Archive for September 2017
How many people move per hour …
This graphic was posted to twitter this morning by Brent Toderian. It comes from Dale Bracewell the Manager of Transportation Planning at the City of Vancouver.
Most people still think that widening streets and adding lanes for more cars will somehow help congestion. In fact that simply induces more traffic and makes matters worse. If more people chose to use bikes and walking for short trips – which are in fact the majority of trips in the city – there would be less traffic. What we need to concentrate on is the number of people being moved, not the number of vehicles. Using cars with a capacity of five or more people to move just one or two people is clearly a waste of space – not just the 3 metre lane width on streets but the parking spaces needed to accommodate cars when they are not being used – which is most of the time. There are far better uses for urban land than storing vehicles.
Clearly even if we cannot afford lots more skytrain lines, we could be moving lots more people if we had bus lanes in the City of Vancouver. There are not many at present, and most are peak hour, peak direction. The City cannot do very much by itself to increase transit supply but it could do a great deal to make the bus network much better. Exclusive bus only lanes and traffic light priority would straightforward to implement – but the noisy pro-car lobby would have to overridden.
CUTA Integrated Mobility Report
I have decided that there is no way to make this work just with a retweet. So this blog post is addressed to mostly to readers who come to this blog because they are interested in how Canadian transit agencies should better adapt themselves to changing circumstances. Unlike CUTA’s approach to transit statistics, this report is not restricted in its distribution and it is free to download as a large pdf.
It is meant to be a resource for transit agencies wishing to advance their communities towards integrated mobility.
So if that is something you want to read, start at the CUTA report web page from which there is a download link.
WPC second bite at “Windows”
There was no reponse shown on the challenge page so I tweeted WordPress and they seem to have fixed the issue – but only posts that go up after the fix will show up there. So here are some more windows
These are the windows installed on what was once a balcony in our suite. It is north-west facing, so only gets sunshine late in the day. But the view of the trees is one I often use – and sunsets – the mountains are slowly being hidden as the canopy of tree tops rises.
Here is the previous effort
Weekly Photo Challenge: Window
This window is in the Pantheon in Paris. The building is a deconsecrated church, whose architecture is inspired by St Paul’s cathedral in London and has a magnificent dome. If you have a head for heights, you can access both the interior and exterior of the dome, and views from both are impressive. I took the picture as we started our way up the many stairs to the top. The view from this window was a bit of a disappointment, and it did not get used in my record of the trip on either WordPress or Flickr. But it does seem to fit rather neatly into this week’s challenge “To get more creative, use the glass in a window to add texture to your photo.” It seems to me that the panes of this window have not been cleaned for a while. If you like flying buttresses, or colonnades, this is a view of the building not usually seen.
“Watermelon” wants free transit
There are a lot of nice photos of Mary Jean “Watermelon” Dunsdon and a nice old bus in the Straight. I replied under the article but decided I should post here too. Not that I need to write much more
“she’s traded in her bikini for a business licence”
Erm, I don’t think so. Wreck beach is not the sort of place where people wear bikinis, is it. And her famous Georgia Straight front cover picture doesn’t have her wearing a bikini either.
As for free transit, we have been around this argument several times over the years
https://stephenrees.blog/…/a-case-for-free-transit-in…/
https://stephenrees.blog/2008/03/31/free-transit/
https://stephenrees.blog/2007/12/20/free-ride/
And just to show I’m not the only one who thinks this idea is far from “sensible”.
https://thetyee.ca/News/2007/07/30/FareFree6/
The way to get more people using transit is to increase service – and make what you do provide more reliable. That means more trains and buses – and put the buses is exclusive bus lanes. Put a camera in the front of every bus, and paint the bus lane red, then the operator just clicks the button every time the bus gets behind a vehicle that is not a bus. Use the ticket revenue from that to buy even more buses. But you cannot afford to give up 50% of current revenues if you want to increase service.
By the way the City has no power to make transit free – but there is a great deal it could do to give buses priority on Vancouver’s streets.
I think we would be better off with Pete Fry on council.
Seven Sisters Road by “sarflondonunc” on flickr
Weekly Photo Challenge: Layered
The sides of the canyon through Zion Nation Park in Utah shows how the rocks are layered. The erosion caused by wind and water reveals the rock “an immense sequence of sedimentary rock layers” over 250 million years old. There is a really nice infographic giving the names of the rocks on the NPS web site.
Double Deckers for Vancouver
Translink is saying that it will start trials of doubledeck buses this year. I just came across a picture of a German bus in Berlin
This is a Lion’s City DD (A39) by manufacturer MAN – and is 13.73 m long (just over 45′ or five feet longer than the current fleet of single deckers. The feature that caught my eye was the three sets of doors – just as we have on the 60 foot artics currently in use. My bet would be that this has two staircases – as seems to be common in many large double deckers these days. These should speed dwell times at stops, which can be an issue with large capacity double deckers. I imagine that Translink will be using the Alexander Dennis buses which both BC Transit in Victoria and GO Transit in Toronto use, to avoid the usual performance of getting new vehicles certified for use in Canada.
By the way the capacity of the illustrated bus is 129.
Jericho Pier Renewal
Jericho Pier is a regular destination for our walks, but I have many more photos taken from the pier than of the pier itself. I thought it might be a good idea to record what is there now, before work starts. Then I took a look at the City webpage
The Vancouver Park Board, in partnership with the Disabled Sailing Association, is renewing the aging pier at Jericho Beach and providing an accessible dock for sailors with disabilities.
The pier is a popular destination for locals and visitors as well as for fishing and crabbing. The ramp and float on the east side of the pier are used for emergency boat landing.
The reconstructed pier will:
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Provide an accessible floating dock to provide for users of all ages and levels of mobility, accommodating up to 15 sailboats for the Disabled Sailing Association’s adaptive sailing program
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Provide seating and views of Burrard Inlet and English Bay
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Offer recreational fishing and crabbing opportunities
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Accommodate future sea level rise
So it looks like I have some time. It also looks like there is a conceptual design already although not on the webpage at the time of writing. Ken Ohrn on the PriceTags page does have a rendering – but without any link to where he got it from – so I won’t steal it.
If you cannot make it to the open house at pier tomorrow 11:00am to 2:00pm, presentation materials and an online questionnaire will be available September 16 to October 2, 2017.
Drive Time
I was staggered by the subtitle of this New Yorker essay by Ian Frazier “The surprising pleasures of driving in New York“. It seemed to me unlikely but the claim he makes – that starting with the “improvements” made by Robert Moses “the city has remade itself to favor cars” seems to be borne out by what I read. I have been driven in New York – by taxis and black cars – and the experience has been generally unremarkable. Especially as the flight times for planes leaving New York for Vancouver tend to be very early. But he also describes a multi-car pile-up in a passage that started giving me flashbacks.
Of course I have also ridden the crosstown bus – and the bike share. From what I read on Twitter from @StreetsblogNYC (a walking biking transit advocacy) I am lucky not to have had to deal with NYPD.
But my intention was mostly to direct you to read the article – and I will throw in a few photos from my flickr stream for good measure. All are locations mentioned in the article
The Williamsburg Bridge
59th St – Ed Koch – Queensborough Bridge
FDR Drive
Brooklyn Bridge
Not The WP Photo Challenge
There is no Weekly Photo Challenge being issued by WordPress this week. But I miss it, and by now this blog has amassed a considerable following of people who have liked my posts. So like me I think they may be missing the challenge. In cognisance of its absence I am posting a picture which demonstrates that concept. Which, I think you will agree, is indeed hard to pictorialize.
This is the local mall, where footfall has declined precipitously during redevelopment. There used to be two pay phones here.
So that’s my challenge – in one photo can you demonstrate absence? When you post set a pingback to this post and I will assemble a list of responses here.
Stephen Rees's blog 