1) Rapid transit takes an enormous number of vehicles off the road
Think traffic is bad in Metro Vancouver? Here is something to consider: If the people currently taking the Expo Line were to drive instead they would require 16 freeway lanes to accommodate them. The ultimate capacities of our Skytrain lines are equivalent to 26 lane freeways. Now look at the Expo Line running from Surrey to downtown Vancouver and the Millennium Line that could eventually extend from Port Moody to UBC. Picture those as 26 lane freeways packed with vehicles and ask yourself, would rather have that traffic on the road?
2) A massive number of additional vehicles could be coming and competing for your road space
If current ownership rates persist, this region will add a staggering number of vehicles over the next 30 years. Placed end to end in a straight line, they would stretch from here to Montreal. On our road network they would cover every lane of the highlighted major routes. This is just the additional vehicles. As a driver you should want to do everything you can to reduce the number of vehicles on the road in front of you.
3) That massive number of additional vehicles will also need to park
Those vehicles don’t just take up space on the roads. A parking lot large enough to contain all of them would cover 22 square kilometers – an area one quarter of the size of Burnaby. So the next time you are frustrated looking for parking remember that there could be many more vehicles coming that will be looking to do the same thing.
4) Transit frees up a huge number of parking spaces
Trouble finding parking downtown? During their busiest hour the Expo Line and Canada Line bring enough people downtown that if they needed to park, they would require two parking structures with floor area equivalent to Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. At their ultimate capacities they would require four. This is for just an hour worth of passengers. So keep in mind that without transit things could be much worse…
5) Either way you will pay for transportation infrastructure, so why not pay for less?
Pictured below are the 48 additional 8-lane bridges Manhattan would need if they didn’t have transit. Without a doubt New York taxpayers saved a lot of money by not having to build them. Whether through tolls or taxes or fees you will end up paying for more transportation infrastructure. With transit you benefit from requiring less of it, even if you personally never use it.
Note: Click on linked text for calculations and references
grumps92 said:
Your statistical projections are alarming, but like all who proselytize, you tend to exaggerate to prove a conviction. You have not taken in to account the probable population adjustments of wars, sicknesses, plagues or other natural adjustments. As well you have not assessed the strain on existing mass transit by your estimates of statistical population increases.
Thomas Beyer said:
To get people out of their cars we need more RAPID transit. The new plan fails on that front. The newly proposed plan is merely a band-aid. The currently proposed transit plan is far too bus based and car use will remain far too cheap for any significant changes to happen in MetroVan.
For example: With the viaducts soon gone, we need a subway along Hastings, to Burnaby, then looping to N-Van over Second Narrows bridge along Marine Drive all the way past Lonsdale to W-Van’s Ambleside. The proposed Broadway line ends far too soon at Arbutus, especially with the federal & native land being developed on Jericho barracks. It has to go to Alma at the very least, then cheaper above ground all the way to UBC. 41st needs a subway, possibly extending to UBC to make it a full loop eventually. Langley need a train to connect to Surrey. Lionsgate bridge needs widening with a ped path and rail link on it to complete the North Shore subway loop into downtown. Then, and only then, will N-Van and W-Van folks switch from cars, especially if each car crossing will cost $10 in rush-hour or $5 outside of rush hour. This vision is nowhere in the band-aid plan.
Highrises get built and levies collected to fund overpaid civil servants in the planning departments or elsewhere in the vast city bureaucracies but far too little infrastructure is developed. The cities then have their hand out to the province lamenting: we need more roads and especially transit – look at all these people coming.MetroVan councils have increased spending over 50% the last decade, well above inflation plus immigration due to excessive unionization and lack of outsourcing or other cost control measures.
This is a major issue, and at the core of the city-province dispute over funding, not just for transit but also education (loads of ESL requirements – see teachers strike), healthcare (not enough funding for nurses & doctors to be hired), homelessness (rents are too high as immigrants with money crowd out folks that live here on low wages) or crowded community centers.
Let’s look at in-migration, the main cause of this congestion: What is the rational behavior of a rich or even merely affluent immigrant , or a passport seeker posing as an “immigrant” for 3 or 4 years ? Buy a huge mansion or condo with the best views in town, as capital gains are not taxed and property taxes are so low, and shift income to abroad ie from his foreign owned corporation, or just have the wife and the kids here and husband works abroad, i.e. very little PST and almost no income taxes are paid in BC ! Plus buy a fat car as gasoline taxes are quite low and roads are not tolled. That is rational behavior, we see by the ten’s of thousands per year in BC, primarily Vancouver & Richmond but also elsewhere to a somewhat lesser degree. The new transit plan does not change this rational behavior one iota. As such: we need a better plan on the expense reduction, the funding and the spending side !
The tax system needs some major re-jigging in BC: far higher road use fees (at choke points say bridges, tunnels, major intersections), far higher land transfer taxes, say 1% per $1M to 15% (like UK or Hongkong), far higher property taxes (up 100%, say over 10 years), coupled with a credit for BC income tax payers, plus far higher parking fees on every residential road, plus perhaps a luxury tax for vehicles over $50,000, plus gasoline taxes that are 100% higher.
A mere 0.5% PST increase is a drop in the bucket and will not systemically change things in MetoVan .. with more (slow) buses as it will not shift the rational behavior.
==> Which politician has the guts to be honest with citizens, then tackle that on the city or provincial level ?
I am happy to pay 10% PST or any of the above taxes or fees if I get something of value. I do not today, and neither do 600,000+ other car users who will thus oppose this band-aid “decongestion” plan as it will not achieve what it is intended to do, namely shift car users to transit. Only far more RAPID transit coupled with higher car use costs will achieve that.
I urge both MetroVan mayors and provincial political leaders to come to their senses as opposed to snow ball their voters with more lies and band-aids ! Soon 3.5M people deserve a world class RAPID transit not mere band-aids !
Thomas Beyer said:
More buses is not RAPID transit as buses are slow, wobbly, not A/Ced and stuck in traffic just as cars, or in fact cause more gridlock as they constantly start and stop at bus stops, or even hog two lanes as one can routinely observe on 4th or Broadway !
Rapid transit plan: YES
This plan: no !
Matt Taylor said:
grumps92:
I am guilty of using a tone in this post that is aimed at producing converts. If you want the numbers without me trying to sell you on something you can look at any of my other posts where I go through my calculations. They are much more dry. But I am not exaggerating the numbers, the figures I have have used to make these calculations are not controversial.
On the population growth: Metro Vancouver has had a relatively steady growth rate since 1900. The population projection is not mine and is done by people who study these things, but I believe it is more or less a linear projection of the past centuries growth rate. There are reasons this could decelerate as you are suggesting, but there are also reasons it could accelerate (in my mind there are more of these), inducing the ones you listed. For instance wars and sickness on the other side of the world could increasingly make Vancouver look like an attractive place to live. You can’t know what the future will be. There is some possibility it could include massive population collapse, but when making investment decisions you can’t really rely on this.
Matt Taylor said:
Thomas, as with probably most people on the yes side of this argument I would have been happy with a somewhat more aggressive plan and would still vote yes to a somewhat larger tax increase. I think the reality of the situation is that with a larger tax increase it would be more likely to fail, even if the plan offered more.
This is also just a 10 year plan. If this is approved there will definitely be more rapid transit planned and constructed in the next 10 year period, and over time we can develop a truly great network for our region. I would like to see things move a little faster as well but you don’t want to get to far ahead of yourself or you risk having a lot of underutilized investments because they don’t have time to mature. That leads to high operations and maintenance expenses with low revenues. It is not a good recipe for the fiscal health of a region.
You say this plan is all about buses and not about rapid transit, but in terms of capital expenditure that is not at all accurate. I’ll point you to the work of Voony: https://voony.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/metro-vancouver-a-look-at-the-mayors-plan-capital-investment/. Bus expenditure looks to be about 15% of the spending (and over half of that is rapid bus), while the capital spending on rail rapid transit looks like around 60% of the cost.