Faces of Vancouver: Interurban trams

My opinion is Vancouverites are crazy over transit. Consider the endless line ups the day the Canada Line opened... then, when I went to try the new tram there was a 2 train wait with about 400 in line!

Where are our electric cars?

"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."
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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

Let's see Rod,

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.

Ron van der Eerden

Come back when you can demonstrate otherwise.
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I don't need your permission for anything.

But watch the suburbs disintegrate too.
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Is that the objective of your approach, or an unintended consequence? How would electric or other ZEVs change that?

Rod Smelser

No Rod, The disintegration of the suburbs will be a natural consequence of building an unsustainabe model. They can only exist because of cheap oil and the massive subsidies that make driving "affordable". If motorists had to pay the true cost of driving the market would never have come up with such energy sucking sprawl. We'd have neighbourhoods much like those that existed before the middle of last century, denser, walkable, more dynamic with profitable public transit as a bonus.

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.

@ Ron Van der Eerden

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

I'm not sure what the rare rude cyclist has to do with this thread. (As if there aren't far more rude and far more deadly motorists.) But arguing that transit is subsidized is part of my point. Of course it's subsidized. How could it otherwise compete with the highly subsidized car? 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.

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.

Ron

I'm not sure what the rare rude cyclist has to do with this thread.
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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.
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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

Rod, You are right that the "much larger bill" of driving is not paid by the motorist. What still you fail to understand is how that affects transit.

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.