Quote:
Originally Posted by aberdeen5698
What the "OMG" people keep forgetting is that traffic regulates itself. If there's a consistent bottleneck somewhere, people start avoiding it. If lack of capacity causes delays that are too long, people find alternatives.
I think Vancouver's biggest "OMG" moment was when the approach to the Patullo bridge caught fire and closed the bridge for two weeks. Amazingly, we all survived and in fact the problems weren't anywhere near as bad as many people feared.
Fearmongers continually forget this fact, which proves itself over and over again whenever road capacity gets reduced deliberately or through some sort of disaster. San Francisco's Embarcadero freeway is another prime example of this - vehement protests and predictions of doom when plans were floated demolish it, but after it was knocked down by an earthquake they never bothered to rebuild the damaged sections and it's now been completely torn down.
So don't worry about the Grandview exit, folks - it'll all work itself out.
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That's actually a very valid point. The missing part is that it isn't just traffic that redistributes, it is people that redistribute too. You've been seeing it steady the past 10 years with industry vacating Vancouver as land prices were rising along with the traffic and difficulty in moving trucks through the city. Most industry is now out in the suburbs. In the last 5 years you're seeing that trend move towards the technology industry and medium business with migrations towards Metrotown, Brentwood, New West, Richmond, Surrey, and Langley. The people are also moving out here more than to Vancouver.
So I think the doom and gloom probably won't come to Grandview because there will be less A to B to A travel by people with B being downtown Vancouver. As I've pointed out in other threads about these topics, statistics show that just 20 years ago, 65% of all jobs in metro Vancouver were in Vancouver itself. Today that number is getting really close to 30%, and current estimates are that in another 20 years it will probably flatten out around the 20% mark making Vancouver important for certain business and industry, but only those more focused around transit and non-car transportation. You'll see more condos on the higher price range scale and in turn more and more businesses in downtown will focus in the finance, mining, and technology sectors, sectors with a lot of money and whose employees tend to also have more money than average meaning they can live in Vancouver. In turn you will see industry continue to move out towards the suburbs and that portion of the population, many of which already live out this direction, will have shorter commute times and less need to go out towards Vancouver every day further helping to balance traffic around the region.
This is also why I think expanding roads in Vancouver probably doesn't have to happen. The "negative" is that Vancouver is becoming a little less relevant in the business/industry front regionally, but overall I think it is healthy for the region to decentralize more and more and dissipate the population and traffic greater. Things like the SFPR, Golden Ears Bridge, Evergreen Line that doesn't go TO Vancouver but rather to a point in Burnaby, and even a continued expansion of Abbotsford Airport is moving car and transit demands but also helping to reduce problems at current bad spots.
A lot of this is also why I'm not completely against the notion of taking down the Patullo bridge and replacing it. I am fairly certain doing so would kill New Westminster and make it regionally irrelevant, but the flip side is it would strength Surrey, Coquitlam, and possibly Burnaby even more. And let's remember, the traffic studies for the Gateway project showed a large portion of traffic along HWY and over the PMB was from Surrey/Langley to Coquitlam, not actually to Vancouver or even Burnaby. That's why the bridge will have collector lanes specifically to get people from Surrey to Coquitlam. So the traffic trends already show that less cars are going to Vancouver itself, even if traffic continues to increase with population growth.