Finally they are moving ahead with Evergreen. This is great news!

The whole RFQ can be found here [1].

Wood will be a prominent design feature of the stations. Stations themselves will aim to blend into the neighbourhood, unlike say, Brentwood.

“Wood will certainly be a feature in the architecture, according to Dave Duncan, project manager for the Burnaby-to-Coquitlam line.

“B.C. has a ‘wood-first’ policy and, where practical and appropriate, we should incorporate wood into the design,” he said.

That could mean distinctive wood ceilings, as in some stations along the Canada Line. But Duncan said there won’t be any grand architectural statements in stations along the route — like there are along the Millennium Line — because the feedback from open houses indicated Tri-City residents wanted the stations to blend in with the surrounding community, he said.” [2]

Larry Blain is talking through his hat, TransLink does not have the money to build, not to operate a SkyTrain Evergreen line.

P-3 transit projects are in a shambles and the once much praised P-3 is now discredited.

What the Evergreen line is and has been (it has been promised since 1990) is a testament to 1950’s transit thinking.

Outside Vancouver, TransLink’s/Vancouver’s fascination with SkyTrain light-metro (the Canada line is a truncated heavy-rail metro and not compatible with SkyTrain) is puzzling.

Gerald Fox, an American transit and transportation expert roasted TransLink’s business case for a SkyTrain Evergreen Line.

http://railforthevalley.wordpress.com/2008/12/26/can-translinks-business-cases-be-trusted/

Despite the now over $8 billion ($10 billion counting the Evergreen line) there has been no noticeable modal shift from car to transit, as well a recent study has shown that gas consumption has increased dramatically in the region – hardly signs of a success.

But there is a storm brewing ‘South of the Fraser’ where South Fraser taxpayers are sick and tired funding ‘North of the Fraser’ transit projects, especially very expensive SkyTrain projects.

Already those living South of the Fraser know that for the cost of the Evergreen line, the region could build a deluxe Vancouver to Chilliwack TramTrain service and a deluxe Vancouver to Maple Ridge TramTrain service.

The Evergreen line maybe the straw that breaks the camels back, splitting TransLink into two entities ;North Fraser/South Fraser, those living in the SkyTrain ‘North’ of the Fraser River, may see a doubling or trebling of their TransLink tax on their property tax notices!

The HST debacle is a good indication that the public are ed up being dictated to by government, especially taxpayers who see little benefit being with TransLink.

What SkyTrain has been is a make work project for many people in TransLink who would otherwise find it very difficult to get a job in the real world – very few cities have built with SkyTrain and even fewer follow the light-metro philosophy.

The Evergreen Line is a good political promise that has grown very ‘long in the tooth’ of late and shows the desperation Mr. Campbell and his Liberal government are in, by trundling out the Evergreen line rhetoric, way before an election.

Funny how light-metro and SkyTrain were made obsolete by light-rail, isn’t it. Light rail actually has a longer lifespan than light-metro.

As for trams being slow, maybe, but not LRT, which is a tram operating on a reserved rights-of-way. Any transit system is as slow as it is designed to be.

Skytrain yay! Maybe it is my champagne tastes but I can’t see light rail catching on.
On the days that I don’t bike, I take Skytrain. Buses are horribly uncomfortable because they stop/start and the heat and airlessness makes my gorge rise.
I’ve done a bit of tram riding in different cities and I agree that the way to go would be to have separate rights of way, as in Ottawa. But where is that space going to come from? You think it costs billions to make a Skytrain — I think it would cost billions plus billions to make new dedicated roads out of the space currently allotted to streets, buildings, etc.

By the simple fact that Vancouver real estate is significantly more expensive than say in Delta, that Vancouver parking fee have nothing in common with the Delta one….
The Vancouver taxpayer pay already many times more translink tax than say someone in Delta.

But furthermore, because the farebox recovery cost of Vancouver transit route are in the vicinity of breaking even if not even making a benefit what is far to be the case in say Delta, The Vancouver translink tax are basically funneled out of the city to support transit in other area of the region, say Delta.

As teach us Lenin, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth” , so sometimes it is important to bring some reality check, and it is maybe the reason why cities like Langley or Delta don’t even think to secede of Translink in despite of all the disingenuous information by some people arguing for more transit in their backyard already receiving more than their share in road investment, this to the expense of other…

Zweisystem, could you please provide some evidence to back up this assertion: “Funny how light-metro and SkyTrain were made obsolete by light-rail, isn’t it.”?

“Voony, I think that your analysis suggests that it is Vancouver that beaks away from Translink and runs their own metro”

yes, you could think like it, like Vancouver could break away of BC, Toronto of Canada …or on same account Germany from European Union.

but it doesn’t happen like it, because eventually people there have some sense “collective sense”.

on your assessment of “skytrain technology”,
according your point 2: “Skytrain stations are few and far between.[…] negates any speed advantages”: by this account High speed train, like french TGV (basically fewer and farther between stop than “classic” train) is an “obsolete technology”…

Voony, are we going to run TGV between Lougheed Mall and Coquitlam Centre?

@Lewis, you mention some good benefits of LRT over skytrain, however driverless metro has a huge benefit when it comes to ridership, and that’s frequency of service. Translink wouldn’t run an LRT service any more frequent than the existing 97 B Line service, whereas skytrain can and does run very frequent service right from the start of the day until after midnight. Frequency of service is a huge factor when calculating the total trip time, which includes time spent waiting at a platform for a train to come. It’s also a huge determining factor when it comes to whether people choose to use the service, as you don’t need a schedule for frequent service and it makes travelling on a whim via transit truly possible.

Yes, there will be fewer stations, but by far most of the ridership on the line will be at the stations that skytrain accepts. Having a station at Cameron and North Road, just four blocks from the existing Lougheed station as the original LRT plan included, is hardly going to increase ridership on a rapid transit line. It will really just slow it down.

And while unfortunately cities have kept street capacity the same after the canada line, they could easily remove lanes of traffic to improve the pedestrian realm, and they really should. I don’t think taking a lane of traffic away from cars should be a reason for choosing a technology when that can be done anyway, and this time improve the pedestrian or biking experience.

And while I am not excited about the impact of skytrain on North Road (it ought to run down an alley or side street as it does near Commercial drive, for instance. At the very least it should run along the side of North Road, not in the median), I don’t think Port Moody will be negatively impacted as the train line will run along existing railway right of ways. It’ll fit in quite fine there.

Tessa, you and I and a friend or two, should spend 20 minutes on Clarke Street—Port Moody, near the Legion with tape measures in hand—then, you would agree with me that the Skytrain implementation in Port Moody is going to be a DIS-aster!

Never mind that… LRT on St. Johns could be part of a strategy to create a great street of what is today a highway that kills. Full stop.

We have to plan transportation and neighbourhood intensification together.

“Having a station at Cameron and North Road, just four blocks from the existing Lougheed station as the original LRT plan included, is hardly going to increase ridership on a rapid transit line. It will really just slow it down.”

If neighbourhood intensification puts 10,000 people living within a 5 minute walking distance of the LRT stop, then having a station four blocks from Lougheed is exactly what we would want. Ridership will be increased, I think you would agree, as would the livability of the street.

That’s the no-brainer.

If we choose Skytrain, we screw the neighbourhoods where the elevated track goes by blocking the sky and blighting the neighbourhood. If we choose LRT, we actually reduce the impacts of traffic volume at the same time that we deliver more trip capacity.

Add tree medians, and areas of pedestrian refuge (MB really has a point for us all to keep in mind regarding pedestrian safety and LRT), and what is today a dangerous St. John Street, or what will be tomorrow a blighted North Road, might become instead urban spines serving their neighbourhoods and doing great business (residential or commercial).

Tessa, it’s the common sense stuff that is eluding the Evergreen (really?) Skytrain.

@Lewis, I don’t know Port Moody as well as you do, so I’ll defer to your experience when it comes to the impact on the street, however I would guess that you are also rather bias to anything being above the street. There are many places that do elevated transit far better than Vancouver, and I don’t find the skytrain too destructive to the public realm, either.

That said, what about the actual quality of transit service? I mentioned frequency, to which you didn’t respond. Because of labour costs, an LRT will run at best every 15 minutes for most of the day like they do in Portland, and translink coudn’t pay to operate more than the existing 97b line. With skytrain, more service is as easy as turning on a tap, and that’s why we have such great frequency of service until past 1 a.m. on the skytrain. That’s something only driverless systems can offer, and it is a boon for ridership.

And I think you misunderstood my point with the extra stations. A station four blocks from Lougheed IS a five minute walk from an existing station. What you’re proposing isn’t rapid transit, as stop spacing is one of the main determining factors in speed. Neighbourhood intensification can happen regardless.

Aside from being slowed down, it also forces commuters to make an extra transfer at Lougheed, and doesn’t integrate well with the rest of the network. Transfer penalties are a real problem, especially when service is less frequent, such as an LRT would be.

And like I say, you can make a great street without LRT. You can widen the sidewalks on St. John’s, throw in a planted median the whole length of the street, and do the same on North Road. Nothing is stopping us. It doesn’t make sense to package that as part of an LRT when the two are really separate issues.

Also, an express service is far more complicated than you suggest, and really requires four tracks, two in each direction, to run efficiently.

What I think is most important is that we get the best transit to serve the most people, to get the most cars off the road, to encourage more transit users. The Canada Line has shown how effective light metro can be at doing that. Whereas previous buses to Richmond, Delta and Tsawassen had maybe 45,000 riders a day, the new metro is more than double that now. While an LRT would doubtlessly have increased ridership, I don’t think it would have been nearly as dramatic.

Vive la difference! But, you know, Tessa, the more interesting stuff is the things we can agree about, and there is really plenty of that.

Skytrain’s big win was a driver-less system. In a province with the labour relations history that we have that is more or less understandable.

Things get dodgy from there. If you accept the premise that Skytrain more or less “blights” the neighbourhoods it crosses, then we have a new set of considerations to talk about. That kind of system works along heavy rail corridors (but in Port Moody, Council stipulated it be put on grade to protect “the view”); along freeways (where there is usually space in middle anyway—L.A. & Toronto); and thru farm fields or ravines where the topography is tricky, or there are ownership issues (TGV—train a gran vitesse—near Grenoble, France).

The dream of “grade separation” to solve all our problems was one of the Lies of Modernism. Sant’Ellia and others dreamed of “streets in the sky”, ridding neighbourhoods of traffic, or giving pedestrians immaculate walks in the sky. Well, it didn’t work. Urbanism is the art and science of messy accommodation. Of balancing one thing against the other, and showing flexibility as cities march on their protracted journey across time. We are passengers only for a short segment of that trip.

Thus, we come to the transportation issue pure and simple. Let’s give Skytrain a bye, and suggest it can carry as many trips as a subway. Subways are hard to get to, and the station spacing is typically far apart, for reasons of cost and speed of travel, as you point out. I talk about the Broadway Line in NYC that runs both an express train downtown (i.e. Wall Street and the financial centre where hundreds of thousands work everyday), and a local train to serve stops along the way.

We are hearing on this blog from residents along Cambie that they still want a trolley on Cambie (and I would make it Trolley Rapid Transit—i.e. on dedicated lanes). The conclusion we have to take away from that is that for local trips, LRT may well be more effective, and easier to get to than Skytrain.

Then, there is Patrick Condon’s point. For the cost of the Gateway Project, we could have built a complete LRT system in the entire Lower Mainland. And, as I have pointed out, if we make Evergreen LRT not Skytrain, then we already have ALL the money we need to build the system. No need for P3, new taxes, more borrowing, etc. The moneys have all been allocated, and the system has already been designed. It just means putting one plan in the drawer, and taking the other plan out.

Keep in mind that Evergreen is a special case. The tunnel from Burquitlam to the bottom of the hill means that much of the cost is the same regardless of system technology. Boring tunnels is expensive.

Then, there is athe issue that just came to light for me during the Olympic Line debates. No one, myself included, really knew or talked about what the trip capacity of LRT. Some experts put it at 60,000 trips per day.

That is very near either Skytrain or subway, assuming we have the local population and work force to run 60,000 trips per day. Along Barnet Highway, for example, the strip mall staff are too scattered to be served by transit.

How many vehicles-per-day run on the same amount of road space taken up by LRT? If LRT takes up two lanes, the number is 20,000 v.p.d.

Now, if we stay focused on transportation, then that’s a 3x increase in capacity. Yawn.

However, if you are concerned about livable streets and designing places with bustle, taking 20,000 cars of the street is a damn good start. And, that’s the rub. Transportation should not just be about trips, it should be part of creating vibrant places to live. We don’t just want urbanism, what we really want is good urbanism.

On North Road, on St. John’s Street, and on Guilford Way, LRT means building community space, social space, recharging the local economy, doing all kinds of things that we all want to see happen. Skytrain means blight.

Now for Vancovuer Arterials: on Broadway, Arbutus, Main, Fraser, Clarke, Commercial-Victoria, Nanaimo, Rupert, 4th Ave., 41st, King Ed, etc., LRT means building a transportation system that can take some 220,000 cars off the road per day (almost a 1/4 million cars), and re-energizing the neighbourhoods crossed all at the very same time.

Working independently, different designers have calculated that we can double the existing Vancouver population simply by intensifying the single family lots that front Vancouver’s Arterials today.

That too is an LRT advantage. Nobody wants to live beside Skytrain, as the North Road apartment dwellers are soon to find out.

How much of all this is something we can all agree about? Our government is not practicing open & transparent consultation. They really are not using the tools at their disposal to build a consensus vision of change.

If we combine LRT implementation with the construction of tree-medians as “islands of safety”, each mile of new LRT will plant two miles of street trees. Spaced 25 feet on centre, that’s 422 trees per mile. We have 50 miles of north-south arterials, and 40 miles east-to-west, for a total of 38,000 trees and 180 miles of islands of pedestrian safety.

I can smell the air getting cleaner already.

The urban forest will provide cooling shade in the summer, and drop its leaves in the winter to allow solar heating. Energy savings both times. We do not have the science that can tell us how much of the hydrocarbons are going to get sucked up by those threes and used to make wood and leaves. We do not yet understand how effectively the tree canopies will prove in trapping the particulate matter kicked up by the rubber tires that ends up as a layer of soot on the IKEA furniture of condos fronting on today’s arterials. Yep, there will be a few more jobs created sweeping the leaves.

However, in corridors where there is a bus system already in place, we can implement LRT with not much increase in the labour force. To get to 60k trips per day, one driver runs a double train. According to someone named “Richard”, if you add a café car to that train, you can run rouge on the railway R.O.W. and send that LRT train all the way to Chilliwack, and Hope.

O.K. Tessa, how much of this explanation holds common ground for us?

First of all, a couple points of clarification: Patrick Condon has not argued for LRT per say, but rather streetcars, which would not be any faster whatsoever than a bus. His plan is to spend $3 billion on something that will not improve mobility one iota, but will look nicer and feel nicer. That’s really the only benefit. For more info on that, check Jarrett’s human transit blog: http://www.humantransit.org/2010/04/is-speed-obsolete-.html

The main difference i find in LRT is that LRT is designed to mimic rapid transit, see Portland LRT compared to Portland streetcar, which runs in traffic, and which Condon emulates.

Also, 60,000 trips per day isn’t anywhere near the capacity of light metro, and it would seem to be quite smaller than the 20,000 ppd ph you suggest later on. I’m not sure which it is, though I’ve never heard of an LRT running at the frequency needed for 20,000 ppdph. Is there an example of one that actually moves that many people?

Also, capacity and ridership aren’t the same thing. Translink has estimated that skytrain will attract more riders, and while not everyone has to trust those studies, I’m inclined to agree.

I just don’t think LRT fits the bill in this case, where we’re building onto a regional network, where we’re trying to attract significant ridership for a rapid transit line that should be just that: rapid. It’s part of the spine. I think LRT or trams will fit better in some areas, say Arbutus, the Olympic Line, maybe in areas of Surrey and especially in rail for the valley, but I don’t think it’s the best option in this case.

Lots of people do live beside skytrain, and don’t mind at all. In fact, it’s a selling feature for new homes. And the arterials along Vancouver streets are already being intensified rapidly because they are already served by very good local transit. If you give those trolley buses their own lane on busy sections then that’s as good as a tram. Simply electrifying the remaining greater vancouver routes with trolley wires would provide many benefits of trams as well at a lower cost.

Also, because this has gone way off topic of the thread, I should add that I don’t buy the idea that the Evergreen Line will be finished on schedule. In fact, it’s already six months behind schedule, as can be seen here: http://www.straight.com/article-331482/vancouver/report-says-evergreen-line-already-six-months-behind-schedule.

Michael, there are always many reasons to do the wrong thing, and just one to do the right thing. I remember driving by Ioco Road and St. John’s Street one morning and seeing to my great surprise Mayor and Council out on the street waving placards to obtain public support to press for LRT.

Port Moody will go down as the poster child of why it is an imperative to plan transportation, intensification and revitalization all at the same time.

Streetcars, LRT, BRT, from an urban design perspective, Tessa, these amount to the same thing. They require the same amount of urban space to run.

I don’t have numbers to compare Max and Portland Streetcars, but you can think of in terms of 20 minute trip times. 20 minutes on commuter rail (Max) will get you to the Portland Airport from downtown (if memory serves). Twenty minutes on the streetcar will get you to the suburban fringes of downtown. Twenty minutes on foot will get you one mile, or from the river to 19th Avenue, the edge of Portland Downtown. From there you will be a 5 minute walk from 23rd Avenue, one of the finest “urban spines” in our region.

In Portland, if you live within a 5 minute walk of 23rd, you would walk to shop or have coffee; take the streetcar to work downtown, and get there in about 5 minutes; and take Max to go to the airport. Good coverage.

I find the transportation engineers weak in reporting capacity. We measure road capacity in vehicles per day. But, when it comes to transit, it becomes “people per direction per hour” (ppdph). Which is fine, as long as we are also given a scale for direct comparison to cars.

My numbers are “ball park guesses” for design purposes. The notion that we can run 3x more trips on LRT/BRT on the same street space that we run 20,000 vehicles per day is worth considering. Especially important is that this is a guaranteed reduction in automobile traffic. Cars can’t go, because the transit has taken back the space.

If the road space is there because the transportation is Skytrain, then I harbour doubts that we will achieve the same kinds of vehicular reductions.

“Lots of people do live beside skytrain, and don’t mind at all. In fact, it’s a selling feature for new homes. And the arterials along Vancouver streets are already being intensified rapidly because they are already served by very good local transit. If you give those trolley buses their own lane on busy sections then that’s as good as a tram. Simply electrifying the remaining greater vancouver routes with trolley wires would provide many benefits of trams as well at a lower cost.”

—Tessa

1. Lots of people don’t have much choice where to locate as they search for affordable housing. Build bad housing, and the market will rent that out to the folks with the least amount of options. Thus, we do well to take urban design to heart as a social benefit.

2. I don’t see arterials intensifying rapidly in Vancouver. Quite the opposite, is see single family rentals beaten down by high traffic volumes, especially east of Cambie.

3. Trolley rapid transit requires centre lanes and signal priority to be as good as a tram. We agree the costs are much lower. I’ve proposed using BRT as a preliminary step. Then, building LRT on the same R.O.W. for the extra capacity when need arises.

Don’t forget that what we are saying with BRT/LRT is that the lines would be spaced at about 0.5 miles apart (following the original interurban network). Thus, BRT/LRT also gives the opportunity to spread the load out over more neighbourhood space, and spread the benefits more evenly of government investments in transportation infrastructure.

@Lewis

“I don’t have numbers to compare Max and Portland Streetcars, but you can think of in terms of 20 minute trip times. 20 minutes on commuter rail (Max) will get you to the Portland Airport from downtown (if memory serves). Twenty minutes on the streetcar will get you to the suburban fringes of downtown. Twenty minutes on foot will get you one mile, or from the river to 19th Avenue, the edge of Portland Downtown. From there you will be a 5 minute walk from 23rd Avenue, one of the finest “urban spines” in our region.”

I was in Portland last month and the speed of the MAX from the Airport is greatly exaggerated. I stayed at a hotel at the Cascade Station (kitty corner from the Airport) and it took me 40 minutes to get into downtown Portland. Sure, the train is nice (after all, they have bike hangers!), but the ride is painfully slow once the MAX hits the fare-free zone. Furthermore, waiting 15 minutes for a train in downtown Portland after 9 PM isn’t exactly my cup of tea. (Downtown Portland is virtually dead after 6 PM unless you happen to be a hipster in the Pearl District.)

Portland’s streetcar is somewhat quaint, but it’s no faster than our electric trolleys. At least our trolleys can be re-routed if there are obstructions – the streetcars cannot.

I think Tessa has nailed it – the transportation perspective is just as important as the urban design perspective. As someone who has chosen to live in a “shoebox in the sky” nearby a Skytrain station, I happen to very much appreciate the frequent service of the Skytrain. I like lightrail and the streetcar too, but they should be just one component of a comprehensive public transportation system.