Metro Vancouver Road Infrastructure Discussion

[FarmerHaight]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

They are not defined by great transit systems but rather great TRANSPORTATION systems which includes transit, highways, bikes, and walking.

Cities are not defined by transportation systems at all.

Cities should be built for people, not cars, buses, or even bikes. Unfortunately, many North American cities have flipped the priorities upside down, and pay more attention to the vehicles traveling through them than the people living in them. When I think about livability, I don't look at the 401 or the New Jersey Turnpike or Interstate 5. Instead, I think about Central Park, or the Seawall, or walkable brownstone neighbourhoods, or Parisian cafes.

That being said, roads play a critical role in any city or region, which is moving people and goods across and through them. But if a road is at capacity, we should not only focus on increasing that capacity. We have seen time and again that shifting habits and population growth will easily over compensate for that extra capacity. Instead, we should focus on removing trips that can be made in another fashion by making those alternative modes faster, more reliable, and more comfortable. Mass transit hits all of those points and it would be cheaper than widening the highway.

[CanSpice]

Originally Posted by Migrant_Coconut

Upgrading six lanes to ten only gets you about 37,000 more vehicles a day. Knowing the North Shore, it'll be right back to "normal" five years after that - especially if Taylor Way, Marine/Main and Hastings remain as-is.

We have an example of that already in Metro Vancouver: Highway 1 in Burnaby. It was widened with the Gateway program and every single day I hear on the radio "backing up through the Burnaby Lake area through to Brunette". Highway was widened to improve congestion and yet here we are.

[osirisboy]

Originally Posted by CanSpice

We have an example of that already in Metro Vancouver: Highway 1 in Burnaby. It was widened with the Gateway program and every single day I hear on the radio "backing up through the Burnaby Lake area through to Brunette". Highway was widened to improve congestion and yet here we are.

Nope. Highway has been hugely improved since gateway! Especially the new bridge. There is no comparison at all! The only problem I regularly see is the bottleneck from the cassier tunnel where it turns to two thru lanes (going west). They added a third lane but made it a massively long exit lane for McGill. Wasted opportunity.

[madog222]

Originally Posted by osirisboy

Nope. Highway has been hugely improved since gateway! Especially the new bridge. There is no comparison at all! The only problem I regularly see is the bottleneck from the cassier tunnel where it turns to two thru lanes (going west). They added a third lane but made it a massively long exit lane for McGill. Wasted opportunity.

The issue is the 2nd narrows, there can only be two thru lanes with the current bridge.
I see a potentially big improvement to this area in changing the Hastings and McGill on-ramps to merge together then form the third lane. Just like what was done on the other side of the bridge. The Hastings merge causes major issues with incoming traffic number to number crawling onto the highway while the McGill on-ramp has next to no traffic.

That said the highway still has major backups EB in the afternoon through Burnaby, can’t say how far along it’s bad.

[jollyburger]

They should fine trucks that want to go 40km/h on the bridge or up the cut during rush hour

[Klazu]

Highway 1 is the only free-flowing highway through the region. Always has been and always will be the only one. It is a main thoroughfare for a metropolitan area of 2M+ people and less than 10 years ago it still used to be laughable 3+3 lanes from the 70s. Once it was finally widened by the least amount of extra capacity possible (1 extra HOV lane in each direction), they cheapened out on important details like merge lane lengths, which are causing most of the congestion since Day 1.

During the last 10 years the Metro has grown by 350-400K people with most people settling in far-flung suburbs due to the lack of affordability. Places like Squamish and Fraser Valley are among the fastest growing locales in the entire country. That is never going to change until a major earthquake eventually brings Vancouver housing prices to rubble (that will happen). Until then, people are going to rely on cars for their life in the suburbs, no matter how much SkyTrain we plan for.

There is also no demand to induce, as the demand already happened in the past decade and continues to happen at record pace, despite our highway system still being from the 70s (looking at you, Highway 99). The lack of affordability will continue to push a vast majority of the population increase into the suburbs and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

North Shore SkyTrain is also not going to happen for the next 15-20 years and we are likely talking 2040s at the earliest. By then our population will be pushing 3M and there will be several hundred thousand more cars on the road, regardless of what TransLink will or won't do. It is inevitable, like it or not. Build more SkyTrain, RapidBuses and bike lanes or not.

I do fully support North Shore SkyTrain, everyone does. But I am also realistic that it isn't going to happen any time soon (some of us will literally be dead by the time it finally opens) and it won't change traffic conditions on North Shore. By the time it is completed, it may at best help us move from daily multi-hour gridlocks to the 10-kilometre traffic jams we have today. Nothing will be back free-flowing as demand has grown so much by then, unless we also build more road capacity.

Let's also be real that North Shore will never build density. Never ever. North Vancouver builds ridiculously modestly even around Lower Lonsdale with direct connection to Vancouver, and the scale in Lynn Valley pales even in comparison with places like Port Moody. West Vancouver will also never embrace high density more than few towers here and there around that one SkyTrain station they may eventually get. All development in West Vancouver and up North Shore mountains will be car-dependent and affluent people moving into those areas will not use public transit, like it or not.

It has been reported many times that much of the traffic across Ironworkers is trades traffic and like someone said, most of the North Shore Upper Levels traffic is cross-traffic for local people, as it is the only highway. When a SkyTrain gets built in far future, it will solve neither the former or the latter point, as connections will make intra-North Shore trips awkward and trades just cannot use transit. Neither can a 99% of those going skiing or hiking, as car is always going to be 3x faster and 10x more convenient to get to those places.

I find it so reflective of how poor our transit is that my 26km commute is a nice 25 minutes door-to-door to drive vs. taking SkyTrain + RapidBus (a gold-star transit combo) for 45 minutes. Our transit sucks big time even in best of scenarios and stations/stops are so few and far between that walking times are ridiculous. By car you only take an elevator down and drive your warm car to another parkade with no worry of the weather or others breathing COVID in your neck. Most people will always opt for this convenience no matter how expensive gas/electricity will be. I know several people that have bought a car this year just because of the convenience over a 1-hour transit. And yes, I do commute against the traffic, as anyone clever about where they work should do if walking to work isn't an option.

It is burying your head in the sand to say that we don't need to build any new road infrastructure and more transit and bike lanes will solve all the population growth in the suburbs. Building more transit will help a little, but won't do on its own. Building bike lanes will solve nothing. Zero. Zilch.

[Klazu]

Originally Posted by osirisboy

Nope. Highway has been hugely improved since gateway! Especially the new bridge. There is no comparison at all! The only problem I regularly see is the bottleneck from the cassier tunnel where it turns to two thru lanes (going west). They added a third lane but made it a massively long exit lane for McGill. Wasted opportunity.

Yeah, I am so happy with Port Mann Bridge and the Cape Horn interchange. Neither was under-built and they are world-class implementations. It feels amazing to drive across PMB and against the traffic, just fly through the Metro. My 26km commute is consistently only 25 minutes.

They could solve so much of the current afternoon rush hour congestion by just extending merge lanes at Willingdon and especially Kensington. A merge lane like WB from Brunette would have traffic just fly by. It is more problematic with morning rush hour, as entering Vancouver is a nightmare.

I have never seen the original plans for Highway 1 and do wonder if the 4+4 lane solution was a value engineered compromise? If 5+5 lanes was not possible, why didn't they go for a configurable 3+5 setup? Our rush hour traffic is so directional, that 3+5 lanes could work so much better than the current 4+4 setup does. My commute against the traffic would still be free-flowing with one lane being taken out to support the direction of the rush hour.

[ssiguy]

Originally Posted by Migrant_Coconut

Nope, Toronto's got the worst, followed by Montreal. We're #3, as expected from the third-biggest city. Looks like all those highways in Essex County have done jack squat to solve congestion.

Wrong. Vancouver has the worst congestion in the country by a long shot according to the 2021 TomTom Traffic Index. It is for urbanized metro areas.

CITY...............TIME LOST IN CONGESTION...........CONGESTION INDEX

1) Vancouver............75 hours..................33
2}Toronto.................55...........................24
3} Montreal...............55..........................24
4}London.................46...........................20
5}Halifax..................43...........................19

As far as "Essex Country doing squat", you clearly need to go back to school.
Essex County is in SW with Windsor as it's largest city and Windsor is 400km from Toronto.

[Changing City]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

Wrong. Vancouver has the worst congestion in the country by a long shot according to the 2021 TomTom Traffic Index. It is for urbanized metro areas.

CITY...............TIME LOST IN CONGESTION...........CONGESTION INDEX

1) Vancouver............75 hours..................33
2}Toronto.................55...........................24
3} Montreal...............55..........................24
4}London.................46...........................20
5}Halifax..................43...........................19

As far as "Essex Country doing squat", you clearly need to go back to school.
Essex County is in SW with Windsor as it's largest city and Windsor is 400km from Toronto.

To quote migrantcoconut from July last year "TomTom is sensationalist trash though - it measures congestion by commute speed, so any city without a 16-lane freeway is automatically high. Inrix goes by commute time." Toronto and Montreal are both worse for congestion. Vancouver ranks 16th worst in North America and 107th in the world.

[officedweller]

Originally Posted by osirisboy

Nope. Highway has been hugely improved since gateway! Especially the new bridge. There is no comparison at all! The only problem I regularly see is the bottleneck from the cassier tunnel where it turns to two thru lanes (going west). They added a third lane but made it a massively long exit lane for McGill. Wasted opportunity.

Remember that a key aspect of the Gateway Program was bridge tolls to manage traffic demand. Only with tolls would the traffic volumes be lowered enough to allow the bridge and highway to have capacity for the next 35 years without clogging up. The removal of tolls has screwed that up - and you have congestion.

[Migrant_Coconut]

Gonna point out that unlike Delta, regional traffic on the North Shore is significantly lower than local (where are they all driving to, Whistler?) and population density is higher. So while the GM replacement is all Victoria and Peace Arch'll get for half a century and they could probably use every lane they can get, the Second Narrows is likely to receive a SkyTrain, and it's likely to fill most of the demand.

It's true that trades and other labour need vehicles, as do most skiers. So let's get all the 9-to-5 employees off the road at peak hour so they have an easier time of it, and let's definitely get North Van to build a lot more density than they're doing right now. If we're looking at several hundred thousand more people a day, then statistically speaking, that means we'll need an eighteen-lane road... or a SkyTrain.

[Migrant_Coconut]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

Wrong. Vancouver has the worst congestion in the country by a long shot according to the 2021 TomTom Traffic Index. It is for urbanized metro areas.

CITY...............TIME LOST IN CONGESTION...........CONGESTION INDEX

1) Vancouver............75 hours..................33
2}Toronto.................55...........................24
3} Montreal...............55..........................24
4}London.................46...........................20
5}Halifax..................43...........................19

As far as "Essex Country doing squat", you clearly need to go back to school.
Essex County is in SW with Windsor as it's largest city and Windsor is 400km from Toronto.

You've got numbers, I've got numbers. INRIX in 2019 has Halifax of all places doing worse than Vancouver. I'll take the one that actually measures time spent in traffic, rather than how fast the car is going.

And that's my point: why bring up Windsor when we're talking about Toronto and Vancouver? But hey, since we're already off-topic, it turns out that Windsor, despite similar populations, somehow has worse traffic than Regina and its four-lane highways. How about I go back to school, and you go all the way back to daycare?

[FarmerHaight]

Originally Posted by Klazu

There is also no demand to induce, as the demand already happened in the past decade and continues to happen at record pace

You don't understand induced demand.

You are a good case study for induced demand. You proudly commute 26 kms everyday, which is only made possible by the one true freeway that cuts across Metro Vancouver. However, you avoid driving to North Vancouver because the bridge is too narrow and the Cassiar tunnel is too backed up. Because of the gateway project, you demand space for your vehicle on the TC everyday during your commute. But because of a lack of expansion to the Cassiar and the IWM and the TC north of the inlet, you rarely demand space for your vehicle on that stretch of highway.

I am not sure if you would still be commuting 26 kms everyday if the Gateway project hadn't happened. Maybe you would have chosen to sit in traffic, or maybe you would have tried to WFH 50% of the time, or found a job closer to home, or found a home closer to work. But either way, I imagine there are thousands of people like you who choose to make trips because of the Gateway project, but avoid making other trips because of projects that haven't happened.

The average commute time in the Vancouver CMA is about 30 minutes. Some people will choose a longer commute in order to purchase a large house or whatever, but not expanding highways will force denser development in order to not bump up those average commutes.

[aberdeen5698]

Originally Posted by Migrant_Coconut

Gonna point out that unlike Delta, regional traffic on the North Shore is significantly lower than local (where are they all driving to, Whistler?)

It's always seemed to me that when a ferry arrives at Horseshoe Bay you get a wave of congestion that often takes a lot time to work its way across the Upper Levels highway and over the bridges.

[jollyburger]

Originally Posted by aberdeen5698

It's always seemed to me that when a ferry arrives at Horseshoe Bay you get a wave of congestion that often takes a lot time to work its way across the Upper Levels highway and over the bridges.

I wonder if you disrupted that traffic if it would help in any way. Might be a stop-gap while they fix the intersections/Capilano River crossing. Hopefully they include the data on everyone getting off and see how they actually impact the traffic flow all the way to Burnaby.

[Migrant_Coconut]

Originally Posted by aberdeen5698

It's always seemed to me that when a ferry arrives at Horseshoe Bay you get a wave of congestion that often takes a lot time to work its way across the Upper Levels highway and over the bridges.

Could be, but that's at most 316 cars; the Horseshoe Bay ferries are literally not designed to carry any more than that. A two-lane highway should be able to clear that in five minutes (316 divided by 3,800/hr) unless outside variables are in play.

[flipper316]

Originally Posted by Klazu

Highway 1 is the only free-flowing highway through the region. Always has been and always will be the only one. It is a main thoroughfare for a metropolitan area of 2M+ people and less than 10 years ago it still used to be laughable 3+3 lanes from the 70s. Once it was finally widened by the least amount of extra capacity possible (1 extra HOV lane in each direction), they cheapened out on important details like merge lane lengths, which are causing most of the congestion since Day 1.

During the last 10 years the Metro has grown by 350-400K people with most people settling in far-flung suburbs due to the lack of affordability. Places like Squamish and Fraser Valley are among the fastest growing locales in the entire country. That is never going to change until a major earthquake eventually brings Vancouver housing prices to rubble (that will happen). Until then, people are going to rely on cars for their life in the suburbs, no matter how much SkyTrain we plan for.

There is also no demand to induce, as the demand already happened in the past decade and continues to happen at record pace, despite our highway system still being from the 70s (looking at you, Highway 99). The lack of affordability will continue to push a vast majority of the population increase into the suburbs and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

North Shore SkyTrain is also not going to happen for the next 15-20 years and we are likely talking 2040s at the earliest. By then our population will be pushing 3M and there will be several hundred thousand more cars on the road, regardless of what TransLink will or won't do. It is inevitable, like it or not. Build more SkyTrain, RapidBuses and bike lanes or not.

I do fully support North Shore SkyTrain, everyone does. But I am also realistic that it isn't going to happen any time soon (some of us will literally be dead by the time it finally opens) and it won't change traffic conditions on North Shore. By the time it is completed, it may at best help us move from daily multi-hour gridlocks to the 10-kilometre traffic jams we have today. Nothing will be back free-flowing as demand has grown so much by then, unless we also build more road capacity.

Let's also be real that North Shore will never build density. Never ever. North Vancouver builds ridiculously modestly even around Lower Lonsdale with direct connection to Vancouver, and the scale in Lynn Valley pales even in comparison with places like Port Moody. West Vancouver will also never embrace high density more than few towers here and there around that one SkyTrain station they may eventually get. All development in West Vancouver and up North Shore mountains will be car-dependent and affluent people moving into those areas will not use public transit, like it or not.

It has been reported many times that much of the traffic across Ironworkers is trades traffic and like someone said, most of the North Shore Upper Levels traffic is cross-traffic for local people, as it is the only highway. When a SkyTrain gets built in far future, it will solve neither the former or the latter point, as connections will make intra-North Shore trips awkward and trades just cannot use transit. Neither can a 99% of those going skiing or hiking, as car is always going to be 3x faster and 10x more convenient to get to those places.

I find it so reflective of how poor our transit is that my 26km commute is a nice 25 minutes door-to-door to drive vs. taking SkyTrain + RapidBus (a gold-star transit combo) for 45 minutes. Our transit sucks big time even in best of scenarios and stations/stops are so few and far between that walking times are ridiculous. By car you only take an elevator down and drive your warm car to another parkade with no worry of the weather or others breathing COVID in your neck. Most people will always opt for this convenience no matter how expensive gas/electricity will be. I know several people that have bought a car this year just because of the convenience over a 1-hour transit. And yes, I do commute against the traffic, as anyone clever about where they work should do if walking to work isn't an option.

It is burying your head in the sand to say that we don't need to build any new road infrastructure and more transit and bike lanes will solve all the population growth in the suburbs. Building more transit will help a little, but won't do on its own. Building bike lanes will solve nothing. Zero. Zilch.

Excellent post as always . You one of the few level headed people on here . Not these angry out of touch liberals on reddit Vancouver.

[ssiguy]

People also forget that highways don't just move people but also cargo.

It is patently ridiculous that you cannot get from the FV and beyond to the Vic/Nam on a freeway little alone an even marginally fast route. Ditto for the airport. Ditto for the Delta Port. It's patently ridiculous that you cannot get to the NS/Whistler from the border on a freeway. Ditto for not even being able to get from our only truck crossing to HWY#1. It is patently ridiculous that the province builds a new road along the Fraser that is not up to full freeway standards and really is little more than a regular road with lights on it and was built to such poor standard that they didn't even properly ramp the road so now trucks flip on their sides when turning at lights.

This is made exponentially worse by the fact that the province has done nothing to ensure in the future that these things can be done. If Victoria had a lick of transportation forethought, they would have at least secured the appropriate ROW but didn't. Now there is absolutely no way to connect the Valley to the ferries/port/airport without tearing downs hundreds of homes.

BC's complete lack of freeway infrastructure is costing the province billions in lost productivity and reducing the quality of life by adding needlessly to commuting times and having transport trucks going down residential roadways belching out their fumes and loud engine noise.

[FarmerHaight]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

People also forget that highways don't just move people but also cargo.

No, I did not forget that. That's why time and again I have mentioned that investing in rapid transit will remove thousands of vehicles from critical transportation routes, allowing goods and people making trips that have to go by road to flow freely. Based on carrying capacity, Skytrain would be 16x more effective at creating space on the highways.

[Migrant_Coconut]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

People also forget that highways don't just move people but also cargo.

That's correct. Which is why the plan is to get the majority of traffic that's white and blue collars with fixed destinations off the road, so the 7.5% that's truckers can have freer movement.

DNV City Hall's already run the numbers on a ten-lane bridge... it only saves a few minutes, and that's only until 2045 when it fills up again (page 12).