Who would benefit from a Broadway subway?

Once again, I’m deeply puzzled by the anger of the opposition people have to the idea of a Broadway subway line.  Part of the anger, if not all, seems to come from some real confusion about who would benefit from it.  Here’s Zweisystem:

The promoters of the a UBC subway and the SkyTrain Lobby will delight at the fact that once again taxpayers who live outside of Vancouver, with no say on how transit is provided inside Vancouver will see massive tax and user fee increases to fund a subway to UBC that they will seldom, if ever use.

People from outside of Vancouver would “seldom, if ever,” use a Broadway subway?  Really?  Who are those massive crowds of people getting off the Expo line at Commercial-Broadway and seeing two- and three-sailing waits to get on a B-Line?  Did they all get on the Skytrain at Joyce-Collingwood?  Really?

Those crowds don’t by any means make a knock-down case for a subway, but let’s try to get some perspective on who’s going to benefit from a Broadway rail line, regardless of whether it’s light rail or a subway.  People in the city aren’t the only ones who stand to gain here.

 

Priorities.

Courtesy of Stephen Rees, here’s your Friday morning piece of the big picture:

All kinds of things – really important things that the BC Liberals promised were sacrosanct a few months ago like healthcare and education – are now being cut. But nothing it seems can stop the freeway juggernaut here.

 

Where’s the low-hanging fruit?

That Burrows article in the Straight about a Broadway rail line seems to have pushed some buttons.  Zweisystem at Rail for the Valley says, “If Vancouver wants a subway, let Vancouver taxpayers pay for it!”  And Jordan Bateman at Langley Politics says,

a South Fraser light rail line should be the next transit priority, not another gold-plated SkyTrain in Vancouver. If Vancouver is as concerned about urban sprawl and car culture as they claim, they should be pushing to get transit into Surrey, Langley, and Abbotsford. That’s where the most gains can be made; that’s the low-hanging fruit when it comes to battling climate change and air pollution.

I think the animosity in these reactions is a mistake.  I understand how easy it is to feel like other regions of metro Vancouver are getting transit goodies that your own region isn’t, but sub-regional sniping isn’t doing anyone any good.  We all want more and better transit for the entire region.

But I also think there’s no particular reason to think the “low-hanging fruit” is all south of the Fraser.  The buses on the Broadway corridor are at capacity during peak times right now.  In fact, they’ve been at capacity during peak times for a while.  They’re actually over-capacity for some parts of the day.  (Details here: pp. 86-87.)  As I’ve talked about before, this isn’t a problem that Translink can solve easily by putting more buses on the route.  With three-minute headways, a few red lights in a row is enough to pile up three B-Lines up end.

But what does it mean if Broadway’s at capacity — and sometimes over capacity — right now?  It means that there’s people who want to take the transit on Broadway, but who don’t because the buses are too full.  Add capacity to the route — with light rail or a subway — and all of a sudden there’s room for more people on transit.  Why wouldn’t that count as low-hanging fruit?

 

A Broadway rail line has to go all the way to UBC.

Via Zweisystem, here’s a Matthew Burrows piece in the Straight about plans for rapid transit along the Broadway corridor and out to UBC — a plan that, like a mirage, seems always to recede into the distance just as we think we’re getting closer to it.  Burrows’ piece is about the fight about whether a rail line along Broadway should be surface-level light rail or a light-metro subway.  But that’s not the fight I want to have right now.

Instead, I want to flag something that Vision’s Geoff Meggs’ says in the piece:

“We already have a high-speed line ending at the Millennium Line at VCC–Clark,” [Meggs] noted. “It just makes sense to complete it somehow, either over to the Canada Line or, better yet, take it to Arbutus. It could be the hub of a future extension down the Arbutus corridor or over to UBC.”

This is something you hear from time to time — that maybe the Broadway corridor only needs rapid transit to Arbutus, and that extending the line all the way to UBC would be something to do later, rather than when the first stretch of rail gets built.

This is a deeply, deeply stupid idea.  It fundamentally fails to recognize just how big UBC is.  UBC is already second only to downtown in Vancouver as a destination for transit trips.  (Go to p. 81 of this Translink report for that factoid.  Warning: it’s an enormous pdf.)  And looking to the future, UBC is again second only to downtown in Vancouver as an area of significant job growth (p. 55).  So how stupid would it be to run a rail line to Arbutus but not all the way to UBC?   Only slightly less stupid than running the Expo line to Commercial, but then not going downtown.  Or running the Canada Line to Broadway, but then not going downtown.  In other words, epically, monumentally, enormously stupid.

 

Affordable housing for families? Bigger apartments.

Since I was just on a tear about the choices people make to live in transit-unfriendly sprawl, my friend K pointed me to this Don Cayo write-up of a report on rental housing for families in Vancouver.  The report comes from Bing Thom Architects, and it says that — as you might guess — Vancouver doesn’t have enough affordable housing for families.  No, I don’t suppose it does.

But check out what Michael Heeney, a partner at Bing Thom, says the solution is: “What we do need are rental units with two or more bedrooms that can be occupied by young families.”  He’s not taking about building more single-family, detached houses.  (Where would we build them?)  He’s talking about building condos with two and three bedrooms, instead of just one.  He’s talk about building laneway housing that takes up a bigger footprint of a 50-foot lot than the 750 sq. feet that’s currently allowed.

In other words, he’s acknowledging that a lot of families in metro Vancouver don’t necessarily want to own a three-bedroom-plus-den-and-two-car-garage house.  They want to live in a dense, walkable, livable part of the city, and they’d be willing to trade a lot of space to do it — if only the city made sure those two and three bedroom condos were there for them to rent.

 

Parking lots are blight.

Down at the very bottom of this Frank Bucholtz piece in the Langley Times, there’s a disappointing note about Translink boss Tom Prendergast:

Prendergast also said TransLink needs to change its attitude towards park and ride lots, which can boost transit ridership. TransLink historically hasn’t supported such lots.

No doubt park-and-rides increase transit ridership, but do they decrease the overall number of trips people make by car?  Here’s the worry.  Park-and-rides increase the number of people commuting by transit — and that’s obviously a good thing.  But they also make it easier for people to live in car-dependent places, where they can’t take transit to get groceries or go out for dinner, and their kids can’t walk to school very easily.  So even if people are taking transit to get to work, they’re using their cars more for everything else.

Besides, when people are already paying a premium to live close to transit, why waste the land around transit nodes on cars when people could live there?

 

Tolls certainly tax people for living in the suburbs, but there’s nothing unfair about them.

The Province has an unsigned editorial in today’s paper arguing that tolls tax people unfairly for living in the suburbs.  I am, as you might guess, unconvinced.  First, as I’ve said before, I think it’s not really the best idea to talk about this issue in such morally-loaded language.  The point of the policy isn’t to punish anyone for anything.  The point of the policy is to generate revenue while changing people’s habits in a way that reduces the number on cars on the road.  ”Fair” doesn’t really come into it at all.

That said, it’s worth engaging the Province‘s editors on their own terms and asking whether tolls really would be unfair to people in the suburbs.  The argument seems to turn on a contrast drawn in the last two paragraphs:

It’s easy, of course, for City of Vancouver residents such as Robertson to argue for road tolls. They’re fortunate to have reasonably good public transit, including the new Canada Line.

Folks in the ‘burbs are not so blessed. They don’t have any real alternative to the motor car. And they deserve better than to have their pockets constantly picked by opportunistic politicians.

It’s unfair to toll suburban roads, this line goes, because people in the suburbs don’t have good public transit.

But — and this is really important — we normally don’t think it’s unfair to ask people to face the consequences of their own actions.  No one tricked people living in the suburbs into thinking there was great public transit in Langley.  They knew that when they chose to live there, and they decided they wanted to live there anyway.  Now, I know what you’re going to say next.  People live in the suburbs because they can’t afford to live in the city!  That’s what the Province‘s editors insinuate when call city-dwellers “fortunate.”  It’s a cute thing to say, but it’s irrelevant.  Here’s why.

Everyone — no matter how much money that have — faces choices about how to spend their money.  Rich people, poor people, and everyone in between.  We all makes choices.  Some people choose to spend their money on the rent and mortgage payments required to live close to good public transit.

Other people choose to spend their money on other things.  By living in the suburbs, they save a lot of money with cheaper rent and lower mortgage payments.  That means they can afford a car, or even a second one.  It means they can afford to have two or three kids instead of one, and maybe it even means they can afford to send those kids to private school.  It means they can afford more and better vacations, and more and better toys.  When people choose to live in the suburbs, they’re implicitly saying that these things — some of them very worthwhile! — are more important to them than reducing their dependence on unsustainable ways of getting themselves around.  And that’s fine!  Not everyone has to value the same things in exactly the same way.  My point is that everyone here, on some level, made choices.  The people in the suburbs could have chosen to live in the city.  But they didn’t, because it would have meant they’d have to give up a lot of stuff they weren’t willing to give up.

People end up living where they live because of the choices they make — not dumb luck or “fortune.”  And there’s nothing unfair about asking people to deal with the consequences of choices they’ve made.

 

Why have road pricing for truckers?

Via Nathan Pachal, here’s a paper about road pricing for freight that concludes, not surprisingly, that you might be able to ease peak-hour road congestion a bit by charging truckers for using roads at peak times.  Yeah, that seems right.  But are truckers really who we want to charge for using the roads?

The whole idea that you’d want to ease congestion at rush hour by getting truckers off the road smacks of a transportation policy that’s catering to people who commute by car.   But making it easier for people to commute by car is a bad thing.  We want people to get out of their cars and find other ways of getting to work.  So don’t we want to find ways of charging commuters for using the road, and not truckers?

 

Getting out of traffic.

One more thing about getting to and from Toronto.  I was paying attention to my experience of getting to YVR and Pearson, and it’s really astonishing what a difference it makes being on a train that’s separated from traffic.  The thing is, I’m a bit of an anxious traveller.  I’m not a nervous flyer or anything like.  I worry about getting to the airport on time.

For somebody in that kind of headspace, the worst part about getting to YVR is getting to the Canada Line.  There I was on Friday afternoon, well before the afternoon rush, but still dealing with the B-Line gong show, trying to get to Broadway-City Hall station.  Why would a bus stay at stop for over four minutes?  For so long that we got passed by the B-Line behind us?  I really couldn’t say.  The bus was too full for anyone to see what was going on, so we just sat there, going nowhere.  Similarly, knowing that it can take anywhere between 20 minutes and an hour to get from the Danforth to Pearson — depending on traffic — is infuriating.   And even though it was late on a Sunday night, we still hit traffic — enough to seriously screw with our plans for getting to airport with lots of time to spare.

But being on the train, and knowing exactly how long it was going to take — there’s just no uncertainty there.  At that point, if you know you’re on schedule, there’s just nothing left to worry about.

 

Getting on and off Toronto’s streetcars.

I spent the weekend in Toronto with GF’s family, including the cutest niece in the history of babies.  But with this Jarrett Walker post from a little while ago stuck in my head, I was also paying close attention to how people get onto and off of the TTCs streetcars.  The streetcars are in the left-hand lanes of traffic, to try to limit the time they spend stuck behind cars turning right or parallel parking or whatever.  But that means there’s a lane of car traffic between the sidewalk and the streetcar.  So how do people get onto the streetcars without getting mowed down by cars?

Well, whenever I’ve taken streetcars in Toronto in the past, I’d always gotten on from an island in the middle of the street.  So where there are these islands, you just cross the street as a light to get to the island, wait there for the streetcar, and then get onto the streetcar from the middle of the road.  That has its advantages and disadvantages.  But when I was thinking about downtown Toronto streets, I couldn’t remember there being all that many islands.  So I wanted to know how you got onto a streetcar when there’s no island.

Well, I spent all of Saturday night sitting in the window of the Free Times Cafe, eating latkes, drinking beer, and watching streetcars let people on and off on College St.  Here’s how it works. The streetcars just stop in the left-hand lane, and then people trot across the right-hand lane of traffic to get on and off.  They just walk through a lane of traffic.  There’s seems to be no infrastructure at all to make drivers stop behind a streetcar to let people on or off in the right-hand lane.

But even if there’s no infrastructure, there are some very robust social norms.  When a driver doesn’t stop behind the streetcar to let people walk through the right-hand lane, people honk.  A lot of people honk.  There seemed to be an impressive effort to everyone’s part to enforce the norm that when a streetcar’s stopped, you don’t pass it on the right.

That said, having nothing but norms — even very robust ones, backed up by traffic laws — keeping that right-hand lane clear for people getting on and off the streetcar has obvious downsides.  Over the course of three of so hours, I heard that honking three different times.  Three different times while I was sitting and drinking my beer, drivers failed to observe the norm, and drove into a lane that pedestrians were trying to use.  Nobody got killed.  But still, that’s not a friendly space for people trying to get onto the streetcar.