Not quite Google Buses, but it has implications:
From Business in Vancouver:
TransLink has no plans to halt the for-pay employee shuttle that Tsawwassen Mills started operating September 29 to help its tenants attract employees in time for the mall’s October 5 launch. …
It will travel to Scott Road SkyTrain station, where it would also leave every half hour. Each trip would take 25 minutes.
Fees for the shuttle, the only one at a Metro Vancouver mall, will be $2 each way or $40 for a monthly pass.
“We’re pleased with the way the traffic is building on the employee shuttle service,” Tsawwassen Mills general manager Mark Fenwick told Business in Vancouver October 4.
While B.C.’s South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority Act designates TransLink as the exclusive body responsible for approving all independent for-pay transit service operations in Metro Vancouver, TransLink has no plans to halt the shuttle’s operations because the service is exclusively being offered to employees at the mall.
Surely any development on this scale that requires its own shuttle just to get employees to work is the antithesis of everything this region is supposed to stand for.
They also have a free shuttle connecting to the ferry terminal for customers travelling as foot passengers:
https://www.tsawwassenmills.com/info/ferry-shuttle/
I wonder if there are any bike racks at the mall…
How many folks bike there to shop ? 1% ? less than 0.5% ?
I hear the mall is now open. Is it nice ? Understaffed ? Yawningly empty ?
PS.: I might bike there to try it ..
P.S.S: Just kidding ..
It’s an easy cycle from Tsawwassen. I have cycled numerous times between Vancouver and Tsawwassen, so cycling there is certainly doable.
Looks jam packed…
Traffic delays with opening of Metro Vancouver’s newest mega-mall
http://www.news1130.com/2016/10/05/traffic-delays-opening-metro-vancouvers-newest-mega-mall/
Like all fads, there’s great fanfare and excitement at first. I would imagine once people realize it’s just more of the same old Chinese made plastic wrapped garbage they can get at any strip mall anywhere, the interest will rapidly fade.
Translink is ok with the employee shuttle?
What hubristic, hegemonic chutzpah. Who mouthed the words for the mouthpiece?
The decree has come down from high. The Transit Overlords are granting a dispensation.
The Robert Moses wannabes have bigger bridges and tunnels to drool over. The shuttle is a bagatelle.
Private employee shuttles are quite common throughout the lower mainland. Just take a look at any good sized business park and you’ll find one or more . Perhaps the difference is the employers don’t charge their employees for using it. They also don’t charge their auto driving counterparts for parking.
Several employers run shuttles from Glen Lyon business park (North Fraser Way / Glen Lyon, BBY). Same for Crestwood Business Center (Westminster at 6 Rd, RMD). Both these have actual Transit service too, just not frequent enough and not direct to the preferred transit hub to be useful.
Shame on Tsawwassen Mills for charging the employees for basic transportation needed to make their businesses function.
Shame on Tsawwassen First Nations for allowing / encouraging this non-sustainable development, and shame on the province and TFN for not doing more to protect this environmentally sensitive area for migratory birds and protecting some of the most fertile soils in North America.
PS: @arno, it’s one thing to commute / cycle Tsawwassen/downtown, it’s another to do it in your heels with armloads of shoppings under your arms. Who do you thing is doing the shopping? Will they also have drone to do your delivery?
“Shame on Tsawwassen First Nations for allowing / encouraging this non-sustainable development”
I don’t have any desire to shop there and would prefer this mall (and lots of others) didn’t exist but how far down (or up) the food chain of this project should I go before I stop shaming? The contractors who supply the materials and the equipment? The operator who ran an excavator? The traffic flagger who directed traffic? What about the agency that creates the ads promoting this shoptopia? Should we excoriate the teachers that failed to instill enough eco-awareness in all of the above, or the ministry that doesn’t make it a compulsory facet of education?
There’s buckets and buckets of complicity to go around. Not many are willing to take a scoop voluntarily or by force. Shaming doesn’t seem to work IMO.