The Canadian National Newspaper: Vancouver: More transit is needed

Vancouver has long prided itself on not having a major freeway running through its centre. About 40 years ago, a group of community members, urban planners and citizens fought to keep Vancouver freeway-free, favouring instead a plan that protected farmland, reduced traffic congestion, and focused on public transit. This is a plan which other major cities in Canada and the United States would adopt — see Toronto. The fact that the downtown core is hopelessly lacking in decent parking lots was also intentional. It is apparent that our city is not built to be driven in.

Where is our affordable transit? We have only just started moving on the Canada and Evergreen lines when, frankly, we needed them a decade ago. The SkyTrain still doesn’t run all night (due to technical limitations), leaving those of us not fortunate enough to live in Vancouver proper high and dry and stranded in Burnaby past 1am.

Try and work a shift till midnight, or stay out at the bar till last call and you are left with no options, short of shelling out fortunes for a cab or buying a car so you can sleep in the back seat while you’re sobering up.

Of course, even before that 1:27 AM deadline for Eastbound passengers, the trains come infrequently, leaving poor commuters cold and wet in the stations (which, by the way, do not have the best security record).

Once you get out of the city, the buses suddenly seem to stop running. To get to UBC from anywhere past Main will take you up to two hours; more if you’re coming from past Boundary.

And now the Gateway project: millions spent on expanding a bridge into a city that isn’t built to take this sort of traffic flow. Speaking of long travel times: have you ever tried to get out to Aldergrove in less than two and a half hours by car during rush hour?

The West Coast Express runs extremely early, in one direction, and from Mission. To get to it from Abbotsford, you must take a bus (or drive) to the station, then hop on the train for two hours, then hop on another bus to get anywhere remotely close to your workplace. Around the world, British Columbia is seen as a pristine bastion of greenness, and yet, we still don’t have an effective, affordable rail system. Vancouver has been rated one of the best cities to live in the world yet people do not have an effective system to get around the many communities. It’s time for Vancouver to provide infrastructure which benefits its residents, not just the Olympics.

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