Metro Vancouver Bike & Pedestrian Discussion

[SOSS]

After 109 years, North Vancouver’s Green Necklace is one step from making ends meet.

Council voted to fund the next-to-last-leg of the seven-kilometre walking/cycling loop around Central Lonsdale Monday, but not everyone was seeing green.

“It’s a strip of tarmacadam around the city, there’s nothing green about it,” said Coun. Rod Clark, adding he’d once dubbed the loop “the black necklace.”

The newest stretch of paved trail is slated to stretch 2.1 kilometres along East Keith Road to Grand Boulevard and north to 19th Street. However, the bike trails would be better suited to Ridgeway, Sutherland, or Moody Avenues, according to Clark, who said Grand Boulevard “has served the city extremely well just the way it is.”

Besides paving the pedestrian trail down the centre of Grand Boulevard, the plan includes two single-direction cycle paths along the park’s
perimeter.

“What’s multi-modal about putting three strips of tarmacadam down Grand Boulevard; two on either side for exclusive use of bicycles, one north and one south?” Clark asked, adding he was dubious about the city’s ability to enforce the single-direction lanes.

The Green Necklace is essential for allowing North Vancouverites to travel freely and easily around the heart of their city, responded Mayor Darrell Mussatto.

“If we don’t give (commuters) alternatives they will continue to use their automobiles, so we have to give them proper, logical alternatives,” Mussatto said.

After initially resisting the Green Necklace, the public is now clamouring for it, according to Coun. Craig Keating.

“People want multi-modal trails where they can have bikes and strollers and wheelchairs,” he said.

The city has now allocated $2.3 million to continue work on the Green Necklace, as well as $200,000 already spent for planning and design. City staff expect the municipality to receive $382,700 in funding from TransLink for the project.

The $2.5-million price tag is too steep, according to Coun. Pam Bookham, who also criticized the selection of Grand Boulevard.

“Maybe it’s not the best thing to put cyclists, pedestrians, trucks and cars all in the same corridor,” she said. “Anyone who has been on this particular route at rush hour – which is increasingly longer – knows that there exists already a huge challenge, and that’s without removing any parking.”

City staff promised to retain as many parking spots as possible. The plan also includes improved street lighting at each intersection.

While she was initially opposed to the trail system, Coun. Holly Back lauded the Green Necklace, particularly the decision to pave the centre of Grand Boulevard, which she said would allow easy passage for people in wheelchairs and parents pushing strollers.

“I think that we’ve started the project and we should take it to completion,” Back said.

The motion to fund the Green Necklace passed 5-2, with Couns. Clark and Bookham opposed.

After first being envisioned in North Vancouver’s 1907 town plan, the first segment of the Green Necklace along Keith Road was finished in 2005.

Coun. Craig Keating was nearly two hours late for the meeting, but arrived just in time to debate the Green Necklace.

link

[WarrenC12]

I wasn't sure where to post this, since it relates to overall transportation in the city. Some good highlights from the "Streetfight" talk a few days back:

http://www.vancourier.com/opinion/city-s...mind-addressing-transportation-1.2220220

Great to see Lon LaClair get the job. I've met him a few times over the years, seems like a hard worker with good intentions.

Also, here's your chance to chime in on the name of the new Vancouver bike share:

https://momentummag.com/vancouver-bike-share/

[Aroundtheworld]

Originally Posted by WarrenC12

I wasn't sure where to post this, since it relates to overall transportation in the city. Some good highlights from the "Streetfight" talk a few days back:

http://www.vancourier.com/opinion/city-s...mind-addressing-transportation-1.2220220

Great to see Lon LaClair get the job. I've met him a few times over the years, seems like a hard worker with good intentions.

Also, here's your chance to chime in on the name of the new Vancouver bike share:

https://momentummag.com/vancouver-bike-share/

I interviewed Lon as part of a masters program project. He will be a great head of transportation.

The city is at a turning point which is why I think people are so upset. The next step for Vancouver is to become a much more pedestrian and cycling friendly city. I've been to places like Vienna with their pedestrian only precincts and I think why do I have to fly all this distance to enjoy an urban realm of such quality.

I think we can do it here; it will take some courage though.

[CanSpice]

Originally Posted by Aroundtheworld

I interviewed Lon as part of a masters program project. He will be a great head of transportation.

The city is at a turning point which is why I think people are so upset. The next step for Vancouver is to become a much more pedestrian and cycling friendly city. I've been to places like Vienna with their pedestrian only precincts and I think why do I have to fly all this distance to enjoy an urban realm of such quality.

I think we can do it here; it will take some courage though.

Well, you only need to look at the viaducts thread here to see why the city might be hesitant to switch from car-centric to people-centric urban planning.

[Metro-One]

So supporting a balanced approach is being car centric?

If you people actually read my posts you would have seen that in keeping the viaducts I also wanted to close Water Street to general traffic (perfect street for a pedestrian atmosphere, and one that could use a really nice resurfacing using masonry, instead of the city's current desire to re-do the street with asphalt...), reducing Hasting Street's car dependency, making it more bike / pedestrian friendly, removing dumpsters from alley ways and converting them into arcade style pedestrian streets, the building of the Georgia steps to the water under the viaducts between the stadiums (a great pedestrian plan now impossible / reduced it seems), using the space under the viaducts as public event space / covered sports facilities, etc...

Yet all these ideas are too creative for the city of Van it seems.

Seriously, the fact that we don't have a single covered arcade downtown is hilarious.

I don't know, after living in Asia for several years you start getting accustom to true dense urban layering approaches, ones that balance pedestrian use, retail, commercial, industrial, residential, and movement. Not just condos and bikes.

Also let me add a note that I am not against every bike project that has been done recently, some of them are quite nice and the redesigns of several intersections recently will be major improvements IMO, but I also have never been a person to write blank cheques to an ideology / political group and agree with everything they do.

And I really, really hate the big boring empty park that will be replacing the viaducts, which ironically will still be a large barrier / break in the urban fabric between downtown and areas east of Main and between Gastown and False Creek (the areas the removal of the viaducts were suppose to connect).

So maybe it is just ideological differences, where Visions priorities have been to tear down the viaducts and build bike lanes, my priorities would have been removing the dumpsters, converting select alleys into covered arcades and patio dinning spaces, resurfacing Water Street and making it pedestrian only, the downtown street car (at least phase 0 from Science World to Granville Island), and improvements to bike lanes.

I feel those would have made Vancouver a far more pedestrian / transit friendly city than Vision's approach.

[BCPhil]

Originally Posted by Aroundtheworld

I interviewed Lon as part of a masters program project. He will be a great head of transportation.

The city is at a turning point which is why I think people are so upset. The next step for Vancouver is to become a much more pedestrian and cycling friendly city. I've been to places like Vienna with their pedestrian only precincts and I think why do I have to fly all this distance to enjoy an urban realm of such quality.

I think we can do it here; it will take some courage though.

Well, Vienna has had a little bit more time to work on it.

I mean, in 1910 their population was 1.9 million (more than their population is today). That's comparable to our city but in a city before cars existed. At that time the population of Metro Vancouver was 164,000. When you build a city for 2 million people before cars were a thing, and when most of that population are dirt poor peasants, it's probably conducive to walking.

We got to design our city around the Railroad and streetcar at first, then around the automobile making it possible to link together dispersed resource based towns very quickly, all while the exploding population was almost entirely middle class with disposable income, so it's going to be radically different.

[WBC]

Originally Posted by BCPhil

Well, Vienna has had a little bit more time to work on it.

I mean, in 1910 their population was 1.9 million (more than their population is today). That's comparable to our city but in a city before cars existed. At that time the population of Metro Vancouver was 164,000. When you build a city for 2 million people before cars were a thing, and when most of that population are dirt poor peasants, it's probably conducive to walking.

We got to design our city around the Railroad and streetcar at first, then around the automobile making it possible to link together dispersed resource based towns very quickly, all while the exploding population was almost entirely middle class with disposable income, so it's going to be radically different.

I would not call a former capital city of Habsburg empire a city of "dirt poor peasants" but the fact is that it was built way before the cars were invented and it will be naturally more suitable for walking...

Trying to base our city design on European cities is a bit silly though...People tend to romanticize Europe because they go there as a wide eyed students, have a good time and think everything is awesome. The reality of a daily life in a European city is a bit different.

[Aroundtheworld]

Originally Posted by BCPhil

Well, Vienna has had a little bit more time to work on it.

I mean, in 1910 their population was 1.9 million (more than their population is today). That's comparable to our city but in a city before cars existed. At that time the population of Metro Vancouver was 164,000. When you build a city for 2 million people before cars were a thing, and when most of that population are dirt poor peasants, it's probably conducive to walking.

We got to design our city around the Railroad and streetcar at first, then around the automobile making it possible to link together dispersed resource based towns very quickly, all while the exploding population was almost entirely middle class with disposable income, so it's going to be radically different.

You're absolutely right that those cities were built around the pedestrian, however, I'm sure you will recognize there are many parts of Vancouver that could and arguably should be pedestrian precincts. I'm not saying all areas, but there should at least be some. Gastown and parts of Robson street would be suitable locations.

Sure people may romanticize European cities (I'm no exception), however, the fact remains I would have no problem letting a kid run around in them without any fear of them getting run over. Through my travels in North America, I can only think of two places: The Old Port in Quebec City and Downtown Portland Oregon. I think it's wonderful that a city has places like that and I would like Vancouver to be one of them.

I think that what is stopping us from making our city more cycling and pedestrian friendly is this fear that if we restrict or slow down vehicular traffic it will hurt the economy. That may be the case where the automobile is the only viable option, but that's not the case for any of the places I've mentioned which are both very accessible by transit and have large residential populations nearby.

There are also many examples of cities that have embarked on this path and they have reaped the benefits. Copenhagen comes to mind. Even though it was founded in medieval times and is a pedestrian and cycling paradise now, it wasn't in the 1960s. You can see photos where it was overrun by parking and vehicles. But they chose to gradually transform it and now it is attracting record tourist numbers.

[VancouverOfTheFuture]

Copenhagen also has ring-freeways and ring roads. they have more car infrastructure then Vancouver does. they also have more passenger trains and more transit. it is easy to make a city more pedestrian friendly when you have a place for cars other than regular surface streets.

people always want Vancouver to be European cities, but so many people leave out the fact those cities have way way way more car, transit, and train infrastructure then we do. we cant compare them, or if you want to, we better catch up with them.

[Aroundtheworld]

Originally Posted by VancouverOfTheFuture

Copenhagen also has ring-freeways and ring roads. they have more car infrastructure then Vancouver does. they also have more passenger trains and more transit. it is easy to make a city more pedestrian friendly when you have a place for cars other than regular surface streets.

people always want Vancouver to be European cities, but so many people leave out the fact those cities have way way way more car, transit, and train infrastructure then we do. we cant compare them, or if you want to, we better catch up with them.

There are so many factors (geography, regional demographics) that make it hard to compare levels of infrastructure. True Vancouver doesn't have a ring road, but a ring road wouldn't really make sense here. I would actually say the amount of infrastructure is quite comparable.

• Both cities have light metro systems
• Both cities have freeways, but little through the city proper
• Both metropolitan areas have roughly the same population (over 2 million)

The one things is Copenhagen has a much more developed suburban rail system, but I think that's partially compensated by the fact that Vancouver's Skytrain system is more regional and is much bigger.

Also a few pedestrian streets is not going to lead to carmageddon, nor will it kill the businesses that are on pedestrian streets. I think it would be quite the opposite; by making those areas more of an attraction, people will spend more money. This has happened in New York and even here when areas have been made more people friendly.

[aberdeen5698]

Originally Posted by VancouverOfTheFuture

Copenhagen also has ring-freeways and ring roads.

Well, Vancouver obviously can't have a "ring road" because of its location on the edge of Georgia Straight. But I think you could consider Highway 1 to the east and north and Highway 91 to the south as more or less the equivalent of a "ring road".

[WarrenC12]

Sneak peek at the new bike share bikes:



via Twitter

[BCPhil]

Originally Posted by Aroundtheworld

You're absolutely right that those cities were built around the pedestrian, however, I'm sure you will recognize there are many parts of Vancouver that could and arguably should be pedestrian precincts. I'm not saying all areas, but there should at least be some. Gastown and parts of Robson street would be suitable locations.

Sure people may romanticize European cities (I'm no exception), however, the fact remains I would have no problem letting a kid run around in them without any fear of them getting run over. Through my travels in North America, I can only think of two places: The Old Port in Quebec City and Downtown Portland Oregon. I think it's wonderful that a city has places like that and I would like Vancouver to be one of them.

I think that what is stopping us from making our city more cycling and pedestrian friendly is this fear that if we restrict or slow down vehicular traffic it will hurt the economy. That may be the case where the automobile is the only viable option, but that's not the case for any of the places I've mentioned which are both very accessible by transit and have large residential populations nearby.

There are also many examples of cities that have embarked on this path and they have reaped the benefits. Copenhagen comes to mind. Even though it was founded in medieval times and is a pedestrian and cycling paradise now, it wasn't in the 1960s. You can see photos where it was overrun by parking and vehicles. But they chose to gradually transform it and now it is attracting record tourist numbers.

Things might be different now, but I would like to refresh your memory that we DID have a pedestrian precinct in Vancouver. It was Granville street. It was a bustling theater row, then it became pedestrian, then it died and porn shops and smut shows moved in. It took almost 30 years to fix it.

I'm not saying it will happen again for sure, but we have a bad track record, and so does North America in general. The North American mantra is that less eyes = more crime. Something like 90% of US pedestrian malls have been a failure (many experiencing a rebound when traffic is reintroduced).

I don't think Gastown nor Robson street would benefit from being car free.

That said, there are a lot of places that are car free or virtually car free in downtown Vancouver. All along the waterfront is pretty calm. Sure, if you only look at the CBD as "downtown" it is pretty busy with cars, but the West End is pretty quiet. If you extend past the office district, like you would for a European town, and include places like Kits in the "city", there are many high density population streets with low traffic volumes.

And it's interesting that you mention Portland. Portland has smaller blocks and more streets than Vancouver, so local traffic has a lot of options for getting around. They also have the I405 in a trench right to the West of downtown which pretty much brings the I5, I84, #30, and #26 right into and through the core. If we dug a trench for Georgia Street and funneled all our street traffic onto it, many of our streets would seem a bit calmer.

Vancouver is also similar in that Downtown Portland too is cut off from the rest of the city (steep hills on one side, river on the other). There are 7 major routes out of downtown Vancouver, Portland has about 15, 4 of those being freeflow freeway (for a downtown I would consider a lot less busy).



And is Copenhagen a tourist destination because it is an amazing city for bikes and pedestrians, or because it is a nice city on the water with 800 years of culture that is a 2 hour flight away from 80 million Germans?

And even then... As far as I can tell, according to to Worldbank, Denmark gets 8.5 million international visitors a year. BC got 4.6 million international visitors in 2014. It gets a bit murkier when looking at overnight hotel nights. Vancouver is hitting 9 million, but the Danish media lists anywhere from 4.5 million to 14 million. The Wikipidia page quotes a 8.1 million room nights in 2012.

The tourism industry in Denmark generated $16 billion Canadian, and BC generated $13.9 billion. So I think we are quite comparable.

When you think about it, travelling from Frankfurt to Copenhagen is as far as travelling from Calgary to Vancouver. San Fran is as far as Turin.

So are we really doing that bad, comparatively? I don't think our tourism future hinges on becoming a more pedestrian only city. Most of our in city attractions are dispersed around town, not really in comfortable walking range. The Seawall alone is more walking/biking than most tourists want to do (and most visitors to the province come to do more walking outside city limits than in). Instead we need more accessible and tourist friendly transit around the city if we want to actually draw even more tourists.

[WarrenC12]

New Vancouver bike share website:

http://vancouverbikeshare.ca/

You can suggest locations for stations.

[Conrad Yablonski]

Originally Posted by BCPhil

Things might be different now, but I would like to refresh your memory that we DID have a pedestrian precinct in Vancouver. It was Granville street. It was a bustling theater row, then it became pedestrian, then it died and porn shops and smut shows moved in. It took almost 30 years to fix it...

The south end of Granville is still what's commonly called a 'shit show' and overall it's still a half dozen types of failure especially in the evening.

[BCPhil]

Originally Posted by WarrenC12

New Vancouver bike share website:

http://vancouverbikeshare.ca/

You can suggest locations for stations.

They should really extend the box to King Eddy on Main and Cambie streets. Almost all the stuff you want to go to in the Cambie Village is south of 16th. I understand the purpose of keeping it small at the beginning, but they should really put a rack at King Edward station, Nat Bailey, Queen Elizabeth Park, and VanDusen. Those are pretty popular tourist spots that are just a little too far to comfortably walk to from rapid transit, but perfect distance to bike to.

And Arbutus? Did they just pick a street everyone knows where it is? Why not Balsam? At least that puts all of Kits beach and a good chuck of the popular part of W 4th in it as well.

Seattle tried to keep theirs small at first and basically handicapped it so that it was useless for most trips, and it was a disaster.

After watching the Smoove videos on their site, I guess you can just bring the bike that far and lock it with the built in locking mechanism (which is pretty cool I must say, every bike should come with locks like that). But it looks like some of the CycleHop implementations charge you $20 for locking the bike up outside the service area. So I guess if you lock up your bike at the Safeway at 4th and Vine, or you ride it to the Kits Pool, you get charged $20!?

• Video Link

Also, the Smoove bikes in Moscow work on their Troika card card, which is their contactless transit card. And it looks like CycleHop in Santa Monica can use the TAP card (LA's Compass, by Cubic too). I hope they bring integration with Compass here.

[Aroundtheworld]

Originally Posted by BCPhil

They should really extend the box to King Eddy on Main and Cambie streets. Almost all the stuff you want to go to in the Cambie Village is south of 16th. I understand the purpose of keeping it small at the beginning, but they should really put a rack at King Edward station, Nat Bailey, Queen Elizabeth Park, and VanDusen. Those are pretty popular tourist spots that are just a little too far to comfortably walk to from rapid transit, but perfect distance to bike to.

And Arbutus? Did they just pick a street everyone knows where it is? Why not Balsam? At least that puts all of Kits beach and a good chuck of the popular part of W 4th in it as well.

Also, the Smoove bikes in Moscow work on their Troika card card, which is their contactless transit card. And it looks like CycleHop in Santa Monica can use the TAP card (LA's Compass, by Cubic too). I hope they bring integration with Compass here.

I have a feeling that if the helmet law doesn't kill this and this succeeds it will expand pretty rapidly. Montreal expanded theirs from 3000 to 5000 in the first year.

It would be phenomenal if they integrated this with the Compass Card.

[Large Cat]

Compass card integration is a must. If the bike share is a success this will also boost Compass' public perception. It could also really help relieve some overcrowded routes (I'm thinking the 2/22 and the 17) if people decide to bike across the bridge in question instead using the same fare.

I agree that the program area should start out selectively larger. To begin with, it should at least extend officially as far as the seawall/seaside bikeway go to the west...as far as Jericho Beach ideally, but at least as far as Balsam where Kits Beach ends. A good southern boundary in this section would be 4th, whether it goes all the way to Jericho or just to Balsam.

I'm really excited about this! I hope it really does roll out in June. I hope the bikes or at least the docking stations are forward-compatible with compass for the future.

[officedweller]

You'd also think they'd go to Commercial or Clark Drive or an arm along Great Northern Way
- at least to VCC-Clark Station so some commuters could continue there trips by bike from there.
Lots of potential demand with VCC, Emily Carr, and the station.

[WarrenC12]

I think this is small because they want to get it operating in 2016.

Stations at the false creek ferry locations is perfect.