Quote:
Originally Posted by agrant
 Maybe there's only so many spaces on campus. Look, a commute from the valley into the city is not that unusual. |
For once, I'm siding with SpongeG's devil's advocacy. For full-time students who have at least partial parental support, unless you're seriously bent on not realizing your full potential and having this wastefulness subsidized in the form of pricey road and transit improvements, there's little reason to commute from any further east than Commercial Drive, very little justification for starting from as far east as Metrotown, and absolutely none for living further afield than New West. I don't care how common it is - It's a terrible habit, economically damaging, and shouldn't be encouraged (for the economy's sake, if nothing else) any more than cigarette smoking. Not to mention that the latter is less harmful (in second-hand form) to my lungs than the other.
I'm generally for the use of ALRT technology for the Broadway corridor (I've had to go to UBC a handful of times, and been astonished at how long it took), but can sympathize with the need to rein in the somewhat wasteful government expenditure on making extremely long-distance commutes too easy.
I had a friend who spent several years in Taipei who, when I asked him about the most visible differences between that city and Vancouver, said that the most obvious was space: a metro area of over 10 million (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taipei) did not take up nearly the amount of space consumed by the measly 2.5m metro Vancouver population. Not surprisingly, it has an extremely efficient metro network (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Taipei_Rail_Map_ENHP.png), not including a gondola and LRT network as well.
I am for ALRT along Broadway, if only because the area is currently a traffic nightmare (which, at peak hours especially, engulfs the B-lines as well) and will only get worse, and is already quite dense for most of the Commercial-UBC route.
However, the notion that a person should be able to take daily, affordable commuting trips to Vancouver from Mission (70km) or, frankly, even Maple Ridge (45km) - or worse, to a less central location in Vancouver like UBC - is a little bit absurd. At any rate, I don't want too much of my own tax dollars going towards such a venture - no personal offense intended to those who commute from distant Fraser Valley locations. To put the distance/transit efficiency ratio in a more local perspective, consider that the GO train only currently goes as far west as Hamilton, Ontario (which is much, much larger than Mission), which is also 70km from Toronto, with significant urban centres located farther afield (London, St. Catherines, Kitchener), and for a much larger city (5.5m). Finally, a one-way trip from Hamilton to Toronto costs nearly the same as a trip from Mission to Vancouver (9.00 versus 11.25). I occasionally even hear echoes on this forum of extending skytrain to Chilliwack. Not too often as of late, thank goodness.
At best, longer distance commuting should be much more expensive, take considerably longer, or be a combination of these things, unless citizens of the GVRD are willing to pay well in excess of Swiss tax rates for the right to live so far from their place of work and get there using publicly-subsidized transit. As a post above suggested, far-reaching, extravagant metro systems that serve low-density populations at high frequencies for low prices actually encourage sprawl, not the reverse.
As a self-styled eco freak, I naturally cringe at the idea of people from the outlying burbs using cars as more efficient alternatives to transit. Car emissions, however, are not the only source of pollutants, nor the only thing hazardous to our wider ecological health and well-being. Even electricity is far from ecologically neutral - something that becomes particularly obvious when hydroelectric sources of the stuff are exhausted (see Ontario). Nor is going nuclear going to solve the long-term problems associated with, among other things, nuclear waste. The long-term solution, unpalatable as it may seem, is a lifestyle that relies considerably less on artificial generation of energy - be it solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, etc.
As for city planning, this would entail encouraging the development of denser, more multifunctional (ie. not just bedroom suburbs) urban populations. Furthermore,
1) Long distance commuting should be discouraged using both carrots and sticks. I would even suggest that, particularly for outlying bedroom communities, there be a lower ceiling on residential development if it is not tied to an increase in commercial and industrial jobs. This might sound heavy-handed - but then, so too is the amount of tax that would otherwise be required to subsidize our current addiction to low-density development well into the future. Households in the burbs are already realizing that the cost-saving benefits of living in more affordable housing are offset considerably by the costs in time and fuel to get where they need to go. A carrot for this point might be significant provincial and/or federal incentives for locally based trams and/or LRTs in places like Langley, Maple Ridge, Mission, Chilliwack and Abbotsford. If residential development were tied to the local availability of industrial and commercial jobs, and if local transit were very cheap (cheaper than it is now), governments (or translink) could certainly justify increasing fares between zones, and especially for longer lines like the WCE. If places like Mission, Abbotsford or Chilliwack (in the future) want it otherwise, they should be prepared to subsidize this as communities, not expect handouts from the province or the feds or elsewhere.
2) Vancouver should seriously densify. This need not even necessarily mean a concrete jungle. Much, much higher densities around Skytrain stations like 22nd Street, Nanaimo and 29th avenue are no brainers, but neighborhoods adjacent to corridors like Hastings, W. 4th, W. Broadway (west, that is, of Arbutus), and others would benefit considerably from an increase to at least 4-5 stories.
3) Vancouver should seriously tackle the issue of housing affordability. Neighborhoods in Manhattan have a frozen (but still high) rental ceiling. Vancouver could experiment with this as well, coupled - of course - with a smoother, incentives-based process for higher density residential building.
I'm not entirely pessimistic, however. I like, for instance, the current emphasis on fostering regional town centres, two downtowns, etc. I do think there's a long way to go, and I will forever cringe to hear dwellers from areas as far out as Aldergrove, Abbotsford, or even (to include my parents, of whom I'm otherwise quite fond) Cloverdale, think they're somehow entitled to a cheap, speedy, long-distance commute. Why, indeed, aren't there express bus routes criss-crossing every two- and three-car garage neighborhood from Squamish to Chilliwack? Heck, let's throw in Hope, maybe even Penticton. . .
[On a side note, since, short of taking up politics myself, I can't really do a lot to effect any of these changes, I will probably have to simply hide in a vibrant city somewhere and hope that the long-term social, environmental and economic quandaries wreaked by such wasteful planning will either go away, or that - miraculously - the consequences will somehow bypass myself and my descendants. One thing working against me is that the foolish planning of bygone years is not limited to Vancouver - far from it.]
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