Quote:
Originally Posted by racc
Yet the Viaducts were closed during the most successful event in Vancouver's history. People were making the same type of tired alarmist arguments 40 years ago to justify building freeways downtown. There are plenty of ways to get downtown besides the viaduct both for drivers and transit users. Having thousands of more people living near downtown would actually benefit the economy not hurt it. These people will likely walk to work instead of driving freeing up space on roads all over the region which will make driving faster on other roads likely making up for any delays caused by removing the viaducts.
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How does tearing down the viaducts put more people closer to downtown? It just lengthens automobile commutes, which when you measure the hours of a persons day puts people that much more time away from downtown when traveling by car. If transit was more efficient time wise, 90% of the people who currently drive would already be using it instead. Still not discounting the freight and commercial traffic.
Question: Any bus routes that use the ducts that would be delayed by having to use the surface grid instead?
As for the most succesful event in the cities history, downtown became a party zone, not a work zone. As stated by many of the office-dwelling members we have here on our forums, as many as 90% of their coworkers in one way or another managed to not show up to work for most that time. Some of them were drivers, some of them were transit users.
Instead of having the usual economic flow during the peak week-day hours, you had a constant flow cause the party was 24/7, whether it was auto or transit.
As for going places to party, the general population usually takes transit... because it is usually more convenient in that use (cheap parking, if any parking, a mass of people driving cars would cause insane headaches, etc), and you don't have to worry about driving home drunk.
As for this party, translink put it all out there on the line to proide the best service possible. they can't do this on a day to day basis. Not enough funding. Tearing down the viaducts wont create the critical mass needed to get more transit to downtown (it is already there during peak hours), you'll just piss a lot of people off, and get a few more riders on what is already the busiest part of the system, have no increased transit capacity and an overall reduced capacity into downtown.
As for any short-term economic benefits to the sale of viaduct land, they wont go to transit funding. So good luck tying to pass the argument that the destruction of the roads will mean more money for transit, thus more transit. Not gonna happen. What will provide more money for transit is a stronger economic base in the region that is the driving force behind BC's overall economy, which is what determines transit funding.
How do you stimulate an economy? You make it attractive for companies to grow and invest. There are a million ways to do that, but one option is to always make a region more accessible to commercial, industrial, and residential traffic/commuters (i.e. Gateway, skytrain extensions to Richmond and Tri-cities, etc). Each piece has it's part in the system, and ultimately what determines accessibility is not whether you have more transit or more highways/roads; it is the overall effective capacity to transport people efficiently.
In this case, the viaducts are the most efficient system for thousands of trips to and from downtown everyday, for both commercial and residential traffic. The blatant destruction of them with no equivalent offset in transit AND roadways to keep the same capacity (as a factor of man-hours spent commuting, the less there are the better), will ultimately be detrimental to the economy as people must find different, longer, less efficient means of performing the smae commute that likely would men the increase of traffic volumes in residential/upcoming redsidential areas. This means less livability.
So now tearing down the viaducts makes the city less livable overall, aswell as being economically detrimental.
Finally, for those that choose to continue driving because transit is still less efficient than driving... even when system capacity and efficiency is increased in the future, or are forced to continue driving due to nature of employment. For every car that spends half an hour everyday slowly making it's way through the DTES and Gastown to get to the CBD, it will produce the same amount of greenhouse gas as
6 cars that each take only 5 minutes to travel the same distance using the already-existing arterial roads and Viaducts.
Even if transit picked up 75% of the people who formerly used the viaducts, 25 % will still choose to drive in what would now be a much slower, stop-and-go commute. 25% is 1/4, and 1/4 is a higher chunk of pie than the 1/6; which by the way, is 16.66666%. Transit would have to offset 5 out of every 6 cars that formerly used the viaducts in the above scenario to just be a carbon-neutral change in the commuting environment. And that isn't including the inescapable fact that transit to, produces greenhouse gases.
So under the present and currently foreseeable socio-economic state and forseeable levels of transit funding, it is:
- Economically detrimental to tear down the viaducts.
- Detrimental to the livability of downtown to tear down the viaducts.
- And it is, more likely than not, detrimental to the environment in the near future (till we all get carbon free cars... yea right)
I'd do a strike one, strike two, strike three, and your out... But that is baseball, and that is American. We aren't American, we're Canadians. Those are my three points in the first period, and I'd like to see you try to tie it up in the second.
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Also the vast majority of those crowds were non daily commuters, they were event / party crowds, very different from the norm. When one goes to party, they do not need to bring all their work equipment with them or need to go to 10 different places in one day.
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