Alan Garr in the Vancouver Courier speculates (with a little more certainty than most) about various possibilities in the Vancouver Mayoral race coming to a vote in October.
Shauna Sylvester — rumoured April 5 announcement
. . . Shauna Sylvester could very well be the first female mayor elected in the Vancouver’s history. For weeks now this neophyte in the world of public electoral politics has been saying publicly that she is actively considering running as an “independent candidate.”
. . . Sylvester confirmed to me a few days ago she was also in conversation with various civic political power brokers and three of the four centre-left parties — Vision, OneCity and the Greens — expressing her ambitions and seeking support.
Adriane Carr — probably will stay as a council candidate, tacitly conceding to Sylvester
NPA — lots of room for change, especially with new-gen council candidates knocking on the door, looking for an NPA policy upheaval. Currently, it’s a three-way race, with two viable mayoral choices.
Wai Young — an independent candidate and vote-taker on the right.
Patrick Condon — COPE (with thanks to Carlito Pablo in the Georgia Straight)
Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) and the team of anti-poverty warrior Jean Swanson are actively encouraging Condon to run for mayor of Vancouver in the October 2018 municipal election.
. . . Condon is not a fan of costly transportation projects like the planned subway underneath Broadway, preferring instead trams and trolley buses.
Patrick Condon? What a refreshing idea that is!
I believe Patrick Condon’s heart is in the right place on motherhood (sustainable cities, climate change …). But when it comes to hard analysis, practical project management, urban economics and so forth, his formulaic, one-size-fits-all ideas on urbansim and energy lead me to conclude his head is in the wrong place.
Good god, please not Patrick Condon. He would be a good person to propose ideas but you want someone who can filter out the unrealistic or misinformed portions of his shtick.
Hah, as if I needed a reason to like COPE less. Condon would be a disaster. We could wait 2 decades for Broadway Subway, then end up with a streetcar that has 5,000 pphpd as it’s max capacity…
I think I’d honestly get up and move.
Hopefully there’s something in writing from Translink regarding Broadway before the election happens. I know the design/build teams are already lining up their ducks for a bidding process.
The funding’s already in place. Even if he somehow got elected (which I doubt, since it looks like mostly an NPA/Green contest), he couldn’t get the Broadway subway halted and replaced with a streetcar without other politicians backing him up.
The Broadway subway is part of a unanimously approved $7 billion TransLink plan with two senior governments picking up the majority of the tab. One mayor or council cannot change it now.
Except that the result of a leaky, prone to breakdowns, and already 30 percent overpriced is a bad exclusive in-a-tunnel SUBWAY route that will decimate/cut surface routing.
And it is not going to carry many people.
Parallel bus routes, 4th, 9th, 12th and 16 would do better.
And the end is going to nowhere. UBC is losing students. Broadway and Commercial transfer point is a disaster, and more so when a subway disgorges.
Condon knows the numbers, has estimated the future needs and knows the subway is a massively wasteful drain on the region.
A new EXPO line station next to the VCC Clarke station with non stop buses to UBC would take less time . ( One transfer penalty instead of 2 )
With bus lanes & signal priority
I’ll take a hard pass on that option, thanks.
The last ridership forecast I saw had 230,000 riders per day by 2023 on Broadway. More than enough for the system to run at an operating profit, but not quite enough to cover CAPEX.
Bestbus (multiple improved bus routes) as a scenario still didn’t do so hot for ridership, mobility improvement or operating cost. It also still required a few hundred million in new buses.
The TransLink estimate after 10 years is 320,000 per day. Given the underestimated demand on the less significant Cambie corridor that saw ridership blow through it the day the underengineered Canada Line opened, I’d say Broadway could also blow through 400,000 after a decade considering its connectivity to the regional SkyTrain system, its inherent superior efficiency and frequency, and the high network effect potential.
The public pressure to extend it to the UBC campus will be enormous just a few years after it’s completed to Arbutus.
I have not seen any evidence that Condon knows the transportation planning numbers that count. There are sarcastic analogies about the subway cost and Priuses, but never any real analysis on Broadway’s geometry, induced demand, network effect, transit demand management initatives, and on hard engineering concerns, like underground utilities. Not even a realistic independent feasibility study.
He will cite the cheapest tram costs from overseas and simply roll them out onto the surface of Broadway. He maintains you can spend billions to replace good quality and very affordable trolley bus service on our arterials with trams, essentially placing the Number 9, 3, 19, 14 and other buses on rails, and call it fiscally responsible without anything remotely resembling a professional transit planning study. He doesn’t appear to understand the extemely important distinction between fast regional ridership and slower local transit demand, nor the fact that Broadway contains both and both are growing fast.
His other schtick is One City Plan. My, that sounds like a dikdat from the Communist Party of China. The danger is, of course, urban form bias creeping into a public process from on high. Note that both City Plan and the Grandview Woodlands plans arose from excellent public consultation processes at different times, and they allowed a wide diversity in building type and form, including towers in strategic locations.
Condon also elevates wealthy foreign buyers of real estate to mythically evil proportions while seemingly dismissing low interest rates, constrained land supply, high demand due to regional attractiveness, and the evidence so far that prices remain unaffordable even when sales are down and foreigners are hit with additional taxes and subject to the hard focused attention of all levels of government. Blaming foreigners for everything affecting housing prices is easy and supplies a popular uncomplicated answer. But it’s not accurate.
COPE has their candidate, and I know who to avoid in the next vote.
I would vote NPA for the first time in my life if it meant keeping Condon out of office.