June 8, 2015

The Carmageddon Cycle – 3: Point Grey Road

“Every time we go through this, it seems to be the same pattern. There’s predictions there’s going to be ‘Carmageddon,’” Price said. “Every time it doesn’t happen. And then we go on to the next one, and have to go through the whole cycle again.”

– Gordon Price, SFU City Program, in The Province

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Today in Metro:

Metro

A year and half after the city raised an uproar by shutting a stretch of Point Grey Road to vehicles to make way for a bike lane, travel time for buses and cars is almost identical to what it was before the closure, according to data released Monday.

The city monitored how re-routing extra cars to Macdonald Street would affect the 22 bus re-route using “extremely detailed” GPS data and found travel times to be “so similar it’s hard to say whether there’s a change,” said Lon LaClaire, Vancouver’s acting director of transportation. “

“It’s pretty much the same,” LaClaire said. “There’s no real interesting story there.”

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But of course the interesting story here is that there’s no interesting story.  Imagine if the delay had been even 5 minutes.  Carmageddon!

It’s so frustrating when confident predictions of bad things don’t happen, but it’s important to acknowledge for the next proposal of a greenway or bike lane.  Let’s see if we get any.

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Comments

  1. Props to Ms Jackson for running this (non-)story, but it’s a shame she didn’t get a quote from George Affleck to make it a bit more schadenfreudey.

    1. Yes, where is George on this one? And where is Nelson, I-can’t-drive-to-play-tennis Skalbania for that matter?

  2. While, it’s good that we’ve gained a new city asset and it hasn’t delayed anyone who drives or takes the 22 bus but I think we should be a bit sympathetic to people who were scared of something new that seemed to go against how they used to view things. While some of us had been following the evolution of transportation for decades, many people had no clue it was even going on so this and other things came as a surprise.
    If we want them to not oppose other good new things in the future we shouldn’t rub their noses in it. That only makes enemies.

    1. OK… I agree that we shouldn’t rub people’s noses in it, but the Point Grey route was not exactly the first bit of cycling infrastructure installed in Vancouver. People needn’t have been following the evolution of transportation for decades – only since about 2009 (Burrard Bridge) or the few subsequent years (Dunsmuir, Hornby, etc.). Hell, even if they hadn’t been following it at all, they could easily have caught up on progress and looked at the evidence for themselves once the Point Grey route was proposed.

  3. One of the unintended consequences is that driving north of 4th Avenue feels like being a “rat in a maze,” Lucks said.

    That was completely intended, Spice. The combination of new dead-ends and re-routing going nowhere did not happen by accident. It was by design.

  4. Ok, so why has congestion not increased? If capacity goes down, and congestion isn’t affected, does that mean demand for road space fell equivalently to the fall in supply?

    1. Every year, working people are displaced out of the city. Think anyone living in the $5-10M homes in Pt Grey need to punch a clock downtown? I figure, give it about 10 years, and we can get rid of both the Burrard and Granville St bridges.

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