Readings: Seven Rules by Condon
From Philip Langdon at New Urban Network:
My review (just posted on New Urban Network) of a terrific new book by Patrick Condon, Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities.
A few years ago, Condon took me on a nearly four-hour walking tour of the place he calls home: the Kitsilano section of Vancouver. It’s an urban district that combines ease of getting around
(quick, frequent public transit); abundant neighborhood amenities (shops, stores, cafes, restaurants, parks, tree-lined streets); and a pleasingly human scale (few buildings are more than four stories, and many people occupy traditional-looking homes containing just two or three households).
Condon’s intimate understanding of his neighborhood — of how a series of different elements work together to make Kitsilano a satisfying human habitat — gives depth and persuasiveness to his Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities, one of the best books I’ve read on urban planning in the era of climate change.
Full review here.
As someone who works for a University, has a Degree and plans on pursuing Graduate studies within the next five years this may be ironic for me to say this: but Phillip and Patrick, get out of your ivory tower. That book is ridiculous. The minutia isn’t necessarily bad, nor is the idea of sustainability and compact complete neighbourhoods. I sympathize with some of it. But the whole idea that people will be concentrated in compact and complete urban neighbourhoods with little need to ever leave them isn’t realistic. Let’s disregard the need for pleasurable travel, to see friends and family, or go to regional attractions. Let’s focus solely on work.
How is Kitsilano a typical or even replicable neighbourhood for work is beyond me. It’s a great neighbourhood, if you can afford it. But most people can’t afford it. And it’s not the sort of place where there will be enough 70K/yr jobs (what you’d likely need to make to live there comfortably) and a large enough housing base to keep housing within the realm of the merely exorbitant (let alone prevent it from becoming ridiculously expensive).
How, or really where, are most people going to get well paying jobs? Especially jobs that pay well enough to provide you with enough space for a family. (And I’m thinking modestly here, a three bedroom apartment of approximately 1000-1500 sq ft for a two child two parent family). Some of the biggest employment centres in the region are Downtown Vancouver, Central Broadway and UBC. Yet, interestingly enough, these are also some of the least affordable areas in the region. If you can’t expect the people don’t these jobs to live in the neighbourhoods they work in, they’re probably going to have to commute.
By commuting they’re probably going to want to get to their destinations efficiently and effectively (i.e. quickly). Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that means we should kow-tow to the car lobby, but Condon’s fetish with the Streetcar is silly. He’s not a transportation engineer/planner so his cheering for that specific mode of transportation isn’t the sort of authority I can take seriously. His complete opposition to any new forms of rapid transit are also silly. Assuming the rapid transit doesn’t take resources away from the bus network, the streetcar is a nice idea, but ultimately a superficial one. When we need the extra capacity and can afford it, why not build it? But rip out the bus system to replace it? That seems superficial and more of an aesthetic choice than a logical one.
It’s not a particularly quick form of transportation, it’s less mobile than a bus (what does it do when there’s an accident in the next block… it can’t be re-routed easily and if it’s driven in mixed traffic there are bound to be problems) and it isn’t the best form of transportation for someone who needs to commute a long distance. Yet, in Condon’s view we need to discourage the long distance commute and encourage slow leisurely commutes. A nice idea, but he never really says how to make it affordable to live near one’s work. I suppose there’s always telecommuting, but we’ve been promised that for quite some time.
I hate to attack the person, but Condon is a well paid academic living in Kits commuting to UBC. What about your average service worker who lives in Burnaby and commutes Downtown? Can they afford the money to live closer to work? Probably not. Can they afford the time to take a slow streetcar to work? Maybe. But should they?
Re: David
That’s quite a sobering comment on the current economic reality of Vancouver.
David – that is a thoughtful comment.
I haven’t read the book, but I get the feeling that it is advocating (at least, in part) for cities that have employment corridors rather than hubs. Then the guy in Burnaby could commute along Broadway, or along 41st Ave, or what-have-you, instead of having to go downtown.
As to the insistence on streetcars… certainly you are right that there is a place for other modes of transport. And TBH the trolley busses do a lot of what streetcars could do, although they could be much improved if they had dedicated rights of way.
I do like the idea of keeping buildings to a human scale. One of Vancouver’s best assets is how many neighbourhoods have maintained a human scale while having pretty good density.
Streetcar? it is Torontonians who speaks the best about it… and they have spoke loudly Monday…
(not necessarily to say that the downtown streetcars are bad, but streetcar to commute from Scarborough to Toronto downtown doesn’t seem what they hope…that eventually answers the David question).
I agree with David. No neighborhood stands unto itself – a city needs transit backbones to connect its residential and job centers. A hierarchy of local and regional transit services is essential to all modern cities, and regional transit needs to have the capacity, frequency and speed to move people efficiently. And none of that precludes a walkable neighborhood built on a human scale.
Jarrett Walker has put together a critique of Prof. Condon’s streetcar vision on his excellent Human Transit blog – it’s very well worth the read for anyone who’s interested in these issues: http://www.humantransit.org/2010/04/is-speed-obsolete-.html
Well said David!
Its really sad that without reading the book people feel obliged to mis represent it, and to disparage my motives for writing it. Sadder still if they DO read the book and willfully misrepresent it.
A few clarifications for those who’s minds are not yet closed.
I do not say that we do not need a backbone system. We do. We have one. Its called the Skytrain and the West Coast express. I ask simply if there is a place for something between the buses provided for the “captive riders” and the Skytrain provided for the “choice” riders. If we think there is, then we might agree it should be GHG zero, as diesel is a bad for the planet. Shifting all our car trips to buses will still leave us short of the goal: cutting our GHG production by 90 percent per capita by 2050. These cuts are required by law but our policy environment has not yet caught up with this imperative. I have said many times that if we gradually switch buses to zero ghg trolley buses then fine. Sign me up. But I also ask why would you do that when you can have much more comfortable and complete community friendly trams for less money.
I also make it clear that affordable housing is the crux of the matter. Without affordable housing evenly distributed within the region we will always fail to provide sustainable transit and walkable areas. There is a whole chapter on the topic. But housing far from jobs is not a recipe for a sustainable region, no matter how many tens of billions you pour into skytrain.
It is simply not affordable to put skytrain within a ten minute walk of everyone. Consequently, most folks who use transit will be relegated to a bus trip for one or both ends of their trip. To calculate the speed of the trip one should include these slower legs plus walk time plus wait times. Those legs are never included. If those times are included any speed gains one expects from riding skytrain quickly vanish.
The bus system is starving presently, crushed under the wight of amortizing the costs of skytrain extensions. Budget shortfalls are chronic but we persist in imagining a three billion dollar subway to UBC. But as long as subways are too expensive to get within walking distance of all or most of our low density regional population, surface transit (buses, trolley, possilby trams) will always be the core of regions transit system. If this is the case then it makes sense to try to balance jobs, housing, and services in the region, and to find a transit solution that is compatible with that long term goal.
I really don’t understand the “Skytrain can’t be built to a 10-minute walking distance” argument. Freeways can’t be built to within a 10-minute driving distance of everyone either, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important. Skytrain doesn’t have to be everywhere, it just needs to serve the major regional flows. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a feeder network of local transit routes providing access to the transit backbone for those that need it – that’s how Toronto’s subway system works and it works well.
Skytrain is expensive, but the Broadway corridor is so heavily used that it will soon likely pay for itself as the Expo line does. The point on greenhouse gases is a good one, but we already have one of the few trolley networks in North America and it would be cheaper and politically easier to expand that rather than try to replace it with a less-flexible streetcar infrastructure, particularly when trolleys are perfectly adequate to meet the needs of most routes. Why the heck aren’t we running trolleys on 41st, for example?
Quick comment, hopefully the link I used works.
Same David here, posting from a different computer btw. My mind isn’t actually closed to the need for some of your ideas, so I find that to be a bit of an odd comment from a professor.
In any case I’m not actually suggesting that Skytrain or an equivalent metro system cover the entire region, within a 10 minute walk of everyone. Obviously that’s not realistic so I’m not particularly sure why you’ve made that inference. But, from what I’ve gathered from all of your writings including your response to Jarett Walker, you seem to oppose any meaningful extension of the backbone of the public transit system (rapid transit) because it goes against your vision of what the city should look like by about 2050. This includes what I assume is your opposition to the Skytrain extension to UBC. After all if 2.8 billion dollars can build trams throughout the region, why not do that, right? Except that building trams throughout the region won’t solve that specific transportation need, and seems like a superfluous waste of money if buses (including mostly electric trolleys) actually perform that role (a Metro system never could or should) already!
As to this quote: “But I also ask why would you do that when you can have much more comfortable and complete community friendly trams for less money. ”
This is odd for various reasons. Comfort and “community friendly” are value judgments. How and why are trams more “community friendly” or comfortable? If the next design used for buses, including electric trolleys (which Vancouver has plenty of), improves the “comfort” and “community friendly” aspects of the physical bus wouldn’t it be more financially prudent to stick with them? I’m serious here – this is why I’ve quoted and really focused on these two things. Perhaps I’m just missing something, since I didn’t “do my homework” by buying and reading your book. But you’re the one with an advanced degree, convince me. I’d really like to know why they are more community friendly and comfortable than an electric bus. From what I’ve read, many European transit systems use busses that are practically the same inside as a tram, so this seems like a simple aesthetic choice. It seems like it’s only in car-dominant cultures where the bus is seen as a “looser cruiser” that most people (including academics) really want to get away from in finding a way to attract “choice riders.”
I’m not against trams, if we had the money I’d even want to build them. But it seems to me that trams are more expensive than buses from a capital point of view and just as expensive from a labour point of view. I realize that they have higher capacity than an average bus, so it would make sense to upgrade a bus route to a tram route when demand calls for it. But I don’t think it makes sense to do that before then, just in the hopes that one will “shape” the community around it. That seems to be the same sort of thinking that is going into prioritizing the Surrey bound skytrain extensions over the UBC bound one that would by any non-political measure be the more logical choice.
Sean et al:
It has to do with how you want to spend your money. If there was unlimited money then buy more skytrain. But if money is limited you have to make choices. Sky train in a tunnel to UBC is absolutely the most expensive way possible to move people. And because its in a ‘big pipe” it means you have to get to it to use it. So flows that really would be better off going down 41st, SW Marine, 16th, Broadway, and 4th are all shifted to Broadway. So that makes the average trip longer than it could be and more time consuming than it should be.
On the other hand if you took the same money and put it into other surface technologies, such as tram, well, its less than a tenth of the cost per KM. You could equip all of Vancouver with trams on all the routes mentioned with a lot of money left over for surface rail for south of Fraser. Trips to UBC would not have to be funneled onto Broadway into the big pipe. Instead you would have a robust network.
As to flexibility and getting stuck thats a red herring. Go to any city in Switzerland for proof. I have made it clear that trams should be in dedicated lanes with stops every 800 meters not every 400. Skytrain stops frequently too so its not that much faster and it does not have a higher capacity (capacity is just a function of the number of cars strung together and the headways between trains).
Finally, and with respect to all, if we all agreed to get behind electrifying the regional transit system using trolley bus technology then ok, sign me up. Its the system access and the zero GHG that matters the most to me. Its the planet we are trying to save here. Its not about what kind of toy we like the most. But if you can do it for less with rail then why not.
Finally the Canada line doesn’t pay for itself. It pays operating expenses. It doesn’t pay for the cost of construction that has to be paid off yearly with a payment on the construction loans. The auditor general of BC determined that it will lose 25 million dollars per year indefinitely as a consequence.
Patrick.
David:
Well we might end up with a violent agreement if we keep this up. I agree that the region needs a backbone, although i dont think the backbone should go all the way to UBC.
What i have a problem with is that we have nothing in between buses and skytrain, and no real strategy to get 80 percent of all our trips to zero GHG by 2050 (walking, biking, and transit have to be the bulk of those trips and transit needs to be zero GHG).
You ask why streetcars and not buses. Well as i say above if we all get behind zero GHG trolley buses in dedicated lanes with signal priority then ok, count me in. But the cost of tram is less over the long term than trolley bus. This is because the cars last longer and one driver can handle over 200 fares rather than 60 to 110.
The more subtle reason is that the ride is much much smoother. Rubber tired vehicles sway and rock so that standing is no fun. This is a very significant factor. We will soon be a city of elderly. By 2050 our senior population is going to increase by 250 percent. I am sixty now and I really notice the discomfort. We should give this factor a good think.
Finally trams have been shown to stimulate investment in low and mid rise construction all along the route (Portland is the example of this) while metro stimulates the development of towers at station areas and not too much in between. The Marine Gateway proposal at Cambie and Marine Drive is a good example. In short you get a very different kind of neighbourhood emerging with tram. Since our neighborhoods grew up with tram, and have that basic low and mid rise configuration, it makes sense to work with the inherent nature of our neighborhoods, not against them.
If you want more on this it just so happens that the chapter on the “restore the streetcar city” rule is available free on line from UBC press at:
http://www.ubcpress.ca/books/pdf/chapters/2010/CondonSevenRulesForSustainableCommunitiesCh2.pdf
Patrick
I’ve bought the book and I agree with David’s views of it. Overall, it is a silly book.
Mr. Condon is out of his element. There is money for plenty of Skytrain expansion, it’s a political matter of assigning the available revenue flows.
There should be multiple Skytrain routes to UBC .
As for GHG’s, come on folks, it’s a phony feelgood priority. ie: “It’s the planet we are trying to save here”
Try spending a few minutes really thinking about ways to improve the lives of people on this planet.
An unhealthy fixation on reducing GHG’s won’t be anywhere on the list.
I’ve got three more useful ways.
http://www.lutw.org/
http://www.samaritanspurse.ca/ourwork/water/default.aspx
http://www.msf.ca/
regards,
Patrick, firsts of all a disclaimer: I have not read your book, which is why I had not commented until now, and I intend to read your book at some point. That said, I have read your comments here and on HumanTransit.org, and it is the thoughts articulated in those comments that I’m responding to here.
I think your comment that trams are cheaper is misleading. They cost a lot more to implement – certainly the greenest and cheapest system is the the electric trolly buses we already have built on many routes that would see changed to tram – and in order to have lower operating cost, you would need lower service. Fraser Street already operates articulated buses, for instances, and commuting along that route I’ve never once seen a full bus at rush hour. If you want to have lower operational costs with larger vehicles, that means less frequent service, which is something that would greatly diminish the quality of my trip, and mean I’d likely have to leave my house earlier. That also impacts ridership.
I also question your construction costs estimates: It’s something that won’t be resolved over an internet discussion, but streetcar construction costs have varied greatly.
I don’t understand why we should spend $3 billion on something that will not improve mobility for me in any way whatsoever, and will likely have minimal impact on ridership.
Capacity is also limited on surface transit, due to two factors: train lengths are limited by block spacing in some areas, and there’s intersections. Yes, you can have signal prioritization, but if you ran trains as often as they do on the Expo Line during rush hour the light would likely never turn green in some places. As well, operating costs are higher for LRT due to drivers, which will mean less frequent service, which will mean less ridership.
As for development, buses do that, too. You can see the effect on arterials throughout the city, or if you want to see a startling transformation, take a peek at Marine Drive in North Vancouver, which doesn’t even have what I would call high quality transit service.
I agree LRT is important for some situations: The Fraser Valley is a great example. A streetcar could work around False Creek as well, if the money is available, and when capacity needs require a streetcar then it would be a smart investment to make. But if we’re going to spend money on transit, let’s make sure it’s effective transit that people want to use and then we can have success in restricting car use.
On the comment of affordability, I have difficulty commenting as I haven’t read the book, I can’t comment on what solutions are proposed there. Yet I’ve never seen any suggestion that could close the affordability gap in a place like Kitsilano and make it affordable to me – never. Not without razing single family neighbourhoods and building the kind of massive tower blocks that nobody wants to see.
I don’t think we’re going to solve that problem, and so in the end that’s going to be the sticking point for slow transit – it’s that people who can’t afford the luxury of living wherever they desire would rather not be condemned to sit in transit for hours a day when they could spend that time with their families, getting more sleep, etc.
@Voony
Keep in mind it was drivers who spoke in the election in Toronto, not transit users. The people of the inner-city who are served by the streetcars love them dearly, and they do make a lot of sense in Toronto. Certianly if Vancouver had an existing streetcar network it would be utturly senseless to rip it up, but we don’t. Toronto is lucky to have what it has.
The gross ignorance of people re: streetcars and light rail is quite appalling. Not only have they not read Patrick Condon’s book, they have not read anything about the modern streetcar or tram.
This anti-light rail/tram bias is setting Vancouver up for a major fall, both socially and economically as Vancouver’s present transit system has priced itself out of reach and is dependent on major tax infusions from municipalities south of the Fraser.
The regional taxpayer is waking up to this Vancouver tax grab and are now agitating to leave TransLink and form a South Fraser Transit Authority. The result of this will do many things, but from the onset, triple property taxes in Vancouver. The trolleybus will disappear because it is expensive to maintain and operate and a host of other unpleasant things will happen transit wise.
The anti-LRT/tram/streetcar crowd are just the 21st century version of the Luddite movement, afraid of modern innovation.
Carry on Patrick, these guys just don’t get it.
A note about the Toronto election. The mayor elect is so ignorant about streetcars and their operating philosophy, that he thinks that it is cheaper to build subways! Oh yes, he wants to rip up rails for more road space for cars – a wonderful transit solution that will help gridlock and pollution!
@ Tessa, the base cost of streetcar construction is (pre-fab dual track & overhead) is about $6 million/km. The Lesley LR-55 track is cheaper to install. The increased costs for streetcar in North America is that many other street improvement projects are cascaded onto the streetcar/tram construction.
When ridership on a transit route exceeds about 2,000 pphpd, the trams becomes cheaper to operate than buses. This is why those producing trolleybuses are finding it a hard sell, with costs about 30% less than streetcars to install, they have little of the benefits of a streetcar or tram, thus have now become a niche transport system.
France has over 20 years of transit studies comparing bus, trolleybus, tram and light-metro and the tram has proven to be a better investment. Even the much heralded GLT has succumbed to the tram.
Tessa:
We do in fact have a streetcar system here in vancouver. The most important part. The streetcar streets themselves: broadway, dunbar, 4th, commercial, oak, main, hastings, on and on. Its the whole urban composition that matters: the block size, the density, the commercial services along the corridor. The streetcar is only a part of it, and a relatively small part at that. As Zwei says, above a certain ridership level it makes economic sense to put the streetcars back on those streets. Why would you not want to do that if you could? If you rode the Olympic line, which most of us did, why would you not want to have something like that running down those streets, for less money, and zero GHG?
PC
Translink is already trying very hard to offload Broadway ridership by providing alternate routes to UBC via 25th / 33rd / 41st / 49th. It’s only a few years ago that most of these routes were extended to UBC. Yet Broadway continues to run at maximum capacity, and a big part of the reason for this is that Broadway itself and the hospital district in particular is a huge destination. You can’t divert that ridership to other routes. A streetcar down 41st won’t change the Broadway ridership one iota. And in fact it’s even pretty difficult to divert those going to UBC if they’re coming from the northern or northeastern sectors.
I agree with David in that I see no immediate need to push Skytrain through the Broadway corridor all the way through to UBC. But it seems patently obvious to me that it absolutely MUST be extended at LEAST to Cambie so as to link up to the existing Canada Line, and it really needs to be taken as far as Granville street to service the other high-density centers along Broadway. Stopping Skytrain short of the hospital district makes as much sense as stopping the Canada Line at False Creek and requiring everyone to transfer to streetcars to to take them downtown.
It’s certainly true that Skytrain will be more expensive than LRT along Broadway, but you get what you pay for. I believe that at-grade LRT is a false economy because it won’t have the ultimate capacity of a grade-separated system – it would eventually have to be replaced, and not all that far in the future given transit ridership trends. And in the meantime everyone would benefit from the increased speed and frequency of Skytrain, which I believe would draw more transit ridership sooner.
David.
You are right. It is patently obvious that skytrain must be extended to Cambie from the dead end of the Millennium line, partly mitigating that legacy of poor planning. I have said that many times. All of the Translink options do at least that much. After that the options all struggle with the same problem. If it goes further how much further, and how do we get it up to Broadway, and how fast.
One of the options shows dual surface rail for part of the distance, choosing the City’s plan for tram between downtown and Granville island as the point of departure, capitalizing on that investment to extend service out to and up arbutus with a Broadway surface line out to UBC.
What we always seem to miss about that part of Broadway between Cambie and Granville is that you have many robust parallel arteries very close to each other: Second Avenue/Olympic line ROW, Broadway, and 12th. All can be re enforced and all three of these arteries could be equipped with tram at a tiny fraction of the cost of a subway, if you wanted to. What prevents us from capitalizing on this opportunity is our natural habit of thinking of “big pipe” hub and spoke solutions rather than network solutions.
It should be noted that one of the Translink option is a network option. The “best bus” option expands service on 16th, 4th, Broadway, and, i believe, 41st. While this one is not perfect either it is informed by “systems” thinking and enhances the whole network not simply one big pipe.
Finally I will leave it to Zwei to comment on the details of capacity, except to say that on any corridor you can carry as many passengers through a certain point per hour as you want (up to a point..but that point is way higher than the demand..even the demand way out to 2100). It makes no difference if its subway or tram. Its just how many cars you are putting through that point per hour that matters.
PC
My apologies…..my most recent reply was in response to a post from Sean not David.
Patrick
There was a discussion over on Stephen Ree’s blog about a month ago in which I was arguing that there won’t be a day when trams magically reappear in Vancouver. There are steps that need to be taken before a group of bus routes can be converted. The incremental path to tramways starts with making local bus routes operate more like tramways. I suggest removing and relocating stops so that they are typically spaced at 400 m (i.e. typically half the distance between arterials), providing separated lanes wherever buses currently experience delays, and moving to proof-of-payment to reduce dwell times.
http://stephenrees.wordpress.com/2010/10/03/streetcars-op-ed/
@PC:
“I have made it clear that trams should be in dedicated lanes with stops every 800 meters not every 400.”
To me this says, “We should replace local bus routes with B-Lines or B-Line-like tramways.” I’m not sure that it’s a bad idea everywhere. But I’m also not sure that it will lead to the type of corridor redevelopment we want. It is the stop spacing that determines the balance between access and mobility of the transit route, so we should expect that similar stop spacings will produce similar development patterns regardless of the specific technology.
With one mode operating at 800-m arterial stop spacing, there will typically be another mode operating with more frequent stops. This is not a situation that lends itself to conversion to trams.
I think there are two ways to improve surface transit routes in Vancouver: add a B-Line on top of the local bus route or make the local bus route more like a B-Line.
An example of the former is on Broadway. This setup lends itself to later conversion to subway leaving the local bus as is. Unless there is room for a dedicated bus lane and a dedicated bus passing lane, only one mode can operate in the dedicated space. Putting both modes (i.e. B-Line and local bus) in a single dedicated lane won’t work because the faster mode can’t pass the slower mode and has to wait for it at its many stops. Putting just the faster mode in the dedicated lane improves it at the expense of the slower mode, which will suffer from significantly reduced speed and reliability over the status quo. Instead, the faster mode is taken off the surface.
The alternative is to remove many of the stops on local bus routes but only to the point that stops are spaced at about the limit of walking distance. Then, only a single mode needs to be operated on the route, and it can have sole use of a dedicated lane without conflicting with other modes. The eventual conversion to a tramway will not negatively affect another mode and its users on that street. Once the space is reallocated for buses, the choice of technology can later be decided on a cost-recovery or operating-cost basis.
@P. Condon. Streetcar suburban style development is clearly not what I meant by a streetcar system, and it is not a streetcar system. It is one development pattern likely to result from having streetcars as the dominant mode of transportation in a new city. Though it is arguably a very nice development pattern, it certainly has some benefits (especially over car suburbs).
As for the rest of the comment, you didn’t respond to any of my concerns as to the cost, as to the frequency cuts that would be required to have a lower cost service, or anything really. I still maintain what I said in my post, but once I’ve picked up a copy of your book then hopefully those concerns are addressed in there and I can at least consider the merit.
The $6 million figure Zwei quotes, I’m guessing, is from Portland. I’m guessing, because Zwei never backs up any of his numbers, he just says numbers and hopes we believe everything he says, but that’s about what Portland paid for its first streetcar project. Keep in mind that didn’t involve any new right of way, it operates in traffic, and there was no utility relocation done (I’ve heard that’s a limiting factor for their system, but I’m not exactly sure the specifics of it) That means the Portland streetcar is often held up by traffic and is slower and less reliable than Portland’s buses. At the same time, I know they don’t ever pair their streetcars into trains, and may not be able to, which limits capacity) Building that sort of system would make transit users worse off, not better off.
Zwei, of course, also likes to claim benefits of full LRT with the cost of installing the most basic of streetcars. Those extra costs, of course, for a dedicated right of way for example, are absolutely necessary if you want to make the project have any sort of mobility improvement for people using it. Of course, those same improvements can be done using trolly bus technology just as easily, at least as a first step until ridership requires additional capacity, and then we can build a streetcar right.
If anyone wants to know what that costs, an example would be Portland’s Eastside Streetcar, which is $147 million for a 5.3 kilometre line, or about $27.4 million per kilometre, to start-up a new line. Or maybe the South Lake Union Streetcar in Seattle, which cost $56 million for a 2.1 kilometre line, or $26.7 million per kilometre, not coincidentally quite similar to Portland. And that even operates in mixed traffic, not its own right of way.
Patrick, the fact that you listen to Zwei and trust his cherry-picked statistics is appalling. I suggest you go to his “Rail for the Valley” blog and continuously read the misinformation he perpetuates. What’s frightening is that I assume you already do. Any sane person would realize this guy is a completely biased nut.
I’m sorry Patrick, but the simple fact that you trust Zwei says quite a bit about you credibility.
The problem Toronto face is that a line like the Eglinton LRT is now priced at $4.6 Billion, for an average speed of … 22km/h (whereas buses currently go at 18km/h, and remember that TTC has still to achieve the promised performance improvement on the St Clair LRT). May be Rob Ford is nuts when come to Transit, but it is more than probable that lot of Torontonians believe that $4.6 Billion for a streetcar line is totally insane, and can buy decent subway trackage instead.
Now, since Zwei seems to know better than anyone else how to build a world class LRT, like those recurrently featured on his blog, for less than $6 millions/km, why from Seattle to Toronto, via Calgary or Edmonton,…noone is listening him?
Urban form,
some believe that the high rise form in vancouver is consequence of the skytrain, and that LRT could bring more so called “human scale” or ala Portland urbanism.
Unfortunately, if it was true, Calgary, San Diego, Long Beach,…should be free of high rise,
conversely, Montreal subway should have fostered high rise neighborood everywhere, like the Washington DC one (not even talking of European cities here).
There is simply no proven causality between the urban form and the transit choice….
Lougheed, like the Westend, havn’t waited for the skytrain to have high rises. More probably Vancouver urban form is dictated by the market, and market want it, possibly for the views …In Portland beside maybe Mount St Helen, there is no view to sale, in Vancouver view is good in all 4 directions (south less good, but compensated by the sun!), and now even in the middle of DT peninsula, with view blocked left and right, market continue to want it eventually because we start to achieve a critical size providing this forest of High rise giving this “Manhattanization” effect and people like it…
Another problem with Zwei is that he’s rather abrasive and it’s nearly impossible to have a civil conversation with him on these matters since he seems to confuse his opinions with ironclad facts.
One of the problems with the “do everything in one neighbourhood” model of urban development, is that it takes away free choice. I for one don’t have any interest in living in the same neighbourhood as my work, because I don’t actually like that neighbourhood. I love my neighbourhood but I also like my job and see no reason why I should have to make a sacrifice between where I work and where I live. The commute is manageable and I don’t plan on moving anywhere closer to my work in the near future (nor could I afford to). Now, of course one could always say, “do it for the environment.” But this line of argument isn’t going to get people who have a reasonable commute to change two of some of the most important aspects of their lives. The only thing they’ll “do” for the environment is change their commuting habits – i.e. from a car to public transit.
This will mean that we still have to get people around the region. In any case, I happen to think speed is very important. People are busy and don’t usually have time to sit around wasting on public transit. I for one want to get to my destinations as quickly as possible. As this link demonstrates travel times can be substantially saved by building skytrain all the way to UBC. And as I had already mentioned a regional draw like UBC can’t be easily replicated across the region. People will still need to travel there. Same goes for downtown, the airport, SFU and probably a few other destinations.
So, for Patrick, I suppose it’s just a matter of simply disagreeing with you on the extent to which the “backbone” of the public transit should be extended to. I for one would like to see Skytrain extended to UBC, the Evergreen Line route and a little further in Surrey (to Guilford and Newton but not all the way to Langley like has been suggested).
Just a note:
I do not cherry pick statistics, rather light rail/tram/streetcar is a generic transit mode and what one system can achieve, most other LRT systems can achieve too. This goes for vehicles as well. Try operating Canada line cars on the SkyTrain line, can’t be done.
The $6 million quoted above was the cost of track and overhead installation in Helsinki, not including cars. In North America, we do not have many tram experts, rather engineers who tend to over engineer transit projects. In fact most transit projects in Canada and the USA are grossly over engineered for what they achieve, with Seattle being a good example.
We do not have a faculty in urban transportation at UBC or SFU and many in the transit game are woefully ignorant on transit mode, installation, and operating philosophy. Has anyone read Prof. Carmen Hass-Klau’s quartet of transit studies, starting with Bus or Light Rail – making the right choice?
Seriously, I do not see much of a future for SkyTrain in the region as there is not the funds to build it. With the South Fraser voters wanting ‘rail’ transit, cheaper LRT will be built or TransLink will split asunder.
The problem, as I have stated before – abrasively – in some opinion, is that SkyTrain has not achieved what TransLink would want us to believe it has achieved. You many fool the locals with the Goebbels Gambit, but not transit authorities elsewhere who have not copied Vancouver in how we provide transit. If SkyTrain is so good, why isn’t anyone else building with it?
Lastly, transit is not about development, as this is a SkyTrain only issue, transit is about moving people and providing an attractive alternative to the car and our light metro network has not done this. What has happened is that we are giving bus riders a forced short, faster, yet inconvenient trip. TransLink has not achieve the much valued modal shift from car to transit with a now $8 billion invested in SkyTrain and light metro; a figure that has not gone unnoticed by transit authorities elsewhere.
@Voony: Eglington costs as much as it does because half of it IS a subway, dug underground, with stop spacing further apart than the Bloor Line. To say it’s a streetcar line is completely insufficient and misleading and wrong. The subway section will actually be faster than the Bloor line. To not build that line over some stupid political squabbling when the money is already there would be a travesty.
Please read the specifics of the line before trashing it.
@Zwei: What North American city has achieved a statistically significant increase in transit mode share? I don’t think any has. Portland, which has put all its eggs in the LRT basket, has seen a decrease in transit mode share, even while Vancouver is edging slightly forward, if at a maddeningly slow pace. You’re creating unrealistic expectations for transit to set it up for failure.
I’ll take a look at Helsinki, but buying cars is an important part of the expenditure, as they’re a lot more expensive than buses. Toronto’s cars cost nearly $6 million each, and amounted to more than $1 billion expenditure for just a small portion of their total transit system. Whether you include it in your estimates or not, we’ll still have to pay for it.
I haven’t read your book. But I have been following this discussion on Human Transit and the Liveable Blog.
Why did you author a study that compared different transit modes to a prius? I am still unsure how you got the conclusion that a “Toyota Prius scores best per passenger-mile with a total cost of $1.09 followed by modern tram at $1.23. Even with negligible energy costs, Skytrain is by far the most expensive at $2.66 per passenger-mile.”
http://www.sxd.sala.ubc.ca/8_research/sxd_FRB07Transport.pdf
And can you explain Figure 10 on that paper? (typical occupancy per skytrain = 10) At rush hour, I’ve never seen just 10 ppl on a skytrain car. The only way I could explain this is that you include the very early or late-in-the-day ridership, and average that over skytrain’s good frequency. If that’s the case, you are making the “skytrain isn’t green becasue it runs more empty compared to other modes” arguement.
http://www.humantransit.org/2009/12/yet-another-transit-isnt-green-because-of-empty-buses-story.html
Thank you Zwei, that was the best post I’ve read from you on the subject and you make some good points too.
The difficulty with citing costs in another location is that they are not readily translatable to the local context. Helsinki may well be able to put in tram lines for $6 million CAD (~4 million Euros?) But that surely is not comparable to the cost of building here. For one, I would assume that they already have a fleet of rail vehicles in their tram network and here we would need to buy a fleet in order to get up and runninh. Next, I am assuming they already have an operations and maintenance centre and storage yard for the fleet, which are essential parts of any tram system and necessary to include in our start up costs. I am sure Helsinki also already has the electrical rectifier infrastructure in place so that only expansion is required for their new tram lines. Here the trolley electrical infrastructure is in place but it would clearly require a major upgrade to handle a second parallel load of trams. That certainly is not insurmountable but quite different, I imagine, from Helsinki.Lastly there is street work and utility relocation that has to be factored into the cost. I have no idea about how utilities work in Helsinki, whether they are beneath their major streets or not, but utility reloaction is required for any major in-street construction project and those costs have to factored into the true overall construction budget. So, this is all by way of saying that the $6 million a kilometre cost for tram lines in Helsinki are no more comparable to the full cost of building such infrastructure here than is the cost of bored tunnel subways in Madrid or Beijing, both of which are far less expensive per kilometre than our recent $100 million or so per kilometre for the Canada Line.
None of this settles the argument of which mode is better for rapid transit on the Broadway Corridor to UBC, but it helps level the playing field when the cost of a potential SkyTrain expension inherently include the full costs mention above while the assertions about trams/LRT seldom do.
PS, I had intended to say $6 million per kilometre near the beginning of my last post. I am not implying that Zwei said that Helsinki’s tram line only cost that much. Also, apologies for the spelling errors. I’m on a Blackberry and I find it difficult to review and proofread posts on this type of blog using my phone. The field where one enters their text just turns into one long never ending line with the text moving off to the left like a text crawl at the bottom of a cable news show.
I really do not want to turn Gordon’s site into a light rail/SkyTrain debate – go to the Rail for the Valley blog for that.
http://railforthevalley.wordpress.com/
I will answer some questions posed.
I used the example of Helsinki to show the raw cost of track and overhead only and dis not claim it could be done in Vancouver. What I do say is that we can build LRT/tram/streetcar far cheaper than the $35 mil/km as claimed by TransLink etc. The experts that I have dealt with have told me that we could have LRT/streetcar built for $15 mil/km to $20 mil/km complete. We do have the electrical overhead etc. already in place.
http://railforthevalley.wordpress.com/2008/12/26/trams-on-the-cheap-part-2/
Houston, by strange chance has shown the highest amount of new customers to their new LRT, which if memory is correct, was about 40%. Houston is building more light rail.
Now to answer Tessa’s question about the economics of bus and a tram.
One tram (1 driver) is as efficient as 6 to 8 buses (6 to 8 drivers) and for every bus or tram operated, one needs at least three people to drive, maintain and manage them. As well, one tram has a life span of 40 to 50 years, where a bus lifespan is about 12 to 20 years.
Do the calculations and one finds that trams become more economic to operate on most transit routes when ridership exceeds 2,000 pphpd.
http://railforthevalley.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/the-1986-lrta-study-bus-lrt-metro-comparison/
Now the hoary old debate about speed. Speed of a transit system is not and I repeat, is not the prime reason for attracting ridership; it is a combination of many factors including speed (when compared to a bus only) that attract people to transit.
SkyTrain’s higher commercial speeds come from a penalty of a lack of stations – the fewer the stations, the higher the commercial speed of a transit system.
Studies have shown that in an urban area, ‘rail’ transit should have a stop every 500m to 600m to maximize customer demand. One may build a high speed subway, but with stations every 1 km to 1.5 km apart, many potential customers will just take the car instead as it will be more convenient. We seem to forget that the prime reason we have public transit is to move people, efficiently and affordable, something we are now lacking in our planning.
Zwei:
It’s true streetcars are often kept in service longer than buses, but I think 50 years, in most cases, is an exaggeration compared what we can expect. Toronto had to do a major rebuild of their streetcars in 2006, with most starting service in the very late 70′s to 1981, or 1983 for articulated ones. That compares to Vancouver’s trolleybuses, which were brought into service in 1982, about the same time, and were removed from Vancouver, I think in 2007, but as far as I’m aware are still in use in Argentina, where they were sold to. At the same time, Toronto is replacing its streetcar fleet as we speak, and in fact must replace it unless they choose to do a substantial rebuild.
At least in this example, streetcars haven’t outlived trollybuses by a significant margin, though they did last a few years longer. I’m not sure how this stacks up to other situations, however, or how expensive the rebuild was compared to purchasing a new trolleybus.
Remember: It only cost $273 million for 188 regular and 40 articulated trolleybuses. I can’t find the breakdown for how much each of those cost, unfortunately. That would make a much better comparison.
As for the idea that we could save money by operating fewer streetcars than buses. You say a streetcar is worth 6-8 buses, but the Flexity Outlook seems to have capacity for 179 people, at least the ones in Frankfurt that I found stats for. That’s a little more than double the articulated trolley bus capacity, if I’m right, of about 80 or so. Not exactly 6-8 times.
I’m sure you can run trains, but remember, the length is limited by street blocks. I haven’t done the final math of course, but in this case I don’t think the finances work out to significant savings.
At the same time, as I stated before, the only way we could save operational costs by operating longer streetcars is if we reduce frequency on existing trolleybus routes. Right now my bus, the #8 Fraser, is nowhere near capacity, and to replace it with a streetcar would mean either wasted money on a needless capacity improvement, or longer waits for the train than the bus, which is a service reduction I would notice and which would make me less likely to ride. I can already bike downtown in about the same time as the bus takes, so why would I wait longer? Certainly if you can drive, you would do the same. And I believe frequency of service and reliability to be the two most important features in choosing whether to take transit, both of which would be negatively affected (at least without dedicated lanes)
So no, as I’ve argued before, streetcars would mean a reduction of service or at the very best no change in operating cost despite a large up-front capital cost. I’ll admit that in looking this up, the long-term replacement costs look better for streetcars than I initially thought, and given an increase in capacity could easily be made to make sense, but that shouldn’t be treated as a rapid transit system, because it won’t be, and it’s contingent upon an increase in capacity. I’m certainly not against a study specific to Vancouver to see if tramss could be operated cheaper, but I don’t see it as likely for the above reasons.
Relax Zwei, you’ll see plenty of skytrain coming!
Tessa, terminology problem:
a subterranean streetcar doesn’t make a “subway”,
if so, by this token, San Francisco should be featured as having an extensive “subway” network, but more realistically the “muni” are more assimilated to streetcars than anything else.
the same for the “harbourfront LRT” in Toronto: in despite of a section in tunnel, and most of the route in a segregated right of way, torontonian call it a streetcar…
there is little reason for them to assimilate the Eglinton LRT to the subway they know on Bloor or Yonge, and far more to do it with the streetcar they know on Harbourfront, Spadina or St Clair.
To give some perspective, today when you land to Pearson, you have basically 2 transit option to reach Yonge, a bus + bloor subway = 45 mn
another Go bus to York Mills = 35mn at worst, but often less (going to Eglinton from there is a mere 5mn subway ride).
With the Eglinton streetcar, it will take 50mn for a mere 18-km!
“subway” request on wiki redirect you to ‘rapid transit’, and by any account the Eglinton streetcar is simply not that.
Toronto could have its reason to build like it, I don’t judge it, I just call a transit route by the name I feel fitting the best with the “geometric: feature the route has: slow transit stopping every block.
That brings me to the expert Zwei assertion: “Studies have shown that in an urban area, ‘rail’ transit should have a stop every 500m to 600m to maximize customer demand”
Well, it is not what is done for Paris RER, it was eventually done for the paris metro, but new line are built on new standard with stop much farther appart…
It is not the case for Hong Kong MTR,…it is not either the case for Zurich S-bahn…
Really, how come so many cities can be wrong?…All the above mentioned must have dismissal record when come public transit modal split, isn’it?
In Toronto still, bus life expectancy is close to 20 years, but apparently streetcar life expectancy is closer to 30 than 50 years (it was already the case for the Toronto’s PCC),
a huge tram in Europe carries in the tune of 350 pax, and artic bus are more often than note advertised carrying 150pax in Europe.. do the math, factor it financial cost,…and you will see the point on rolling stock is very moot, on operating cost it is the same (as mentioned, driver cost money and they are not paid by the mileage but by hour, so a bus running at 15km cost way more than a bus running at 30km/h: so provide speed to bus, and you will see operating cost, rolling stock requirement… dropping dramatically…).
and please don’t compare tram using European standard with bus using the NA standard , even if, I know, BRT zealots tend also to do the same with BRT using South american number to foster their cause.
All that said, there is simply no clearcut between bus and tram, no magic bullet, no silver recipe…and it is the reason there is debate
zwei wrote: “SkyTrain’s higher commercial speeds come from a penalty of a lack of stations – the fewer the stations, the higher the commercial speed of a transit system.”
The lion’s share of Skytrain’s superior speed comes from its grade separation.
Today, 50 year German trams are being refurbished and being sold to Turkey. Trams do have a very long lifespan. The Glenelg tramway in Australia had 70 year old trams in daily service until just a few years ago!
The author of the Rail for the Valley TramTrain report sourced 20 year old articulated European trams being sold second hand for $54,000 each. They were being replaced by low-floor trams and they still had over 30 years of active life yet!
The benefits of grade separation is vastly over stated as a tram operating on a reserved rights-of-ways (Arbutus Corridor) could obtain commercial speeds of that of SkyTrain. Station spacing and the number of stations per route/km. is more important for commercial speed than the difference between a tram on a viaduct or on a Reserver R-0-W.
This is despite what Voony says.
I do wonder if anyone here (Vancouver) has read anything about transit, I doubt it as some of the statements made are, to be kind, naive.
Operating a transit system is about moving transit customers and giving transit customers what they want. Again, studies have shown that transit customers want their transit options “on the pavement”, ready to use. The transit customer knows full well that faster commercial speeds come at a price (fewer stops) but when the the transit becomes too inconvenient to use, the transit customers opts for other modes, namely the car.
When it comes to urban transit, Vancouver is seen as a bit of a joke, where the reality is, the operating authority is cramming every bus rider it can on the mini-metro and trying to pretend that they are doing a good job. In fact Translink can’t show a modal shift and no one (except Seattle) has copied Vancouver’s transit planning.
The North American streetcar issue is even more alarming. Afraid to build light rail for fear of public backlash, cities are building little starter lines which do not offer much in customer convenience, yet cost huge sums of money to build. It is as though they are designed to fail.
The fear taking on the auto lobby has left North American transit planning adrift, with massively huge metro style transit systems, huge debt and not much to show. Again Seattle is a good example.
If transit is up in the air and doesn’t hinder auto traffic then the senior government may fund it, but take up road space, well that is a different story, as cries of “shock and belief” come from car drivers everywhere.
It will take a major calamity, such as a middle east war (cutting off oil supplies) or peak oil to set thing right and they way things are going abroad, that calamity will come sooner rather than later.
Until then the tax and spend SkyTrain Lobby will squander billions of dollars building truncated metro lines, up in the air and stations inconveniently far apart, that do not or will not offer an attractive alternative to the car.
Zwei, we’re tired of hearing the same unsubstantiated arguments. Here’s a fact, spewing your wishful thinking again and again doesn’t make it a fact.
Please keep your fictions in your valley blog.
And btw, a tram on the Arbutus Corridor would never reach the commercial speeds of skytrain for safety reasons.
Could. But wouldn’t.
zwei wrote: “The benefits of grade separation is vastly over stated as a tram operating on a reserved rights-of-ways (Arbutus Corridor) could obtain commercial speeds of that of SkyTrain.”
…which has nothing whatsoever to do with Broadway. And frankly I’m pretty skeptical that trams in the Arbutus corridor would be allowed 90km/h speeds through level crossings of city streets, even if they were equipped with crossing gates. Not to mention the fact that an at-grade tram with level crossings could never be automated – one of Skytrain’s biggest benefits since it enables such high frequencies throughout the day.
It is sad to see the misinformation spread about SkyTrain… even worse by someone (zwiesystem) who claims to be an expert and yet continuously misrepresents his facts and claims that everyone else are “SkyTrain lobbyists”. (These remarks are true, you just have to search up the many news articles where he has claimed this.)
You consistently claim that transfers between buses and SkyTrain are inconvenient to the point that the networks should be deserted because no one would use them. If that’s the case, please explain the 100000 riders on the Canada Line after only one year of operation, or the many thousands more that ride the Expo and Millennium Lines.
Truth is, your points don’t quite stand up. Close stops at ground level MIGHT be appealing to local residents and tourists, but they are the minority in many scenarios. A lot of people just want to get somewhere and do not have the patience to wait for a tram while it stops at every block or traffic light. This is where speed matters… a fast network means people can make it there in time or in less time than before, saving them minutes that they could use productively elsewhere.
With speed comes the need for grade separation Yes, you can have trains run on surface streets… however, prepare for many many accidents with careless pedestrians and drivers trying to beat the train while crossing the many side streets. You can also build many safeguards to stop these people from doing this like crossing gates, train horns, and slowing trains down at intersections, but what’s the point? You’ve just spent so much more money on things that residents will get annoyed about… and your train won’t be as fast it was before.
You’ve mentioned Houston’s surface-level LRT lines as being “successful”; however maybe it’s not a surprise to also know that they have a very HIGH rate of accidents that SkyTrain will never reach in a single year. This is why SkyTrain’s grade separation is so critical… since it moves independent of anything above or below it, it can just cruise at top speeds between stations without suffering from heavy delays. And people are generally less careless about going into the tracks because there’s no real point in trying to cross platforms.
Another point: lack of rapid transit expansion. False. There are several places expanding their metros at the moment, most in China, but a few elsewhere as well. Also, there are many other existing systems in place that demonstrably prove the viability of dedicated rapid transit around the world. There might not be a lot of expansion right now but that’s primarily because most of the developed cities already have built their systems. In fact, I think that we are seriously behind in building rapid transit to keep up with population demands.
Finally, I probably do not need to reiterate the fact that SkyTrain pays for itself since someone else mentioned it already. The REAL reason, and the ONLY reason, why TransLink would be in a pitfall at the moment is its mandate to service every area in the region, including the improperly designed suburbs south of the Fraser. It’s not TransLink’s fault for the budget crisis: it’s the mayors of the cities of Surrey, Langley, Pitt Meadows, Maple Ridge, and Delta, who continually approve developments bordering farmlands without even considering where transit current runs and where it should run in the future. It seriously bothers me also that these same people would also demand transit in their areas when they still continue to approve suburb after suburb of suburbia. Mind you, I’m not angry about the people living down there (in fact I know some people living there), just at those who decided that with their elected power they could make a cheap profit without considering the future.
It’s a great pity so many Vancouverites have bought the misinformation, spread by the SkyTrain appparatchiks, that grade separated heavy-rail Automated Metros and journey time with limited stops are the only solution for city transit.
Though you deny it, Europe & the US could teach you a lot.