Urban rethink.

If there’s one thing the pandemic has proven, it’s that we were right about everything all along.

Those of us who admired the Chinese government have found new reasons for admiration. Those of us who distrusted the Chinese government have found new reasons for distrust.

Those of us who fretted about deficits now have even bigger deficits to fret about. Those of us who favoured bigger government are certain that the current crisis has vindicated our arguments.

And those of us who argued for “taking space away from cars and using it for people” are more committed than ever to the cause…

I happen to like density, public transportation, and walkable neighbourhoods. So I’m not too vexed by the news that the City of Vancouver is using the pandemic as an excuse to do more of what it was doing already:

[T]he pandemic is creating opportunities, council heard Wednesday, like the massive reduction in cars driving and parking, allowing the city to make strides on long-standing goals of promoting active transportation for a more healthy, happy, environmentally friendly city.

But I had to laugh at the headline of the above story as it appeared in the print version of Thursday’s Sun:

“Pandemic forces urban rethink”, by Dan Fumano, Vancouver Sun, May 14, 2020.

What would an “urban rethink” actually look like?

Richard J. Williams argued in the New York Times earlier this month that the mid-20th century trend towards sprawl and suburbanization was driven largely by still-fresh memories of poor sanitation and plague in overcrowded big cities:

If density was disease for modernists, it followed that their cities were about keeping people apart. Look back at the utopian schemes for cities of the first half of the 20th century, and the same hygienic preoccupations come up again and again: There must be light and space and fresh air. The Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier wrote about these things in his book “Vers Une Architecture” (translated as “Towards a New Architecture”). Parts of the book read like comedy now – the author’s attempt to turn his own obsession with hygiene into an avant-garde manifesto. But it was serious when it was published in 1923, the Spanish flu pandemic having just run its course.

As the new millennium approached, and concern about hygiene receded, the old wisdom that crowded sidewalks were dirty and unsightly was supplanted by the conviction that density was terrific, that every family should be grateful to live in an 800 sq. ft. townhouse and ride the subway to work, and that the previous generation of planners who had pulled down tenements to build freeways and public housing projects were frauds and bullies and probably racists to boot.

But now, of course, it looks like hygiene is something we have to worry about again, so planners may drift back to sprawl and suburbanization:

The dense city might not turn out to be responsible for the virus when all is said and done – but as it did a century ago in relation to the Spanish flu, it might well start to feel like a cause. After months of social distancing, are we going to want to go straight back into the crowd? Even if we are allowed to, I doubt it.

With arguments like these gaining traction – here’s Steve Sailer elaborating on the Times article, and Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky making a similar case in Quillette – I wonder if Vancouver city staff will be forced to re-evaluate their priorities.

Take the Broadway subway that finally got the go-ahead last year, which will, upon its planned completion in 2025, fill an annoying gap in Vancouver’s SkyTrain network. Might it be postponed or cancelled outright when politicians are forced to grapple with the deficits that have been piling up during the shutdown?

There is a trendy line of thought that says – I hope I’m getting this right – that deficits don’t matter, that since governments control the supply of money they can print more whenever they need it, and that inflation can be controlled by simply regulating prices. Therefore we should spend our way back to prosperity with massive public works projects like subways and bridges, the costlier the better.

But if it turns out that public transit was a significant vector of infection – which at the moment looks plausible, though far from proven – then it may be foolish to continue building hugely expensive subways that no-one will be very eager to ride. There are more hygienic megaprojects that can be bumped to the top of the to-do list.

In BC’s Lower Mainland, a region of rivers and inlets, there’s always a demand for more bridges and tunnels:

• Work had already begun in 2017 to replace the antique and overcrowded Massey Tunnel under the Fraser River with a new bridge, before the project was booted back into consultations with the change of government. It would be easy to get it back on track.
• The new government also squashed hopes for a bridge to the Sunshine Coast, with the district’s MLA saying “it would not provide value for money”. But the study he was referring to specifically excluded “consideration of economic development benefits”, which could always be factored back in to justify reviving the idea.
• If those projects aren’t ambitious enough, we could always take another look at the old, old dream of a fixed link between Vancouver Island and the mainland.

Over in the UK there’s the so-called Boris bridge. In 2018 Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s idea for an English Channel bridge came to nothing, but now that he’s prime minister, civil servants are obliged to take his whims seriously – so they’re at least going through the motions of considering a 20-mile-long, £20 billion bridge over the Irish Sea to join Scotland and Northern Ireland. Last I heard, the Scottish government was bitching that London hadn’t consulted them before undertaking the study.

“Boris bridge”, as visualized by The Sun.

Now, assuming it’s technically possible, I don’t think the bridge is such a bad idea. But it’s unlikely to be built, not just because of the eye-popping price tag but also because, with the UK’s devolved parliaments in Edinburgh and Belfast, the project would be scuppered by the same kind of grandstanding, blame-shifting, and legal obstructionism that make it nigh-impossible to build any infrastructure across an interprovincial border in Canada.

But if in the aftermath of the virus London is looking for something big, bold, and labour-intensive to lift British spirits – and to put a ton of potential Tory voters to work – then a massive bridge that travellers cross in their own hermetically-sealed automobiles might look better than, say, a £106 billion high-speed rail network that could end up whooshing half-empty trains past idling queues of resentful auto commuters.

M.

—

Speaking of bridges and tunnels, the BC government has embarked on yet another study of a rapid transit link to the North Shore; I touched on one of the previous studies last year when looking at some abandoned SkyTrain schemes. A couple weeks back I wondered whether, given the current difficulties getting infrastructure built, an un-building project might be an easier sell. I’ve mentioned Le Corbusier once before, in an essay that attempted to extract a consistent definition of that perennial media bugbear “populism”.

The Hastings SkyTrain alternate reality.

Having a couple leftover maps and newspaper clippings from my researches into Vancouver’s unrealized rapid transit plans, I thought I should find an excuse to share them.

Here it is: a commenter on my post on the Edmonds-Cariboo SkyTrain extension quibbled with my assessment that this widely hated late ’80s proposal might have been a better deal than the Millennium Line that was built instead.

This is a reasonable quibble. I’m not all that sure myself. Although I’ve hinted here and there, I’ve never really spelled out my conjecture that the Millennium Line was a wrong turn, and that Vancouver might have been better off sticking to its earlier plan for four routes radiating from the Central Business District:

Source: Vancouver Richmond Rapid Transit Project, N.D. Lea Consultants / Reid Crowther and Partners, 1990.

A. North to the North Shore.
B. East along Hastings Street.
C. Southeast to New Westminster and Surrey.
D. South to Richmond.

Routes C and D are today’s Expo and Canada Lines.

Route A still gets a flutter of interest now and then, most recently in 2017 when the outgoing mayor of North Vancouver pitched a tunnelled Waterfront Station-Lonsdale Quay SkyTrain to take some pressure off the overloaded bridges.

And though it’s largely been forgotten now, as late as the 1990s transit officials had hazy notions of going ahead with route B, which would have entailed extending the Expo Line eastward from its current terminus at Waterfront Station to a Park & Ride at the PNE.

There appear to be no technical obstacles to extending SkyTrain beyond Waterfront. [1] In fact the idea was considered in the early stages of planning for what became the Canada Line. In this study from 1990, the routes marked G1-5, H1-5, and I1-5 would have looped the Expo Line southward toward Richmond via a tunnel entrance just east of Waterfront Station:

Source: Vancouver Richmond Rapid Transit Project, N.D. Lea Consultants / Reid Crowther and Partners, 1990.

These routes were ruled out as they would have required burrowing under architecturally sensitive Gastown.

Suppose the Expo Line had instead been extended eastward. Rather than undermining Gastown, the line might have followed the harbourfront at surface level or on elevated rails, and crossed south to Hastings in one of the less-cherished neighbourhoods to the east. From there it might have proceeded either overhead or via tunnel to Hastings Park and the PNE.

At some later date, whenever it came time to replace one of the two existing Second Narrows crossings, the line could be affordably extended across the new bridge to the North Shore – as in this map from a 1994 study: [2]

Source: North Shore Transit Options, BC Transit, 1994.

But let’s assume that the extension terminated at the PNE. In that case the whole length would be about six kilometres. Travel time would be roughly ten minutes, versus twenty by express bus.

In the 1990s, BC Transit might easily have scrimped and built the whole thing on elevated rails, for around $60 million per kilometre, $360 million overall. [3] It would have been damned as a blot on the skyline, of course, but by now everyone would be used to it. And imagine the views from the train windows!

In recent decades, Vancouver’s centre of gravity has been drifting eastward, bringing wealthy new residents and rising prices to the East Hastings area. If TransLink (BC Transit’s successor agency) were to attempt a Hastings SkyTrain now, they’d be obliged to defer to concerns about community impacts and tunnel the whole way, at a cost approaching the half-billion dollars per kilometre budgeted for the upcoming Broadway extension.

Therefore I’m afraid that by the time such a line becomes necessary it’ll be too pricy to build. (See my post on rapid transit in the era of cost disease.)

In any case, the construction of the Millennium Line on a parallel route a couple kilometres further south has made the prospect of a future Hastings SkyTrain quite remote. A pity, because:

• As shown in the maps below, the Hastings extension would have linked a number of densely-populated, rental-heavy, and transit-dependent neighbourhoods;
• It would have serviced the eastern edge of Gastown, the Port of Vancouver, the Pacific Coliseum, and the PNE – all potential high-volume destinations;
• It would have brought rapid transit to a new region of the city, instead of concentrating service in a narrow triangle of Vancouver’s east side;
• Consequently it would have enjoyed high ridership from day one, rather than underperforming as the Millennium Line did in its early years. [4]

Based on a map by Anthony Smith.

Based on a map by Anthony Smith.
For the assumptions behind this fanciful map, see [5].

Okay, okay, I foresee your objection: my maps conveniently cut off everything east of Boundary Road, while the Millennium Line extends clear across Burnaby and into Coquitlam. Which brings us to…

The Edmonds-Cariboo SkyTrain alternate reality.

I don’t begrudge the residents of central Burnaby and East Vancouver the speed and convenience of the Millennium Line. I rode it for a while myself.

But SkyTrain wasn’t built through those neighbourhoods in response to demand from existing residents. It was built there because Lougheed Highway was a big, wide road with nothing much on either side of it – meaning construction would be cheap, and the new line would spur the profitable redevelopment of low-density residential and light industrial properties along its route.

As I discussed in my 2015 post on planners versus riders, there’s nothing wrong with using rapid transit to shape the growth of the city. The downside is that in the short term, while your new line is used only by the few pioneers willing to live along its largely barren route, commuters who elected to live in already-developed neighbourhoods are stuck riding overcrowded buses.

This is particularly annoying because on a busy corridor like, say, Hastings Street, buses are constantly having to slow down for red lights, pedestrians, and cars backing into tight parking spots. Meanwhile a road like Lougheed, with its mile-long blocks, empty shoulders, and lack of pedestrians, is a perfect spot for high-speed bus service. For the cost of a single SkyTrain station an express bus lane could have been built clear across Burnaby.

Of course, the Millennium Line wasn’t built solely to spur development along Lougheed Highway. The goal was always to connect busy downtown Coquitlam, in the far northeast, with the even busier Broadway corridor.

For cost-saving reasons the lightly populated middle section was built first. Then the more technically challenging Lougheed Mall-Coquitlam stretch. Now, a couple decades into the new millennium, we’re getting serious about extending it to West Broadway – the neighbourhood whose population density and employment opportunities will at last justify the line’s existence.

The Millennium Line’s defenders will say that without the middle stretch the route would make no sense. But the Edmonds-Cariboo extension proposed in the late 1980s was meant as a cheap-and-easy shortcut to Coquitlam.

Under this option a Coquitlam-downtown Vancouver trip would have been just as quick as it is today, and wouldn’t have required a transfer. Because the route was substantially less costly to build, it could have been in service years sooner.

The route was ruled out in 1991 by the incoming NDP government, who in opposition had derided SkyTrain as a “big white elephant”. [6] They may have had a point! But after a few extra years of dawdling the NDP decided they liked the technology after all, and the Millennium Line was born.

Suppose the Edmonds-Cariboo route had been chosen, and the line subsequently extended from Lougheed Town Centre to Coquitlam, as in the above map. The advantages I’ve already outlined. What about the drawbacks?

• Several neighbourhoods that have enjoyed an economic boost from the proximity of the Millennium Line would instead have remained neglected. (Some residents might see this as benign neglect.) [7] However, much of that development would have been redirected to stops on the Edmonds-Cariboo route.
• The network would have lacked the redundancy that the Millennium Line provides. Currently when a train breaks down on the central portion of the Expo Line commuters can bypass the obstruction via the Millennium Line. This is no small thing! (The completion of the Broadway extension will add another sorely needed bypass route.)
• The overcrowding that currently afflicts the Expo Line between downtown and Commercial-Broadway Station (where it intersects with the Millennium Line) would instead persist all the way to Royal Oak. This might be mitigated by turning around some percentage of eastbound trains at Edmonds Station, but it is a serious shortcoming of the Edmonds-Cariboo design.
• Without the middle stretch of the Millennium Line there would be no obvious way to link a future Broadway extension to the original SkyTrain network. It would have to be built as an independent line (like the Canada Line) with its own train yard and maintenance facility.

I see these drawbacks as serious but not decisive. I suspect that over in the alternate reality where the Edmonds-Cariboo and Hastings routes were completed there are transit nerds speculating about the missed opportunity of the Broadway-Lougheed SkyTrain, with similarly equivocal results.

M.

1. The option of extending the Expo Line beyond Waterfront Station will be closed off if the City of Vancouver ever follows through on its plans for a pedestrian plaza over the train platforms there. Although the plans leave a contingency for an additional commuter rail platform, they appear to rule out any future rapid transit line – tunneled or aboveground, north or eastbound – that might terminate there.

2. The 1994 BC Transit study North Shore Transit Options examined three different corridors by which SkyTrain could be brought to North and West Vancouver – via the First Narrows, Second Narrows, or a tunnel directly connecting Waterfront Station and Lonsdale Quay. The authors’ verdict:

[R]ail based transit was considered not to be a viable alternative in either the short or long term for the following reasons:

Low Ridership: … For ridership to reach the level that would make it cost-effective, a single rail link would be required to capture over 75% of all peak period, peak direction travel across Burrard Inlet. Given the distinct market areas for travel across Burrard Inlet, there is no single corridor which is likely to achieve this level of demand….

Minimal Travel Time Savings: … Most users of a rapid transit link to the North Shore would be required to travel to a rail station by bus and then transfer to the rail system. Transferring has been shown to be a deterrent to increasing transit ridership. With a relatively short trip across the inlet, it is likely that any travel time savings of a rail system would be offset by the need to transfer.

High Cost: … In 1989, a SkyTrain link between Waterfront Station and Lonsdale Quay was estimated to cost over $400 million…. There would also be a cost in getting rail transit to and from a new crossing.

Since (unlike the other routes discussed in this post) a North Shore rapid transit link remains a live, if remote, possibility, the study is still worth a read. You can find a copy at the downtown library.

3. My extremely crude cost estimate for the Hastings extension is based on the per-kilometre price of the mostly elevated Millennium Line, built in 2002.

4. “Second SkyTrain line lags behind predictions,” Surrey / North Delta Leader, May 20, 2005. Three years after the opening of the Millennium Line, TransLink officials were putting an optimistic spin on ridership figures that were well below projections.

5. In mapping my hypothetical Hastings extension I’ve tried to stick to what might actually have been approved in the 1990s. If I’ve cheated it’s by being unrealistically generous in the spacing of stations: I’ve located them at Main Street, Clark, Nanaimo, Renfrew, and Highway 1.

A real-world version might easily look like Exhibit IX, above, with one crummy stop (at Commercial Drive) between Main Street and the PNE.

6. “NDP calls SkyTrain big white elephant,” Vancouver Sun, May 4, 1988. Opposition MLA Bob Williams complains about a 3-cents-per-litre gasoline tax to pay for SkyTrain; Finance Minister Mel Couvelier points to how many construction jobs were created and says the project “met all our objectives”.

7. “Transit Studying East Van Link,” Vancouver Courier, April 17, 1991. From a moment in history when Vancouver’s city council and a significant bloc of its citizens were united in resistance to what would become the Millennium Line. To quote a member of HASTE (Homeowners Against SkyTrain Effects): “SkyTrain is a raucous, screeching, horrible machine that has no place in residential neighbourhoods.”

Prophylactic planning: Rapid transit in the era of cost disease.

A couple years back, Slate Star Codex published a widely-discussed article about what the author called “cost disease” – not the disease identified and explained by William Baumol, but a distinct and poorly-understood condition where prices in certain industries rise at a rate much faster than inflation.

This condition is particularly acute in the case of rapid transit infrastructure.

Since Slate Star Codex had limited itself to American data, I wondered whether Canadian rapid transit projects might be suffering from the same ailment. It’s difficult to compare infrastructure costs over time, as no two projects are identical. But looking at projects in Toronto and Vancouver, I found a noticeable upward tick since the 1990s, suggesting the presence of cost disease in Canada.

(Click image for data and sources.)

(To emphasize, these are per-kilometre, inflation-adjusted prices that appear to be rising.)

Accepting that this wasn’t just a mirage created by staring too hard at a limited data set, I went on to argue that we should hurry up and start digging subways now, while it’s only shockingly expensive, instead of putting it off into the future, when it’s likely to be cripplingly so.

(But one could also argue that we’ve already missed our window, and that instead of blowing money on huge infrastructure projects that are unlikely to prove cost-effective, we should invest in a better bus network, or fleets of autonomous cars, or the latest Elon Musk fever dream, or what-have-you.)

For now, let’s assume what I can’t prove: that at least some rapid transit megaprojects are still worth the inflated price. If we want that to continue being true in the future, we need to smarten up the way we plan our rapid transit network.

In my earlier essay I mentioned four factors contributing to the spread of cost disease:

1. In the big cities where rapid transit gets built, land values have been rising at a rate far exceeding inflation, leading to higher property acquisition costs.

(Click image for data and sources.)

2. The accumulation of buildings, pipes, and wires – what I called infrastructure clutter – around potential rapid transit corridors makes construction ever more complicated.

3. We’re more safety-conscious these days, which means we build more slowly, carefully, and expensively than they did in the rough-and-ready 20th century.

4. We’re willing to spend more to protect our natural and architectural heritage from the negative side effects of construction, and to ensure full access for handicapped people.

Since then, other factors have occurred to me:

5. Population growth means there are ever more residents and business owners to object to the inconvenience of construction, the noise of passing trains, lowlife transit riders invading their fancy neighbourhoods, and other blights of public transportation. The internet has made it cheaper and easier for obstructionists to organize and demand pricey compromises.

6. We’ve gradually used up or sold off the most promising rights-of-way that came available in last century’s shift from rail to road as the primary transportation mode, leaving us no choice but to dig tunnels.

7. Related to point 6, for political reasons earlier city planners prioritized easy-(and therefore cheap)-to-build projects, leaving the most challenging (and pricey) pieces of the network to be dealt with by future generations – i.e., us. Look at Toronto, which has spent the last half-century pushing its subway ever further into the lightly-built suburbs, ignoring the pressing need for a new line downtown.

8. Related to points 6 and 7, modern planners may be more choosy than their predecessors about where to place their routes. Vancouver’s original 1986 Expo Line was built on an abandoned rail right-of-way four or five blocks from Kingsway, the busy road it parallels. Thirty years later, many Kingsway commuters continue to take the bus. Compare the current plan to extend the Millennium Line, which disregards the out-of-service rail line a few blocks to the north for a brand-new tunnel directly under Broadway.

Not coincidentally, the per-kilometre cost of the Millennium tunnel is expected to be over five times higher than the Expo Line.

Millennium Line extension (6 stations, 5.5 km.) estimated at $2.57 billion (2018 Canadian dollars), completion date 2025. Source.

Of the above list – which I fear is far from comprehensive – most of the factors are driven by population growth, which means they’ll only get worse.

We could conceivably save money by skimping on factors 3 and 4 – by building more recklessly, noisily, and uglily. As an example, Surrey mayor Doug McCallum has suggested that the proposed Langley extension of the Expo Line could be built more cheaply if crews worked round-the-clock. Maybe so, but I suspect they’d only run up against factor 5: angry opposition from residents living near the construction zone.

This doesn’t mean we’re helpless against cost disease. Since the choices of today’s planners determine where future residents will live, we can predict where demand for transit should grow. And by thinking about why costs go up, we can predict which routes will be most expensive to build in the future and should therefore be prioritized, and which can be affordably postponed.

Some basic principles of cost prophylaxis. All else being equal…

1. Extending existing lines is cheaper than building new ones.

2. Building all in one go is cheaper than building in fits and starts.

3. Building where there’s nothing is cheaper than building where there’s something.

4. Coordinating with other infrastructure projects lowers costs. (Toronto’s 1966 Bloor-Danforth subway saved a bundle thanks to the farsighted inclusion of a lower deck on the Bloor viaduct – fifty years earlier.)

…But as I stated in my earlier post, planners are already well aware of the above strategies. If they fail to implement them, it’s only because it’s difficult: to anticipate which projects future politicians might prioritize; to coordinate between multiple agencies, levels of government, and private entities; to resist political pressure to cut corners and push expenses into the future.

I doubt I can offer any insights that haven’t occurred already to the experts. But I think they might give points 5 and 6 a little more weight:

5. Every project will stir up opposition. But well-off residents, because they rely on transit less, and because they tend to own their homes, have less to gain and more to lose from transit expansion. Their money, education, and well-groomed spokespeople make them more effective obstructionists. Therefore, try to put rapid transit into a neighbourhood before it fills up with yuppies.

6. If you’re hoping to preserve a corridor for future use, you’d be better off building now: to prevent future politicians from selling it off piecemeal; to prevent infrastructure clutter along the route; and to prevent residents from getting emotionally attached to it in its virgin state.

(Here I’m thinking of Vancouver’s Arbutus corridor – the rail line shown on the map above – stretches of which were colonized by gardeners from neighbouring properties during its years of disuse. When the city, after acquiring it last year from CP Rail after much haggling, tried to convert it to a paved bike path, nearby residents protested the despoliation of what they viewed as their private rambling grounds. I can just see the outcry in the future when the city attempts to pursue its vision of running a streetcar down the line…)

Vancouver’s new mayor, Kennedy Stewart, has been advocating for the Millennium Line extension – currently set to terminate at Arbutus Street – to continue down Broadway and West 10th Avenue all the way to UBC.

…Which, don’t get me wrong, would be terrific: I’d use it a lot.

However, looking at it from a cost-prophylactic perspective:

1. The corridor is already densely built-up: infrastructure clutter is therefore unlikely to worsen.

2. The properties for future stations, if they haven’t already, can be acquired now, and held onto until needed. (Astonishingly, if this Daily Hive article is to be believed, as late as March of last year the site of the Millennium Line’s planned Broadway & Granville Street station hadn’t yet been sewn up.)

3. The West Side can’t be any further yuppified. The locals have already secured all the compromises they’re likely to dream up: instead of a noisy elevated train like their poor cousins in East Van, they’re getting a tunnel; and not a cut-and-cover tunnel, like the one that enraged Cambie Street merchants during the construction of the Canada Line a decade back, but a fully bored tunnel.

If the Millennium Line can be extended all the way to UBC in a single go, then it absolutely should: it would be far more cost-effective.

If (as seems likely) it can’t, this corridor presents only a moderate inflationary risk. The UBC extension can affordably be postponed.

Meanwhile, down at the southern end of the Arbutus corridor the homely neighbourhood of Marpole, containing one of the few concentrations of affordable apartments still left within the city’s borders, is seeing a surge of new construction. Would it make sense to move the Arbutus streetcar plan forward, while there are still a few students and working class people living along its route who might benefit from it? [1]

The Arbutus corridor is wide enough that property acquisition costs for future streetcar stops should be minimal. But have they figured out yet how to bridge the 2-kilometre distance between the end of the corridor and Marine Drive station on the Canada Line? That could be an expensive gap to fill.

And if the city is seriously contemplating rapid transit along 41st Avenue, even in the “extremely long term”, they’d better start locking things down now. With the lower-middle-class enclave near Joyce-Collingwood station doomed by encroaching condo towers, and the futuristic “micro city” about to begin construction at Oakridge, 41st Ave. is extremely susceptible to cost disease.

I’d nominate Marine Drive and East Hastings as two other yuppifying streets where rapid transit would make sense, and where the risk of cost disease is acute. I hope to have more to say about the latter corridor in a follow-up post.

[Update, Dec. 25 2019: As promised above, The Hastings SkyTrain alternate reality.]

M.

1. This isn’t an endorsement of the Arbutus streetcar scheme, by the way. To me it seems as misbegotten as the now-abandoned Surrey LRT plan I discussed last month: why spend a bajillion dollars laying rail for “rapid transit” that’s not significantly faster than a bus? You might as well make a bigger up-front investment in a tunnel or elevated tracks and enjoy the benefits of higher speed and driverless operation.

If I’d been benevolent dictator, on the day the Arbutus corridor was acquired I would have turned it into a trench two SkyTrain cars wide, put a roof over it, and left the resultant tunnel until it was needed. Instead, the city elected to fancy up the corridor with walking paths and flowerbeds from one end to the other, guaranteeing an infestation of sign-waving old ladies in sunhats whenever they attempt to alter it.

Planners versus riders: Metro Vancouver transit after the referendum.

So the results are in from Metro Vancouver’s recent mail-in transit referendum. (Technically a plebiscite, but I’m fuzzy on the distinction.)

The issue on the ballot was a proposed 0.5% sales tax hike to help pay for the so-called Mayors’ Plan, a raft of regional transportation improvements. Specifically:

1. A tunneled extension of the Skytrain rapid rail line through the busiest stretch of Vancouver’s Broadway corridor;
2. Two new LRT lines in the fast-growing suburb of Surrey;
3. A replacement for the past-its-expected-lifespan Patullo bridge between New Westminster and Surrey;
4. 11 new “B-Line” high-frequency express bus routes;
5. More trains for Skytrain, more sailings for the Seabus to North Vancouver, more buses, more late-night service – just more transit in general;
6. Improvements to cycle and walking paths throughout the region.

The Mayors’ Plan.

To the surprise of approximately no-one, the Mayors’ Plan was roundly rejected, by majorities ranging from about 51-49% in Vancouver proper up to 75% in the more distant exurbs.

I voted Yes, as the proposal would have benefited me personally: I take transit regularly, and spend very little, so I would have enjoyed the improved service while barely feeling the pain of higher taxes. However, I sympathize with No voters who objected to that extra fraction on their sales tax on top of the already staggering cost of living in the Lower Mainland.

Since voting ended, the federal government has announced a substantial new fund to support large transit infrastructure projects, and both Surrey and Vancouver have pledged to look into this and other means of achieving their respective rail ambitions. Which means a very possible outcome is that in a decade or so we’ll end up with items 1, 2, and 3 from the list above, but none of the small-beer improvements that would actually have made getting around the region more efficient in the short term.

The Mayors’ Plan, big-beer version.

This is a little annoying to me, because although the Broadway subway and Surrey LRT are worthy projects, and the new bridge is probably a necessity, they’re going to suck up all the funds we could have used to make less flashy but far more useful upgrades.

Problem: Rapid transit doesn’t take you to places you want to go.

Transit serves two very different purposes, and it’s easy to forget that they are actually in conflict. The first purpose, the one riders prioritize, is to take you to places you want to go. To your home, your job, your school, a bar, a doctor.

The second purpose is to shape growth – to redirect investment and development to underdeveloped areas – to remake the city. Which is why cities are constantly building rail lines to precisely the places riders don’t want to go. Where there are no homes, no jobs, no schools, no bars, no doctors. Not yet, anyway.

Ideally there should be a balance between serving the first purpose and the second; between the short-term needs of riders, and the long-term goals of city planners. But the planners tend to win out, because they have a pretty strong argument on their side: It’s expensive to build where stuff already is. It’s cheap to build where there’s nothing.

So you wind up with a project like the Skytrain’s Millennium Line, which at the time of its opening in 2002 connected a string of down-at-heels suburban malls and light-industrial zones.

Meanwhile, over a decade later, riders wanting to go to the University of British Columbia, or Stanley Park, or Granville Island, still have to ride the bus.

The two big-ticket transit items in the Mayors’ Plan are a decent balance of short-term and long-term. The Surrey LRT would stop at many a weed-choked lot, but the communities at the extremities of its three arms – Newton, Guildford, and Langley – are already busy, built-up suburban centres. And Vancouver’s Broadway corridor is a thriving business district abutting a dense residential population heavy on renters and students.

The ultimate objective is for the Broadway subway to extend all the way to UBC. Maybe I’ll get to see that before I die, though I wouldn’t bet on it. In the meantime, the plan has the line terminating at Arbutus Street, or not quite halfway.

Millennium line subway down Broadway.

Which means that, barring other improvements, taking transit to school from the middle part of the corridor – say, the intersection of Broadway and Oak – will actually be slightly less convenient than it is at present. Instead of boarding an overcrowded express bus that takes you all the way to UBC, you’ll have to travel a couple subway stops and then transfer to an overcrowded express bus. Much of the time you save from having bypassed a few dozen blocks of traffic will be eaten up in transferring and waiting.

Let’s forget about the rail proposals for a second and consider only the express bus routes – the B-Lines – laid out in the Mayors’ Plan.

The Mayors’ Plan, small-beer only.

Absent the subway, the existing Broadway B-Line would remain in operation, but be supplemented by another one along 41st Avenue, creating a more direct route to UBC for students coming from the south and southeast, and alleviating the ridiculous congestion on Broadway.

Two new routes would head east out of downtown Vancouver, helping to relieve the overcrowded Expo/Millennium Line. Another would lead up through the West End and Stanley Park to the North Shore.

What’s missing is an all-day express route directly linking downtown and UBC via the Burrard Bridge and 4th Avenue West, to take further pressure off the Broadway B-Line. [1]

Proposed B-Lines – with my suggestion (green).

Simon Fraser University, Capilano University, and BCIT would all enjoy all-day express service under the plan. So would Burnaby Heights, Kerrisdale, Hastings Park, Park Royal, White Rock…all places people either already live or might actually want to go.

The initial capital cost for all eleven proposed B-Lines would be a shade under $100 million. On top of that the plan proposes $193 million in “transit priority” upgrades – things like queue-jumper lanes and traffic signal priority for buses. That’s $300 million, total – or about 1/6th of the cost of the Broadway subway.

And unlike the subway, we could be enjoying at least some of these improvements immediately.

Problem: Buses are the worst.

It’s strange, but some folks out in the suburbs aren’t too keen on getting around by bus. Why could this be?

1. Waiting like a schmuck in the rain or in the sun.
2. Time listed in the schedule is only an approximation. Did I miss it? Should I just start walking?
3. Inscrutable notice tacked to bus stop seems to be saying on certain days I have to wait at a different stop two blocks away.
4. Not sure how to use unfamiliar payment system, driver vaguely hostile when I make a mistake.
5. Nowhere to sit. Packed shoulder to shoulder with the plebes, swinging from a strap, broiling in summer heat.
6. Bus stuck in rush hour traffic along with all the idiots in their cars. At least those idiots have air conditioning.
7. Never been on this route before, not sure when to pull the cord.
8. Shouldn’t we be turning here? Am I even on the right bus? [2]

Some of these drawbacks are shared by trains. You’re as likely taking a train to be confused at first by the payment system. You’re as likely to be wedged in between a wheelchair and a sweaty hiker’s backpack (although at least on a train the aisle is wider and the ride smoother). There’s still a chance of getting on the wrong train, though the maps conveniently placed above the doors, and the big signs on the wall when you pull into a station, make it easier to recognize when you’ve made a mistake.

It seems to me the main advantages of taking the train are that your waiting area is sheltered from the elements, your route will be clearly mapped and easy to follow, and – of course – the speed and frequency of service.

City planners, with their emphasis on long-term goals over short-term needs, will say: People hate to take the bus. Let’s build new rail lines and attract those people.

Whereas an emphasis on currently existing riders would say: People hate to take the bus. Let’s make the bus-taking experience better.

Let’s build clearly-marked, well-lit, fully-covered platforms instead of rinkydink shelters. Let’s have an electronic timer counting down the minutes till the next departure. Let’s put the payment system at the entrance to the platform so passengers can board the bus itself more smoothly. Let’s have dedicated bus lanes so those who elect to leave their cars at home actually enjoy a time advantage over drivers of single occupant vehicles. Most importantly, let’s have more and more frequent buses.

The best thing about this strategy is that the cost-savings advantage swings from planners to riders.

If we tripled the $300 million B-Line investments described in the Mayor’s Plan, we could make getting around by bus almost as attractive as taking the train. And it would still cost only half as much as a new rail line. [3]

Specific suggestions for Metro Vancouver in the wake of the plebiscite’s defeat.

I’m not saying let’s not build rail lines. I love rail lines. They’re fast, they move a lot of people, and yes – they attract a lot of new riders to the system. Rail is worth building – when you can afford it.

But if we have to pick and choose which improvements we can afford to make right now, maybe let’s put a little more emphasis on the needs of existing transit riders than the needs of the possible future riders of 2040.

If there are federal infrastructure funds available, instead of blowing them on a couple big rail projects, use them to build platforms and dedicated lanes for express buses. [4] They’re not very glamourous but they’ll get people moving.

Start with the B-Lines proposed in the Mayors’ Plan. Maybe we don’t do all of them right away – I’m not sure we need two separate express buses trundling along Marine Drive in North Vancouver, as the plan proposes. Maybe for now we focus on the most congested corridors.

If there’s a little money left over, get to work on extending the Millennium Line as far as the new Emily Carr University campus scheduled to open in 2017. Then, stop.

Pause to think about whether it’s worthwhile to continue tunneling on down Broadway. Maybe it would make more sense, and be less expensive, to close the gap between the Millennium and Canada Lines by building along 1st Avenue, the old rail corridor, to Olympic Village Station.

Millennium Line extension options.

Maybe a system of east-west express buses down, say, 4th, Broadway, and 41st could do the job of keeping students flowing to and from UBC while relieving congestion on Broadway.

If we choose trains over express buses, I can live with that too. I’m sure I’ll enjoy riding the Broadway subway in 2025 or so. On my not-too-frequent trips out to Guildford, I’ll happily take the LRT.

But when I go to Stanley Park? I’ll drive.

M.

1. My proposed 4th Avenue B-Line would be a slight augmentation of the existing 44 express, which already runs every 10 minutes at peak times on weekdays.

2. Recent technological improvements have made the bus-taking experience significantly better. TransLink has a website that will tell you based on GPS tracking data when your next bus is due to arrive. Smartphones allow you to follow your progress on a map to make sure you’re going where you think you’re going. And the little digital display at the front of the bus showing the next stop makes riding an unfamiliar route much less stressful.

3. To be fair, the ongoing operating costs for the B-Lines would be quite a bit higher. Operating the 11 new proposed routes would cost about $50 million a year, twice as much as the completed Broadway subway.

4. We’ll also need to put aside some money for new off-street parking lots. This is to appease local business owners when we start taking away street parking for bus lanes.