Extra density,rail transit all wrong in Vancouver?

[vanman]

This was originally posted by en at SSC:


From newspaper: Expert: Density, Rail Transit All Wrong

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wrong way to make a region livable
Randal O'Toole
Special to the Sun


Tuesday, June 12, 2007


Property owners in the Lower Mainland face some of the strictest land-use regulations in Canada, with more than two-thirds of the region off limits to development. Not coincidentally, Vancouver also has the least affordable housing in Canada.

TransLink, the Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority, is building expensive light-rail and other transit lines, and has given relief of highway congestion the lowest priority for funding.

Not coincidentally, Vancouver shares with Toronto and Montreal the record of most time and fuel wasted per commuter of any urban area in Canada.

In 1995, the provincial government asked the Greater Vancouver Regional District to write a "strategic plan" for the region. The legislature gave planners 14 goals, including maintaining housing affordability, providing efficient transportation and protecting the unique character of communities.

The GVRD responded with its Livable Region Strategic Plan. But rather than meet all 14 goals, this plan focused on just two -- "avoiding urban sprawl" and "minimize the use of automobiles." Unfortunately, achieving these goals meant discarding several of the others.

To avoid sprawl, the GVRD closed more than 70 per cent of the region's land to development and mandated that all cities in the region accommodate growth by increasing population densities. The result has been skyrocketing housing prices and, for most families, an end to the great Canadian dream of owning your own single-family home.

To minimize automobile use, TransLink spends a large share of the region's limited transportation funds on various forms of rail transit. These expensive projects will not get a significant number of people out of their automobiles.

The growing congestion that results will only waste the time of the 90 per cent of people in the region who rely on autos as their main source of transport.

Meanwhile, the mania for density is destroying the unique character of communities. District planners directed cities and towns to move more of their residents into five-story apartments and condo towers.

Cities are also supposed to provide a "jobs-labour balance." This means cities like Surrey that have almost twice as many workers as jobs are expected to add more than 100,000 new jobs.

Meanwhile, cities like Burnaby that have more jobs than workers are supposed to discourage new businesses. The result will be that everything looks exactly alike.

Where will it end? Vancouver is already the densest major city in Canada, 14 per cent denser than Montreal and 27 per cent denser than Toronto and Victoria. The only incorporated Canadian town of any size that is denser than Vancouver (by a mere one per cent) is the Montreal suburb of Westmount.

Vancouver's Mayor Sam Sullivan says even more density is needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This argument is without foundation. Research shows that building, heating, and operating highrise condos emits more greenhouse gases than single-family homes.

Density also increases traffic congestion, and cars produce the most pollution and greenhouse gases in congested traffic.

The region will not reduce carbon emissions by forcing people to waste fuel in stop-and-go traffic.

Just who decided that "avoiding sprawl" should be the paramount goal of the region's planners anyway?

This goal should be laughable in a province that has some of the lowest population densities in the world, all of whose cities, towns, and villages cover less than one-half per cent of British Columbia.

Planners have their priorities upside down. In a province such as B.C., which is 99 per cent rural open space, or even a region such as Vancouver, which is more than 70 per cent open space, keeping housing affordable is more important the preserving every last acre of undeveloped land.

Nearly three out of four Canadians aspire to live in a single-family home with a yard. The yards people want to own are some of the most valuable sources of open space and outdoor recreation a city can have. Denying this goal to most of the region's residents makes Vancouver less livable, not more.

Discouraging driving is even dumber. Besides being the most convenient form of urban transport ever invented, autos have given Canadians access to better jobs, housing and recreation, and Canadians are not going to give them up.

If driving has problems, such as greenhouse gas emissions, fix those problems. One of the world's leading alternative fuel research labs is located right in Burnaby, yet planners chose social engineering over technical solutions to pollution.

Government strategic planning inevitably does more harm than good. The province should break up the GVRD and TransLink into decentralized, user-fee-driven agencies each focusing on a specific mission such as sewers or transit.

Land-use planning should be turned over to the cities, or better yet, private landowners.

Local governments should focus on providing effective urban services, not on changing people's lifestyles.

Randal O'Toole (rot@cato.org) is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., and author of The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths: How Smart Growth Harms American Cities.

- - -

Randal O'Toole will speak on this topic at the Fraser Institute, 1770 Burrard,at noon on June 20.

For tickets, call 604-714-4578.
__________________
Visit my former Japan student exchange blog
http://ngaie.blogspot.com

[vanman]

Ah, double post, delete.

[CBeats]

I know this is old - I wasn't on the forum when it was posted - but still...

:ahhh:

Anti-smart growth? Promote urban sprawl and automobile use? What!? This guy is crazier than any one of our local nutjobs.

[touraccuracy]

O'Tool, indeed.

[crazyjoeda]

Yeah, we have all that land just being wasted to grow food. Vancouver should look to LA for sustainable growth solutions we should demand less transit and more freeways! We have an endless supply of oil and a little more co2 and pollution would only make the sunset look more beautiful.

That guy is nuts, why did you waste my time by posting this ridiculousness.

[geoff's two cents]

I initially thought it was just some crank writing a letter to the editor, until I saw that he actually expects people to pay to hear him spout this garbage. Perhaps, if tickets are cheap enough, we could crash his party. . . .

[rather_draconian]

I think the stupidest part is that he insists that BC has 99% OPEN RURAL SPACE, suggesting that we can build on it or something. Where are you from? Why do you think everyone lives in the lower mainland? Because it's not a big rocky mountain!

[Delirium]

"Vancouver's Mayor Sam Sullivan says even more density is needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This argument is without foundation. Research shows that building, heating, and operating highrise condos emits more greenhouse gases than single-family homes."

duh! but there's more than one family living in a high-rise. multiply 200 single family homes versus one highrise with 200 units and tell me which is worse.
what an idiot!

[djmk]

this article is from Randal O'Toole from the Cato Institute.

the cato institute is this right wing think tank/lobby group which promotes the American values of "limited government, free markets, individual liberty, and peace" within the US and all over the world. These were the ideals of the American Revolution and these people fight for these ideals. I believe they call themselves "libertarians" but i think they are more like uber-capitalists.

if you re-read this article, what Randal is saying is that we wants market forces to determine how this city is shaped and that people are smart enough to make their own decisions on car ownership and where they build their homes.

of course it all rubbish

[G-Slice]

The Montreal suburb of Westmount?

This guy is pretty dumb.

[nickinacan]

I don't think that he is entirely incorrect though.

I find that these arguments seem to focus on the polar extremes of society. It is always the "More transit, less highways" crowd versus the "more highways, less transit" crowd. We've done the more transit route for the last 20+ years and let our highway system decay, since the eco-hippies have rallied in force to get things like skytrain, rapidbus, community shuttles and more buses. Has it been effective? Has it reduced traffic like they said it would? The answer is a resounding no.

Now look at the flip side of things. Instead of investing in public transit, we could have built giant highways to get everyone from point a to point b and back again. But has this solution worked in other cities? Definitely not.

The solution is to find a balance between the two ideals. Focus on the middle ground rather than the radicals on either end of the spectrum. Build some highways AND some public transit. Give people options to get where they need to go. Sure I am a supporter of Gateway, as it is needed, however it angers me that there wasn't a bigger use of public transit in the project, although other public transit projects have been announced.

As for density, not everyone wants to live in a high rise, not everyone wants to live in a townhouse/condo, and not everyone wants to live in a house. Just that statement should sum up that density should mixed, not uniform. Of course there is a bias to high density on this board...

[Locked In]

I initially thought it was just some crank writing a letter to the editor, until I saw that he actually expects people to pay to hear him spout this garbage. Perhaps, if tickets are cheap enough, we could crash his party. . . .

The original post is almost 2 years old, so I imagine he's long gone and forgotten - hopefully stuck in traffic on a highway somewhere ;)

IMO, this article gets it wrong on an almost line-by-line basis. You almost have to give him credit for having such a mish-mash of partisan arrogance, faulty logic, and short-sightedness published in a real newspaper though! Some personal lowlights:

"rail transit...will not get a significant number of people out of their automobiles" (?)
"the mania for density is destroying the unique character of communities" (?)
"avoiding sprawl... should be laughable in a province that has some of the lowest population densities in the world" (?)

That's not to mention the bits touched on by other posters: a ridiculous comparison between greenhouse gas emissions from SFHs versus multi-unit residential, and the non-sequitar about Westmount.

Anyways, rant off. Sorry for contributing to keeping this thread alive way past its time...

Edit: I entirely agree with nickinacan's comment that a balance is required. However, it doesn't sound like O'Toole is advocating anything close to a balanced, realistic approach to transportation or land-use planning. He seems to be advocating the abolishment of urban containment boundaries, the ALR, rapid transit, and (possibly) land use regulation in general(?). He equates greenfield development with affordable housing. He attempts to portray growth boundaries as being solely responsible for increased housing prices. He entirely misconstrues the role of municipalities under the LRSP in respect to population and job growth. I just think that his positions on a lot of these issues and the various bits of misinformation sprinkled throughout the article make it very difficult to take what he says seriously.

[G-Slice]

Of course people prefer single-family homes to high-density living. You get more space and a yard. The problem is that in order to make that lifestyle affordable, single-family housing has moved progressively further away from the kinds of places the occupants of those homes need to travel.

The result has been a host of additional costs for government to provide services to those areas. From the municipal governments that pay for more water pipes and garbage collection in spread-out neighbourhoods, to provincial governments paying for new highway projects and increased health costs from sedentary lifestyles and air pollution from car travel. Then there are the less tangible costs to everybody, such as having noisy, unsightly, and polluting highways cutting off neighbourhoods from one another. And of course, we can't avoid mentioning climate change brought on by suburbanites using comparatively more energy to heat their larger homes and traveling by car. Even suburbanites who chose to take public transit are emitting more carbon than a city-dweller because there are generally fewer passengers on each bus.

The problem is that these costs are in large part borne equally by everybody, even by those who chose to live a lifestyle that imposes fewer costs on the rest of society.

In spite of everything I wrote above, I am really not suggesting that we should demonize suburbanites or legislate restrictions on urban sprawl. Rather, we need to take steps to more fairly impose the costs of suburban life on people living in the suburbs, rather than forcing city dwellers to subsidize them. If we can manage to do that, people will have a better idea of how much their lifestyle really costs and make choices accordingly.

[Kwik-E-Mart]

Ahh... Let's move on folks. There's nothing to see from the Cato Institute.

[Architype]

There are two sides to every argument, but one side is usually wrong. Increased density does involve some increase in the cost of housing (same in Europe), but it's the sprawl that causes most of the problems such as traffic congestion and long term environmental costs.

[racc]

The solution is to find a balance between the two ideals. Focus on the middle ground rather than the radicals on either end of the spectrum. Build some highways AND some public transit. Give people options to get where they need to go. Sure I am a supporter of Gateway, as it is needed, however it angers me that there wasn't a bigger use of public transit in the project, although other public transit projects have been announced.


Currently, there is no balance. After decades of almost exclusively investing in roads before the 1980s, our transportation system is way out of balance. To suggest that somehow going forward that "balanced" investment in roads and transit will create a balanced system, is simply not true. Massive investment in transit required to address the current imbalance. Unfortunately, South of the Fraser, pretty much all transportation investments are in roads and highways, creating even more imbalance in the system. To suggest, as the Minster of Transportation does, that the investment in the Canada Line somehow "balances" the investment in roads in other parts of the region is ridiculous. Taking the Canada Line is not an option for people in Surrey and Langley.

If you want a balanced transportation system, which I believe is a great ideal, we need to invest almost exclusively in transit for a couple of decades at least.

[mthq]

I think ShatterStar was talking more about himself when referring to 4 or 5 children which would be no surprise considering his education on urbanism and its solutions were last relevant in the 1950s and 60s.

[vid]

Wow, he was active for what, 45 minutes?

[WBC]

Of course people prefer single-family homes to high-density living. You get more space and a yard. The problem is that in order to make that lifestyle affordable, single-family housing has moved progressively further away from the kinds of places the occupants of those homes need to travel.



I don't agree with this statement. I prefer not having to do house maintenance and yard work. I also prefer conveniences that a modern condo brings - pools, gyms, being close to shopping, transit, entertianment, etc. And don't also forget that many families living in a house have less space than condo dwellers when you account for the fact that large number of people actually rent out a sizable chunk of the house to support their mortgage payments.

[Whalleyboy]

I don't think that he is entirely incorrect though.

I find that these arguments seem to focus on the polar extremes of society. It is always the "More transit, less highways" crowd versus the "more highways, less transit" crowd. We've done the more transit route for the last 20+ years and let our highway system decay, since the eco-hippies have rallied in force to get things like skytrain, rapidbus, community shuttles and more buses. Has it been effective? Has it reduced traffic like they said it would? The answer is a resounding no.

Now look at the flip side of things. Instead of investing in public transit, we could have built giant highways to get everyone from point a to point b and back again. But has this solution worked in other cities? Definitely not.

The solution is to find a balance between the two ideals. Focus on the middle ground rather than the radicals on either end of the spectrum. Build some highways AND some public transit. Give people options to get where they need to go. Sure I am a supporter of Gateway, as it is needed, however it angers me that there wasn't a bigger use of public transit in the project, although other public transit projects have been announced.

As for density, not everyone wants to live in a high rise, not everyone wants to live in a townhouse/condo, and not everyone wants to live in a house. Just that statement should sum up that density should mixed, not uniform. Of course there is a bias to high density on this board...
i can agree on lack of transit used for gateway. i am all for gateway but they should have did more transit stuff for it like a bus from central to the ferries along SFPR would be great in my eyes

[DKaz]

I find that these arguments seem to focus on the polar extremes of society. It is always the "More transit, less highways" crowd versus the "more highways, less transit" crowd. We've done the more transit route for the last 20+ years and let our highway system decay, since the eco-hippies have rallied in force to get things like skytrain, rapidbus, community shuttles and more buses. Has it been effective? Has it reduced traffic like they said it would? The answer is a resounding no.

The problem is both transit and roads have not kept up with demand. Roads have been more neglected than transit but we need to play catch up with both now.

The problem is that we have two extremes. We have Vancouver on one hand who is trying to super-densify, and then on the other hand we have the American-like suburbs surrounding Vancouver. I think New Westminster, Burnaby, Coquitlam, and Cloverdale are examples of cities that have examples how mixed densities can cooperate in peace. I like the narrow single houses in Cloverdale, good examples of how you can densify without taking away people's desires for their own yard etc.

[van-island]

News flash: with roads, we're never going to catch up! Not only that, we can barely maintain the roads we have with all the downloading going on. While Perl may have some funny ideas, he's heading in the right direction. We need to build smarter, more efficient transportation networks rather than the same old thing.

Cars, especially single occupany ones, are the most inefficient form of transportation the world has ever seen, in terms of fuel and (dynamic) space use. They blight urban areas and frankly we need to go in a new direction. Of course car will always be with us (we hope) but I seriously think we need to take a cue from the Japanese and Europeans and put our energy into a modern rail system while keeping road capacity stable.

[Metro-One]

Have you ever seen a japanese city? there are elevated freeways all over the place! But they are toll (distance based) something i would support. the general idea is when needed there are fast, direct seamless freeways that can take you to almost anywhere, but you have to pay for them, and if you don't want to pay then there are the slow, winding narrow surface roads which most would like to avoid. that is how you build an efficient road system while accomplishing large transit volumes.

[racc]

Have you ever seen a japanese city? there are elevated freeways all over the place! But they are toll (distance based) something i would support. the general idea is when needed there are fast, direct seamless freeways that can take you to almost anywhere, but you have to pay for them, and if you don't want to pay then there are the slow, winding narrow surface roads which most would like to avoid. that is how you build an efficient road system while accomplishing large transit volumes.

Or not:

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20090421zg.html

Japan's many roads to ruin

By COLIN P.A. JONES
Special to The Japan Times
While there are many roads to democracy and prosperity, in Japan it is roads that may take the country in a different direction. In their latest book on construction in Japan, "Doro o do suru ka" ("What to do about the roads?"), lawyer Takayoshi Igarashi and journalist Akio Ogawa paint a bleak picture of how the "road tribes" — the impenetrable scrum of bureaucrats, politicians and industry that benefit from an ever-expanding program of road construction — are literally paving the road to national ruin.

Road policy received a great deal of attention in early 2008 with the so-called "gasoline Diet." Having lost control of the Upper House, the Liberal Democratic Party-New Komeito ruling coalition was unable to have the Diet rubber-stamp the renewal of a "temporary" gasoline tax set to expire in March of that year. Ultimately, they were able to use their majority in the Lower House to renew that tax through a legislative override, but not before it expired briefly (resulting in a period during which the price of gasoline dropped by about ¥25 a liter) and generated widespread debate about this seemingly innocuous source of government revenue.

The real issue in this debate was not so much whether the gasoline tax should be renewed, but whether the revenues should go into the general tax coffers and applied to much-needed social programs and education, areas where Japan lags behind most developed countries in public spending. This battle was lost, and the tax remains earmarked for road repairs and the construction of unneeded expressways, not to mention the occasional massage chair for public road company employees.

The problem has its roots in Japan's last experience with ruin: its defeat in World War II and occupation by the allies. The American military authorities who ran Japan had a number of agendas. One was countering the resurgence of a central fascist government through enhancing regional autonomy. Another was restoring the roads and other transportation infrastructure that had been the target of allied bombing campaigns. Roads that might have a military purpose were no longer to be owned by the central government.

In 1948, the Americans ordered the Japanese government to produce a five-year plan for building and repairing roads. Five-year (or longer-term) road plans have been a feature of Japanese politics ever since, and each one has been more grandiose than the last. The plans have been accompanied by an expanding array of special taxes on fuel and automobiles, as well as a bewildering regime of laws on road construction. Somewhere along the line, these laws made it possible for road-building plans to be approved by the Cabinet, or in some cases by the minister of construction (now the minister of land, infrastructure, transport and tourism) acting alone, without Diet approval. In essence, the road bureaucrats can build whatever roads they want unchecked by democratic oversight. The 12th five-year plan (1998-2002) cost ¥78 trillion, recession notwithstanding. The mammoth plan that superseded it in 2003 even dispensed with timelines and published cost projections, focusing instead on projected "outcomes" such as reducing traffic jams by 10 percent. Thus the tax (together with loads of public debt) has given the bureaucrats what has become quite literally a blank check to spend on roads and, by extension, political influence and cushy retirement jobs.

The results have been a disaster. Certainly, Japan has a lot of roads: four to five times the number of any other Group of Seven country when measured by kilometers of road to usable land. The trouble is, a lot of these roads are in places where they are not needed. The country has an impressive network of toll roads that will never be profitable. It has expressways that connect industrial parks to ports and airports that industries do not want to use, and monumental bridges that suck people and money out of rural towns rather than reviving them. Yet despite decades worth of road and other infrastructure projects, projects that people actually need remain undone: In 2007 the government identified 110,000 km of roads where there was a high risk of accidents because, for example, children used them to walk to school (including 40,000 km of streets lacking separated sidewalks!). Adding sidewalks to streets used by small children simply doesn't fit the agenda of the road tribes as well as a four-lane expressway to nowhere does.

The cost of all this has also been disastrous. Thanks in part to road-building costs 10 to 30 times higher than in other countries, Japan has the most expensive toll roads in the world, some of the highest vehicle acquisition costs, and a national debt almost double the country's GDP, the servicing of which consumes about a quarter of the annual budget. Japan's four principal road corporations stagger under an additional ¥40 trillion in debt that is guaranteed by the government.

Ironically, ballooning debt has been one of the means by which central authorities have secured a stranglehold over local governments, negating American efforts to expand regional autonomy. Since the roads no longer belong exclusively to the national government, when the road bureaucrats mandate the construction of a new expressway, the regional and local governments which "benefit" from it must shoulder part of the expense. Combined with a generous regime of subsidies that encourage local authorities to build more pointless infrastructure for almost no money down, a never-ending cycle of construction spending has rendered many local governments insolvent, and thus completely beholden to the central government for funding just to keep going.

For example, in its 2008 budget Fukuoka Prefecture had ¥58.7 billion available for road construction from the gasoline tax and other sources. However, it needed ¥50.9 billion just to service its existing debt. Yet with just ¥7.8 billion remaining, it had a road construction budget of ¥103.7 billion, funded mostly by more debt or subsidies from the national government (effectively more debt). Small wonder, then, that despite the continuation of the gasoline tax being opposed by a great majority of the population, the ruling coalition was able to summon an impressive body of local politicians to insist upon its renewal. Without it they could barely pay their existing debts, let alone incur new ones.

Efforts to remedy the situation have repeatedly failed. The road bureaucrats are adept at frustrating anyone who seeks to take away their pie. Freeways are recharacterized to fit the best legal and funding regime, resulting in anomalies such as the "toll-free toll road." Demands that new road projects only proceed after a cost-benefit analysis is conducted are duly met with studies showing that all planned roads are beneficial. Such studies may include publicized future road-use projections that contradict the government's own projections regarding Japan's shrinking and aging population. They also use fanciful assumptions such as that all of the country's 50 million privately-owned cars will be used by a driver and one passenger, both of whom earn ¥300,000 a month, and that each hour saved by shorter drive times is worth ¥2,200-2,700 to each of them. The value of this time saved is in turn derived from an assumption that the drivers could use it to rent their cars out at commercial rates (though doing so would actually be illegal).

The planned privatization of the road corporations also seems unlikely to change things. Despite recommendations to the contrary by a committee picked by former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, the "privatized" corporations will apparently continue to build money-losing roads using debt guaranteed by the government. Tolls from money-losing expressways will continue to be pooled with those of profitable routes, disguising the fact that some of them cost more than three times more to run than they generate in revenue.

Nonetheless, the authors make a number of proposals for reform, including "real" privatization of the road corporations, increased activity by the media and citizens' groups (which have successfully fought some road and other projects), and the ever-elusive elimination of amakudari, which encourages road bureaucrats to shovel public largess on construction companies and quasi-public entities on the understanding that they will be rewarded with plum jobs after retirement.

If there was one complaint to be made about book, it is that it barely touches on the issue that underlies U.S. President Barack Obama's current grandiose plans for infrastructure spending: jobs. Certainly Igarashi and Ogawa present government arguments for roads even if only for the purpose of showing them to be empty, yet none of these arguments involve the jobs that road projects presumably create across the country. Perhaps this was an omission on the part of the authors, or perhaps jobs are simply one more incidental side effect of an endless series of road projects, like blocked traffic and increased concrete production. Keynesian economics aside, perhaps Japan's road tribes do not care about jobs any more than they do about children walking to school on a sidewalk.

Colin P.A. Jones is a professor at Doshisha University Law School in Kyoto. Send comments to community@japantimes.co.jp

[Metro-One]

yeah yeah, we have seen you post that article several times. The same way we can post articles by profesors who essentially say that skytrain is the anti-christ ;)

[racc]

yeah yeah, we have seen you post that article several times. The same way we can post articles by profesors who essentially say that skytrain is the anti-christ ;)

Just like we keep seeing that last post of yours. If you keep repeating yourself, I'll keep repeating myself.

[mrjauk]

Currently, there is no balance. After decades of almost exclusively investing in roads before the 1980s, our transportation system is way out of balance. To suggest that somehow going forward that "balanced" investment in roads and transit will create a balanced system, is simply not true. Massive investment in transit required to address the current imbalance. Unfortunately, South of the Fraser, pretty much all transportation investments are in roads and highways, creating even more imbalance in the system. To suggest, as the Minster of Transportation does, that the investment in the Canada Line somehow "balances" the investment in roads in other parts of the region is ridiculous. Taking the Canada Line is not an option for people in Surrey and Langley.

If you want a balanced transportation system, which I believe is a great ideal, we need to invest almost exclusively in transit for a couple of decades at least.

I completely agree. It irks me when automobile owners decry the taxes/fees used to fund public transit but choose to forget that when it comes to public transportation spending in the Lower Mainland over the 60 or 70 years, the amount spent on roads/bridges, etc., far exceeds the amount spent on public transportation (even accounting for the portion of roads/bridges used by buses.) We should have been building rapid transit from about the 1960s on.

Does anybody here know of a study that has calculated the historical figures for relative spending on roads/bridges versus public transportation?

[twoNeurons]

Last time I heard, they're trying to remove tolls (or at least lower them) for cars in Japan.

Don't know how true this is.