 Interurban tram at Quebec Street and Terminal Street with Main Street SkyTrain station in the background. Douglas Aitken |
Shown above is one of two heritage trams that have operated as the Downtown Historic Railway on summer weekends from May to October for the past eight years. It is hoped they will resume operation this coming summer on the track that has recently been upgraded between the Canada Line’s Olympic Village Station and Granville Island. There are also talked-about proposals to open heritage tram lines in Steveston and Surrey.
Rapid transit came early to Greater Vancouver. In 1891, the Westminster and Vancouver Tramway Co. inaugurated service between downtown New Westminster and downtown Vancouver. At the time, it was the first interurban tram system in North America. In 1897, the company was reorganized under the name B.C. Electric Railway Co. By 1911, the company was running four electrified suburban railways: the Central Park Line between Vancouver and New Westminster, the Steveston Line from the south end of Granville Bridge to Steveston in Richmond via Marpole, the North Arm Line from Marpole to New Westminster along the North Arm of the Fraser River, and the Fraser Valley Line from New Westminster to Chilliwack.
All four lines were financial successes and, along with the railways, were the backbone of Greater Vancouver’s regional economy. Rapid transit in Greater Vancouver was humming with over 600 electric tramcars in service. During World War II, the system became rundown for lack of upkeep and maintenance. In the 1950s, competition from the automobile led to the closing of unprofitable lines. In 1958, the last interurban tram took its final run between Steveston and Marpole. At the time, neither the provincial or municipal governments showed any interest in upgrading Vancouver’s regional rapid transit system, and the system was allowed to die.
For several years, the City of Vancouver has been proposing to rebuild tram service on several lines within the city. The first portion of the False Creek Line, connecting Granville Island with the Olympic Village Station has already been completed. It is proposed the line will be continued to Gastown, Waterfront Station, and Stanley Park. Bombardier is providing two modern, multi-car “Flexity Trams” to carry passengers free of charge during the Olympics and until March 21. Following public reaction, a decision will be made whether or not to expand the system.
Interest in restoring regional rapid transit in the Fraser Valley is very strong. Currently there are several groups fighting to re-establish service to Abbotsford and Chilliwack. These groups include Rail for the Valley, Valley Transportation Advisory Committee, and South Fraser OnTrax.
Since Greater Vancouver and its region is totally dependent on cheap oil, it is extremely important that a sustainable regional transportation system be in place before the world’s dwindling reserves push prices beyond reach. Optimistic estimates say that in 30 years the oil will run out. More conservative estimates state prices will be beyond reach in only five to 10 years. Since British Colombia is blessed with sufficient supplies of sustainable hydro electricity, it seems natural to connect our region with a workable transit system for the transport of both people and goods. Our very survival may depend on this. Comments are invited.
Douglas Aitken is the author of the book Three Faces of Vancouver. Every Monday, Faces of Vancouver looks at the area’s buildings, past and present, with a focus on Vancouver’s European, Asian, and First Nations cultures.
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Comments
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Only in Vancouver can claims like this one be made with a straight face. No serious analyst of oil resources or markets believes any part of this.
In 2005 the IMF concluded that over the next three decades oil would trade in the $35 to $50 per barrel range, and they made that forecast assuming there would be about 400 million cars and trucks in China. While that price range has been exceeded by quite a bit in recent years, a recent article in Foreign Affairs makes it clear that over the next few years oil prices are likely to stabilize and even decrease.
If someone wants a contrary opinion, consider that of Premier Gordon M. Campbell's principal carbon tax crusader, SFU Economist Mark Jaccard. His long run forecast is $80 per barrel.
I have to emphasize that I could care less if some assistant deputy planning official for one of Greater Vancouver's pivotal municipal bureaucracies makes impassioned power point presentations on peak oil. The political currency of these apocalytic theories is clearly a function of their ability to serve simultaneously the pecuniary interests of oil companies AND their competitors in the alternative energy field, a point made without too much subtlety by Tzeporah Berman in last year's provincial election. Both these sectors have a material interest in higher oil/gas prices, and both are happy to promote theories which will soften up the consumer and forcibly silence any and all criticisms of high oil/gas prices.
Local governemnt politicians and bureaucrats in Greater Vancouver have never had an appetite for the kind of property tax increases that would be needed for them to add significantly to the highway and freeway network, so they are delighted to assist in peddling theories which suggest any such expenditure is inappropriate.
Rod Smelser
You are an authority on peak oil. The evidence doesn't support you but we should listen to you because you read somewhere that in future the evidence will show otherwise. Uh-huh!
Gas prices are high. Gas prices are volotile but high. Just as one would expect with peak oil. There may be debate about reserves, but the evidence supports the theory that we are at or near peak. Come back when you can demonstrate otherwise.
Meanwhile, public transit doesn't struggle financially because it is in some way less efficient. It struggles financially because motorists are so heavily subsidized. The taxpayer coughs over thousands of dollars a year to keep cars on the road. Remove that subsidy, make drivers pay, and watch public transit run at or near a profit. But watch the suburbs disintegrate too.
It's unfortunate our leaders took that wrong turn 60 years ago. But it's insanity that they keep doing it.
Come back when you can demonstrate otherwise.
===================================
I don't need your permission for anything.
But watch the suburbs disintegrate too.
================================
Is that the objective of your approach, or an unintended consequence? How would electric or other ZEVs change that?
Rod Smelser
Should we continue to pay motorists and encourage their filthy habit? I think not. The suburbs would come apart if we made motorists pay. But that will happen soon enough anyway. Peak oil will see to that. Why support a lost cause.
Electric cars won't solve the problem. You have to understand the enormous amount of energy that is provided by oil. You can't just switch to electric vehicles without ramping up electrical production on an unprecedented scale. We're already pushing the limits of demand on our current grid without cars increasing the load. Where would the massive increase in electricity come from?
The reality is pushing a tonne or more of steel around to propel a lazy 75kg body throughout their daily routine is just not sustainable. The forces that created our car dependant suburbs had only your money, not your best interests, in mind. The money you need to own and operate a car ($500/month min.); the money to flip cheap land into cookie cutters and the money to build massive sprawling roadways, water and sewer systems. They have pilfered pockets either directly or through the government. And they destroyed public transit as part of their aim.
We're in the midst of an intense recession but gas prices remain high. Peak oil would explain that dichotomy. Oil accounts for 80% of transpotation energy. As it disappears transportation will become increasingly unaffordable unless efficient mass transit takes the place of the car. Trams, by the way, are about the most efficient mass people movers ever devised. But you just can't beat a bike for individual travel.
You bring a lot of emotion to this subject. It's plain that like many cyclists you feel very passionate about your chosen mode of transportation. I get that message downtown as a pedestrian when I say "excuse me" to cyclists who are zipping along the sidewalk or crosswalk within three feet of me, and then am treated to obscene gestures, profanities, and threats of violence.
I live in Maple Ridge where the municipality will make a fuss about painting lines on the road for bike lanes, but still hasn't provided cyclists with a usable east-west corridor along Dewdney Trunk or Lougheed.
The notion that more expensive oil will lead to the end of suburbia is, frankly, a gross exaggeration. It's a joke circulated by people who want to promote downtown real estate, cookie cutter micro condos for a quarter of a million dollars for a 400 square foot studio. [Where do y ou store your bike in a place like that???] You forget that while the auto is subsidized in terms of uncosted externalities, transit is also subsidized in its case in terms of basic operating costs, capital, labour, and material inputs.
There's one well known ecological economist in Vancouver who says that gas needs to be six dollars a litre, and bases that guesstimate on website material, but a more sober approach in the Journal of Economic Literature suggested more like raising taxes on American gas by about another $1.5 per gallon.
Rod Smelser
But you need only look at cities as they evolved pre-oil. It doesn't take too much imagination to see they will return to that model once oil becomes too expensive to simply drive everywhere. Suburbs may coalesce around viable nodes. But areas of sprawl without nearby amenities (most suburban areas) will become devalued and either become slums, revert to rural agriculture or just disappear. All three of those things are already happening in the US in response to market forces.
Did pre-oil development evolve tight villages and compact cities surrounded by productive farmland because of Bob Rennie? It's natural to live close to your activities and livelihood. Only cheap oil broke that natural living arrangement... much as it broke nature in may ways.
I'm not sure what the rare rude cyclist has to do with this thread.
===============================
As you well know, Ron, they are far from rare.
... At least transit riders pay a substantial portion of the cost of the service, unlike motorists who get all municipal roads for free. Fuel taxes contribute only to regional roads and highways. Without automobile subsidies many would flock to transit and make it more profitable like the busy urban routes. Then we'd all have fewer taxes to pay. Nobody asked me if I want to subsidize both ends of the transportation spectrum instead of letting the market decide.
==============================
This is kind of funny, actually. The need to subsidize public transit has little to do with any implicit subsidies to the automobile, most of which pertain to unpriced externalities. Cars pay their own private costs, but not all their social costs, a much larger bill. Transit has been unable to pay even its private costs, labour, capital, materials.
Some "greens" think the solution to transits problems is simple. Reduce drivers wages, and that thinking is very prevalent in Vancouver. That was the impetus behind the C series buses with drivers paid less.
Rod Smelser
Urban transit routes make money. Why? Because the density is high enough to create a critical mass of ridership which in turn encourages a higher level of service in a positive feedback loop.
Suburban routes lose money because the subsidized car created sprawl which cannot be efficiently served by transit creating a negative feedback loop. Without free roads and other unpaid externalities there never would have been suburbs except for the very rich.
One solution is to subsidize suburban transit, as we do. But that plays one subsidy off against another in another vicious spiral. The other solution is to cut subsidies to the automobile and let the market determine densities and neighbourhood form. Then the shrill right wingers cannot shout "social engineering!".
The irony is that it is the "right" who espouse freeway expansions and who rail against public transit believing the free market should prevail and the "poor" shouldn't be "given" good transit. "The right" are the biggest socialists ever, pushing the biggest and most disastrous social engineering experiment in the history of humanity. It never has been a free market when it comes to free roads and the sprawl they induce. The free market would have given us much higher densities and profitable, privately run mass transit along with pay per use roads. It was the massive road building schemes of the US government (followed by much of the world) that created sprawl and put an end to profitable public transit.
And that was no accident. It was designed to stimulate the post war economy... extremely successfully in the short term. But as with all overzealous government meddling we are now paying a heavy toll that may well bankrupt many governments. It will get much worse in the years to come unless we change course very quickly.
By the way, no need to reduce drivers' wages, although graduated pay, while graduating from small buses to larger ones makes sense to me.
===================================
Ron, as I am sure you know the principal rationale behind the smaller, 24 passenger C series buses was to provide an "objective" rationale for reducing the wages and other benefits of entry level drivers.
Much of what you present is the usual urban/suburban rhetoric that anyone can find on any number of "urbanist" blogs. Some of it may have a basis in reality, but most of it is just nostrums and cliches that were constructed to advance the argument that money spent on suburban service is wasted, so better concentrate the dollars in urban areas with expensive projects like the RAV line, ,,, and next will be the U/G line to UBC.
I really don't know why it's assumed that all you have to do is mumble the density word and people will somehow be so dazzled they'll fail to see that this is just a constructed argument, an excuse for moving the dollars around, away from the suburbs and towards the urban core.
The notion that urban services are making money and suburban services are losing it is a joke. Any number of city buses may be packed at rush hour, but an hour and a half later they can be down to a driver and ten passengers.
The free roads thing is also pretty rich. Motorists and commercial truckers pay for those roads through gas taxes, and transit buses use those roads and also get subsidies to the capital and operating costs from those same gas taxes.
Rod Smelser
Municipal roads are funded through property taxes alone. They are free for the motorist to use as no gas taxes are applied to them. That is a market distortion that favours cars.
Fuel taxes contribute only to regional roads and highways. But nobody drives only on regional roads and highways. They depend predominantly on all those "free" roads that all taxpayers pay for. Buses use a tiny fraction of our road system. But they each suck potentially dozens of cars off the road REDUCING the cost to the taxpayer of the road system. I’ll get back to the public cost of transit in a second.
So if motorists aren't paying the full cost of roads how can they possibly be contributing to transit? They can't! It's a clever fabrication designed to make motorists look like philanthropists and transit riders look like beggars. Terms like "transit tax" were devised by the automotive/oil lobby to the eager ears of motorist-friendly governments.
Do you really think the few hundred dollars a year you pay in fuel taxes covers the cost of all the roads you use? Transit riders pay more than five times as much while reducing the need for massive road expansions, health problems pollution and policing. If you eliminate subsidies to motorists far fewer could afford to drive. The market would evolve denser cities supported by transit. Transit would become more profitable reducing or eliminating the need to subsidize it too. It is not the transit rider who costs the taxpayer. It is the lack of a dense market to make transit profitable. But that sprawl happened in large part because the government built free roads for everybody to disperse themselves. Owning a car is far more expensive than the $500/month the driver pays. If they had to pay that full cost they would have been less likely to sprawl in the first place. They were paid to sprawl.
Back to trams and such. While the Canada Line is an instant success, unlike the Golden Ears Bridge, it was only such a costly subway to satisfy the demands of motorists... not transit riders. For much much less money a tram or LRT could have taken the place of a couple of road lanes and moved hundreds of times more people than the cars in those lanes. But oh the shrill cries from motorists when you want to repurpose a traffic lane or two. Motorists have a completely false sense of entitlement when it comes to “their roads”. Now transit riders are stuck riding in a dark hole. Who won that one?
Sprawl is expensive. Driving is expensive. Before cheap oil cities were dense. Go figure.
Rod, please be serious.
=============================
It's actually very funny you should say that!
Municipal roads are funded through property taxes alone. They are free for the motorist to use as no gas taxes are applied to them. That is a market distortion that favours cars.
Fuel taxes contribute only to regional roads and highways. But nobody drives only on regional roads and highways. They depend predominantly on all those "free" roads that all taxpayers pay for.
==================================
Any serious road building by local government relies on supporting funding from Victoria and/or Ottawa. Some of those federal and provincial dollars are raised from gas taxes, and indeed the CFM has been demanding a return of federal gas taxes to local governments for a long time, something that has begun to happen in the last five or so years.
The local streets would have to be there if there were no cars at all. Local streets predated the automobile by several thousand years. Did you not know that?
Buses use a tiny fraction of our road system.
=================================
You could say the same thing about trucks, yet the trucking industry is said to be subsidized because unlike railroads they don't own and operate their roadbeds.
Rod Smelser
one of the most persistent myths of modern society -
In fact private car ownership is one of he most subsidized aspects of our society. In Metro Vancouver taxpayers subsidize car owners to the tune of $6.6 billioin per year.
In fact private car ownership is one of he most subsidized aspects of our society. In Metro Vancouver taxpayers subsidize car owners to the tune of $6.6 billioin per year.
==================================
This assertion has absolutely no foundation whatsoever, as you well know. Where are the subsidy payments? I didn't get a cheque last month or last year, did you? How are these subsidies financed, ... out of the gas tax perhaps?
Hiding behind the silly and anonymous moniker "truthseeking" is positively Orwellian given the nature and quality of what you're saying. It's one of those internet abuses everyone has become too cynical to even notice anymore.
Rod Smelser
It is entirely legitimate that a network of public rights-of-ways remain in place... places for the public to move about freely... “local streets” if you will. But instead the property taxpayer is forced to pay for 8 metre wide (minimum) swaths of expensive asphalt primarily for the movement and storage of private automobiles. That amount of expensive infrastructure is entirely unnecessary for anything else. And that's just for the residential streets. Then there's the 18 metre wide arterial roads also paid entirely by property taxes. They all have to be maintained and policed at great cost. Public transit policing costs comes out the public transit budget. Road policing costs come out of general revenue. Another subsidy to the motorist. And I don’t even need to get into all the health and pollution problems that the motorist passes on to society.
There are indeed regional roads that get gas tax funding. Perhaps a rare very major local road improvement will get senior government support. But almost all roads are “free” to the user. The motorist IS heavily subsidized in this way. No cheque in the mail is required. Your denial doesn’t change the fact. But you want to claim that motorists fund themselves AND a portion of transit. Please!
“Buses use a tiny fraction of our road system.”
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“You could say the same thing about trucks”¦”
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I do say the same thing about trucks.
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"...yet the trucking industry is said to be subsidized because unlike railroads they don't own and operate their roadbeds."
They should also have to pay their own way just like the railways (primarily) do. We have the dysfunctional, distorted transportatin system we have because of massive subsidies (free roads, Rod) that skew everything in favour of the private motor vehicle, car or truck.
End the subsidies and, over time, most things would tend to fix themselves. Why are you and all the "right" so mortally afraid of the free market?
Your comments show that you have done a little selected reading here and there and have then got religion on the subject. People don't get religion on a subject like this unless it's serving some baser needs.
Your statements about local roads are just plain false. There were local roads, and wider streets too, long before the automobile. Your 8 and 18 metre figures are pure make believe, giving a fake appearance of precision and measurement to unfounded rhetoric.
There was a time when liberals, at least in America, supported road and freeway construction as an egalitarian transportation policy, a open network in contrast to the railroad's closed monopoly position. That stance has changed in the last thirty or so years years as privleged Yuppies, concerned only about enhancing urban amenities and raising urban residential real estate prices (the largest single holding in their private investment portfolios) have taken over the discussion.
It's past time for liberals, labour and social demcrats to re-connect with their working class origins, and Carole James has done well to do that, supporting a balanced approach to transportation policy that includes PMH1 and expanded WCExpress commuter rail services, as well as LRT and buses. For her troubles, she has earned the sneering scorn of all the urbanist congiscenti and cafe society sophisticates.
The fake claim that railroads pay all their costs, when they were originally GRANTED their ROWs is so historically inaccurate it's intentionally abusive. The deliberately contradictory treatment you give to buses using roads and trucks using the same roads is not supportable or logical, it's just an ideological shell game.
The frightening thing is not that you're fooling anyone. The frightening thing is that there are so many people willing to pretend to have been fooled by this kind of material when they are really marching quite deliberately to a very aggressive and extremely selfish agenda, cleverly dressed up in greenish camouflage.
Rod Smelser
How about we GRANT the truckers their ROWs but have them build all the infrastructure out of their own pockets. Sound fair? What do you think Paul Landry would have to say about that?
And why are motor vehicle fuels exempt from the proposed HST? Because, of course, car culture can't stand on it's own four wheels. It needs the coddling hand of government at every step of its existance. Are solar panels exempt? Bicycles? Shoes?
PMH1 will turn into a white elephant worse than the fast ferries as peak oil takes its toll - pun intended. Just as the Golden Ears Bridge is showing "disappointing" numbers and now TransLink is forced to "market" it better to recoup its losses. More bad money after bad when it comes to motor vehicles. They will likely curtail transit expansion to ramp up car use to satisfy the private partner.
Yay!
===================================
A structure like the Golden Ears, or Port Mann, or a new Patullo, are 100 or 200 year capital investments. What happes in the first few decades, let alone the first few months, is simply not relevant at all.
Prof Anthony Perle of SFU was on a talk radio show a few months ago. He claimed, using the same terms you do, that a new 10 lane Port Mann would be a "white elephant". He compared it to Mirabel Airport in Montreal. Yet less than five minutes later he did a complete 180 and claimed that any new Port Mann structure would be congested in a very few years.
Ron, can you get in touch with Prof Perle and ask him which page in the official script he's on today?
Here's another thing I am curious about. How is it that Corrigan's Burnaby is totally opposed to a new Port Mann bridge, and yet Mayor Corrigan and his planning gurus, including the one who does the cute little Peak Oil powerpoints, are in favour of a new Patullo Birdge? Why the differential treatment?
Could it be that Burnaby officials know very well just how critical the Trans Canada was to Burnaby's indusrial growth over the last half century and are now afraid that an expanded freeway will tend to confer a similar industrial benefit on further-out municiplaties, such as Surrey, Langley and Abbotsford? Could it be that they don't want the competition for development, and lucrative development cost charges, and industrial tax bases?
You know, Ron, it never ceases to amaze me how some people think that all they have to do is camouflage their positions behind various bits of green jargon and once they've done that no one will be able to figure out what the real game is. The one and only green thing opponents of PMH1 are concerned about is money.
Rod Smelser
Perle is absolutely correct. So is Corrigan.
But you haven’t answered my question
...An expanded Port Mann will induce car-dependent sprawl and be congested again in a short period of time. That is not a good investment since it exacerbates the problem. But to make it much worse, peak oil will make driving impossibly expensive long before this 100 year $6 billion capital investment has lived its useful life.
=====================================
Like Perle and most other highway opponents, you're detremined to have it both ways. The bridge will be congested, jammed with traffic. The bridge will be basically empty, a white elephant because of oil scarcities and price rises. Which is it?
A recent article in Foreign Affairs puts forward the view that for the next several years oil prices will generaly be moderating, at or below today's levels. So the empty scenario would not appear to be on. But with a roughly $3 toll, neither is the packed scenario.
I agree that tearing down the existing bridge is hard to accept, but that's the bargain made by Premier Gordon M. Campbell, the hero of David Suzuki and Mark Jaccard and of course Andrew Weaver - a full-on partisan who recorded Get Out The Vote "robo-calls" for Victoria Becaon Hill Liberal Candidate Dallas Henealut as part of Will Horter's Anybody But Carol effort. The calls did not offer Liberal Govt patronage, but they did offer anyone who wanted it a free ride to the polls in a gas or diesel powered car. The sincerity of these people is remarkable, and so is that of their disciples and idolators.
Rod Smelser
Both.
The only way oil prices will not rise dramatically is if we remain in a permanent recession. That's even quite likely because energy scarcity will drive up all costs and cool any recovery. But then there will be fewer cars and sprawl and shipping will be curtailed. Both the stated purposes and the clandestine purposes for a big new bridge and massive 60's era freeways will be lost.
Either way its a bad investment.
And you're getting downright silly if you think Suzuki and Weaver support Campbell's stuborn determination to build that bridge. They held their noses and supported Campbell only because of the NDP's absurd "axe the tax" campaign. (And the NDP was going to build the bridge anyway.) They didn't want the carbon tax to become politically toxic. Suzuki is very clear in his opposition to the Bridge. Weaver is extremely clear about our need to reduce GHGs. (Like doubling a freeway will help with that.) I don't know Jaccards position but he's betting on coal to be our energy saviour so that says a lot.
Are you avoiding my questions because you don't have answers?
There are parts of your most recent post which seem to be a verbatim repeat of speaking lines from the DSF communications group.
Rod Smelser
But rather than blame you for using ideological arguments I asked you a few simple questions to make you think about what you are saying. Obviously you don't like the answers... your own answers.
In the coming years, adaptation, smart choices and flexibnility are going to be key to living well within a quickly disintegrating economy. Being married "'til death do us part" to your car will become a ball and chain.
I feel a bit sorry for you.
But rather than blame you for using ideological arguments I asked you a few simple questions ...
In the coming years, adaptation, smart choices and flexibnility ...
=======================================
I don't recall any questions. I do recall you resorting to DSF talking points and peak oil ideology.
Would it be safe to conclude that "smart choices and flexibnility (sic)" are code words for insisting on living downtown and nowhere else?
Rod Smelser
And why are motor vehicle fuels exempt from the proposed HST? Are solar panels exempt? Bicycles? Shoes?
I would assume that the first set of questions were rhetorical. How is the Crown going to acquire these ROWs you're going to hand over to the trucking industry? Whose going to represent that industry, which is made up of small firms? Paul Landry would probably want to know how that industry would borrow the money to build a road network even if they were granted the ROW for free. As I said in an earlier post, "There was a time when liberals, at least in America, supported road and freeway construction as an egalitarian transportation policy, a open network in contrast to the railroad's closed monopoly position."
Rod Smelser