyTrain without the columns for areas where utilities are a problem and revert to more conventional construction where they aren’t. It must always have to be less expensive than something up high that has the added lateral stability component. To this I add the enormous cost of stations for elevated or subway systems. You could probably build brand new basic LRT stations for $5 million. We’ve just seen a series of SkyTrain station *renovations* that cost $25 million to $60 million each.
I used Kingsway because it follows the old ridge trail route on a fairly level contour over the southern Burrard peninsula, which cuts at a diagonal through three historic cities. Hence the original BCER Interurban routing, BC Hydro easement and Expo Line. I agree that Kingsway would make a great case study for light rail. But the in-depth costing, engineering feasibility studies, risk assessments and so forth need to be advanced well before the lighrailers start drooling.
Light rail promotion should come with a cautionary preamble about realistic service levels if it’s to be placed in mixed traffic (the B-Line would perform better in congestion, but a dedicated LRT median may work best), and about cost escalation. Yes, it would still be cheaper than SkyTrain, but the Kingsway Line would not be designed to replicate the parallel Expo Line; it would perform a complementary secondary service. If the feasibility studies offer a green or conditional yellow light, then there are a number of other arterials that could be opened to a similar effort. I also take to heart Jarrett Walker’s assertion that replacing viable bus routes with light rail without a significant increase in ridership and frequency would be a waste of hundreds of millions.
The concern about locating a railway over underground utilities isn’t necessarily the weight, but repairing burst pipes that run vertically parallel with the tracks, or maintaining lateral connections under the rail bed. Best practices dictates that a railway not be lain over parallel undergrounds, and that an underground culvert or stout steel sleeve encapsulates any utilities that cross under. This will allow the repair trenches to be dug beside the tracks and the service pulled out sideways without disrupting the trains which will in effect be bridged over the pipes.
Alex, Vancouver was built around a network of trams. If relocating utilities is as difficult as you say then all the arterials that once carried trams should be able to accommodate trams and/or LRT tomorrow. Undoubtedly some utilities may have been added without consideration of this but the primary ones should not be an issue.
Does anybody have a good name for hybrid (Tram/LRT) urban surface rail?
The cost/benefit ratio for Condon’s LRT revival plan is pretty slim. You’d be spending Morgan Freeman knows how many billion to rip up every other arterial in the downtown area, relocate all the utilities, lay down rails and medians, pave the roads back up again, and buy enough trams to replace all the electric trolley buses… to get the exact same network as we had before, but with slightly bigger vehicles that can’t switch lanes?
Ron, my neighbourhood was built before WWI. There were no sewers, no gas, no comm lines. Outdoor biffys were in every back yard. There was a water connection made to my house in 1910. The Westminster Road streetcar predates autos by decades, and it originally ran in a linear mud pie before the road was paved and renamed Main Street. Main is now underlain by many, many more utilities, several of which have been replaced at least once.
That’s the trouble with undergrounds … they’re invisible and therein easy to dismiss until you have to dig them up.