July 4, 2017

Space Allocation Priorities

When in Melbourne’s CBD, check out this spot, where transportation priorities are seen with laser-focused clarity. And, to the surprise of absolutely no one, illustrating that no place is perfect, even if it’s mostly pretty good.
Thanks to Stephen B (@BicycleAdagio).

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Leave a Reply to Arnie CarnegieCancel Reply

  1. what about giving the full story context before drawing hasty conclusions?
    according to @BicycleAdagio, all those people where going to this occasional sport game:
    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DDspWIbVYAAmYUW.jpg
    Same things happen with the skytrain on every downtown event such as this week-end.
    Does that means the Public transit infrastructure should be sized to the demand generated by the occasional big game in town?
    next exercise, take a picture of an empty bike lane next to a congested roadway (with preferably an ambulance in the mix), and explain…

  2. This photo — better yet a video — should be seen by those who would impose similar trams down the middle of Broadway. There is clearly at least 10 m more width on this street than on the 30 m Broadway. Some advocate removing traffic lanes for this purpose, but even with a shared centre-loaded platform taking three lanes, the important buses and commercial vehicles will have a tough time sharing the remaining three. The tram indicated takes up four lanes with two platforms, a design rejected in the early studies for LRT in favour of highly inefficient split stations.
    In addition, the background indicates an unfenced median, which will translate into slower speeds and less frequency in order to maintain safety at crossings. Why bother spending a billion + bucks to replicate the Number 9 bus service? Trams do have their place, but those who toss logical analysis in favour of tram love need to rethink everything when they suggest spending big bucks to replace an already-good bus service.
    The only way to improve transit with surface rail on Broadway to the anticipated future capacity would be to build a dedicated fenced median, run trains with greater capacity than those skinny trams with higher speeds and greater frequency, and outlay a hundred million ++ more a year in operating costs to hire an army of drivers willing to work split shifts (the turnover is high). Then, of course, you have just severed 90% of all signalized crossings on Broadway, except at stations placed at major arterials. How will businesses between stations react to their customers not being able to cross the road other than to swing hundreds of metres east or west to cross at a half dozen lights in a 6-kilometre stretch of Broadway?
    The beauty of a subway is that you will have seamless continuity with the SkyTrain system, the ability to increase frequency and train length by pressing a few computer keys, and the opportunity to accommodate a huge future capacity. The icing on the cake could be the removal of great sections of the parking lanes for an expanded pedestrian realm, mid-block crosswalks in the busiest stretches, and to maintain on-street commercial loading. And you can increase the number of signalized crossings (with a natural support for increased bike and pedestrian traffic) to 100% from today’s 90+%.
    Now, if only they’d take the thing all the way to UBC in one contract ———-

    1. West of Arbutus, demand falls by half. If future demand increases to that justifying a subway, a second tram/LRT route can be built for less. That combo is more resilient (and potentially networked) than relying on a single subway line.
      Subways do not add to the well being of the streets they serve. They take people from one place and beam them to another at great expense. Like freeways, they encourage people to live farther from their daily activities. Yes, they too have their place. But we should not encourage UBC staff and students to live in Coquitlam. Something is wrong with our urban plan if they cannot live west of Main, but better yet on campus.
      Trams are not buses. One isn’t simply replacing a bus when building a tram line. Trams offer stability and attract more investment – but at a scale which is neighbourhood enhancing rather than subway disruptive.
      Broadway west of Arbutus can accommodate a tram/LRT hybrid, running at 50 km/h when on the street but much faster along other parts of its route. A Main Street/Science World to UBC alignments has opportunity to run fast from Cambie to Pine, from Highbury to Discovery (along 8th) and the length of UBC Boulevard.
      A parallel arterial, 10th/12th, compliments the reduced MV capacity of Broadway with a tram/LRT in its own ROW. It makes Broadway more of a complete street by reducing the dominance of motor vehicles.
      As for the passenger experience, I’d rather take two or three minutes longer but enjoy the places I pass through, recognize the shops and services I might patronize. I’d rather not be in a dark, smelly tunnel.
      I challenge you to describe where trams “have their place” in Vancouver. What street is more deserving than West Broadway? Trams exist in most major cities in Europe and hundreds are in operation in core areas of cities around the world. I get the sense that here, in Metro Vancouver, they are seen as something to be banished to the suburbs.

      1. Good luck with that Ron. What UBC faculty let alone staff can afford to live in Point Grey? A few lucky students get offshore money to purchase a home there but do you want a university solely for the global rich? West Broadway, west of Arbutus is in no way the CBD, so why run trams there?

        1. That’s the whole point, Bob. UBC had lots of land to house their own. Instead they sell to the highest bidder but expect us taxpayers to fund a subway to bump their land values even more.
          We can choose otherwise. We can have policies that make housing west of Main affordable for UBC staff and students. If they have to commute from Coquitlam something is terribly wrong. A subway to UBC is a band-aid. It doesn’t address the fundamental problem. I will repeat, like freeways, subways encourage people to live far away. That doesn’t make for better cities.
          Ideally everyone lives, works and plays without having to travel too far. Obviously not everyone can fit that ideal and at some point subways become a solution. The west side is nowhere near justifying a subway when more urban and cheaper forms of transit transit would add positively to the neighbourhoods they pass through.

  3. “…a dark, smelly tunnel…” […] “…an extra three minutes…”
    Well, a tunnel does have a musty concrete smell, but it is certainly detached from car and truck exhaust. And when I board the Canada Line at KE Station, I really appreciate the fact I’ll be at my downtown destination in just seven minutes with a fast, direct, transfer-free trip no matter what the weather and traffic are doing. As Jarrett Walker implied in his piece, Is Speed Obsolete?, speed is most definitely not obsolete to most commuters, near and far.
    http://humantransit.org/2010/04/is-speed-obsolete.html
    Further, it’s a big mistake to promote rail transit as one-size-fits-all. Walker is one of the few professionals to clearly articulate the differences between trams / streetcars and other forms of light rail, each with their own separate specs and capacities. He compared the slower trams in mixed traffic in Prague to the peripheral, high-capacity LRT lines in Paris. The illustration is most appropriate because Paris also demonstrates that there are four gradations of rail transit: RER (express); the Metro; peripheral high-capacity LRT; and trams.
    http://humantransit.org/2010/03/streetcars-vs-light-rail-is-there-a-difference.html
    Trams will replicate the Number 9 speed and two-block local neighbourhood stop rhythm. How on Earth can that huge expense be justified only as a replacement for the existing bus service, especially when you cannot justifiably build a railway vertically parallel over underground services? It’s more financially prudent to stick to improving the Number 9 (bump outs, articulated vehicles).
    If a subway was proposed for 41sr Ave, I would be objecting for all the reasons stated before, and the fact Broadway contains the second largest employment, residential and office floor space densities in the region. The ridership to UBC does currently fall off with the current inadequate service (roughly 65-35), especially when session is in, based on data a few years old. There was no provision for any expansion at UBC in an of the comments about cost, which is destined to become a city at the end of the line (it’s halfways there now), and new density at the Jericho Lands and west Kits. The subway will have a planned lifespan of 100+ years. To assume west-of-Arbutus ridership will remain at today’s levels for the next century-plus does not make any sense. I’ve also been involved in enough projects to know that building the UBC extension now in one contract will incur much lower costs than building it later in a separate contract subject to political footballing and delays for decades.
    Then you’ve got a big issue at Arbutus where a hub station and transfer movements for thousands of people a day between two modes of rail needs to be planned. The land assembly for sidings, mainlines, platforms ticket halls, underground-surface interface, and so forth will be huge. And from a high-capacity subway to a …. tram. Are you kidding?
    In my view the Parisian peripheral light rail system would be the most workable here in a lot of places in the Metro (Metrotown-UBC via 41st Ave; Langley-Maple Ridge / Coquitlam via 200th St & Golden Ears; While Rock-Coquitlam via King George & Port Mann ….). These would be high-capacity trains in fenced centre medians with 100 m station platforms. I don’t care about the company design specs or high-floor vs low-floor, as long as the service is top notch and offers excellent public safety measures, uses direct geometry and is universally accessible.
    The Parisian version would not be well-suited to Broadway because of the existing signalized crossing density, a point you seemed to miss. Pedestrians can safely cross at virtually every intersection between Main and Alma. However, I believe this LRT system is well-suited to roads like 41st Ave as an intermediate level service. This means that the stops are about 500 m apart instead of one km (essentially an extra stop, maybe two, between major arterials, one step below SkyTrain, and one above trams / buses). There is just a fraction of the number of signalized crossings between major arterials as Broadway, so severing pedestrian and bike traffic is not as much of a concern.
    Trams would be well-suited for the Arbutus Greenway-False Creek-Downtown route, several suburban loop routes currently not well-served by buses, and new feeder routes serving rapid transit stations. It is in these outlying locations where trams can foster the urbanism that will make a difference though that is a local planning decision, not TransLink’s. It’s a mistake to substitute rapid transit regional service, linearity and geometry with a slow-mo tram on a milk run. On Broadway it’s clear that both are needed, therefore I’d build the subway and improve the Number 9 on the surface while also expanding the pedestrian realm and encourage small shop and low to mid-rise urbanism.
    Regarding trams stimulating sustainable urbanism, I don’t buy it. In Prague, Edinburgh and Strasbourg the urbanism came centuries before the trams, and in all three cases building the tram lines was an excruciating process that stretched over many years and became a huge point of contention. Ian Rankin made mention of the ripped up streets in several of his crime novels. The trams complement the existing urban form. You don’t need to spend billions on trams to encourage decision makers and planners and urban designers to achieve human-scale, sustainable, walkable communities. But if you’re starting from scratch, or are trying to convert sprawling subdivisions with wide roads into denser, more sustainable forms, then go for it.

  4. “And when I board the Canada Line at KE Station, I really appreciate the fact I’ll be at my downtown destination in just seven minutes with a fast, direct, transfer-free trip no matter what the weather and traffic are doing.”
    If you live near a CL Station. Otherwise you transfer. And can you tell me all the shops you go by? Did the CL help Cambie Village? No station there because you can’t justify another $50million per. LRT stations are less than a tenth the cost.so they will often be closer to where you need. Subways don’t always get you there faster.
    “Trams will replicate the Number 9 speed and two-block local neighbourhood stop rhythm. ”
    Or they will be in addition to a local bus service with far fewer stops .
    “There was no provision for any expansion at UBC in an of the comments about cost, which is destined to become a city at the end of the line…”
    Instead of providing homes to UBC students and staff it is another bedroom community while staff and students come from Burnaby or further. Bad planning requires costly solutions. UBC reaps all the benefit of selling it’s land for the highest possible price, stiffs their own and then reaps all the benefits of taxpayers funding their pet train so they can continue profiting from the land value bump. Nice work.
    “To assume west-of-Arbutus ridership will remain at today’s levels for the next century-plus does not make any sense.”
    Who said that? Straw men aren’t arguments.
    “Then you’ve got a big issue at Arbutus where a hub station and transfer movements…”
    A perfect place for sticky urbanism. But, don’t forget. Half of them would transfer at Main anyway.
    “And from a high-capacity subway to a …. tram. Are you kidding?”
    Nope. Not kidding. If a tram is all that’s needed so be it. But I suggested something more than a tram – and more than one line as demand requires.
    “Pedestrians can safely cross at virtually every intersection between Main and Alma.”
    You mean Arbutus and Blanca. I haven’t suggested a tram along Central Broadway. Another straw man. “Signalized crossing density” is much lower along the suggested route. In any case, at 50 km/h, crossing need not be much different than now.
    It should be noted that this option made the final 3-option shortlist in TransLInk and the COV’s evaluation. That they propose terminating the subway at Arbutus speaks fairly loudly that the option is still very much a possibility.

  5. I live a 15-minute walk from the CL King Edward Station. I walk past and often frequent many Cambie shops to and from the station. It’s a nice walk year round; the only thing that stops me is ice and snow. There is a parade of folks like me using the station and walking in the Cambie Village, and transferring to the Number 25 and 33 buses. The CL benefited Cambie peripherally, and yes, they missed the opportunity for a station at 16th. Businesses and nearby residents did suffer greatly because of the archaic tunneling methodology imposed from the Dark Ages, and that is the best reason to avoid that method on Broadway in future along with the design inadequacies and additional expense of having a managing private partner. So bore the thing all the way and do it in standard public tenders managed by the province.
    I really miss the Tomato Café, which was a seriously original bistro with loyal staff and patrons like us. We frequented them at their new location on Bayswater off Broadway. The staff told us they lost about 30% of their revenue from the CL trench warfare on Cambie at 17th. However, they never did regain it in Kits, and in fact lost even more revenue due to stiff competition, so you can’t blame the CL alone for its ultimate failure. Staff said it would have been better to stick it out on Cambie, which has largely recovered and is doing better overall. There is now a bump in patronage even from the distant KE Station foot traffic.
    My biggest beef is with Engineering regarding Cambie about their utter lack of understanding how a major rapid transit project should be accompanied by a major increase in the pedestrian realm on the surface. Where are the permanent corner and bus stop bump outs? The small plazas consuming parts of the parking lanes that would complement the businesses?
    I don’t do straw men, Ron. That’s insulting. I do a modicum of analysis and try to draw reasonable conclusions. Three years ago I mapped the intersections between Main and Alma. Of 39 intersections, only four were not signalized at the time (Alberta, Balsam, Waterloo and Dunbar). There could be fewer now. That means that at least 35 (90%) are currently signalized, which illustrates the very significant amount of controlled cross traffic in the Broadway Corridor for pedestrians, cyclists and commercial vehicles on non-arterials, including seven designated N-S greenways and bike routes. This illustrates my terminology that Broadway has a high “crossing density” and that this is a fact of life that needs to be fully accounted for in the risk assessment for any transit improvements there. To dismiss the presence of legitimate signalized crossings at virtually every intersection would be an egregious mistake.
    From Arbutus to Alma, of 16 intersections three were not signalized (Balsam, Waterloo, Dunbar), which translates to 80% that are. There are also three greenways or designated bike routes that meet the signals at Arbutus, Trafalgar and Trutch.
    As reiterated previously, trams will stop for the local cross traffic, which is exactly what the buses do now. So let’s save our money and stick to improving the B-Line and other bus services if local transit service is to dominate over everything else. Speeding up the surface trains and spacing out the stops will be the only way to accommodate the existing regional transit ridership heading west of Arbutus to Alma, and that’s only possible in such a pedestrian-rich environment by building a continuous barrier in the centre of the road (dedicated median). Another egregious error.
    Moving the tracks to 12th or 16th or 8th (west of Alma) would bypass the central business and residential corridor in the 19 blocks of continuous retail and arterial-based medium-density residential west of Arbutus. Yet another egregious error.
    From Alma to Blanca there are not a lot of signalized pedestrian crossings, and the majority are naturally placed in the four blocks on 10th where the sidewalk retail shops are continuous from Discovery to Tolmie.
    The fourth egregious error is continuing to confuse regional (fast) transit service with local (slow) service. Broadway-UBC has been grossly undersupplied with improvements to both for over 40 years now. The Village by the Sea has been subsumed by a metropolis, and transit must in every way compete and win against the car. Therefore, on a regional basis, we have to look at least to three of the four levels of urban rail service and build what is most appropriate where it is most suited. Sticky urbanism is well served by rail in several forms, as long as the interface is treated humanely.
    Regarding UBC, students are only a part of the total number of humans on campus. There are also faculty, support staff and visitors. Sure, let’s encourage them to build more student and worker’s housing, but I really don’t believe you’re going to achieve self-sufficiency unless you violate the Charter of Rights and imprison everyone on campus. Mobility is essential. Decreasing its dependency levels is an admirable goal, but as long as people search for advancements and betterment in life (jobs, housing, schools …), chances are they and their families will move several times.
    Now, let’s look at the TransLink analysis that provided the combined subway / LRT option you mentioned. The exercise estimated a ridership of 320,000 people a day in a decade in the corridor, up from 110,000 today. The ridership is currently split 65% destined to Broadway with 35% heading on to UBC. In essence, the Network Effect, the attraction of an efficient new transit asset, and new development will eventually increase Broadway ridership to UBC to potentially 112,000 people a day if the ratio holds. Even if the ratio drops to 25%, that’s still potentially 80,000 people a day heading beyond Arbutus in a decade or two.
    Remember we’re talking about service capability and urban efficacy 100 years into the future.

    1. If you pass shops on Cambie on the way to KE Station you certainly would have benefited from surface rail which most certainly would have offered at least one closer station. If you’re headed downtown that’s quite a hike backwards on your commute.
      “Moving the tracks to 12th or 16th or 8th (west of Alma) would bypass the central business and residential corridor in the 19 blocks of continuous retail and arterial-based medium-density residential west of Arbutus. Yet another egregious error.”
      No error. Broadway already flows to 8th and a line there would serve the Jericho Lands before jogging back to a 10th Ave. retail strip and onto UBC boulevard. It would very specifically follow the retail frontages and also serve what will likely be more than medium density at Jericho. West tenth on that hill stretch is all single family. But it is disingenuous to criticize a tram for what a subway cannot possibly offer. Subways by their very nature exclude “19 blocks of continuous retail…”. They are nodal and they hide their passengers from retail exposure.
      Trams can have signal priority but run at 50 km/h when on the street without barriers. Crossings would not be unduly interrupted.
      Transportation engineers in Zurich said a subway system was absolutely necessary because trams could never offer reliable service and capacity. So students went to work on it and now they have a highly efficient, highly networked tram system that serves most of the city. (They also have a commuter rail network which is often underground but it primarily serves the outlying villages and towns with few stations. It offers little to the city except shunting the masses in and out.) But to be clear, their primary transportation within the city is trams. And they have a much more complex mish-mash of oddball bits of curving, intertwined narrow roadways to work with. Not a nice easy grid of wide streets like here.
      Zurich proves trams can work while their engineers said it couldn’t be done.
      “To assume west-of-Arbutus ridership will remain at today’s levels for the next century-plus does not make any sense.” was a straw man.

      1. Yes trams can have signal priority . So could buses if the COV changed its existing anti transit road use policies. Non stop buses from Arbutus along10th to UBC would be almost as fast as skytrain

        1. That’s exactly right, Bob. And that would be far, far less expensive than trying to replace a high-capacity bus service with surface rail subject to all the same conditions buses experience today but with the inability to move around obstructions.

    2. Ron, I don’t think you’ve adequately reflected on the unique transit demand and geometric characteristics of the Broadway-UBC corridor. Broadway and Metro Vancouver are not Geneva. The corridor is saturated with BOTH regional and local ridership. Each has a unique geometry.
      The transit solutions to this high-demand corridor need to be multi-faceted. About 55,000 daily trips to the corridor originate from outside Vancouver at last count. This is a fact of life that no transit planner can ignore without losing her profession credentials. This also reflects the powerful regional character of the job, residential, office and institutional activities of Broadway-UBC. On average 71,000+ daily trips are destined for the central and other points on Broadway today, with 38,000+ destined to points in west Kits, Point Grey and the campus. Triple these figures and you are where the planners at TransLink were in their estimates for the decade after subway construction. Given our experience with the CL, these estimates are probably low.
      A subway combined with improved surface buses will meet all foreseeable fast / regional and slow / local transit demand to the point where the subway ends. Still, it is highly problematic to end the subway prematurely at Arbutus because the transit solutions from there on will force the geometry to change, and the infrastructure expenditures will be hard pressed to manage the interrupted crowd and transit vehicle flows and, in the case of trams, a much larger land assembly for a second 100 m platform and train storage sidings at the hub station. Penny wise, pound foolish.
      If Arbutus is it, then I suggest that triple-articulated electric B-Line buses on a one km stop rhythm to UBC combined with double-articulated electric Number 9s to Blanca will accommodate more than enough ridership to handle any demand that trams could, and at a far lower cost and the built-in flexibility to move around obstructions or to detour around accidents and utility construction. Dealing with the undergrounds will always increase the cost of laying surface rail beds.
      If they won’t take the subway into the heart of the campus, then they should save a billion-plus (including land acquisition for a tram hub station) and stick to buses on the existing roads from Arbutus. But never expect it to be “rapid” transit, and always expect rabid commentary on the transfer penalty paid by transit users.
      Your suggestion to route a tram up 8th is just as feasible as a cut and cover segment of the subway with fewer grading challenges and the necessity to swing over to the retail node at Sasamat without having to take out a swath of houses. Unless, of course, the trams enter a – gasp! – tunnel drilled under the houses.
      On signal priority that doesn’t interrupt an average walk cycle, I simply don’t believe that. If my mother was still alive she would scowl then ridicule that comment in fear of getting caught halfway across when the walk light changes. She was in a wheelchair for 12 years. Ageing Boomers will comprise half the population in a few years. Broadway west of Arbutus still has 16 intersections and 12 signals, most of them spaced only 160 m apart. A high crossing density is also a fact of life that will put people at risk if the transit solutions aren’t properly attuned to society’s needs. That is why only a slow / local transit amenity will work on the surface there. The pedestrian crossing walk cycles in Victoria are purposely long for this very reason, and when you need to eventually accommodate over 100,000 people on transit west of Arbutus, this notion of romantic trams and utilitarian buses stopping 12 times in 2.5 km because slow elderly people need to cross the road is just not going to cut it alone.
      We need a subway to liberate and expand the surface space for pedestrians of all ages and abilities.
      One thing that is very hard to counter is the emotional and romantic aura that encases Eurotrams in the eyes of some urbanists. There is a role for them, most certainly, but let’s start with a little more cold, rational thought first.

      1. Give the tram or bus driver the ability to delay a red light . no more complicated than a garage door opener

      2. Alex, I said Zurich, not Geneva which I know less about. Zurich has much more complex geometric characteristics than Vancouver. It has a much heavier reliance on heavy rail to bring in far far more transit riders than we do and does so from a substantially larger region. (The downside of a great railway is that people commute from much farther away.) It also has a much more fragmented business locations, spread over much of the city. But it relies primarily on trams to distribute the huge crowds that swarm through the main train station (HB) as well as a few peripheral commuter rail stations. And they don’t have a simple grid of wide streets to run their trams on.
        If you saw Zurich HB any time of day, let alone rush hours, you might describe our main hub (Waterfront) as “cute”.
        They also, believe it or not, have old people in Zurich.
        As I keep repeating, vehicle speed is only one variable in the time it takes to get somewhere. The first, the very first, is distance traveled. Applying expensive subways to fundamental problems in our land use patterns is not really the best solution and just encourages more people to live far away. Proximity to stations is another big factor in travel time. A denser network for transfers also plays a big role.
        Trams have been shown to increase development investments that buses simply don’t. They are also much more energy efficient. They have down-sides, as you’ve mentioned. Nothing is perfect. But they wouldn’t exist in many hundreds of cities (including many new systems) if they didn’t offer solutions that buses don’t.

        1. I should add, that by the time you need to accommodate 100,000 west of Arbutus you could add another tram line on another east-west alignment. More resilient, cheaper, more deferred costs.

    3. Zurich …. my bad.
      I’ve Streetviewed Zurich before and am impressed. But it’s not Vancouver. It’s barely 8 km from the northern town boundary to the lake, which is the same length as Broadway from Main to Alma. It predates the car by centuries and as the result there are very few streets in the central area wider than 20 m. In fact, most are 15-18m. One rare exception is Badenerstrasse near the Albisriederplatz at 30 m, the same width as Broadway. Zurich naturally lends itself to walking, and walking is complementary to slow trams. Zurich has recently established congestion fees.
      Another difference is that the urban form and density are pretty well evenly spread at the mid-rise level in Zurich whereas in Vancouver it’s concentrated on arterials and in “town centres” (a distinctly techie North American Planese term for you).
      The Zurich commuter rail would be their equivalent of the regional SkyTrain. Their trams seem to move slower than our buses on much larger and more congested arterials. To interchange these roles to be more like Zurich you would have to redesign the entire Metro. Now that’s an admirable ideal, but I really don’t think it’s possible unless we invent our own limited version and adapt it to today’s urban design, and do it very slowly and incrementally over a half-century. I have no doubt that you and I will agree on the changes required in RS zones to start the process, but we are a long, long ways from adopting Zurich’s dense network of trams to our straight line arterials. Web vs. thread. Field vs. path. Diffuse vs. linear. There are fundamental geometric differences.
      Vancouver’s mode share hangs around 50% walking, transit and biking. Zurich tallies 48% walk + bike, 32% trams / transit and 26% car. Zurich still has a 50% car ownership rate, and Vancouver’s is decreasing, but the car still dominates because most of the city was designed exclusively for it after about 1935.
      The median price for an apartment in Zurich is E10,472, or almost CAN$1,500 / ft2. And that’s after prices decreased over a four-year period. Last year the average price for condos in downtown Vancouver was just over $1,000 / ft2. It may be approaching par with Zurich now. No wonder both cities need a good regional transit system. Economics is a powerful influence on mobility.
      This video was probably posted on PT before. Zurich is a cool town, except for its real estate prices.
      http://www.streetfilms.org/zurich-a-world-class-transit-metropolis/

      1. Keep in mind that average wages in Zurich are significantly higher than Vancouver. Also, the Swiss aren’t homeowners in the same way as here. They are happy to rent and invest elsewhere. They tend to live smaller and go out more. So the cost of housing isn’t as comparable as it seems on the surface.

  6. Resilient.
    (of a substance or object) able to recoil or spring back into shape after bending, stretching, or being compressed: a shoe with resilient cushioning.
    This word is increasing being used as a meme.

    1. When one line is down another is still available. The object, the transit system, is able to continue offering service.
      (of a person or animal) able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions.
      A little artistic license but sounds close enough to me. It isn’t trying to be something deceitful.

  7. The *new* Rockefeller Foundation funded Chief Resilience Officer of the City of Vancouver might be proud, although the usage is generally for acute disasters.
    It doesn’t appear as deceitful in your usage. It does appear trendy.

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