Metro Vancouver Transit Discussion

[ssiguy]

Originally Posted by rsxstock

sure housing is more affordable out there but you'll have to deal with the cost and stress of travel if you work near the core. there is no reason for growth to move so far eastward when housing just outside of vancouver like burnaby or richmond is quite affordable. burnaby for example has only recently ramped up condo construction and there are still plenty of opportunities. do remember that there is also the option in renting which is arguably affordable as well.

This may come as a surprise but some people actually have kids and some........wait for it.............even have 2 or more. That requires at a minimum a large townhouse or a regular house if they have the nerve of actually wanting a tiny backyard. $700,000 for a little dump is not affordable to the masses. This is why there are massive SFH developments across the Valley.

Policy wonks love the "live near where you work" mantra but have little understanding of reality. Something tells me that the City of Vancouver isn't going to be tripling it's wages for it's employees so they can live near City Hall.

When your wealthy it's easy to tell people how they should live but for the masses that is not reality. Metro Vancouver will continue it's endless eastern sprawl as people have to move further from the city to enjoy decent housing.
There is a reason why the Valley is growing faster than anywhere else by a long shot, it's cheaper. It's not like people salivate at the idea of living in low income areas, far from better urban amenities/services, and day long commutes. If they could afford to buy in nicer and more convenient locations then they would but they can't so they don't.

Vancouver can only grow eastward further from the core and other employment areas so commuter rail is going to be the logical next step.

[officedweller]

TOD chart from the Suburban thread and Sapperton Green report.
(And we know Brentwood's tallest will be 56 storeys, not 70 storeys, and Station Square's tallest won't be 57 storeys)

Originally Posted by jlousa

http://www.sappertongreen.com/wp-content/files_mf/openhouse5boardslettersize.pdf

[rsxstock]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

This may come as a surprise but some people actually have kids and some........wait for it.............even have 2 or more. That requires at a minimum a large townhouse or a regular house if they have the nerve of actually wanting a tiny backyard. $700,000 for a little dump is not affordable to the masses. This is why there are massive SFH developments across the Valley.

Policy wonks love the "live near where you work" mantra but have little understanding of reality. Something tells me that the City of Vancouver isn't going to be tripling it's wages for it's employees so they can live near City Hall.

When your wealthy it's easy to tell people how they should live but for the masses that is not reality. Metro Vancouver will continue it's endless eastern sprawl as people have to move further from the city to enjoy decent housing.
There is a reason why the Valley is growing faster than anywhere else by a long shot, it's cheaper. It's not like people salivate at the idea of living in low income areas, far from better urban amenities/services, and day long commutes. If they could afford to buy in nicer and more convenient locations then they would but they can't so they don't.

Vancouver can only grow eastward further from the core and other employment areas so commuter rail is going to be the logical next step.

this is going off topic so i'll keep it simple:
1. having more kids than you can comfortably support is just poor planning
2. having a house and a yard is a want, not a need, even for a family of 4 or more
3. i'm not telling you to work and live in the core. burnaby and richmond is very affordable
4. if you can afford a home and commute into the city from the east, you can definitely afford to rent so there are options.
grow eastward? eventually. maybe in 30 years

[VancouverOfTheFuture]

Originally Posted by rsxstock

this is going off topic so i'll keep it simple:
1. having more kids than you can comfortably support is just poor planning
2. having a house and a yard is a want, not a need, even for a family of 4 or more
3. i'm not telling you to work and live in the core. burnaby and richmond is very affordable
4. if you can afford a home and commute into the city from the east, you can definitely afford to rent so there are options.
grow eastward? eventually. maybe in 30 years

i don't know how affordable Richmond is.

my parents live there and it is a nothing special, late 89 built house. not a big back yard but enough for growing up in. same with the front yard. only a 2 car garage and even that is already ~1.1million. it doesn't seem very affordable to the average person. prices have skyrocketed in the past 1.5/2 decades.

and i think for kids a yard is a must have really. especially when you have more then 1. sure it may not be "needed" but it certainly makes being a kid and having friends over more fun. I'm on the younger side, 20s, and i must say having a yard was a nice thing as a kid growing up in Richmond.

[Metro-One]

OK, what is that very intriguing looking Lougheed and Gilmore render. Never seen that before.

[Kisai]

Originally Posted by VancouverOfTheFuture

i don't know how affordable Richmond is.

my parents live there and it is a nothing special, late 89 built house. not a big back yard but enough for growing up in. same with the front yard. only a 2 car garage and even that is already ~1.1million. it doesn't seem very affordable to the average person. prices have skyrocketed in the past 1.5/2 decades.

and i think for kids a yard is a must have really. especially when you have more then 1. sure it may not be "needed" but it certainly makes being a kid and having friends over more fun. I'm on the younger side, 20s, and i must say having a yard was a nice thing as a kid growing up in Richmond.

Richmond should not have high FSR development because 1. It's mostly a flood plane, and 2. In the even of an earthquake everything south of the Fraser closest to the straight will liquefy.

http://www.empr.gov.bc.ca/Mining/Geoscie...ps/GeoscienceMaps/Documents/GM2010-3.pdf
It's all marked High or very high risk.

As far as affordability. "Live where you work" should be how it works, at least for the person in the family that is paying the Mortgage/rent. It's within reason to work in Vancouver and live in Burnaby, or the reverse. It's however not particularly reasonable to have a 30+ minute commute.

[ssiguy]

Originally Posted by Kisai

Richmond should not have high FSR development because 1. It's mostly a flood plane, and 2. In the even of an earthquake everything south of the Fraser closest to the straight will liquefy.

http://www.empr.gov.bc.ca/Mining/Geoscie...ps/GeoscienceMaps/Documents/GM2010-3.pdf
It's all marked High or very high risk.

As far as affordability. "Live where you work" should be how it works, at least for the person in the family that is paying the Mortgage/rent. It's within reason to work in Vancouver and live in Burnaby, or the reverse. It's however not particularly reasonable to have a 30+ minute commute.

That's a lovely idea.

Curious, seeing you think people should live near their work, are you willing to have your income and property taxes double overnight to pay for these higher wages? Even for a family of $100k {which is well in excess of the average for Vancouver} would NEVER be able to afford WVan/NVan/VanW/VanE/Rich/Burn. You may think otherwise but that doesn't change the fact that people are moving en masse to SoF because it's the only place they can afford to live.

Vancouver's growth will be further eastward. Unless there is a housing crash and the city becomes affordable to even the middle class, that will continue. That means further commutes and that means commuter rail.

Vancouver is certainly not an ideal choice city for commuter rail in regards to it's economy. Vancouver has a very decentralized work force making providing transit that much harder and why excellent SkyTrain connections must be part of an line.

The Expo line stations can be lengthened but it is at maximum frequency capacity right now due to i9nterlining with the Millenium Line. Commuter rail must be provided to relieve the stress on the system. With the population of the Valley growing quickly, the crush on the Expo line will be too large and the commute too long.

[st7860]

Originally Posted by aberdeen5698

I have CDO. That's OCD but with the letters in alphabetical order the way they're supposed to be.

lol.

I meant that well.. I'm not a neat freak that expects transit vehicles to be super clean and smell-free but...since the Canada Line doesn't have fans going unless the air conditioning is on, it gets smelly and stale sometimes. Maybe the designer(Hyundai) thought that's their way of saving electricity.

[GlassCity]

I agree with you ssiguy. "Live near your work" just doesn't work. Most people can't afford it. I grew up in Richmond, and unless you were one of the lucky ones that bought property there before the rapid rise in prices, it's not a cheap place to live. We sold our Richmond house for just over double what we bought it for, only five years later. It hasn't been affordable for a long time now.

I also agree with you about commuter rail. I often envision it as a great way to relieve the Expo Line, as well as provide faster access for people living in the eastern suburbs, which is likely where most population growth will continue to be. I haven't thought about any corridors or anything because I'm just not familiar at all with Burnaby, Surrey or even Vancouver for that matter so there may need to be some significant tunneling. But a commuter line with stops at Waterfront, Commercial-Broadway, Metrotown, New Westminster, Surrey Central and Langley Centre? Would be absolutely huge for the region. You could expand it out to Abbotsford or maybe even Chilliwack. I believe there's enough major Skytrain connections there to make it much easier for suburban commuters to get to work, even if work isn't downtown.

[Kisai]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

That's a lovely idea.

Curious, seeing you think people should live near their work, are you willing to have your income and property taxes double overnight to pay for these higher wages?

I think you're looking at it backwards. These businesses that rent the expensive property downtown would ALSO save money by moving their business to Surrey or wherever that's more central. But that will never happen if there's no effective mass transit for the south of Fraser.

Just look where some of the Business Park's are in Burnaby. The Still Creek Rd area is close to Gilmore and Lougheed stations, which has a lot of residential developments on the north side of the Skytrain. Metrotown and Lougheed are more central than downtown Vancouver.

What's going to happen... I don't know... 100 years from now is that people will not be willing to take a 4 hour commute just to work in downtown Vancouver as cheap property gets pushed out farther and farther away. So it's unsustainable and inefficient for people to live 30+min away from where they work.

Please note I'm coming from the angle as someone who had to spend 2 hours on the bus every day in each direction just go get to school, when it was only a 20 minute drive.

[logan5]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

The Expo line stations can be lengthened but it is at maximum frequency capacity right now due to i9nterlining with the Millenium Line. Commuter rail must be provided to relieve the stress on the system. With the population of the Valley growing quickly, the crush on the Expo line will be too large and the commute too long.

If the cost of setting up a commuter rail line costs the same or less than expanding Skytrain into Langley and other outer suburbs, then yes, build new commuter rail. The cheap options would likely be very slow, for example the old interurban route that Malcolm talks about. You could lay down new track along the #1 then run through the Grandview Cut,then from on into downtown. Park and ride is very popular with commuters (so popular Translink tries to dissuade it), so this set up would be fast (little interaction with city streets), and imo would garner a lot of ridership. It would be more expensive though. Maybe to the point where we may as well just extend Skytrain into Langley and Maple Ridge.

Skytrain does a pretty good job of serving commuters from the suburbs though, and a relief line (if needed) would not have to be that long. Just enough to relieve the 2 Broadway station where the chokepoints on the systems are.

[ssiguy]

The problem is that the Expo line will not be able to carry the needed capacity.

Just look at Toronto and Montreal as examples. They both built their subway/Metro systems to high capacity standards with very large stations and yet the lines are still busy/packed. This is even when combined with large {especially in Toronto} commuter rail networks.

SkyTrain with station lengthening should be fine for quite a while during regular load periods but during rush hour it will be out of it's league.

Commuter rail in the Valley would be far more successful than the WCE due to serving far more people, longer commutes, and Valley people already having to pay to get to Vancouver via tolls and all but one will be tolled by 2020.

[logan5]

If all these new residents had jobs in DT Vancouver then maybe there would be a problem, but that won't be the case. The choke point on the system is Broadway to Main. The strain on capacity will stem from the amount of jobs there are in the core, not the number of people living in the valley.

[MIPS]

As a transit fantasy you could have some sort of commuter rail station with pocket tracks built into the grandview cut and directly under Commercial Broadway as some sort of massive transit hub with the western terminus being Pacific Central Station. Mind you there's that whole fact that the only rail line out of Vancouver through central burnaby is owned by BNSF and CN.....and the fact that you'd be lynched for digging up the cut again/widening the track RoW to continously handle non-industry trains.

[red-paladin]

I sure hope that when the Millennium line was built, they left enough room for two tracks in the cut.
After all, that cut would have cost billions of dollars in current dollars to built...

[spm2013]

Originally Posted by red-paladin

I sure hope that when the Millennium line was built, they left enough room for two tracks in the cut.
After all, that cut would have cost billions of dollars in current dollars to built...

You mean two additional lines in addition to the two current Millenium line tracks? Doubt there would be any room if the railway track was still operating.

[Pinion]

Originally Posted by Kisai

I think you're looking at it backwards. These businesses that rent the expensive property downtown would ALSO save money by moving their business to Surrey or wherever that's more central. But that will never happen if there's no effective mass transit for the south of Fraser.

Just look where some of the Business Park's are in Burnaby. The Still Creek Rd area is close to Gilmore and Lougheed stations, which has a lot of residential developments on the north side of the Skytrain. Metrotown and Lougheed are more central than downtown Vancouver.

I don't think you know what central means.



Vancouver is central and will be for many decades to come.

[st7860]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

The problem is that the Expo line will not be able to carry the needed capacity.

Just look at Toronto and Montreal as examples. They both built their subway/Metro systems to high capacity standards with very large stations and yet the lines are still busy/packed. This is even when combined with large {especially in Toronto} commuter rail networks.

SkyTrain with station lengthening should be fine for quite a while during regular load periods but during rush hour it will be out of it's league.

Commuter rail in the Valley would be far more successful than the WCE due to serving far more people, longer commutes, and Valley people already having to pay to get to Vancouver via tolls and all but one will be tolled by 2020.

Trains in Toronto are driven by people. So doesn't that mean the minimum headway is a lot longer than possible in Vancouver, for safety reasons?

[memememe76]

Driving by the Surrey Central bus loop this past week (around 5pm on a Thursday), the lineup for the 96B to Guildford was HOOGE (past the hockey store). Today, I took it myself and there was a pretty big lineup. Most seats were occupied.

[spm2013]

They're upgrading one line to shorten the headways but it doesn't sound like it will make a dramatic increase in the number of trains per hour:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/wh...tdowns-ttc-explains-on-youtube-1.2563888