Covering Vancouver.

If I still lived in Saskatchewan, around this time of year I’d be waking up irritable and apprehensive, expecting each morning to discover, when I peeped through the blinds, a blanket of white concealing my car.

In my hometown the snow usually arrives around Halloween and stays on the ground well past Easter. On shady lawns you’ll find patches of sooty snow lingering into May.

Some of my ex-Saskatchewan friends – there are a lot of us out here – tell me they miss winter. A rime-crusted scarf pulled up to just under your eyeballs. A line of ankle-deep footprints guiding you along an unshovelled sidewalk. Fog billowing around you as you stumble through the front door. Numb fingers fumbling with frozen bootlaces. Reddened cheeks defrosting over a mug of hot tea.

Me, I’d be fine if I never saw snow again.

Granted, it snows in Vancouver, too. Sometimes the stuff even sticks around for a month or so. I don’t care for it, but it’s nothing like Saskatchewan. I never wake up apprehensive even on the gloomiest winter mornings.

The perception in the outside world is that winter in the Pacific Northwest means non-stop rain. But that’s not really so. Sure, there will be whole weeks where the sun never peeks through the clouds. But it rarely rains all day long. In the soggy depths of January the clouds will occasionally part, the mercury will climb into the low teens, and for a couple hours it feels like early autumn again. With a light jacket and maybe a toque you can sit comfortably on a bench and read the paper.

You can, at least, if you don’t mind a damp behind. The benches are usually wet from the rain.

***

Since moving out here I’ve noticed a few peculiarities about Vancouver, odd things that seem to go uncommented on by the natives. Like the blinking green lights that identify pedestrian-controlled traffic signals – very distracting to drivers who aren’t used to them. Like the absence of sidewalks in so many swanky neighbourhoods – a frugality that might be justified in an auto-centric place like Saskatoon, and yet in Saskatoon you’ll find every snowy, wind-swept street lined on both sides with sidewalks, as all streets should be.

Another thing that perplexes me about Vancouver is the rarity of sheltered outdoor spaces. I’m talking about canopies, verandas, gazebos, pavilions, and covered patios.

In Saskatchewan such amenities are equally rare – but there they aren’t very useful. During the half of the year it’s warm enough to sit outside, it’s also dry. When the wintry winds sweep down from the Beaufort Sea, a gazebo won’t do much to keep them out.

But here on the balmy coast – well, for instance, here’s Westminster Pier Park, where in summertime I’ll often sit and watch the trains passing back and forth on the SkyBridge. There are dozens of benches arrayed along the riverfront, and on sunny days most of them are occupied.

Image source: Pinterest / BuyRIC.

Notice the wooden pavilion in the foreground, which covers a concession stand and the entrance to the public washrooms. Here’s a better view:

Image source: Pinterest / PWL Partnership.

As you can see, there’s a plexiglass roof suspended from part of the pavilion, which is otherwise open to the sky. The roof shelters an area of a few square metres directly in front of the concession stand on the lower level. It also covers – just barely – one of the two benches on the upper level.

On rainy days this bench is the only spot in the park – and one of a handful of public spaces in all of New Westminster – where you can sit outside while remaining mostly dry.

Of course, on rainy days you’ll usually find this bench already occupied.

***

One of the more encouraging as well as infuriating results of the current pandemic – infuriating because it makes you wonder why we weren’t doing this all along – was the way local city governments expedited the approval of outdoor patios this summer, to allow restaurants to seat customers in the antiseptic open air.

It was great. With the sacrifice of a few parking spots and the placing of a few cheap tables and chairs, businesses were able to partially compensate for the government-ordered slashing of their seating capacity.

But now, just as the long-predicted Second Wave of infections rolls in, those patios have ceased to be of much use. I’d be perfectly happy to button my coat, pull my toque down over my ears, and sit at an outdoor table to sip my Americano – but I’m not going to sit there and get soaked.

I scan the interior for an unoccupied table, but they’re all occupied by hipsters hunched over their laptops who appear to be dug in till closing time. So I skip the coffee and head home.

We’ll see in springtime how many of my favourite coffee shops are still in business. [1]

***

Although I blog now and then about transit issues, I’m really only well acquainted with two big-city transit systems, Vancouver’s and Toronto’s.

I may be biased in comparing them, but my feeling is that Vancouver’s system provides at least equal value for money – which, given the challenges imposed by its geography, is something of a triumph. Vancouver is much less populous than Toronto, much more fragmented by geographic barriers, and much “lumpier” – that is, its population density varies widely, so that many bus routes traverse wide stretches of near-rusticity between one teeming town centre and another.

Vancouver has one great cost-saving advantage, however – its mild weather. Climate has consequently shaped the design of the two systems. In Toronto, for example, when you emerge from the subway you’ll usually find yourself in a big hall enclosed against the elements where you can wait until your bus arrives. In summer it swelters and sometimes stinks, but at least in winter it’s slightly above freezing.

In Vancouver, when you disembark at a suburban SkyTrain station, you’ll descend to an uncovered bus loop, where in summer you can stroll about in the breeze and perhaps take in a view of distant mountains. In winter the mountains are likely to be hidden by the mist. You’ll join a queue of passengers huddled miserably beneath their umbrellas. If you’re lucky there may be a simple plexiglass shelter, wide enough to protect the first dozen or so people in line – fewer, under social-distancing rules. Everyone else gets wet.

Image source: Gerry Kahrmann, Vancouver Sun.

You’d think these stations would have been planned with the comfort of bus passengers in mind. It wouldn’t have been hard to design them with eaved roofs or cantilevered floors to overhang the adjacent waiting areas. Even now, at some stations, by repositioning the bus bays, the queues could be sheltered under the SkyTrain guiderails.

Listen, Vancouver, you’re blessed. You don’t need four walls out here. You only need a roof. The least you can do is supply that.

***

Although I have few regrets about moving here, there are things I don’t like about Vancouver. The cost of housing is absurd. The daffy left-wing political culture gets on my nerves. And of course, not unrelated to the first two points, there are the vagrants staggering about in their hundreds, drunk or strung out or insane, sleeping on sidewalks, pissing in doorfronts, strewing litter, mumbling, shouting, and making life uncomfortable for the rest of us.

It’s hard to tell whom to blame for their predicament. In some cases it’s the vagrants themselves, for making what they knew full well to be terrible choices. In some cases it’s the rest of us, for failing to take action to prevent them from making choices they don’t have the capacity to make.

The daffy left-wing politics, which make it impossible to clamp down on tent cities, open drug use, and petty crime, are no doubt partly to blame for the proliferation of vagrancy. The absurd rents are another huge factor. But the main reason so many people live on the streets here is that they can. You’d have to be very crazy or desperate to attempt to live in a tent in Winnipeg or Prince George in January. In Vancouver it’s a viable option for the merely half-crazed and semi-desperate. Many of the tent city inhabitants claim reasonably enough that they prefer camping to being cooped up in shelters with all their rules, smells, and overcrowding.

I’m pretty sure I know the reason that Vancouver is so stingy with the provision of canopies, verandas, gazebos, pavilions, and covered patios. Every one constitutes an invitation to homeless people. Right now there’s little reason for anyone not waiting for a bus or flogging religious tracts to hang around outside a SkyTrain station. As soon as you put a roof over the bus loop, it becomes a magnet for scary-looking, foul-smelling vagrants whom the transit police will be obliged to spend half their time shooing away, leaving them less time to deal with graver crimes.

That’s my theory, anyway. Given the taboo against speaking ill of the homeless, I doubt any public official would admit that this is the real reason there are so few covered outdoor spaces out here.

Maybe I’m wrong, though, and it’s just that no-one beside me really cares that much about it. Enjoy being wet, Vancouver.

M.

1. I’m pleased to learn that the City of Vancouver will be permitting restaurants and bars to “winterize” their pop-up patios “by adding a cover supported by posts”.

—

I’ve written about the Toronto transit system before, notably last month when I discussed the ever more outlandish cost of building subways, and a couple years back when I recalled a moment of cross-cultural confusion on an overcrowded Toronto bus.

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.”

A SkyTrain historical footnote: The Edmonds-Cariboo extension.

To my handful of regular readers: I apologize for these articles about Vancouver’s SkyTrain that are of very slight interest to local transit nerds, and of no interest at all to anyone else. I promise to return in the future to sexier topics, like the novels of C.P. Snow and illustrations in old editions of Pilgrim’s Progress.

—

While researching last month’s post on unrealized Vancouver rapid transit plans, I became curious about an abandoned plan from the late 1980s / early 1990s to extend the SkyTrain to Burnaby’s Lougheed Mall – not from New Westminster, as eventually happened, but from the vicinity of Edmonds Station.

For instance, this confusing map from a 1989 report draws a thick black line from the then-existing SkyTrain (which isn’t shown) through Burnaby’s Cariboo Heights neighbourhood to a proposed park-and-ride station at the Lougheed Mall, and onward to Coquitlam.

Source: Mainland-Southwest Region 2 Transportation Committee Recommendations, 1989.

This 1991 map from the Vancouver Sun more clearly lays out the two routes then in contention:

Source: Vancouver Sun, Apr. 26, 1991.

To my annoyance, the handful of documents I could find online that referenced the Edmonds-Cariboo route were extremely vague about its alignment, where it would have joined the existing line, where its stations would have been located – were they seriously going to omit a stop at Edmonds & Kingsway? – and why it was eventually abandoned.

In the end I had to schlep around to the UBC, Burnaby, and Vancouver Central libraries to track down the information I needed. As a public service I’m publishing it here to save future researchers the trouble.

***

The original SkyTrain line opened just in time for Expo ’86, hence the name by which it’s known today – the Expo Line.

In the late 1980s work was underway to extend the line across the Fraser River to Surrey from its original terminus in New Westminster. With three of Greater Vancouver’s designated Regional Town Centres linked to the downtown core by rapid transit, the next step was to hook up the fourth, Coquitlam, as visualized in this 1975 map:

Source: The Livable Region 1976/1986, Greater Vancouver Regional District, 1975.

The trouble with this route was that from Coquitlam’s point of view (to quote Burnaby’s Director of Planning, Anthony Parr),

it did not present rapid transit as an attractive means of travel to Downtown Vancouver … because of the need to double back and dog leg via New Westminster. [1]

The Edmonds-Cariboo route would have straightened out the dog-leg, bypassing New Westminster via a shortcut through Burnaby’s Cariboo Heights and Edmonds neighbourhoods, shaving almost ten minutes off a SkyTrain ride from the Lougheed Mall to downtown.

In terms of travel time, here’s how the proposed route would have compared to the network as it was actually built. (Travel times are from TransLink.)

Lougheed Station to Granville Station via:

• Millennium Line (transfer at Commercial-Broadway Station): 26 minutes
• Expo Line (via New Westminster; no transfer): 36 minutes
• Edmonds-Cariboo extension (no transfer): 26 minutes

The downside was that this extension would have run through some quiet suburban neighbourhoods whose residents could be expected to raise a fuss – and they did.

The Edmonds-Cariboo route: 1986

As Anthony Parr put it in a 1986 memo to his boss, Burnaby’s Municipal Manager,

At this stage the … design that we have before us is no more than a conceptual representation – a dotted line on a map.

Parr is referring to BC Transit’s 1986 SkyTrain Extension to Coquitlam Transit Planning Study Summary Report, [1] which evaluated four possible routes connecting the Lougheed Mall and Coquitlam with the existing SkyTrain, as shown in the maps below.

Source: SkyTrain Extension to Coquitlam Transit Planning Study Summary Report, BC Transit, 1986. [1]

Here’s how the authors of that report described the Edmonds-Cariboo option:

[T]his route would leave the existing line just before the Edmonds Station and use the abandoned B.C. Hydro alignment to the old Edmonds Loop.

The old BC Hydro alignment was subsequently turned into a walking path, the Highland Park Line trail. The Edmonds bus loop was at the corner of Edmonds & Kingsway.

Note that in every variation of the Edmonds-Cariboo route, the extension would have bypassed Edmonds Station. The transfer point would have been Royal Oak.

The report continues:

However, the line would encounter residential property even if the old right-of-way were utilized as one condominium development has been built very close to the south side of the R.O.W. and there are now three major high rise apartments on the north side. After crossing Kingsway, the line would follow Edmonds to a station at Canada Way. Since this section is primarily secondary commercial operations with the occasional old residential property, the extension could provide an opportunity to redevelop these properties to screen the Skytrain from nearby residences and to provide off-street parking. Most of the newer structures are adequately set back from the street.

The distance from Royal Oak to the next station at Canada Way would have been about 3.75 kilometres – almost as far as from Burquitlam to Moody Centre on the Millennium Line, the longest gap on today’s SkyTrain system.

Despite this weirdly long gap, there’s no mention of a station at the busy intersection of Edmonds & Kingsway. (This would be addressed in a subsequent report: see next section.) I suppose they were prioritizing speed and cost-whittling in order to make this option competitive with the New Westminster route.

It illustrates the tendency of early SkyTrain planners to avoid putting stations where transit riders might actually want to go, opting instead for brownfield sites where entirely new developments could be built around them…for instance, in a forest next to a freeway interchange (see below)…

After the Canada Way station, the line would continue north-east, enter Robert Burnaby Park at Sixth Street …

(That’s a goof: the western boundary of the park is at Fourth. The elevated guiderails would have loomed over a block of modest single-family homes on Edmonds Street between Sixth and Fourth.)

…and follow a proposed highway alignment through the undeveloped portion of both the park and the George Derby Veterans Affairs Hospital to a station south of the Stormont Interchange on Highway 1. Not only would this Cariboo Station provide a large Park & Ride lot with convenient access to Highway 1, Burnaby has plans for approximately 1500 units of medium density housing in the area.

The Stormont Interchange is Highway 1’s Gaglardi Way exit. I was unaware that there were once plans for a road – the Stormont Connector – that would have slashed across southeast Burnaby from this interchange to New Westminster’s McBride Avenue.

The line would then continue on a relatively high elevated section crossing Cariboo Road, the Brunette River, the Burlington Northern Railway and Highway 1. The route would proceed through a heavily-developed residential area to a station in the vicinity of Lougheed Mall.

The Edmonds-Cariboo route: 1991

Five years later, little progress had been made in advancing beyond the “dotted line on a map” stage.

In the interim, the provincial government had appointed a Coquitlam SkyTrain Route Advisory Committee to evaluate the various corridors, with construction of the first segment to Lougheed Mall slated to begin in mid-1992.

By 1991, as shown in a BC Transit pamphlet from that year called SkyTrain Coquitlam Extension, [2] the Advisory Committee had managed to nix one of the Lougheed Mall-Coquitlam routes. However, an East Broadway / Lougheed Highway option had been tossed into the mix:

Source: SkyTrain Coquitlam Extension, BC Transit, 1991. [2]

(Sometime during the preparation of that pamphlet, an asterisk was added to the specs for the Broadway-Lougheed corridor. The Advisory Committee, it was explained, had rejected the route due to its much higher cost and opposition from Vancouver city council. But the Broadway-Lougheed route wasn’t to be counted out just yet…)

I haven’t been able to locate the report of the Advisory Comittee from which the information in the above pamphlet derives. I did find this Burnaby Now story by Dan Hilborn, from May 1, 1991, describing in some detail three variations of the Edmonds-Cariboo route. [3]

The first option would require the relocation of virtually every business on the south side of Edmonds Street at BC Transit’s expense. Going underground would raise the price by $60 million.

Under the plan, construction would be phased-in and property owners will be given the chance to relocate within blocks of their original location as the guideway is completed.

The second option follows the property line between Edmonds and 19th Avenue, and requires the purchase of 39 homes before reaching Sixth Street. It would allow for a linear park connecting Byrne Creek Ravine, Powerhouse [Park] and a proposed park at the corner of Canada Way and Edmonds.

Either of the two options will require the acquisition of another 16 homes and blocking views at five or eight residences on Edmonds between Sixth Street and the southern end of Robert Burnaby Park. The document does not state which side of the street the guideway will follow.

The third option along a northbound BC Hydro right of way requires no property acquisitions, but comes closer to a neighborhood of new homes around Imperial Street than to the proposed Edmonds Town Centre.

No matter which of three proposals is chosen, two homes and a small industrial property near Powerhouse Park must be purchased. The line will then come within 25 metres of two existing apartment complexes and follow the BC Hydro right of way to Kingsway and Edmonds.

Although a Kingsway Station co-developed with private business is described in the written report, the accompanying maps show the first stop at Canada Way Station.

The 6.7 kilometre Edmonds-Cariboo line will cost an estimated $245 million, carry about 10.6 million passengers annually and take 26 minutes from Lougheed Mall to downtown Vancouver.

If Edmonds is chosen, the alignment will traverse Robert Burnaby Park, wind its way along the Stormont right-of-way to a 1,000-2,000 space park and ride Sky Train Station near Cariboo Road, and follow the #1 Highway and Government Road to Lougheed Mall.

Source: “SkyTrain route debate”, Burnaby Now, May 1, 1991. [3]

So why didn’t it get built?

It was clear early on which way BC Transit and the province were leaning. Premier Bill Vander Zalm and Transportation Minister Rita Johnston – who would succeed Vander Zalm as premier – had both indicated their preference for the Edmonds-Cariboo route.

BC Transit President Mike O’Connor was quoted saying of the Columbia-Brunette corridor, “Technically, it doesn’t look that sound to us.” He went on:

“The most sound route from a technical point of view is the Edmonds corridor. It does more for the transit system as a whole.” [4]

In April of 1991 a leaked memo from Tom Parkinson, project manager of the Coquitlam SkyTrain extension, indicated near-unanimous support by the Advisory Committee for the Edmonds-Lougheed route:

“I am confident of the data – which now points clearly at Edmonds-Cariboo. Port Moody, Coquitlam, and Port Coquitlam have endorsed this choice.

“The New Westminster members of the Coquitlam advisory committee and (former Burnaby mayor Bill) Lewarne say they will do so at the very end, leaving [Burnaby councillor] Doug Drummond as a single no-sayer.”

BC Transit’s O’Connor was obliged to clarify his project manager’s comments:

“The Edmonds alternative – from a ridership, cost-per-ride, distance to downtown – is better. But that doesn’t mean it’s the one that is going to be chosen. There are other reasons to choose. …

“What I think Tom meant to say was that the committee, I think, accepts that technical data that that route has the best technical merit.”

After the leak, which led to the project manager’s removal, a New Westminster member of the Advisory Committee resigned, saying that the technical committee “seemed to be pointing toward a conclusion and didn’t seem to be leaving alternatives.” [5]

There followed a flurry of comments in the local media accusing the provincial government of “skullduggery”, [6] of having “juggled” the cost estimates, [7] of packing the “sham” Advisory Committee with Social Credit party hacks who were “rigging” its deliberations. [8]

When BC Transit went ahead with its promised community engagement, Burnaby Now‘s story emphasized the exasperation of the community:

“Disappointed” was the most common expression from the estimated 500 people who attended two SkyTrain Open Houses held at the Edmonds Community Centre on Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

The surprising absence of all members of the SkyTrain advisory committee, a simple roughed-in map of the ‘Cariboo corridor’ and unanswered technical questions made the forums totally inadequate, said south Burnaby residents interviewed by Burnaby Now. [9]

BC Transit community relations officer Kim Rasberry explains the Broadway-Lougheed SkyTrain corridor route to Toby Louie.
Photo: Paul Clarke, Burnaby Now, May 12, 1991.

Much of this nitpicking, no doubt, was politically motivated. Despite having swapped out scandal-crippled premier Vander Zalm for the comparatively unhated Johnston, after fifteen years in power the Socred government was plumbing new depths of popular disapproval.

Bending to the onslaught of bad press, the government announced an independent review to determine “whether BC Transit data was biased in favour of the Edmonds-Cariboo corridor and why the Lougheed-Broadway proposal was pulled from the government’s terms of reference.” [10]

I could find no mention in the local press of the results of this review. But it didn’t really matter: what killed the Edmonds-Cariboo route was the utter walloping of the Socreds in the general election of fall, 1991.

The incoming New Democratic Party, citing the “massive provincial deficit now estimated at more than $2 billion”, announced that the extension to Lougheed Mall would be put off until “at least 1993” [11] and that the Socred-appointed Coquitlam SkyTrain Route Advisory Committee would be dissolved, later to be replaced by a new group, the Northeast Sector Rapid Transit Committee, whose very name communicated that the menu of options had been expanded yet again. [12]

In opposition the NDP had attacked SkyTrain as a ruinously expensive Socred hobbyhorse. The new committee would give both the Broadway-Lougheed and Hastings corridors a fresh look, but the minister now responsible for BC Transit (and future premier), Glen Clark, was “not impressed with SkyTrain technology” and was “looking closely at commuter rail as a relatively inexpensive and easy-to-implement interim answer”. [13]

Thus the first major transit project undertaken by the new government was the West Coast Express, introduced in 1995: five daily commuter trains each way between Mission and downtown Vancouver. Not exactly the rapid transit solution Coquitlam residents had been promised, but better than nothing.

As for what would eventually become the Millennium Line, it had to endure a half-decade of NDP second-guesses and changes-of-heart between its announcement in 1995 as a street-level LRT linking Coquitlam to Arbutus Street along the Broadway-Lougheed Corridor and its eventual opening in 2002 as a mostly-elevated SkyTrain extension from New Westminster to Commercial Drive.

By that time Glen Clark had been chased from the premier’s office amid a cloud of scandal, just like Vander Zalm a decade before.

***

In the 2020s, as the Millennium Line is extended down West Broadway – finally completing the route promised by the previous NDP government way back in 1995 – I fear we’re going to be confronted with the main shortcoming of the network design we’ve chosen: that it funnels so many commuters into just two overcrowded pipes entering the downtown core.

With this in mind, I can’t help but wonder if it was a mistake back in the ’90s to chuck out the Edmonds-Cariboo corridor.

Arguably, SkyTrain along Edmonds would have rendered the original Millennium Line unnecessary, freeing up money to build rapid transit sooner to Coquitlam, Richmond, and UBC. Maybe by now we’d be discussing adding a third route into downtown via Hastings Street.

I can see why South Burnaby residents objected to SkyTrain screeching through their neighbourhood. But for a fraction of the billion dollars that were eventually spent on the Millennium Line, the more offensive sections of the Edmonds route could have been concealed in tunnels.

However, as a resident of New Westminster for whom a Canada Way stop would come in rather handy, I admit I may be biased.

M.

Files referenced in this post:

1. SkyTrain Extension to Coquitlam

This is a memo dated Oct. 9, 1986, from Anthony L. Parr, Burnaby’s Director of Planning, to the Municipal Manager. It consists of Parr’s summary of the results of a BC Transit study of possible SkyTrain routes to Coquitlam, followed by the following documents:

• BC Transit press release from Oct. 2, 1986: “Transit Study Shows Two Possible SkyTrain Routes to Coquitlam”
• BC Transit report from Sept. 25, 1986: SkyTrain Extension to Coquitlam: Transit Planning Study Summary Report

2. SkyTrain Coquitlam Extension

A 4-page pamphlet published by BC Transit, dated Spring, 1991, discussing an ongoing study to select the optimal route for extending SkyTrain to Lougeed Mall and Coquitlam.

3. SkyTrain route debate

Four SkyTrain-related stories by reporter Dan Hilborn, describing fallout from the Edmonds-Cariboo route controversy, appearing on page 3 of the Burnaby Now newspaper, May 1, 1991.

Other sources:

4. “Transit Link”, Burnaby Now, August 1, 1990.
5. “SkyTrain official steps down over leaked project memo”, Vancouver Sun, April 26, 1991.
6. “Memo cites Edmonds as SkyTrain route”, Burnaby Now, April 24, 1991.
7. “Edmonds financial estimates queried”, Burnaby Now, May 1, 1991.
8. “Leaked memo causes furor”, Burnaby Now, April 28, 1991.
9. “SkyTrain routes debated”, Burnaby Now, May 12, 1991.
10. “Review causes delay”, Burnaby Now, May 12, 1991.
11. “SkyTrain delayed”, Burnaby Now, January 15, 1992.
12. “Fears laid to rest”, Burnaby Now, November 25, 1992.
13. “Clark hot on transit”, Burnaby Now, March 11, 1992.

 

Concrete octopus: Some unrealized Vancouver rapid transit plans.

Here’s a fun artifact from the online archives of the City of Vancouver: a discussion of the Greater Vancouver Area Rapid Transit Study that aired on local cable TV sometime in 1971. [1]

That study recommended a rapid transit system with four arms radiating outward from downtown – or as one of the interview subjects puts it,

Essentially, they’re suggesting that a concrete octopus be superimposed on the City of Vancouver, with the head being located at Georgia and Granville, and the tentacles radiating out from there.

Dr. Julius Kane displays the dreaded concrete octopus.

The speaker, Dr. Julius Kane [2] of UBC’s Institute of Animal Resource Ecology, complains that the proposed system of “spokes leading to a central hub” would make the rest of the region “subservient” to the downtown core – a design he dismisses as “Victorian”. He goes on in increasingly apocalyptic terms:

It’s really hard to see why the planners want to repeat all the mistakes of Chicago, New York, and all other centres of this type, when they could draw upon the experiences of the decay that have been taking place in so many urban regions. … They’re going to contribute towards ultimate decay and the ultimate ruin of everything that makes Vancouver a pleasant or a desirable place to live.

Few urbanists today would think to blame rapid transit, of all things, for the decay that afflicted big U.S. cities in the early 1970s. The slur “concrete octopus” was usually used by citizens opposed to freeway projects, like the one that Vancouver (uniquely among big North American cities) had recently kiboshed.

However, Dr. Kane’s jeremiad anticipates complaints still being made about Vancouver’s SkyTrain system a half century later – that, just like the freeways it was meant to render unnecessary, it’s an ugly, overpriced monstrosity that chokes the life out of every neighbourhood unlucky enough to be embraced in its ever-extending tentacles.

Dr. Kane outlines instead a plan for tripling existing bus service, with modest infrastructure investments (bus-only lanes, overpasses, and tunnels) to make that service more efficient. In essence, he’s describing something like the BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) system I’ve plumped for more than once on these pages.

More radically, he proposes doing away with fares, not only to help out poor folks but to make trips faster for everyone by permitting quick all-door boarding. (BRT presumes stations with faregates for the same purpose.) He figures this could all be paid for out of the dividends from investing the $300-400 million intended for a light rail system into treasury bills instead.

What I find interesting about the “concrete octopus” decried by Dr. Kane is how intuitive a design it is, compared to the one that was eventually settled on. The planners behind that 1970 study simply replicated Vancouver’s existing road network, running rapid transit lines on or near the four provincial highways entering the downtown core:

• South via the Arbutus rail corridor, parallel to Granville Street / Highway 99
• Southeast via the old interurban line, parallel to Kingsway / Highway 1A
• East along Hastings Street / Highway 7A [3]
• North on a new Burrard Inlet crossing parallel to the Lion’s Gate Bridge / Highway 99

I recently spent some off-hours at the downtown library, looking at (and taking low-quality iPhone pictures of) the variety of rapid transit schemes proposed for Vancouver from the 1950s through the 1990s. I was curious to learn when, exactly, the two missing arms of the octopus – the Hastings arm and the North Shore arm – had been lopped off.

***

Prior to the late 1960s, it was assumed that any rapid transit network would be integrated into the freeway system planners were then keen to impose on the city. Here’s a lovely image from the 1958-59 Study on Highway Planning depicting the mid-century ideal of transportation efficiency. We’re looking east toward Burnaby Mountain, with downtown on the left:

“A portion of the recommended freeway network.”
Source: A Study on Highway Planning, Pt. II: Freeways With Rapid Transit, Technical Committee For Metropolitan Highway Planning, 1958-59.

The authors of that report proposed an express bus network running on or alongside the freeway, perhaps dipping into a tunnel underneath the city centre. Here, a designated bus lane zooms transit riders above freeway traffic:

Gazing ahead to the far-off year 1976, the authors projected the busiest route in their freeway bus network to be the one due east of downtown – along Hastings Street.

A few years later, the BC Research Council contemplated a light rail line running down the median of the freeway which it was assumed would soon be built to connect downtown with Highway 1. The alignment of that freeway (which would have flattened thirty or so linear blocks of Vancouver’s east side) would have been between Adanac and Venables Streets – about four blocks south of Hastings.

Source: Rail Rapid Transit For Metropolitan Vancouver, BC Research Council, 1962. (Discussed here.)

By the late 1960s, planners had grokked that while it might be cost-efficient to slap a rapid transit line down the middle of a newly-built freeway, since hardly anyone lived by the freeway, ridership would always be limited.

A 1968 study reverted to locating rapid transit along routes where people actually lived and worked: east along Hastings and south towards Richmond, with “possible future transit corridors” stretching north, southeast, and – a new wrinkle – along West Broadway toward UBC.

Source: An Appraisal for the City of Vancouver of Transportation Systems and Routes Connecting Brockton Point Crossing to Provincial highways 401 and 499, N.D. Lea and Associates, 1968. [4]

The 1970 “concrete octopus” report reshuffled the priorities. Of the four routes recommended by the authors, the Kingsway and Arbutus lines were deemed the best value. A Hastings Street line, while it would attract the second-highest ridership at then-current levels of demand, was deemed to have only “poor to good” potential for future growth.

Present potential passenger loads, AM peak hour inbound.
Source: Report on the Greater Vancouver Area Rapid Transit Study, Deleuw Cather & Company, 1970.

The North Shore route – which was to be integrated into a premised third Burrard Inlet crossing near Brockton Point – had an even weaker growth forecast. Its main selling point was that without it a fourth crossing would soon become necessary. (A half century later, we’re scraping by – barely – with two.)

After the various Brockton Point bridge and tunnel plans petered away in the early seventies, a fixed transit link across Burrard Inlet was never again seriously considered. The SeaBus ferry was instead introduced in 1977 to connect downtown with the North Shore.

***

As the seventies arrived, megalomaniacal neighbourhood-razing schemes were falling out of vogue. Notice that this map from a 1972 study still has its rapid transit lines terminating at “Project 200” – a massive waterfront redevelopment proposal then in its death throes.

Source: A Preliminary Study of Light Rapid Transit in Vancouver, GVRD, 1972.

Apart from that detail, it’s a fairly modest, mostly surface-level LRT proposal with two branches, one parallel to Kingsway on an alignment very close to our Expo Line, the other to Richmond via the Arbutus corridor.

A couple years later, the Richmond route was bounced temporarily out of the picture, as the Greater Vancouver Regional District began to concentrate on using rapid transit to juice the growth of Regional Town Centres in the suburbs to the east. Here we can see the shape of today’s SkyTrain starting to emerge…

Source: The Livable Region 1976/1986, GVRD, 1975.

The GVRD’s 1978’s Rapid Transit Project expanded the menu again. It didn’t look at West Broadway or the North Shore, but it did evaluate a route through central Burnaby – similar to our Millennium Line – which it tossed out as low value. Hastings Street was again examined and rejected: the route as far as Boundary Road would be heavily used, but beyond that the number of potential riders fell off dramatically.

Potential rapid transit ridership – peak loads in the mid-1980s.
Source: The Rapid Transit Project Report, GVRD, 1979.

Although passenger volumes between New Westminster and Coquitlam were even more minuscule, Coquitlam’s designation as a Regional Town Centre made this route the third priority, after the Kingsway and Richmond lines.

Soon work began on the original SkyTrain – what we now call the Expo Line – which on its opening in 1985 reached as far as New Westminster. Over the next few years it was extended across the Fraser River to Surrey, connecting downtown with three of the four Regional Town Centres identified in the 1970s as priority transit destinations.

In the late 1980s, as the Expo Line closed in on its southeastern terminus and planners and politicians squabbled about what should come next, the Vancouver Province published a map showing five routes then under consideration: four variations of the promised branch line to Coquitlam and – just to keep things interesting – an extension down Hastings to the PNE.

Source: Vancouver Province. (Colour highlights added.)
Update, May 19 2019: For more on the rejected Edmonds-Lougheed extension (orange on map) see “A SkyTrain Historical Footnote”.

This was something less than a serious plan but something more than the idle scribbling of a bored graphic artist. In a 1990 interview, BC Transit president Mike O’Connor discussed resuscitating not only the Hastings route but a dedicated Burrard Inlet crossing, and added a few brand-new far-fetched ideas:

BC Transit is studying SkyTrain extensions – including a tunnel under Burrard Inlet – that could revolutionize transportation in the Lower Mainland.

The studies are being spurred by SkyTrain’s spectacular passenger growth, BC Transit president Mike O’Connor told The Sunday Province.

The only way to avoid an impossibly clogged service is to build new lines, he said.

“We have to be very careful that we don’t overload that first rapid-transit line.”

Without further extensions, he said, the system will reach capacity within 10 years – and put the big squeeze on commuters.

O’Connor said BC Transit is investigating:

• A new SkyTrain line to the Pacific National Exhibition from downtown Vancouver, along either the waterfront or Hastings Street.
• A new line from the PNE to Coquitlam Centre, either along Burrard Inlet or south of Burnaby Mountain.
• A North Shore SkyTrain system and tunnel under Burrard Inlet to Vancouver.
• A north-south SkyTrain line – or fast-bus route – along Boundary Road from the PNE to the north arm of the Fraser River.

BC Transit estimates the cost of new lines and equipment at $40 million per kilometre. [5]

The defeat of BC’s scandal-plagued Social Credit government in 1991 put a stop to such speculations. The newly-elected NDP had, while in opposition, hammered SkyTrain as a Socred vanity project. Their intention was to swap elephantine transit megaprojects for quick and gritty pack-mule solutions, such as negotiating with railways to run limited-service commuter trains. These efforts led a few years later to the introduction of the West Coast Express, operating ten trains a day on CPR tracks between Mission and downtown Vancouver, and technically sort-of fulfilling the outgoing government’s promise of rapid transit to Coquitlam by 1995.

That same year, the provincial government announced their plan for an all-new, modestly-priced, street-level light rail line connecting Vancouver to Coquitlam via the Broadway-Lougheed corridor.

Source: “Review of Rapid Transit Project Claims”, Alan Greer, 1999.

The tortuous evolution of this line, which was eventually built with SkyTrain technology and truncated to a scenic tour of the shopping malls of central Burnaby, has been ably related by Daryl de la Cruz, so I’ll let him carry on the history lesson.

***

Richmond was added to the network with the opening of the Canada Line in 2009. Coquitlam had to wait for the extension of the Millennium Line in 2016. If current plans hold, by the mid-2020s SkyTrain will run along West Broadway as far as Arbutus Street and down Fraser Highway to some yet-to-be-determined point in the direction of Langley.

And beyond that? With recent grumblings from North Shore politicians about their traffic woes and overburdened bridges, might the northern arm of the concrete octopus someday sprout anew?

M.

1. This video was produced by the Simon Fraser Video Workshop, an extracurricular club at Simon Fraser University in the early 1970s.

2. Dr. Kane – who, it should be mentioned, was no more an expert on transportation than I am – is best known for having a species of toenail fungus named after him, and for being fired by UBC in 1983 for “improper use of the university computer and for using a research grant for private purpose”.

3. The Highway 1A and 7A designations for Kingsway and Hastings Street, respectively, have been officially retired from use, which came as news to me – they’re still prominently shown on Google Maps.

4. While most of the blurry photos on this page were taken from the original documents, I found this map of the 1968 freeway and rapid transit plan in Derek Hayes’ Historical Atlas of Vancouver and the Lower Fraser Valley.

5. “Transit System Plans On Track”, Vancouver Province, March 11, 1990.

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.

Surrey’s reluctant rapid transit lab rats.

I have mixed feelings about the decision by Surrey’s new mayor and council to scrap the city’s planned light rail project.

The old plan was for an all-new $3.5 billion surface-level light rail network connecting downtown Surrey with Guildford, Newton, and Langley. $1.65 billion of funding was already secured for the Guildford-Newton section of the route, bids were being taken, and pre-construction was underway.

The new plan is to take the $1.65 billion and apply it instead to a continuation of the elevated SkyTrain from downtown Surrey to Langley. Beyond that it’s sort of fuzzy.

On the one hand, I agree with incoming mayor Doug McCallum and the majority of Surrey voters that the light rail proposal was a dud. At vast cost it would have done nothing to improve travel time between the four centres that couldn’t be achieved far more cheaply with designated bus lanes and traffic signal priority.

This isn’t merely the opinion of some random internet chucklehead: Metro Vancouver’s regional transit authority, TransLink, arrived at the same conclusion back in 2012 when it studied a variety of Surrey rapid transit scenarios.

From TransLink’s Surrey Rapid Transit Alternatives Analysis, archived at skytrainforsurrey.org. (Graph has been modified to highlight relevant columns.)

Comparing the “LRT1” option (the now-rejected light rail plan) with “RRT1A” (SkyTrain to Langley, plus Bus Rapid Transit on the King George-104th Avenue corridor), the latter was rated as superior in the categories of “Transportation” and “Financial”.

Surrey’s outgoing councillors apparently had other priorities than speed, capacity, and return-on-investment. As they saw it, a light rail network could be built more cheaply than SkyTrain, bringing slightly-more-rapid transit to more neighbourhoods more quickly.

I get the sense, reading some of the arguments against SkyTrain, that they’re being made by people who either never take transit, or if they do, aren’t in much of a hurry to actually get where they’re going.

For example, some Surrey boosters perversely make it a demerit against SkyTrain that commuters would be able to ride all the way from Langley to downtown Vancouver without changing trains. As they see it, a forced transfer at Surrey Central Station would discourage some riders from travelling onward, keeping their business in Surrey.

But the main anti-SkyTrain argument was summarized in that TransLink study, where the light rail option won out in the “Social & Community” and “Urban Development” categories.

What it boils down to is the widely held perception that SkyTrain’s elevated guiderails are a “blight on the urban landscape”.

I have a hard time imagining how guiderails could make Surrey’s mile upon mile of strip malls and low-slung office buildings any uglier. But thanks to the Photoshopping skills of the Fleetwood Business Improvement Association, I don’t have to imagine:

Fraser Highway and 160th Street, Surrey, with superimposed SkyTrain station.

Fraser Highway in Surrey, with superimposed SkyTrain guiderails.

Grim indeed! But it doesn’t really conform to my experience of Vancouver’s SkyTrain-centred suburbs, which I find quite congenial:

Beresford Street near Patterson Station, Burnaby. From Google Street View.

Rumble Street near Edmonds Station, Burnaby. From Google Street View.

For some people high-rises and raw concrete are the workings of Mordor, to be opposed without compromise. I sympathize with their quaint tastes but also wonder why they go on living in a big city. To me the guiderails, footpaths, and glass towers give these neighbourhoods an endearingly retro-futuristic look:

Pinestreet Way near LaFarge Lake Station, Coquitlam. From Google Street View.

Boundary Road near Joyce Station, Vancouver. From Google Street View.

The writer of the Georgia Straight op-ed linked above points to Lougheed Highway in Burnaby and No. 3 Road in Richmond as exemplars of ugliness. But they’re really not that bad…and most of the ugliness is a hangover from the decades of auto-centred sprawl that rapid transit is meant to curb:

Lougheed Highway near Gilmore Station, Burnaby. From Google Street View.

No. 3 Road near Richmond-Brighouse Station, Richmond. From Google Street View.

I guess the deposed council had a different vision in mind for Surrey. Who knows, maybe it would have been great: as a non-Surreyite, I was keeping an open mind.

Since I rarely travel south of the Fraser River, King George Boulevard would have been a handy spot to experiment with a form of rapid transit that hadn’t been tried in Metro Vancouver. If light rail were successful there, it might have opened up new possibilities for expanding the network in other parts of the region.

And if, as I anticipated, it flopped, it wouldn’t inconvenience me that much.

Despite overblown warnings that killing light rail would mean losing the $1.65 billion designated for the first phase of the project and returning to square one in the planning process, the various levels of government seem to be on board with reallocating the money to SkyTrain. But it’s not clear yet how much SkyTrain can be built with $1.65 billion.

Assuming the whole $3.5 billion intended for both phases is still available for Surrey’s rapid transit plans (no-one knows yet where the remaining $1.9 billion will come from), how much will be left after the Langley SkyTrain extension?

Mayor McCallum claims that the SkyTrain cost estimates have been inflated, and that it can be built for the same price as light rail. In which case the Guildford-Newton section could be done using SkyTrain as well. But that’s almost certainly balderdash.

The SkyTrain For Surrey campaign, which steadfastly opposed the light rail plan in the days when resistance appeared futile, has been pushing for both components of the RRT1A option from that TransLink study: SkyTrain to Langley, plus Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) from Guildford all the way to White Rock.

BRT is a step up from a mere express bus route. It refers to a combination of designated bus lanes, traffic signal priority, and fare-gated stations with raised platforms for quick all-door boarding. A BRT route can’t carry as many passengers as light rail, but it’s way more flexible to build and operate:

• It doesn’t require specially trained drivers. Its buses can be operated by anyone from the regular pool of drivers.
• It doesn’t require its own operations and maintenance centre. The buses can be serviced along with the rest of the fleet.
• It doesn’t need to be constructed all at once. Buses can easily switch back and forth from designated bus lanes to regular traffic lanes. (Also, unlike trains, buses can steer around accidents and obstructions.)

It would be great to have SkyTrain lines extending all over the region, but sadly SkyTrain costs a fortune to build, and it’s not getting any cheaper.

Light rail is more affordable, and offers a smooth and comfortable ride, but the speed advantage over an express bus isn’t enough to make the upgrade worthwhile.

BRT seems like a good compromise on routes where SkyTrain is unrealistic. At a moderate cost it offers moderate capacity, moderate speed – and maximum flexibility.

Or maybe I’m wrong. At any rate, I’d like to see BRT tried out somewhere in Metro Vancouver – ideally, somewhere out of the way, like Surrey, where I won’t be affected if it turns out to be a flop.

M.

—

In the wake of Metro Vancouver’s 2015 transit referendum I made the case for spending more on buses and less on pricey rail projects. A couple years later, worrying that “cost disease” would soon make rail projects unaffordable, I said: hmm, on second thought, better start building them now. More recently I argued that the character of Vancouver’s low-density, family-friendly neighbourhoods could best be preserved by stacking singles and seniors in high-rise clusters.

Sooner or later: Cost disease and Canadian transit.

Back in 2015, in the wake of Metro Vancouver’s failed referendum campaign for a 0.5% sales tax to fund an ambitious list of regional transit upgrades, I argued that the big-ticket items on the list should be scaled back or postponed while we focussed our limited dollars on improving bus service. Subways and LRTs are great, I said, but a couple big rail projects will eat up all the money we could instead use to make the whole network faster, less crowded, and more enticing to commuters.

I still think my argument makes sense. I occasionally take the bus during rush hour, and I seethe at being stuck behind lines of idling cars when I can see how a simple bypass lane, costing a paltry few million bucks, would save thousands of straphangers five or ten minutes out of their commute each way, every day. Many roads wouldn’t even have to be widened – simply sacrificing a few on-street parking spots would do the trick. There must be dozens of such chokepoints around the region, and they could all be unchoked for a fraction of the cost of putting a subway down Broadway. Though I’d like us to build the subway too.

But a post last month on Slate Star Codex – Scott Alexander’s estimable blog, to which I lately find myself linking with unseemly frequency (see here and here) – makes me wonder if my sensible, fiscally-prudent argument was in fact completely wrong.

Alexander discusses something called Baumol’s cost disease, a phenomenon in economics where increasing efficiency in one industry counterintuitively leads to increasing costs in an entirely unrelated industry.

Suppose new manufacturing methods save an auto plant part of the cost of building a car. Profits rise, allowing the company to boost its workers’ wages by a couple bucks an hour. Meanwhile the meat processing facility across town hasn’t seen any improvement in productivity, but if they don’t offer an equivalent wage hike they’ll lose their best workers to the auto plant. They pass the higher costs along to their customers, and suddenly the price of meat goes up because the cost of manufacturing cars has gone down.

That’s Baumol’s version of cost disease, anyway. Alexander wonders whether it’s a sufficient explanation for the perpetually increasing costs in four different sectors of the U.S. economy – education, health care, housing, and public transportation infrastructure. Even after adjusting for inflation, costs in these four sectors have gone up in my lifetime by factors of two, five, even ten, without commensurate improvements in outcomes. Life expectancy is flat. University grads are as semiliterate as ever. Apartments aren’t appreciably nicer. And subway tunnels are pretty much the same as the ones our forefathers dug for a fraction of the cost.

Alexander is American, and in his brief section addressing ever-pricier subway construction he restricts himself to American data. In fact one of the questions he asks is why the U.S. seems to be more susceptible to cost disease than other countries. So my first question was – does this disease afflict Canadian public transportation infrastructure as well?

Let’s look at the costs – adjusted for inflation – for a half-century’s worth of rapid transit projects in the two big cities I know reasonably well, Vancouver and Toronto:

(Click on images for data and sources.)

Some caveats and observations:

• With so few data points to work with, the trendlines are susceptible to being skewed by one or two pricey outliers, like Toronto’s bonkers Line 1 extension to Vaughan.
• Reported final costs are questionable, since governments tend to find ways to obscure overruns. Vancouver’s 2016 Evergreen extension, for instance, is known to have blown past its budget, but we’ve been assured that the unanticipated costs will be eaten by the contractor. The true cost, therefore, is higher than the figure shown.
• The graphs are to the same scale, but the cities’ rapid transit systems shouldn’t be compared directly since they use totally different technologies. Vancouver’s light, high-frequency, mostly-elevated SkyTrain permits smaller stations and (for the 20% or so of the system that’s underground) narrower, cheaper-to-build tunnels than Toronto’s heavy-rail subway. (I’ve left Toronto’s SkyTrain-like Scarborough RT and under-construction Eglinton light-rail project out of the analysis for this reason.)
• Even within each city, these aren’t apples-to-apples. In the Toronto graph there are visible discontinuities between the early cut-and-cover subways in the city core, with stops every 500-600 metres and relatively low per-station costs; the 1970s extensions into suburbia, often at surface level and with fewer, more widely-spaced stops; and more recent bored tunnels where the costs shoot into the stratosphere.

In any case, both graphs show a discernible upward tick since the 1990s or so, suggesting that cost disease may indeed have spread to Canada. But if so, what are the causes?

The libertarianish Megan McArdle waves away Alexander’s data on the rising cost of subways as merely “union featherbedding combined with increasingly dysfunctional procurement and regulatory processes”. Maybe those are worsening the problem – I don’t know enough to comment – but off the top of my head I can think of four other possible contributing factors:

1. The cost of land acquisition goes up at a rate faster than inflation (because they keep making people but they aren’t making more land).

2. The ground beneath and alongside city streets is ever more crowded with pipes, cables, parking structures, and so on, which must either be relocated or awkwardly worked around.

3. An increased emphasis on worker and bystander safety slows and complicates construction. (Some of this probably falls under the definition of “union featherbedding” as mentioned by McArdle.)

4. Projects now include the expenses of mitigating environmental damage, preserving historic neighbourhoods, averting noise pollution, accommodating the handicapped – all that touchy-feely stuff previous generations didn’t give a rip about.

Doubtless there are other causes I haven’t thought of, but I’ll stop at those four because they pair off neatly into two groups I’d like to examine a little more closely. When you think about it, all four are side effects of growing wealth:

• Causes 1 and 2 – the rising cost of land and the build-up of clutter along possible transit routes – accelerate as a city becomes more populous and its taxpayers demand more and better services.
• Causes 3 and 4 – worker safety and the mitigation of environmental and social externalities – might be thought of as perks, which previous generations were willing to forego in their pursuit of progress but which we in our prosperity don’t mind splashing out on.

I think the “perk factor” actually explains much of the cost disease in the sectors Alexander identifies. As we’ve grown wealthier we’re willing to spend more on things that are orthogonal to the actual missions of health care, education, housing, and public transportation – things like prioritizing the physical and mental well-being of our workforces, or ensuring that their gender and ethnic compositions are representative of the wider population. These perks require added layers of administration that do nothing to improve the outcomes we’re attempting to measure. Those layers aren’t failing – they’re doing what they’re meant to do – but those things aren’t captured in graphs like the ones in this post.

As a taxpayer I suspect we could afford to do without much of this extra padding. But I don’t want construction workers risking their necks, or rivers recklessly diverted, or noisy trains rattling people’s cupboards, just to save a few bucks. I know next to nothing about health care or university administration or housing construction, but I suppose the people who are familiar with those matters have equally strong objections to cutting what may strike me as frivolous perks.

In any case, sticking to transit infrastructure, there’s no reason to suppose we’re likely to care less about safety, or the environment, or architectural heritage in the future. In fact those concerns will almost certainly grow, making construction ever less affordable.

To return to causes 1 and 2 – land costs and infrastructure clutter – it should be possible to mitigate cost disease through better planning – say, through more farsighted property acquisition, and coordinating with other agencies to ensure that future transit corridors aren’t obstructed. But I assume we’re already trying to do those things, and my suggestion of “Okay, well, just do them better” is not too helpful.

Sooner, or later?

One way to avert cost disease might be by preemptive surgery – building rapid transit today, at today’s comparatively reasonable prices, in anticipation of tomorrow’s needs. Metro Vancouver’s overall outline is pretty well established by geographic barriers like mountains and rivers, and more recently by the imposition of an urban containment boundary meant to preserve nearby farmland.

Source: Metro Vancouver. (Click for original.)

Therefore we can assume that the Vancouver of the future will be much the same shape as the Vancouver of today, only a lot denser. We should be able to predict with fair accuracy where future demand for transit will lie, and build in anticipation of that demand.

However, of the four causes of cost disease mentioned above, preemptive surgery really only targets the first one – rising land costs. It sidesteps the cost of infrastructure clutter only by transferring that cost to future generations who will have to spend more to build around the clutter we create today. And while it might seem thrifty to thwart the next generation’s opportunity to waste money on what we consider silly perks – by using construction methods that they’ll see as barbarously unsafe, maybe, or by bulldozing some architectural monstrosity before it’s declared a heritage monument – who are we to say what the future’s priorities should be?

I’m grateful for much of the infrastructure earlier generations of headstrong builders bequeathed me, but I wish they’d been more cautious about what they smashed in the process – like the whole blocks of Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood destroyed in the sixties to make room for the Georgia viaducts, which planners are now preparing to remove. Building preemptively means we risk building unnecessarily, as the future evolves new habits of getting around that we can’t anticipate.

Still, being made aware of cost disease has tipped me in favour of building rapid transit now, while it’s still barely affordable, rather than putting it off as demand grows and grows. Spending sooner rather than later may actually be the sensible, fiscally-prudent thing to do.

M.

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.