Patrick Condon highlights cost of Broadway transit
A senior researcher at the UBC Design Centre for Sustainability says that a proposed rapid-transit line along Broadway would be “the most expensive system we’ve had to date”.
Patrick Condon bases this on the provincial government’s 2008 Provincial Transit Plan. In it, the B.C. Liberals called for $2.8 billion for a new 12-kilometre rapid-transit line from Broadway Station to UBC.
“It’s about twice as expensive [per kilometre] as the Canada Line, and it’s about 15 times more expensive per kilometre than a system which, I think, shows a lot of promise, and that would be a European tram system,” Condon told the Straight by phone.
Vision Vancouver councillor Geoff Meggs called expanding the SkyTrain along Broadway a “city priority”.
“But I don’t think it can get ahead of the Evergreen project,” Meggs told the Straight. “I don’t think the regional consensus is there for Broadway until they have the Evergreen Line at hand.”
Meggs said he has no idea how much the Broadway project would cost. “We already have a high-speed line ending at the Millennium Line at VCC–Clark,” he noted. “It just makes sense to complete it somehow, either over to the Canada Line or, better yet, take it to Arbutus. It could be the hub of a future extension down the Arbutus corridor or over to UBC.”
Initially, Non-Partisan Association councillor Suzanne Anton told the Straight she didn’t want to get “embroiled” in a debate over whether SkyTrain expansion along Broadway should take priority over an Evergreen Line to Coquitlam.
“They both have to get built,” Anton said. “The Broadway line serves a need that’s already there, and once it was built, it would immediately start pumping operational dollars back into the system. In other words, it would be a net benefit to the system and not a net cost.”
At its Friday (September 25) meeting, the Metro Vancouver board will vote on a motion to advise TransLink that its 2010 10-year base plan, which calls for “Drastic Cuts”, is not in line with the region’s goals. The motion also states that TransLink’s upgrade and expansion program, which would require additional funds of up to $450 million per year, supports regional planning priorities.
“And I fully expect that it will be endorsed by Metro on Friday,” Meggs said.
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Comments
Consider trams for less intensively used corridors - south false creek for instance.
http://railforthevalley.wordpress.com/2009/08/15/the-skytrain-lobby-pixi...
http://railforthevalley.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/hong-kong-tramway%e2%80...
The Expo Line needs over $1 billion more spent on it so it can match the capacity of a $25 million /km. European style tramway.
The public have been lied to, for far too long by the SkyTrain lobby and not one penny more for TransLink until they start planning for affordable light rail.
http://www.humantransit.org/2009/07/streetcars-an-inconvenient-truth.html
"Streetcars that replace bus lines are not a mobility improvement. If you replace a bus with a streetcar on the same route, nobody will be able to get anywhere any faster than they could before. This makes streetcars quite different from most of the other transit investments being discussed today.
Where a streetcar is faster or more reliable than the bus route it replaced, this is because other improvements were made at the same time -- improvements that could just as well have been made for the bus route. These improvements may have been politically packaged as part of the streetcar project, but they were logically independent, so their benefits are not really benefits of the streetcar as compared to the bus. "
if cost was the biggest issue, instead of skytrain or lrt, you can build a special trolley bus express along a reserved ROW on broadway.
Until real experts and consultants are used, the oh so tired bureaucrats within TransLink and the City will still pervert all planning to support SkyTrain!
http://railforthevalley.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/the-greer-report-review...
Extending trolley buses up W. 4th Avenue and W. 16th Avenue would meet any spill over demand for transit for another $200 million to get those damn 99 B-Line and other diesel buses off the roads. The City of Vancouver and TransLink really don't know what they are doing and are huge disappointment for allowing 99 B-Line and other diesel buses to operate on the #10 trolley bus route out to UBC.
How many large (1.5 million pop. +) European metropolises use trams or LRT as the backbone of their public transportation system? Answer: NONE
They all use "real" trains/subways/commuter rail and trams and LRT are secondary to the heavy rail trains.
During peak hours the 99 B-Line buses leave/pull into the Commercial Drive station stop every 30 seconds. Trams are basically trolley buses that run on tracks and suggesting they are a solution to the Broadway corridor's transportation woes is laughable and shortsighted.
Having a subway built out to UBC is a crazy idea. It reminds me of the Simpsons episode when the town went ga-ga over the monorail. Maybe we should come up with a song?
Vancouver has a relatively small downtown core, and the cost of a subway only makes sense for those types of densities, not for the Broadway corridor.
Broadway already has pretty decent transit service, with all the 99 B-lines supplemented by the 9's. We should be investing money, firstly, in rail transit for regions that don't have well-developed transit yet.
There seems to be a whole lot of uneducated criticism of trams here. You really think you know more about this than Prof. Condon, who lives here and teaches at UBC, and has 25 years experience in sustainable urban design, just because maybe you happened to once ride a rickety old streetcar in Toronto and think you know stuff as a result?
$2.8 billion is a helluva lot of money, and could:
-Buy us a multi-line light rail NETWORK for the Lower Mainland from UBC to Hope.
-Or, the current proposal which would shave a few minutes off travel time for select people living in or travelling to Vancouver-West who happen to have an origin/destination that is close to one of the subway stations (that are spaced very far apart to make the commute 'faster').
Which is the greater good?
Condon is not proposing LRT for Broadway, he is proposing a street car for Broadway that he admits would be significantly slower than even the 99b. Why spend hundreds of millions on worse service than the 99B?
Spending money on rail systems for less developed parts of the region that don't even had the density to support good bus service is not a great idea. The Evergreen Line is fine but seriously, Broadway needs high capacity rail based transit.
How the 99 B-Lines got on the #10 trolley bus route defies comprehension. I'm hoping to see TransLink sued for negligence soon for disregarding GVRD reports harshly criticizing TransLink for creating dangerous “hot spots” along the 99 B-Line route and for making the air unhealthy to breathe within 50 m of the 99 B-Line route. The noise from the 99 B-Line service is also violating the Motor Vehicle Act but nobody seems to care at the City of Vancouver or at the provincial transportation department. The City of Vancouver’s Greenest City Action Team is concentrating on more “important” things than diesel buses on trolley bus routes.
There should be a Millenium Line station at Pacific Central Station to create a true transit hub in an intelligent place instead of at Boadway and Commercial.
Then LRT should run from the Pacific Central hub to UBC using the proposed downtown streetcar alignment along False Creek, connecting to the Arbutus Corridor to Broadway, then turning west to Discovery Street before jogging back to 10th and on to UBC.
It would be faster than a tram or the 99 but be way cheaper than Skytrain and its massive tunelling. It would connect directly with all three existing metro lines and inter-city buses and trains. It would integrate into the community better than SkyTrain. It could run at relatively high speeds in separate ROWs in parts of False Creek, the Arbutus Corridor and the ND/Jericho lands. But it would offer more of a community based tram style service in SE False Creek and West Broadway/West 10th.
It allows the speed freaks to travel further west on SkyTrain before the transfer. And it would operate at faster speeds than the 99 even allowing a few extra stops. And it would be relatively quiet.
Meanwhile, the rest of Broadway is a perfect candidate for a low speed tram service.
I completely disagree with you about spending money on rail systems for less developed parts of the region being a bad idea. That's been the screwed up philosophy of Fraser Valley politicians and their big-city counterparts for the past 60 years, and look where it's got us.... How many times have I heard, "we don't have the density, maybe in 20 years." Will we have to wait for the whole valley to be developed before density builds and we are given a token rail line or maybe a rapid bus for the poor?
How are we going to get this magical density when we don't have the transit to support it? For a line like the interurban it's even cheaper to construct because the right-of-way and track are already there.
It's called community building and it's the right thing to do.
I do agree with you that Broadway would be better-served with high-capacity rail-based transit. LRT would certainly accomplish that! Both an LRT and tram service, possibly like Ron suggests right above me, make a lot of sense.
Besides the huge, almost unimaginable difference in cost, there are a whole lot of businesses on Broadway that would be crippled by a subway system.... because such a system would have fewer stops than the 99, and be underground so that people don't even see the communities they are passing through.
If Condon says a Broadway tram service would be slower than a 99, it's because it would have many more stops, and therefore the correct comparison would be to the 9.
Eric - point taken about the 99. I never had to live or work on Broadway. It's convenient and reasonably fast, that's about it.
http://www.krockradio.com/B-Local/3328940
In terms of LRT, have you been to downtown Calgary and seen the mess of traffic it causes where it travels at grade? It needs to be separated from traffic, in which case Skytrain is perfect. Skytrain also eliminates the need for drivers, reducing operating costs and allowing the system to be extremely flexible in responding to special events, etc.
That said, Skytrain seems ridiculously expensive - I think some serious cost-engineering needs to be done, because the jump from 400 million for an LRT/Tram system to 2.8 billion seems way out of line. Are they planning it to go underground the whole way to UBC? It doesn't need to - only through the busiest sections of the Broadway corridor. Beyond that, raise it above ground like most of the system already is.
Streetcars don't work without dedicated right-of-ways or at least if the street car is flush on the right-most lane (ie., rides against the curb). PERIOD.
In Toronto, when the street cars don't have a ROW, they block traffic down the entire street, which in turn blocks other street cars behind it. If you haven't experienced this, you don't understand the pain of riding in a street car without the ROW.
Even with an ROW, street cars bunch up in busy areas, causing increased wait-times and slow service.
Finally, if a city builds an ROW, why not just use buses on them (say trolley buses or other green options)?? What's the point of wasting money laying down track?
Charlie Smith
Editor
There is this story on "Mayor Meggs":
http://twurl.cc/1u48
And there is this story on comments from Burnaby mayor Derek Corrigan, which to me aim a kick at the collective groin of all Vancouver city councillors, Geoff Meggs included:
http://www.straight.com/article-260401/transit-gambit-condemned
Just FYI
Matt Burrows
Staff Writer
1985 UTDC - SKYTRAIN
Skytrain Expo (EXPO 86) Line 1985 20.4 km $1.45 Billion
Vancouver Waterfront Station to New Westminster Station
114 Skytrain Mark 1 Cars (57 two Car trains or 28 four Car trains + 1 two Car train)
($854 Million paid by British Columbia, $600 Million paid by Canada / Ontario.)
1986 BOMBARDIER - SKYTRAIN
1989 Skytrain Expo Line extension to Columbia Station 0.64 km ?
1990 Skytrain Skybridge $244 Million
1990 Skytrain Expo Line extension to Scott Road Station 2.3 km ?
16 Skytrain Mark 1 series 2 Cars (8 two Car trains; or 4 four Car trains)
1994 Skytrain Expo Line extension to King George Station 4.4 km ?
20 Skytrain Mark 1 series 2 Cars (10 two Car trains or 5 four Car trains)
Total Mark 1Cars 150 (75 two Car trains or 37 four Car trains + 1 two Car train)
2002 BOMBARDIER - SKYTRAIN
Skytrain Millennium Line 2002 20.6 km $1.1 Billion
Columbia Station to Broadway Station
60 Bombardier Mark 11 Skytrain Cars
(30 two Car trains or 15 four Car trains; only Cars 259 / 260 have on-board cameras)
Skytrain Millennium Line 2006 extension to VCC / Clark Drive 0.83 km ?
2009 BOMBARDIER - SKYTRAIN
48 Bombardier Mark 11 series 2 Skytrain Cars with on-board cameras $193 Million
(24 two Car Trains or 12 four Car trains)
2010 BOMBARDIER - SKYTRAIN
7 Bombardier Mark 11 Series 2 Skytrain Cars $28.1 Million
(3 two car trains + 1 one Car train; or 1 four Car train, 1 two Car train + 1 one Car train)
http://www.bclocalnews.com/tri_city_maple_ridge/tricitynews/news/5048688...
2005 SIEMENS - CANADA LINE (orphan system not compatible with Skytrain)
Canada Line (RAV - Richmond Airport Vancouver) 19.2 km $2.05 Billion
1 Block from Waterfront Station to Richmond Centre or Airport
40 Heavy Rail Subway Cars (20 two Car trains) No on-board cameras for safety.
Subway Station Size reduced to two Car trains to save money, no room for expansion.
2009 TOTAL COST: $5.07 Billion
1979 GVRD RAPID TRANSIT PROJECT COST: $430-558 million
Skytrain Expo/ Millennium Lines, longer Evergreen Line, and Canada Line. $430 million at grade; $558 million elevated, subways, Pattullo Bridge with 6 lane car and 2 lane LRT.
PROFIT FOR INVESTORS: PRICELESS
Almost every one of the 23 cross streets in Central Broadway (Main to Arbutus) is signalized. Over 90% of cross streets in the entire West Broadway corridor (Main to Alma) are signalized. Outside of the eight major cross arterials these signals are operated exclusively by thousands of pedestrians and cyclists every day.
Place a fast light rail service in a dedicated median on Broadway, and all cross traffic over half the city -- except for the arterials -- will be severed.
So much for Vancouver's vaunted Greenway network and bicycle routes, let alone the ability for any pedestrian to cross Broadway anywhere except at major intersections.
Place a slower tram on the same route to UBC and you'll spend over a billion dollars (anyone who claims it can be done for less doesn't know construction or the Broadway corridor) only to replicate a milqtoast B-Line, if that. Why not just keep the B-Line, but improve it's service -- without severing cross streets?
Another issue nearly totally ignored is safety at level crossings with rail. The more crossings, the more the risk managers start to twitch thinking of the very real and tragic stats accidents at crossings. Note: this is safety at crossings, not suicides.
But we also happen to have a small city at the end of the line called UBC along with Western Canada's second most dense Central Business District: the major employent centre on Central Broadway, including VGH and all the attendant healthcare-related services and offices. Broadway is unique in Western Canada for the above realities, and also in part for its pedestrian cross traffic density and high levels of existing transit use.
A subway extension of the Millennium Line would, in my opinion, best serve the community AND commuters. But it should never be allowed to replicate the mistakes of the Canada Line (cut & cover construction, station platforms limted in perpetuity to less than 100 metres, lack of compensation for businesses affected by construction, etc).
And the project should be built with the intent to radically increase appropriate urban form (not necessarily high rises) and the space for pedestrians on the street, reinforcing the public realm with wide sidewalks, curb bumpouts at every intersection, mid-block crosswalks throughout Central Broadway, and a unique and creative urban design and architectural response that fosters delight.
This is not to say trams are not appropriate on other arterials, like 41st Ave, the Arbutus corridor, 200th Street, Kingsway, Canada Way, King George, etc. But that's not enough. You have to marry land use to the transit infrastructure and build cities around it, hopefully with a sense of human scaled urbanism and urban resiliency.
If cost is your main argument favouring trams over all else, then save our money and stick to the B-Line.
Lastly, it is patently unfair to promote single transit modes when the real question is: What kind of society do we want to live in when facing the upcoming challenges? The choice in the 21st Century is between transit and the car. A Broadway subway will cost about 10 months worth of the Lower mainland car subsidy combined with the annual economic costs of congestion. Triple digit fuel prices will take cars off the road more than anything else. Let's hope there is a plethora of transit options already in the works before the shit hits the fan later this decade.
1. it would be difficult to get the millenium line to extend westward AND
2. I agree with extending streetcar west from millenium line, past olympic village and granville island. BUT, rather than going through Vanier Park/Discovery Point and out along waterfront through Jericho lands, or at least IN ADDITION TO THAT, the line should go up the arbutus corridor and then west along 16th to UBC. It would be a much faster route than Broadway or 4th Ave, cheaper to build, and simpler and quicker to build.
There will be opposition from residents/homeowners along 16th, of course, but the cost savings, and the ability to eliminate or reduce the 99B diesel bus fiasco and beef up the trolley service on Broadway with the cost savings of this solution is paramount.
Better to send it straight west, to 1st and Main, and either terminate it there, or send it south to intersect with the Canada Line at Broadway and Cambie.
This way, with the expo line station at Main and Terminal, and a Millenium line station at Main and 1st, it creates a TRANSIT PRECINCT that would support massive redevelopment in that underdeveloped area.
As far as transfering between the millenium line and the expo line at Main street is concerned, it would be a pleasant 2 block walk when the weather is good, and a short hop on the downtown streetcar route, once it is built, when the weather is poor.
One question, if there is only one pot of money really, doesn't it make sense to can this UBC east west buildup until Coquitlam gets theirs? The amount of single occupant autos you could potentially get off the road is staggering.
I hate buses with a passion but even I have to say that the #99 system is pretty damn fast, for a bus. It is barely comparable to the horror of riding the plain ol' #9. Surely the #99s can tide us over for a few years. It's Coquitlam's turn.
And I don't live there, I just have ears and listen to the traffic report. "Stall on the Mary Hill Bypass...delays...delays...."
1. completely separated, usu elevated or tunneled guideway
2. much more elaborate stations
3. more-or-less one vendor
4. way more complex guidance and driving systems, in order to allow "driverless" operation. I would think that it costs more to operate skytrain remotely than to drive streetcars the normal way. there ARE drivers, they are just at an operations centre rather than in the trains. I have always wondered how many people work in remote operations, how much they get paid compared to regular drivers, etc. I have never seen such comparisons. Since it is such a debated topic, we should have the real numbers.
Right, Broadway is congested for cars, but there is a dedicated bus/bike lane (terrifying to bike on, by the way...anyone who prefers it to Tenth Avenue is nuts) which leads to a fast bus ride.
It's not a Grade A solution but it's something. What do the Coquitlam people have? They get the Westcoast Express, which only has a few runs, limited times, and is strangely expensive I think. It sure doesn't get a lot of people out of their cars, so if pollution and wasting gas is something we are supposed to get excited about, it makes sense to me to put the electric rail to them.
Economically it makes sense too. Look what Skytrain has done for Burnaby South. It was a bunch of nothing plus the odd car lot twenty years ago, now it is edge to edge stores and condos. That's got to be good for economic purposes.