Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. This is the Red Eye Podcast. You can hear our live broadcast on Saturday mornings from 10 till noon at 100.5 FM in the Lower Mainland.
Speaker: On the podcast today, I'm joined by Dennis Agar of Movement to talk about what's needed to prevent gridlock in Vancouver streets when FIFA comes to town.
Speaker: Vancouver is a host city for the FIFA World Cup this year. It's being co-hosted by Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. There are going to be seven matches at BC Place Stadium and an official FIFA fan festival at the P&E Amphitheaters. Sorry, P&E Amphitheater.
Speaker: Organizers say that more than a million visitors are expected province-wide, including over 360,000 during the tournament itself. The question is how all those people will move around the city once they get here.
Speaker: Dennis Agar is Executive Director of Movement Metro Vancouver Transit Riders, and he joins me today to talk about what Vancouver needs to do before June to keep traffic and transit moving when FIFA comes to town. Hello, Dennis.
Speaker: Hello. Let's start by looking at the last huge sporting event in Vancouver, and that was the 2010 Winter Olympics. What did the city do to prepare then?
Speaker: In 2010, they had a series of Olympic lanes, which I thought was a fun little piece of branding to make it sound nice and warm and cuddly, where they had these dedicated lanes across the region, mostly downtown. that would only allow buses and official kind of Olympic vehicles. So, you know, athletes, buses and officials and that kind of thing.
Speaker: And at the end of the Olympics, they ripped them all right back up again. As an advocate, I would have loved to see them turn them into permanent bus lanes, but that was not the tactic chosen. Is there a proposal for FIFA lanes in the works?
Speaker: um Not really. You know, Vancouver staff gave a report to council about what they were kind of doing to prepare for FIFA, but there there really isn't much to it. You know, there there is a plan for a few blocks of bus lane on Hastings, but interestingly, it's not between the two main FIFA teams. locations. right There's the FIFA fan zone at the PNE and there's the main venue at BC Place. You would think you'd want some bus lanes between the two on Hastings, but actually the lanes the cities are proposing are going to be east of the PNE. And they're going to be great. I honestly am thrilled that they have proposed these bus lanes. They're going to tackle a ah pretty useful spot for bus delay.
Speaker: But it really doesn't seem anywhere near the level of response that we had in 2010. And one of the big differences between then and now is that everyone's got cell phone in their pocket with an Uber and a Lyft app that they can easily just pop out and, you know, with a click, have a private vehicle take them to wherever they want to go. So I am worried that FIFA is going to result in pretty significant congestion if we don't give people a good transit alternative.
Speaker: And I understand that even those kilometer and a half of bus lanes in front of Hastings Park, even they are under opposition from a business association.
Speaker: That's right. Yeah, there's there's a ah section there, the little corner of Vancouver that many people assume is Burnaby between Highway 1 and Boundary Road around Kootenay Loop, that area. Some of those businesses are really worried that they're going to lose on-street parking. And as part of the city's work to prepare for this, they've you know done their due diligence. They found that there is a lot of off-street parking. There are, of course, a lot of new buildings through there and new buildings have have parkades. They're required to by law. So there is a lot more parking there than there used to be. but I mean, I can empathize with the businesses that they're really worried about their bottom line. But the truth is that lots of neighborhoods like this have gone through this.
Speaker: There's been opposition to bus lanes. Because of the fear of loss of parking, the bus lanes go in. And then afterwards, people are like, oh, this is actually great. You know, and my customers and my employees can get to my business without even needing to park.
Speaker: And in a lot of ways, this is an improvement. So we see that turnaround happen quite frequently. Do we know what TransLink is proposing for during FIFA in terms of are they going to up the number of buses on Hastings?
Speaker: There is actually, um that's a really interesting question. There has been some concern from the community in the downtown east side. They don't necessarily want a lot of tourists passing through on Hastings.
Speaker: The fear is that, you know, it'll bring added scrutiny and the the risk of displacement, right? that That police or whomever else might start displacing people because they don't want those people to be seen from passing tourists, that kind of thing.
Speaker: It's kind of a bleak way to think, but it's honestly, you know, there's precedent, so I understand it. So the plan appears to be to really route people down the Millennium Line to take the train to the corner of Renfrew and Boundary, and then take the bus from there to the P&E.
Speaker: And so there's, I think, going to be a lot of augmented service on Renfrew to get people from the Millennium Line to the P&E. Now, if you go to your favorite trip planning app, like Google Maps, Apple Maps, Transit App, and you try and plan that route today, it will not route you down that route down Millennium Line simply because it's a huge, huge detour.
Speaker: So I do think that this approach of trying to get people to go all the way down to Broadway and then back up may fall down when it comes to people actually just like realizing that they can still just take the R5 down Hastings and it'll be much faster. And I do wonder if it would make more sense to find a shuttle route between the two places that is direct and that doesn't go down Hastings through the downtown east side, something like that, some kind of third option, because I'm, I'm worried that there'll be unintended consequences from the current choice.
Speaker: Now, you mentioned Uber and Lyft. I mean, that's a tremendous amount more traffic. And those drivers will obviously go along Hastings, I would assume, just because it's the most direct route. Does there appear to be concern from the city about what's going to happen when all those people are trying to get from downtown to Hastings Park using those individual kind of methods? Yeah.
Speaker: I have not heard anyone from the city express that concern. You know, it'll probably fill up Hastings and Powell and Cordova and First, you know, like, and, and, and. I am really worried about that.
Speaker: And I would love to see a more robust response on that issue. So if you were the person to make decisions at city council, what would you be doing?
Speaker: I would be, for the duration of the games, I would be putting bus lanes on all these corridors because, you know, the tourists will be here. They're not just going from the fan zone to the venue. They're gonna be going to Grouse Mountain and Stanley Park and all these places. And so we really wanna augment bus service by increasing service levels and putting in bus lanes so those buses can stay reliable amid the onslaught of all these taxis that we can expect to be floating around. And then, you know, as I said before, have a dedicated shuttle between the two venues that respects the wishes of the downtown east side that probably would go along Cordova or go along the viaduct and make sure that there's a dedicated lane on that as well. And then, you know, have a process and and have some thought about whether we keep these dedicated lanes after the games.
Speaker: When you convert a lane from a general traffic lane to a bus only lane, you quadruple its capacity. And in a city that's really veered away from investing in ah freeways historically, we don't have a lot of other options to boost the capacity of transportation in and out of the city. You know, Skytrains take a long time, they cost a lot of money, and bus lanes are are just this fast way to move a lot more people for almost no money. And, you know, it's an affordability measure because, you know, transit is so much cheaper than driving. You know, there are so many reasons to think about how we design our streets and to allow buses to be fast and reliable and and really the best option for people. And so I would want to use FIFA as a springboard to talk about, OK, how does our city look going forward?
Speaker: You know, as as you're talking to me about bus lanes, I'm trying to think, do we actually have any bus lanes? And I'm thinking about other cities I've been in, particularly in Europe, where the buses have their own lane and there's a concrete barrier between them and the roads. But we don't have anything like that in Vancouver.
Speaker: um Not with that concrete barrier. We do have some bus lanes. They're curbside bus lanes, which means that the bus is mixed with cars turning right. So you can imagine maybe on Georgia, they have all day curbside bus lanes and on Main Street, let's say between Terminal and 7th 8th. There are all day bus lanes, but you know, you just have one car that's turning right and they're waiting for pedestrians. And so they're flawed.
Speaker: None of these measures are going to be perfect. TransLink actually put out a bus priority toolkit to show all of the different ways that buses can be made faster and more reliable. So sometimes I use bus lanes as a shorthand, but what I really mean is that we just take seriously all these different tools that we can use. Because what you're seeing in Europe is that they've been strategic about deploying all these tools. They may not have enough room for a dedicated bus lane along an entire stretch of road, but they use the signal timing and they use the street design to really just make it so that like ah like a bus in Switzerland, unless it's exchanging passengers at a stop, it almost never stops for a red light. And there's a lot that we can do for that. Actually, one of the candidates for the One City nomination, William Azeroth, has started talking about investing in our traffic signal system so that we can start doing stuff like that.
Speaker: And that's probably not a hard thing to do, to get the bus not have to stop at a red light. Technologically, it's been in place for decades in places in Europe and even in places in the United States that we might look down upon in terms of urban planning.
Speaker: They've had these dynamic signals for decades that detect when a bus is coming and they either hold a green light or they shorten a red light. But in the city of Vancouver,
Speaker: Very few of our traffic signals are actually connected to the internet. And so this plan to make sure they're all kind of intelligent and connected to the internet would actually cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It it ends up adding up to being a lot, but I think it would really pay for itself quite quickly in terms of the savings that it would offer. Not, you know, not only transit riders, but also motorists. This kind of thing can also help motorists.
Speaker: What do you think the city can do? We've got four months, I guess, before this whole thing starts up. What could the city do affordably between now and then to make transit more attractive for all those people who are going to come to FIFA?
Speaker: I think it just comes down to putting up overhead signs and changing the regulation of a lane or two, you know, like I hate to be a broken record, but the thing that is so quick and easy to do is put up a sign that says bus only, we can call them FIFA lanes if you want, you know, um for a month. That stuff just takes a a bit of planning and then a day's worth of sign posting.
Speaker: Toronto recently had to close one of their streetcar lines for a month or no, maybe a couple of months. And they realized that the buses that were replacing them were stuck in just awful traffic. And so council passed a motion in Toronto to put in temporary bus lanes. And from the moment that motion passed, I think it was five days that it took to actually get those new lanes in temporarily. So capital cost isn't great. So you can make them temporary and the amount of effort is so low, so you can do it quickly.
Speaker: What are you asking people to do to make their voices heard on this? We are asking for two things. The city has a survey open until the 9th of February, so quite tight turnaround, but it's very short. Basically, all you need to say is that you like bus lanes and then click submit because they'll ultimately be counting how many are pro and how many are con. And that's for the little chunk of bus lane that's further east in Vancouver towards Burnaby. And then the other thing you can do is we have a letter generator on our website where you can type in your thoughts and have it sent automatically to council and to the city of Vancouver staff and just say, hey, this isn't enough. FIFA is going to be a kind of a big deal for circulation in this region. And I want to see you go further with bus lanes and that kind of thing.
Speaker: Now, just before I let you go, I wanted to ask you about Carter Lavin. Now, he's giving a book talk and webinar for a movement on February 19th. He's also going to be a guest on Red Eye next week. Tell us a bit about him because I found out about him through your website.
Speaker: Awesome. I love to hear that. He is a rousing speaker. He had a newsletter. That's how I learned about him. And in it, you know, each week there would be incredibly useful tidbits about how to do the work that I currently do, right? Like how to organize a campaign, what tactics work, how do you get the attention of of a politician? How do you demonstrate to them that you have this big, strong group of people that will be angry with them if they don't do the thing you want? And so he recently published a book that I think compiles a lot of that thinking into a handy purchasable chunk of paper that you can that you can buy. And it's called, if you want to win, you've got to fight. So yeah, it's ah it's a guidebook for campaigners specifically in the transportation world. So he works with transit groups, but also cycling groups, pedestrian groups all across the continent and gives them really actionable insight on how to win fights.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm really looking forward to talking to him next week. He had me at the title of the book, I have to admit. Fiery. Yeah. Well, thanks so much for talking with me today, Dennis. I really appreciate it. It's been a pleasure. I'll come back anytime.
Speaker: I've been speaking with Dennis Agar. He's Executive Director of Movement, Metro Vancouver Transit Riders. And if you'd like to fill out the survey, it really is just one question about the Hastings bus, you can go to their website, movementyvr.ca, and click on Bus Lanes for Hastings. And if you'd like to register for that webinar with Carter Lavin, then you can just go to the website again and just go to the event section, just scroll down the page and you'll find a link where you can RSVP to that and participate in the webinar.
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Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. Thanks for listening.
