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, including all of the City of Vancouver itself. 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.
Your comments are very good. However, since 2020 many bad changes that reduced the overall rides per capita from 100 in 2019 to 75 in 2025.
Main reasons are by cutting frequency of service on 40 bus routes and eliminating bus routes 32 and 480.
If you really want the whole truth contact me at [email protected]
It’s bizarre that on the American continent a bus route running every 15 minutes, inside an urban area of 900,000 people, is considered “high frequency.” Over here in Europe it would be a secondary line.
Hi Marco,
In Vancouver there are several routes with articulated buses that run 90 seconds apart and on the same route as other all stops local bus every 5 minutes. These are often packed. The 99 B Line used to be North Americas highest bus ridership, maybe still is, not sure. (I have not lived there for a while now.)
This 15 minute average sounds very low frequency to my mind too. There must be a few long distance buses to the suburbs that bring the average down.
Need to improve the grid system of bus routes .
Everyone should be within a 5 minutes walk ( 300 to 400 m ) of a bus stop
The list below provides 20 gaps( about 50 km ) in the City of Vancouver.
TransLink BPATP does not fill all the gaps
1, Arbutus St. North of Broadway( 0.6 km to 2 km )
2. Burrard St. (16th Ave. to Burrard Bridge/Downtown)( 1.7 km )
3. Clark Dr. (Venables to Hastings or Powell ( 0.6 km ))
4. Crown St. ( { Dunbar Loop } SW Marine south to MFN) ( about 2 km )
5. Nelson St. ( Stanley Park to Granville and Georgia ) (4km )
6. Victoria Dr./Wall/Renfrew to Hastings( Commercial-Broadway Station to PNE ).( about 6 km )
7 E.1st Ave/Terminal ( Main St. to Burnaby Brentwood Mall ) ( 5.7 km to 8 ) INTO BURNABY
8.. E. 12th Ave/ South Grandview Hwy .( Commercial Dr. to BCIT ) ( 3.5 km to 5.5 ) INTO BBY
9..16th Ave. ( Cambie to Fraser ) ( 1.8 km )
10.. 29th Ave. ( Nanaimo to Boundary to Burnaby Hospital ) ( 2.5 km to 3 km ) INTO BBY
11.. W. 33rd Ave. ( Cambie to Dunbar )( about 4.8 km )
12. W.57th Ave /SW Marine ( Cambie to Dunbar ) (6 km )
13 59/57/54th ( Cambie to Tyne to Champlain Hts ) ( 7 Km )
14. Redesign of bus routes in S.E. Vancouver including bus service on Boundary North of Imperial/49th ave. to Joyce-Collingwood Station ( about 2 or 3 km ) Return No. 29 service prior to 2001.
15. Mini-buses /Community shuttles could be used on many low ridership bus routes as well as On-Demand Transit where there is no need for a fixed bus route https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand-responsive_transport
16. Return two way bus service ( existed for many years ) on these streets :
a) Robson St. ( Granville to Cambie )
b) Hudson St. ( SW Marine Dr. to 70th Ave. )
17. Provide regular daytime bus service on Howe St. and Seymour St
18. Hastings St.( Renfrew to Cassiar 900 m ) Return bus service after 7 pm
19. Round The Park : Return No.52 bus service around Stanley Park
20. New Brighton Park: Return No.40 bus and/or provide new service.
It would take me a while to sort through all of the suggestions. But it is clear that you are absolutely right, just by looking at that first example. If you are traveling north on Arbutus (on the 16) it turns east on 12th, before it even reaches Broadway. It should just keep going straight and turn on Cornwall, like the 2. While this change would be justified right now, it makes even more sense when SkyTrain is extended to Arbutus. Otherwise riders at the north end of Arbutus can’t easily access SkyTrain. This change would cost next to nothing — it isn’t a new route, you just shift a route a little bit.
Oh, and that essentially solves the second problem as well. You would have a north-south bus to the east and west of Burrard. There is a pretty big gap between them but not so big I think another north-south route is justified. Maybe if the buses ran a lot more but I would rather see better headways overall. In think in general you make a good point. As good as the network is, it could be a lot better (at no additional cost).
The Burrard Peninsula Area Transit Plan fills most of the ones you’ve listed, some of which aren’t gaps (3,5,6,14,16,17,18, and 20). The 22 on Venables for instance is a deviation, as it does connect with Hastings a little further west.
The one gap that is left is Crown, but given its small catchment that would be an underperforming route if implemented.
That’s not to say that some of the deviations you’ve noted aren’t annoying (Robson in particular), but they are less critical than the actual gaps that the plan does cover.
In my opinion Vancouver has the best transit system on the West Coast. Much of it is relatively new — the first SkyTrain line opened in 1985. The key to the system is the way that the trains and buses complement each other. Yes, obviously it helps that the trains are automated and thus run often. It helps that there is a street grid that lends itself to a good transit grid. But a quick glance at the stations shows how effective this grid is. Most buses — whether they are going east-west or north-south — connect to SkyTrain. Most of the time they don’t go out of there way to do so. In other words, the metro connection is just “on the way”. When it isn’t it actually stands out, like a sore thumb. For example the Canada Line should have a couple more stations so that the buses don’t have to zig-zag. But such occurrences are relatively rare.
Unfortunately this model was not followed by Seattle. The lack of stations on the rail line make creating a grid more difficult. Even with a planned expansion (one of the largest on the planet) things won’t change very much. The bus network could certainly be better. But it doesn’t help that there are so few stations or little consideration for bus-rail integration despite the great success of Seattle’s nearest neighbor.