Orphan Road

My last post got me thinking about the 98/99-B Line again. Most of you are familiar with my previous Metro ridership posts, however I don't think that I ever explained the reason I started looking at those numbers.

While attending the CITE conference in Victoria I talked to a engineer who worked for Vancouver. We got to talking about TransLink's Gateway projects and specifically the Broadway Line and he said that basically TransLink can't add any more buses because they are already running at 2.4 minute headways.

This in-turn got me thinking about routes here, none of which run that often. Anyways coming full circle today I become curious about how Seattle's transit stacks up against Vancouver's in terms of riders per mile (which I think is the best measure). Here are the results. Because I had to pull projected riderships and non Metro information this is less accurate, although you get a good idea of where things fall.

The biggest thing is that the B-Line has huge ridership, almost more than Central LINK per mile. It achieves this with a medium BRT treatment which shows that BRT can handle lots of people. With that said I think it also shows that the B-Line corridors should already have Skytrain.

Also these numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt because the GVA has much higher densities than almost anywhere in the Seattle area outside Downtown/Cap Hill/UW. Then again that is an integral part of transit ridership isn't it.

Skytrain is huge success and it shows. Also you can see that the initial Link segments has comparable ridership to the B-Lines but with any expansion plan now on the table it will grow rapidly and be comparable to Skytrain when it opens. Also notice how the old ST2 or a solo Eastside expansion don't have amazing ridership compared to the other options. Goes to show how important the North and U LINK are for ridership.

Oh and poor Rapidride. It makes me want to laugh. Although then again Metro is spending ~2.5 million a mile for it which is a fraction of LINK. I had to make an educated guess (120% 54 and 358 ridership) because I couldn't find any ridership projections. My guesses may be way off but we will have to wait until it opens.

File this one under "only in Vancouver." Trevor Boddy has an interesting piece in the Canadian Globe and Mail critiquing New Urbanism from the left. It's not an argument one hears often in the states:

We Vancouverites sell American planners and developers high density, high amenity urban development attuned to the needs of the new century. Then local developers like the Century Group go consultant shopping in Miami and end up buying the terminally pleasant nostalgia of New Urbanism. Go figure.

Actually, checking the figures helps puncture New Urbanism's claims, especially the spiel that schemes like the one for the Southlands development present a radical increase in suburban residential densities. While this may be true by the standards of the sunbelt United States, Canadian cities have historically developed at higher densities, largely because we lack such sprawl-inducing public policies as the tax deductibility of mortgage interest and the federally funded interstate highway system.

New Urbanism is dangerous because it claims to cure the very sprawl and social class separation that it causes. There are worse ways to develop the suburbs, but none are so two-faced. The New Urbanism is city planning's equivalent of the "compact SUV."

In the States, of course, folks like me tend to view New Urbanism as a step in the right direction. But for Boddy it's a mirage. One one level, he seems miffed that the developers of this particular Vancouver suburb flew in [gasp!] American consultants instead of relying on homegrown talent in Vancouver, but his larger point is that the local consultants would have presumably advocated "real" density.

For my money, New Urbanism is mostly a mirage when it's divorced from holistic regional planning that takes into account land use, employment centers, and, of course transit. The devil's in the details, as they say.

A couple of months back daijimin at STB and I went back and forth
over Vancouver's proposal to become a real-estate developer. At the time I argued that it was illegal because TIF is barred in our state constitution. Daijimin said, in response, that "if it's illegal, we might as well go ahead with the even shadier plan of buying the land with eminent domain, building light rail then selling it after the prices go up. That way you capture all of the gains."

Well, now that more details of the plan have emerged, I think daijimin may have been on to something: Translink has, it seems, gone with the "shadier" approach.

The nickel version of the idea is this: Translink needs funding to build new rail lines, and they know that the property around the stations is going to be in demand, so why not go the extra step and develop the property yourself and use that money to finance the project? It's certainly more attractive than more property or sales taxes.

There are a couple of problems...

The first is eminent domain. Giving a property developer that kind of power sounds like a recipe for a massive conflict of interest. Already Translink is saying that the only way to reall make it work is to buy the property on the sly:

To build three rapid transit lines in a decade, TransLink will need to secure high-density zoning from municipalities to feed ridership and create opportunities to profit from the real estate appreciation, Jacobsen explained.

To acquire the land cheaply and beat out developers and speculators, TransLink will have early discussions about alignments and station locations and then quickly and quietly buy the land where stations are to be built.

Shady! Especially if, as a government agency they have access to the records about property transactions that private developers don't have.

The second issue is that property development is itself a risky business. I know that Vancouver (and Cascadia generally) is supposed to be The Land Of Eternally Rising Property Value, but reality doesn't work that way. Developers go belly-up all the time. Do we really want the trains to stop running if the real-estate market tanks?

Now, Vancouver's planners are hella smart and I wouldn't be surprised if they've thought of these things. Or maybe it's just different in Canada and the idea of giving a government agency that much power doesn't make anyone sweat. After all, they've already done it in Hong Kong, apparently.

But if we're looking for a potential solution for our own fair city, it seems like a LID is a safer, more reliable revenue stream, but one that effectively accomplishes the same thing. Of course, a LID requires all the property owners to approve. Even in South Lake Union, where the vast majority of the property is held by a single owner who was in favor of the tax, there was significant opposition from some property owners.

In short: there are no free lunches!

Canada Line, from Vancouver Airport to downtown Vancouver, opens in 2009, just in time for the 2010 Olympics (and just like our own Link light rail).

This movie showing all the major stops and what's around them, is pretty neat. It's interesting to see how they market rail on that side of the border ("a different kind of car!").

If anyone has good construction photos, let me know!

Update: And the blogosphere comes through once again. Thanks to Ben @ STB for the link!

Vancouver is having some trouble with its new bus-only lanes: the buses aren't going any faster.

But this, in itself, doesn't completely disqualify Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). There are lots of other aspects to a BRT system -- fewer stops, off-bus fare collection, etc. -- that would have a marked effect on transit times.

For example, LA Metro's Metro Rapid seems to be working. As Cascadia Report notes (and Cascadia Prospectus echoes) that's the solution we should be looking at here.

Last week Sightline's Clark Williams-Derry highlighted the fact that Vancouver tops Seattle and Portland in transit use. The Vancouver-area papers have run with the story:

Vancouver is more constrained by geography, so like it or not, there’s less space to sprawl and more likelihood residents will be close to transit.

By year-end, 36 per cent of [Greater Vancouver] residents will live within 450 metres of a “frequent transit” line—what TransLink defines as minimum 15 minute service 15 hours a day, seven days a week.

Williams-Derry also concedes higher gas taxes north of the border may have helped give transit an edge over private car use over the long term.

But ultimately, he argues, Vancouver’s success stems from better land-use decisions rather than the design of its transit system.

That second point about "frequent transit" is key. People need confidence that they can "throw away their schedules," which was one of Ron Sims' key selling points for Transit Now. People like certainty, which is one reason why rail appeals to us: you see the tracks here, it's pretty clear that there's a train going to come sooner or later. Bus stops don't inspire the same confidence. Hopefully Metro's RapidRide will incorporate some rail-station-like features that give us the sense that there's a BRT bus on the way.

For example, I was spending a weekend in Northwest Portland about a year ago, and I wanted to spend the day downtown. I headed right for the streetcar stop. There was a digital readout saying that, since it was a weekend, the next car was coming in, say 20 minutes. I watched a few buses pass me, and thought I probably could have gotten on any one of them and gotten downtown. But there was an uncertainty that I, unfamiliar with Portland, wouldn't get where I wanted to go. So I waited for the streetcar. And sure enough, it came just when the sign said it would. That's how transit should work: we can deal with the waiting, just not the uncertainty.