Vancouver, Canada is a great transit city not just because it pioneered driverless rapid transit, or because of its commitment (somewhat enforced by geography) to a dense and walkable urban form. It’s also a great transit city because of great bus service planning.
Vancouver area transit agency TransLink is out with a new plan for the next 15 years of bus service growth in the densest and most transit oriented part of the region: The City of Vancouver itself and parts of adjacent Burnaby. They call it the Burrard Peninsula Area Transit Plan. It’s worth perusing, but here, I just want to flag one image that may be of global interest:
The black lines are SkyTrain, the driverless rapid transit system, including its newest extension. The grey and blue lines are existing bus routes. The purple are new bus routes they propose to add over the next 15 years.
By the time this plan is implemented, most of the blue and grey lines on this map will be frequent: every 15 minutes or better all day. Many of them already are. This map shows the current Frequent Transit Network.
Why is frequency in a grid pattern so valuable? Every time two frequent lines meet, especially at a right angle, the result is an explosion of usefulness, because each line becomes useful to get to all the points on both lines. In an ideal frequent grid network, you can go from anywhere to anywhere with a single transfer on an L-shaped path. It’s such a powerful concept that many cities whose street networks are not especially gridlike still try to achieve that effect. I discuss the example of San Francisco in Chapter 13 of my book Human Transit.
A grid works best when everyone can walk to either a north-south frequent line or an east-west frequent line. For that reason, Vancouver transit planners have always ruminated over the gaps in their grid, mostly cases where east-west lines are too far apart. The new purple lines fill ALL of these gaps. Across all of Vancouver and western Burnaby, there will finally be service both north-south and east-west near everyone.
Of course, what makes this possible is not just the grid of streets, but the rising density across so much of this area. Vancouver housing is not just the famous 40+ story towers, which are mostly clustered downtown and around rail stations, but many small apartment buildings or large homes that are being divided into smaller units. Vancouver-based experts such as Brent Toderian are promoting “gentle density” or the “missing middle”, encouraging more development of 3-7 stories or so that fits better with the historic character of neighborhoods. This transit grid helps expand the range of places where that density is livable.
Again, the regular grid pattern of arterials makes the transit grid easier, but you can get grid effects in any city of reasonable density and walkability. Just maximize the number of situations where frequent lines cross at right angles, expanding the usefulness of both lines. Then build stuff at those intersections!
Vancouver’s agency TransLink has been a big part of my career. I was an on-site consultant there for a year in 2005-6 and also for the summer of 2011, and our firm continues to work for them now and then. During my on-site time I did a lot of work on helping them formalize and strengthen the frequent transit network concept, and also build the grid. It’s great to see this idea continuing to prosper.
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