my best analogy was planning a wedding wtihout a groom!

given the dire straights of the Broadway corridor, perhaps the idea is to have all the ducks in a row the minute someone is willing to let go of some cash. Who knows, perhaps the most expensive option might not be first choice. (and Bill Clinton did not inhale)
2 things astonished me – the community interest (the room was full) and the lack of UBC students (perhaps they know they will be long graduated by the time this baby is up and running so who cares).

As a commercial community advocate: don’t obstruct our view corridor, don’t slice our nieghbourhood in half, don’t remove pedestrians from street level, and don’t kill us off while you construct the thing.

We don’t want much!

I thought the Broadway corridor would be one of the first places to consider a decent dedicated route rapid transit system. It has two-way traffic in large volumes for large parts of the day coupled with relatively high density centres along most of its expanse.

Here’s one tip I’ll give for free: don’t cut and cover this time.

At the very least, they need to fix the Millennium Line by continuing SkyTrain from VCC at least to Cambie to meet up with the Canada Line.

The system is broken without that connection.

“Curitiba system?”

It works because building and TX were developed together: buses colour coded running on a spoke and hub configuration.

Thanqz to the very wise Mayor Jaime Lerner back in 1972.

Accordingly, vehicular traffic is minimal. Sin embargo, planner Tiboni ([email protected]) ays the system is under sever stress.

Unfortunately, Vancouver has been subject to hit-and-miss planning, for the half century I have been working, essentially responding to capricious individual developer pressure! (Still is from what I see).

It’s beyond remedial, now, and will have to make do!

Rapid Transit on Broadway should be the first opportunity we have in our city to plan a street revitalization at the same time that we plan a transit implementation.

I. The”urban design principles” (my design assumptions, people working on the project would have access to hard numbers):

(1) One lane of traffic on Broadway carries 10,000 vehicles per day

(2) On-peak, Broadway operates as six lanes of traffic; Off-peak Broadway operates as four lanes of traffic, 2 parking lanes.

(3) Broadway B-Line carries [need some help here… what is the ridership?] per day.

(4) A double tack of LRT on Broadway will deliver 60,000 trips per day

(5) Center median stations would be 5m (15 feet wide); on blocks without stations, 2.5m tree medians (5 feet) would separate the centre of the road LRT tracks from the vehicular lanes.

(6) LRT and BRT (bus rapid transit) are signal activated. They trip the traffic lights. When they are stopped loading/unloading, the light is red. When it is time to go, the traffic light turns green. You can experience the difference this makes driving on Dunsmuir late at night, and hitting the speed right to “catch all the green lights”. Great urban rodeo for those long, summer nights.

(7) We can deploy LRT on “heavy bus routes” with a minimum cost because the LRT will actually take buses off the street and save operating costs.

II. Lessons learnt in recent transit implementations:

(1) Canada Line: Cut-and-cover was a horror show on Cambie (we told them that, but they wouldn’t listen); the design for the revitalization of Cambie from King Ed to 12th Avenue—and this is a technical term—Sucks Big Time; if you can afford a tunnel this is a good option.

(2) Evergreen Skytrain: is too expensive; hard to access; blights the neighbourhoods.

(3) Olympic Line: huge, runaway success.

III. Lessons to be learned:

(1) Removing 2 lanes of traffic on Broadway (20,000 vehicles per day) on blocks without LRT stations; and 3 lanes of traffic on Broadway (30,000 vpd) on blocks with stations…

(2) “Enhances the resulting urban quality of Broadway”, and

(3) Adds new trips. Why?

(4) LRT adds two to three times as many trips. [must include BLine trips here]

IV. The drum rolllllll, please, and the winners are:
BRT and LRT—scoring high on environmental, financial, social/community, deliverability, transportation goals, and urban-development matching (I can’t believe they are using the word “nodes”!).
Envirnomental—all technologies are electrical.
Social/community—Broadway would become “A great street” if the implementation is designed carefully. Taking cars off the road is the “sticky-wicket”. Will the engineers buy in? Will we hear at public consultation sessions about how this gambit plays out? Transportation is mobility for everyone, a real social leveller.
Deliverability—on routes with high bus numbers, like Broadway, adding LRT presents no new operational cost burdens. Adding BRT removes most of the capital costs of building the rail, while at the same time it reserves road right-of-way (R.O.W.) for future LRT implementation (note: BRT must be in the centre of the road, on dedicated lanes with trolley wires, to be effective).
Transportation goals—higher capacity and longer range are not an issue. LRT can put two trains together at peak hours; LRT can run on railway R.O.W. as a commuter train (add a cafe car with washrooms).
Urban Development Matching—bit of a misrepresentation of urban design values here—BRT/LRT have stations every quarter mile or 5 minute walking distance. Locations are in the centre of the R.O.W. (i.e. on city owned land). The real advantage is that the LRT trips added/Bus & vehicle trips removed combine to result in an “enhanced urban quality”. Broadway would become a “Green Street”. Sidewalk cafes, and strolling as if on Robsonstrasse would be “the new normal”.
The challenge: Rapid Transit on Broadway would be the first time in our city that we plan a street revitalization at the same time that we plan a transit implementation. It would be a first in our region. We’ve never done it thus far.

P.S. Translink should be looking at doing the same thing on Hastings at the same time. A Streetcar implementation on Hastings would be one of the necessary components of a plan to end homelessness for good.

A few observations and opinions, some of which have been made in previous posts and other blogs:

– TransLink may conduct all the studies it wants, but it’s the provincial government that will make the final decision.

– The federal government has been shamefully absent from participating in a meaningful way in the wellbeing of its own urban constituents, except for providing the occasional packet for the odd project. It prefers to hide behind the constitution which ‘downloads’ responsibility for cities onto the provinces, which in turn downloads costs to locals (transit, education, etc etc) and toys with urban governance models, bending them to its will. It’s time for the feds to show some spine and negotiate with both the provinces and cities to address the huge challenges ahead, not the least being increasing the resiliency of our cities.

– Triple digit hikes in diesel fuel prices will kibosh expansion of the liquid fueled bus fleet and make maintaining the status quo difficult, unless an expensive commitment to electric trolleys and hybrids is made. By many professional estimates (an increasingly large chorus lately) said price increases in fossil fuels will start in earnest in the first half of this decade. When they do, it is a sure thing that demand for public transit will hit the stratosphere once driving private vehicles becomes really painful, and governments at all levels will be caught off guard. The question will be will anybody believe them when they say they didn’t see it coming? I, for one, will not.

– The funding of large scale transit expansion is a small fraction of the per capita cost of continuing to subsidize car dependence.

– The conversation on Broadway-UBC rapid transit will continue to be derailed by comparitive distactions about technology and costs, therein shelving the real comparison that counts: between transit and car dependence. The special status that Broadway has in the region will be ignored; it will continue to be lumped in with other arterials as though they should all receive identical treatments with respect to transit, when in fact transit should respond to the community it serves with a plethora of options suited to the variability within cities.

– Broadway is unique in Western Canada in several ways. It is the second most active CBD in the province. It has continuous ground floor accessed retail, offices and services from Main to Alma that draws a large amount of walk-in business. It also has a very high density of pedestrian, bike and commercial cross traffic. The vast majority of cross streets are signalized and are activated solely by pedestrians and cyclists between arterials. There are significant pedestrian movements at all intersections at all times during the day end evenings, and these are vital to the health of the street level businesses. Name one other 8 km segment of an arterial in Western Canada that has these qualities.

– Complicating Broadway’s intensity and status as a major destination within itself is the fact that tens of thousands of commuters travel through it every day to the small city at the end of the line (UBC).

– After the Canada Line cut & cover construction fiasco, politicians at all levels will be loath to disrupt the West Broadway neighbourhoods and merchants. As the result, some merchants and Kitsilano activists are demanding surface rail transit omly without realizing how disruptive it’s construction will be to Broadway, and to the huge changes in traffic it will impose permanently.

– A dedicated fast surface rail option will sever 30 cross streets out of 38 with a raised fenced median, like a wall in the middle of the road. This means that the ability to get from one side of Broadway to the other will only be possible at stations which will be placed at the eight arterials, or about 1,000 metres apart (except where a couple of extra stations could be placed e.g. at Willow, but the spacing will still exceed 600 m). The repercusions to businesses that depend on local walk in traffic, let alone grannies in wheelchairs trying to cross the street and cyclists using Vancouver’s extensive N-S Greenway and bike routes, will be immeasureable and permanent. However, the trains will suit UBC commuters and will form part of the fast regional rail transit system …. albeit while sacrificing local neighbourhoods.

– A neighbourhood streetcar that respects pedestrian, bike and commercial traffic on cross streets will look cute, but will not improve transit service appreciably. Moreover, it will still cost a billion dollars. Why pay so much to merely replicate the existing B-Line express bus service?

– Option 5, combined LRT + subway is interesting in that it uses a segment of the existing Arbutus rail corridor, something Broadway doesn’t have. However, a huge hub station will have to be built at Arbutus with several sidings for waiting trains to take the high passenger load very inconveniently transferring from a subway to a surface rail line.

– Nowhere in the literature do the rail options have the words “safety at crossings” and “operating costs”. These are two issues that are never adequately addressed by light rail afficiandos, especially on the very active Broadway corridor. There is a quality of service relationship with operating costs with public transit.

– Likewise, the debate ono funding is usually couched in terms steeped in the myopia of yesterday, never in regard to the return on the investment over the next century. How many times have we read you can get so many light rail lines for the price of one SkyTrain line? Well, continuing with that logic you can get one full-scale Broadway subway all the way to UBC using the least disruptive tunnel boring methods, covered station excavations, excellence in design and engineering and even with 5% of the budget devoted to a great pedestrian-oriented urban design treatment on Broadway with a one-time cost of, oh say about 10 months of the local annual automobile subsidy. Think what we could do with all forms of transit if there was a federal-provincial-municipal program to decrease the subsidy of car dependence by 20% a year over ten years.

Priorities is an important word to promote.

The biggest problem along Broadway is that in addition to being a busy corridor unto itself, it is used to shuttle people between UBC and SkyTrain. There’s a REALLY simple solution, though: high-frequency express buses from VCC-Clark Station to UBC, along Great Northern Way/2nd/6th/4th. As Frances points out, the station is virtually unused at this point. It could easily be transformed into the main transfer point for people commuting to UBC, freeing up space along Broadway for people who are actually doing something along Broadway.

This would also, of course, cost a fraction of anything people are discussing here, instead of putting huge capital expenditure into servicing demand that is propped up by the taxpayer-subsidized U-Pass.

@ Lewis: “Rapid Transit on Broadway should be the first opportunity we have in our city to plan a street revitalization at the same time that we plan a transit implementation.”

I fully agree. But I also believe that street (and neighbourhood) revitalization is just as possible with a subway. In fact, I’d go as far as to say many of the sidewalks on Broadway can be widened into curb bulges at crosswalks including new mid-block pedestrian crossings in Central Broadway as part of a subway project.

The stations could really be integrated into the community a lot better than the Canada Line, and have entries on both side of the street, not just one. What better place to establish neighbourhood public squares and pocket parks? I would suggest the treatment of Broadway should be unique.

Other arterials do not have the same concentrated and intense qualities as Broadway, and are therein ripe for surface streetcars if not expanded electric bus service. Perhaps it’s better to get the rail infrastructure in before the existing bus service is upgraded in order to link urban design and land use planning criteria with new rail service. That link is not usually made with buses, and has been unfortunately concerned more with towers than mid rises with SkyTrain so far.

Justifying the higher cost of rail will also be easier if the service is a marked improvement over buses (not the case between the 99 B-Line and streetcars) and the benefits were extended to fostering human scaled urbanism on currently roaring truck arterials (e.g. 41st Ave, 200th Street, King George Hwy, etc etc)

A few interesting options, I like the combo option but think it would come out too expensive once you include the doubling of some of the coverage plus the additional cost of a new Maintance yard for LRT on what will be expensive land. I think RRT is really the only way to go.

Right now the numbers of the broadway buses comes in at hyst under 100K a day. So a lrt system to be considered a success after taking away 2-3lanes going by your figures would require a min ridership of 130K/day just to leave broadway in the same shape it is now. I don’t doubt it could reach those numbers, but I do doubt that it would ever get much above them, so in the end we end up with the same traffic capacity just in a different shape.
A RRT would increase capacity the most, provide the quickest commute, and yes cost the most. My opinion is that it would be worth the additional cost. Also a RRT would most likely run under 10th ave, which would provide street level access to the platform from Broadway, while also not inconviencing the locals nearly as much.

@ Darren: “There’s a REALLY simple solution, though: high-frequency express buses from VCC-Clark Station to UBC, along Great Northern Way/2nd/6th/4th. As Frances points out, the station is virtually unused at this point. It could easily be transformed into the main transfer point for people commuting to UBC, freeing up space along Broadway for people who are actually doing something along Broadway.”

You’re replacing the B-Line on Broadway with one on 4th Ave? I suggest both Broadway commuters / residents AND UBC commuters require better transit. At the very least, improved express bus service. But then you still have the issue of active cross traffic, so in my view surface BRT or LRT (both with signal priority) isn’t feasible on either 4th Ave or Broadway without the expectation that tragedy will regularly occur at crossings .

And bus service will only go so far in these corridors when the next million people arrive in Metro Vancouver over the next 25 years, and a hefty portion of them give up the higher costs of running private cars and rely on transit — with or without U-Passes.

Simple and cheap is just that.

Darren, if you reread my above comments you’ll see that I advocate for transit for the region in a variety of forms, not just one mode for Broadway.

Funding shouldn’t be a matter of picking crumbs off the floor once the automobile dragon has been fed.

@Darren & MB: you do know about this bus called the 84 that does indeed go from VCC-Clark to UBC along 4th, right? Are you guys talking about a “true” express bus that just goes straight through with no additional stops? There used to be a special rush-hour 99 service that went from campus right to Broadway with no stops inbetween–I think they need to consider re-implementing something like that long before they make any decisions on “new modes” along the Broadway corridor.

@Darren: Spending any money developing transit infrastructure south of the Fraser is a total waste until cities like Surrey and Langley, etc., actually start implementing sensible urban planning that allows transit to be delivered effectively. Basically, no more strip malls, more densification. It’s funny how we debate densification in Vancouver when really it’s far more of a horrible problem outside of Vancouver than within it. If Surrey is going to preen about its monumental pace of growth and how it will relatively soon outstrip Vancouver in population, it needs to actually act like a real city and start developing responsibly and sustainably. The abject failure of Surrey with respect to (re)development around Surrey Central Stn (and Gateway and King George Stns too) should make anyone considering serious transit investment South of the Fraser stop dead in their tracks. A huge part of why transit is better in Vancouver is because transit CAN be better in Vancouver given its layout and design.

There is no doubt that the northeast sector needs and definitely deserves some serious investment in transit given how it’s been leapfrogged and lied to the last nearly 20 years. And unlike the South of Fraser area, I’m sure it has the density to support rapid transit and significant transit infrastructure investment. But Broadway, unlike say the Cambie or Arbutus corridor, is a far more deserving corridor for transit investment than most. And UBC is the 2nd biggest transit destination in the GVRD–I’m sorry, I mean “Metro Vancouver” (*sigh* worst renaming EVER).

Not a transportaton expert, but some of these folks are http://bit.ly/aUY4wt .

Thanks for the link, Shepsil. There are some useful numbers for comparison there. Ridership is measured in ppd/h (passengers per direction per hour). BRT is given as 10,000 (not the 2 to 3,000 presented by Translink); and subway/skytrain as 25,000 ppd/h. There is no number for LRT. We can assume that it will match BRT, and exceed it with the ability to link two trains together.

If one is inclined to think “subway” because it delivers higher ridership, think again. We can build many more LRT lines for the price of one subway. So LRT on 4th and on Broadway would deliver more rides, and distribute the service over a more functional network…

Lets use transit implementation to make great places to live, work, and sip java.

As with the posting on this blog, the key difficulty seems to be that discussion gets bogged down on “the numbers” and there is no consideration of the “resulting quality of the urban space”. On Broadway (and Hastings) the resulting quality of place should be the leading consideration.

God is in the details. That’s where I’m coming from. What benefits and impacts will improved transit on Broadway have? Just how do you implement it and mitigate its construction and finished presence once the analysis is over and the thing has been tendered?

Speaking as a veteran of Broadway commuting and living, this has me very concerned. Anyone remember the horrendous inconvenience of transferring from the #9 bus to the #10 at Broadway x Granville? This was in the pre-B-Line age. Times and commuting have certainly changed, but the transferring inconvenience is far worse and has shifted to Broadway x Commercial.

Transferring from one mode or line to another west of Commercial (see TransLink Option 5 combo) will not serve UBC commuters well and I’ll contend that the Arbutus station will see tremendous congestion as the result. It also will require a huge expenditure for gains that may be marginal at best.

Having said that, UBC commuters are somewhat of a captive audience. They have to live with what they’re dealt irrespective of this debate.

And just how does Mount Pleasant, Fairview, Kits and West Point Grey as viable neighbourhoods benefit with a wall built down the middle of Broadway (i.e. BRT and/or dedicated LRT)?

Further, dismissing J. Walker as a professional transit planner is too easy, as is stating that a shift from an express bus to a tram will result in increased ridership without citations and research. The stated ridership gains remain to be proven, but I’d ask why should we spend around a billion dollars in the attempt without looking — as Walker has — at the numbers in other jurisdictions where trams similarly replaced buses in established corridors with marginal if any gains in ridership?

Milk run trams and dedicated LRT are not the answer for Broadway’s particular circumstances, but would certainly have a role elsewhere. To me the best solution for commuters and the neighbourhoods Broadway passes through (and the long-term future) is an underground extension of the Millennium Line to UBC with at least 11 stations integrated into the community with high urban design and architectural standards.

In a normal world in almost any other industrialized nation, the cost of this and every significant transit project would be borne by national governments with minority regional and local financial commitments.

In an ideal world facing a new century that possesses challenges we’ve never seen before, the national government would impose sustainable urban development principles and criteria in exchange for transit infrastructure in all cities. It would be a negotiative process. Those cities that cannot accept smart growth criteria will get less transit, and will have to live with that decision even when gasoline reaches $3/litre.

Canada, it appears, exists in neither a normal or ideal world.

prediction: the province decides to go skytrain and all of this visioning is for nothing, as the city’s role becomes on of route planning. just wait for it.

MB we both like proof. Concrete facts are the only basis for consensus, and I had not forgotten about your earlier reference to a family tragedy when writing about Broadway. But, I’m serious about j-walking because that too is a “concrete fact”. You can see it happening in places where there are very challenging conditions.

Get “Great Streets” out, and let’s keep in mind that “Dazzle Me” has us both hooped. P52 has the plan for Avenue Montaigne. The 42-foot center section, last I was there, has a HOV lane going towards the Champs Elysees, and three lanes of traffic heading the other direction. Two lanes in at the intersections, there was an “island of safety” for pedestrians. However, if you are crossing, you have better have figured out that this is a 3 to 1 directional split.

P153 has the plan for Zurich. The street section shows how buildings on one side are shorter than the other. Shorter buildings would be a good idea on the south side of Broadway to maximize solar penetration.

P93-99 are the Barcelona Ramblas. It’s a pitty that Jacobs does not show below grade conditions in his street sections. The Ramblas came about when the subway was put underground. This would support your idea of “build a metro” and urban design the daylights out of the surface conditions.

I dunno that I can be that positive about the state of urbanist culture in our midst.

P95 is Jacob’s sketch of the fronting build out. 5 and 6 stories high, and extending for miles in each direction, it reminds us that densities in Barcelona are much, much higher than we have here. I don’t see the density along Broadway to support a subway (and you don’t have to remind me about Cambie).

Nevertheless, if the urban design vision were for a high density corridor I think that the subway on Broadway would work, at least as far as Arbutus.

People die in car accidents everyday. The death statistics for bike riders in Amsterdam I remember thinking were alarmingly high. We put pedestrians—including our infants—in peril with our street design and our automobile culture. But that just has to mean that we take on the attitude that you show, and become hyper sensitive on issues of personal safety.

Geepers, Bill. I’m not up on that stuff. Why don’t you do it? Tell me what coordinates you need, and I’ll post them… I can give you any info that Google Earth spits out. What about street intersections and city name?

I love your idea!

@ Lewis, yes, death and injury stats aren’t nice to consider and can become just numbers after a little exposure. And I’m fully aware that enough people die in car accidents to be equivalent to hosting a small war every year, yet this tragedy is widely accepted in our car-addicted society. We do not have large scale car-free experiences here to provide references to alternatives — at least up to the Olympics and its associated temporary downtown street closures and record-busting transit use.

However, I’m hoping the much higher risk associated with surface rail is accounted for during the planning and design process for Broadway. Risk management is common and practiced widely, and this project should be no exception.

You know, “Great Streets” was once posted in its entirety on the Web. I guess A. Jacobs saw the copyright issue and complained, so it’s no longer there. However, it’s a great book to order and have readily available in your library for reference and inspiration.

Thanks for the tip on Avenue Montaigne. My wife and I were planning our first trip to Paris this year for our 25th, but elder care issues kiboshed that. If volcanic ash and steep fuel surcharges don’t keep the airlines grounded, then we’ll be spending part of next spring there.

Great Streets is a great travel book.