Transit Fantasies

[fredinno]

Originally Posted by Bdawe

I have....bus fantasies



1) The 23 Brentwood/Beach

On the East End, run the 23 (with conventional buses) east from Main Street Station along Terminal 1st Avenue, and looping via Douglas and Halifax through Brentwood to offer a direct East - West connection through fairly populous and high ridership areas, while relieving the busiest segment of the Expo Line, and improving transit access to False Creek Flats

On the West End, run the 23 through to Second Beach, increasing recreational access to Stanley Park. You could construct a small turning facility in the parking lots



2) The 7 Musqueam

It would be a relatively trivial amount of trolley wire to extend the 7 down Dunbar and over into Musqueam (about 2.5 km) but would considerably increase transit access to Musqueam residents with a direct route downtown and quick connections to crosstown routes on 49th and 41st. The route could terminal looping around the Musqueam Cultural Centre by way of Musquam Avenue and Mali Avenue. The area is certainly not the richest, and would likely have fairly high ridership for the population.


3) The 9 to Gilmore or Brentwood

Boundary Loop's concrete by the highway overpass is simply a bad place to terminate a bus, and if it weren't for trolley wire terminating there due to the sparseness of 1950s Burnaby, it would have been extended to a more natural terminus long ago. It's just another 1-2 kilometers of trolley wire, similar to the extension of the Kingsway wires to Metrotown when the Expo Line opened, and with trolley-hater Corrigan gone in Burnaby it might even be politically viable now.

I have a bus fantasy too. Run the 562 on 88 and Glover only instead of curving around a billion times through suburbia. I'll gladly walk 10 extra minutes. It's insane how long that bus takes.

Originally Posted by Migrant_Coconut

But that argument only extends so far, otherwise people would still be shouting down the Broadway extension. "Why should Vancouver get another SkyTrain when (insert suburb here) doesn't even have one, huh?" - you saw one of those types in almost every comment section back in the early 2010s. The answer is the same: if we increase capacity on the outskirts before increasing capacity in the centre, all we're doing is shifting the bottleneck further up the line.

If we build waves' Lonsdale line first, we're going to see bottlenecks on the Expo and the 95/R5; Port Coq first, the Expo and the Millennium. Commercial-Broadway will very likely resemble a Tokyo train either way.

Not to mention that Hastings is likely to become the new Broadway with the densest express bus routes - TransLink will point at the 95/R5 ridership, point at North Van/Port Coq/White Rock's ridership, and rest their case. As somebody who would directly benefit from both a Lonsdale and a Marine SkyTrain, Hastings should go first.



Commuters (drivers and riders) got dinged just as much by cut n' cover as businesses did. Nobody wants a repeat of that - even more so, because there's TransCanada traffic too.

More likely is that TransLink will have control of all route planning and construction. The City knows that they're best at providing the space, and then getting out of the way.

Well, considering the City is moving without the city and TransLink doesn't seem to care, I'd be skeptical on that.

A temporary inconvenience for greater benefit is kind of Infrastructure 101. It's a shame if we really can't just go cut-and-cover on major roads anymore. I'd argue it's still worth it to try, for the $800M to $1B, but we've hit a standstill, and it's probably pointless to continue.
Would cut and cover on side roads be ok? Not exactly feasible here, but maybe elsewhere.

95B/Hastings is approx 2/5ths of the 99B's riderhip. Unlikely to be serious problems there for at least the next 2-3 decades, as the 99B's ridership increased ~30.5% since 1998.
Meaning that it might take ~5 decades until we actually hit capacity on the buses on Hastings.
https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/translink-vancouver-transit-ridership-data-2018
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99_B-Line#History

The only realistic possibility is congestion on the Expo, which is partially mitigated by the Broadway Extension (no longer have to go to DT to get to the Canada).
Hastings could serve as a relief line if it turned south. At that point, you're talking a ~$4B project to get a bored tunnel to Gilmore/Brentwood. The problem is that the vast majority of the demand from Main St to Commerical-Broadway actually is coming from the Expo (not Millennium) side of things, so how useful that'd be is up to question. Going all the way to the Expo seems to be of limited usefulness due to the distance being ~1.86 km longer than the Expo Route.

Yes, and TransLink placated the suburban people by moving some money to the SoF extensions simultaneously. If TransLink earmarked the entire Ph1+2 SoF money to getting to UBC instead (as it would logically be- I know they technically don't have all the money yet, but it's not like the boring machine is going to arrive at Arbutus all that quickly- they'd have time to get the remaining Ph2 funds) they'd be fuming and suburbanites would be just as pissed with TransLink as in the early 2010s.
They moved money from a project that would be more important from your perspective, into a suburban line that ends in (admittedly) the edge of the city.

Langley, BTW would increase the demand by 3600pphd at the most congested point over Best Bus. Skytrain to Newton, 1870pphpd. Both by 2041.

Maybe. But since Hastings would be limited as a relief line (even Toronto's (original) DRL was pretty limited in effectiveness and would only provide temporary relief of 5900phpd, which considering the greater size of Toronto... (https://stevemunro.ca/2016/06/27/torontos-network-plan-2031-part-iv-relief-line/), so this isn't unique), you'd still have that problem no matter what you do. The only way to solve the Expo congestion problem ultimately is probably to expand the Expo itself. Easier said than done, and the money would suck any left for Hastings.
https://www.translink.ca/-/media/Documen...de%20Strategy%20%20Project%20Summary.pdf
https://www.translink.ca/-/media/Documen...tudy_Phase_2_Alternatives_Evaluation.pdf
Note also the new ridership will trickle in over time, meaning the total effect is a lot lower.
Not building suburban lines won't stop the Tokyo Trains. It'll only delay things by maybe a decade, so instead of 2050, 2040.