Vancouver

Is Speed Obsolete?

Posted on April 21, 2010 in Philosophy, Rail Transit, Streetcars (Trams), Vancouver

For a while now, a strain of urbanist thought has been asking: Should we want transit to be slower?

That, broadly speaking, is the question raised by Professor Patrick M. Condon at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Condon heads the Design Centre for Sustainability inside UBC’s Department of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and is the author of the very useful book Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities. In his 2008 paper “The Case for the Tram: Learning from Portland,” he explicitly states a radical idea that many urban planners are thinking about, but that not many of them say in public. He suggests that the whole idea of moving large volumes of people relatively quickly across an urban region, as “rapid transit” systems do, is problematic or obsolete: Continue Reading →

vancouver: the great broadway debate

Posted on February 27, 2010 in Rail Transit, Urban Structure, Vancouver

The big rail transit debate in Vancouver at the moment concerns Broadway. You might call it Vancouver’s Wilshire Boulevard: not always a beautiful street but a very important one. It’s the direct line east from the University of British Columbia at the west end of the city, and goes through a major office core, including Vancouver City Hall, just south of downtown proper. It’s the busiest east-west arterial in the entire city and the site of one of the busiest bus lines in North America, the 99. It has everything you need for successful rail transit, except consensus. Here again is the City of Vancouver’s transit network, with the Broadway corridor in dark orange.

Continue Reading →

vancouver: the almost perfect grid

Posted on February 24, 2010 in Strategic Transit Planning, Urban Structure, Vancouver

In the last post, which explains why grids are such an efficient structure for transit, I mentioned that Vancouver has one of the best transit geographies I’ve ever encountered. Here’s what I mean.

A grid pattern of arterial streets covers almost all of Vancouver. Most of the time, parallel major streets are spaced about every 800-1000m apart, and since a comfortable walking distance is about half that, this spacing is perfect for efficient transit. Continue Reading →

Frequency and Freedom on Driverless Rapid Transit

Posted on February 18, 2010 in Automation, Honolulu, Rail Transit, Vancouver

If you’ve seen much of Vancouver on television the last few days, you’ve probably seen a shot of a small train gliding along an elevated guideway. It’s SkyTrain, the world’s largest system of fully automated (driverless) metros. Perhaps you’ve ridden driverless trains that shuttle between airport terminals. SkyTrain is the same principle, at a citywide scale.

Driverless trains raise all kinds of anxieties. Many people like knowing there’s someone in charge on the vehicle, and imagine that this person will be useful in emergencies. But on most subways, you can only talk to this person by pushing an intercom button. There’s very little he can do if there’s an emergency in your car other than call for help. Continue Reading →

Vancouver: An Olympic Urbanist Preview

Posted on February 12, 2010 in Urban Structure, Vancouver

Over the next two weeks, we’ll see a lot of Vancouver, one of the most remarkable achievements in 20th Century urbanism. If you’re going to promote transit anywhere, especially in North America or Australasia, it’s an important city to know about.

As the Olympic Winter Games run, I’ll do a series of posts on Vancouver transit issues (interspersed with some Sydney news that will break over the weekend). I’ll rely on my own experience living and working there in 2005-6, my annual visits since then, and the insights of my former colleagues. But my single best source is probably my friend Gordon Price, a former city councilman and frequent speaker on urbanist issues around the world. His friendly blog Price Tags is my first bookmark for Vancouver’s news on sustainable transport and urban design. (Just today, for example, he posted a link to a spectacular aerial montage, a bit like Google Street View from an altitude of 500m or so. It’s a great way to explore the city.)

What’s special about Vancouver? It’s a new dense city, in North America. Continue Reading →

Is Elevated Acceptable?

Posted on May 19, 2009 in Architecture, Honolulu, Rail Transit, Vancouver

The Transport Politic has an excellent post on the debate over the plan to build Honolulu’s proposed light rail system elevated through downtown, as opposed to at the surface as a group of architects wants.

Everyone is prone to reduce the complexity of urbanism to a problem solvable by their own profession, and risks being dismissive of the expertise of other professions’ points of view. (See here, for example.) When a group of architects proposes that a major new transit investment should be made slower and more expensive to operate in order to foster a better streetscape, as is happening in Honolulu, one hopes that they have thought through the urbanist consequences of all the people who’ll be in cars instead of on transit because the transit is too slow, infrequent, and unreliable. Let me clarify each of those words:

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