1959 Buzzer trumpets fast buses on freeways
1959 Buzzer trumpets fast buses on freeways
While nosing through the Buzzer archives, I dug up this 1959 Buzzer, which comes out swinging for fast buses on freeways!
This was written when freeways were being seriously considered for the region, and since that didn’t happen in the city of Vancouver, it’s a bit like reading about a parallel universe.
I quite liked this quote:
“For our metropolitan area the freeway bus system offers advantages in convenience, travel time and capital cost over a rail system,” Mr. Sutton Brown stated.
In any case, he added, the volume of rapid transit passengers would be insufficient to make a rail system practical.
Make sure to look at the full issue: there’s some great stuff on the growth challenges for 1959, which are especially interesting in light of our current work on rapid transit in UBC and Surrey.
A fascinating insight into the mind of a city planner 50 years ago! Presumably the anticipated time savings implied few, if any, stops en route – so I wonder what the “special freeway facilities” were to be? To add up to 10% to the cost of the freeway system implies that he had some substantial infrastructure in mind – maybe dedicated bus ramps down to surface level transit stops? Or maybe electric moving staircases to bring the passengers up to transit “stations” at freeway level? Sounds to me like the germ of an idea called SkyTrain….
….. now here’s a challenge – is TransLink brave enough to introduce a “Trouble Department”? It certainly seemed to work well for Erldene M. Hamilton. As a customer, he was in trouble. So he needed the Trouble Department. If two buses pass you by on the street because they’re full, you’re in trouble. So you really do need to have a Trouble Department you can call, right?
HI Jhenifer – thank you for posting the old back copies of the Buzzer.
Isn’t it ironic that the elevated guideway (freeway) the bus driving has a striking similarity to the SkyTrain guideway?
In the 1950s planners could never perceive the groth of the automobile or Anthony Downs “Triple Converegence” Theory. A transportation “build it they will come”. Triple in that three things happen:
1. build a new freeway and people will start to drive abandoning transit, carpooling, walking or cycling (modal shift)
2. build a new freeway and people will drive at their optimum time making the peak congestion worse (temporal shift)
3. build a new freeway and people on it instead of the longer route they used to take (spatial shift)
In the 1950s this wasn’t thought of this way, so we were overwhelmed when freeways became congested not long after opening.
We’re going to see this triple convergence when the new Port Mann opens. In 10 years it will be just as congested as it is now with the same lineups, the only difference is there will be 200,000 cars lining up to get over the bridge instead of 100,000.
Triple Convergence works with transit too as can be seen on the Canada Line. Like water, people will take the quickest, fastest and most comfortable route from A to B regardless of mode.
John: Well, the Trouble Department listed in the Buzzer is really for B.C. Electric’s gas department… so when they talk about trouble they really meant huge, dangerous trouble!
However, I certainly do take your point, and I would hope our customer service department already acts as the anchor to identify such trouble spots.
Of course, we did build freeways, didn’t we; even within Vancouver city limits, but especially beyond. Perhaps not as many as were hoped for at the time, though where we didn’t/couldn’t afford to, we ended up with monstrosities like Knight Street. But otherwise, it’s like a “parallel universe.” While Vancouver’s done many things right, this ‘courage in the face of the freeways’ myth-building gets to be a bit much, particularly when so many of the alternatives have languished on the drawing board for so long and outside of very few spots from the late 1980s onward, the land use paradigm is still entirely auto-oriented. Maybe we should channel Gerald Sutton-Brown’s spirit to help design the new bus lanes across the Port Mann…
As much as I’m pleased that Vancouver avoided building freeways within the city, what Sutton Brown was suggesting sounds a lot like a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system. There is a lot to say in favour of BRTs, like their cost efficiency and flexibility compared to rail. Bogota, for instance, has had a lot of success with their BRT system.
Vincent: that’s what I thought it sounded like too, actually! And excellent points about BRT: it is indeed a strong type of transit.
@D: yes and no… The original Vancouver freeway vision of the 50’s never came about. The ring road around the Downtown peninsula was not built. Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts end at Gore. Housing between Ontario and Main still exists today instead of a 10 lane highway.
However the 10-lane will be coming through Burnaby and Coquitlam.
Well, we did get “Freeway Buses” in the 1970s.
The illustration with the buses travelling on the incomplete freeway remind me of the end of “Speed”.
One thing people fail to understand about the lack of a highway system here.
We have a highway that runs well short of downtown, veering north and going to North Vancouver.
The result wasn’t less cars using the freeway; that effect came from rapid transit. The result is gridlock because traffic using the freeway is now forced to exit at 1st avenue and Grandview, which by the way have right of ways governed by traffic lights directly after exiting the freeway, exasperating the situation.
Completing the freeway to the viaducts would not attract as many cars as one might think but it would sure move existing traffic much much more efficiently.
Additionally, what people fail to understand with freeways is the neighbourhood reclamation aspect. Without freeways we have cars going down first avenue and Grandview, both of which were never designed to handle the amounts of traffic they receive today. By building a proper freeway the whole way to downtown, congestion goes down, accidents go down, less money is spent as workers idle in traffic and even businesses may see a benefit as street parking could be introduced back onto streets like Hastings during the afternoon rush. You get less people cutting down streets like N. Grandview, Venables, Joyce, etc… Streets that really should be quiet and “neighbourhoodly”.
No amount of rapid transit is going to make everyone leave their cars. We’d be lucky if we got the existing SOV drivers into transit. With that in mind, why do we continually shoot ourselves in the foot?
Build a proper freeway to downtown, toll it if it must be done and we all benefit.
@Cliff- not sure I agree with the solution, but yes, the ‘no freeways’ situation that we’ve ended up with has sure harmed some of the surface streets. Streets like Grandview, Venables, Joyce, etc… make it clear that the land use paradigm shifts and transit investments that could/should’ve complemented a ‘rejection’ of freeways as a mobility solution have never been implemented to much of a degree here. That’s starting to change, which is encouraging, but it is very slow going, and suggests that we just couldn’t get our acts together to build freeways back in the day, much more so than that we heroically rejected them. Calgary didn’t build its downtown freeway either… yet nobody lauds that courage!
It’s as if people are trying to force Vancouver into being something it simply isn’t.
Vancouver doesn’t have the transit capability or ridership to support the “no freeway” position we have now. We never will. We never could have.
Vancouver has needed a freeway to downtown for over 40 years and it’s only in the last 10 years have we painfully felt what not having that freeway was like. The Expo and to a lesser extent the Millennium lines helped to mitigate some of the cars headed downtown, but not all that much. Gateway is a good response to what has been lost in the last 40 years, but it’s still rather incomplete without a freeway to Vancouver. (Not so much freeway, actually, just limited access)
Don’t get me wrong, the SkyTrain is doing a fantastic job moving people, but this notion that rapid transit can replace highways and is “equivalent to X lanes of traffic” is simply misguided. It may move PEOPLE, but when it comes to economics, time is money and some people’s time is worth more than others. The businessman with his SOV may need it to drive around and deliver meetings. Tradespeople sure aren’t going to haul their tools using the bus. People with more than one job run tight schedules that require a vehicle to get from one job to another.
And there’s one fact that everyone seems to overlook: buses use our road infrastructure. What good are buses if they are perpetually stuck in traffic? The Port Mann bridge lost bus service because buses going over it couldn’t keep a schedule.
A good transit system is only one half of a transportation system. The other half is an efficient, well maintained road system and we’re still lacking that.
I’m still adamant that Hwy 1 should’ve had 3 general lanes of traffic in each direction plus a counterflow 2 lane HOV system in the median that goes towards Vancouver say 3am to 12pm and away from 12pm to 3am. These HOV lanes could’ve could’ve then merged off and continued straight into downtown, and commercial trucks would be allowed to use these as well, and perhaps West Coast Express could offer Trainbus service from Langley which would be way faster and more comfortable than Skytrain, at a premium price of course.
I rarely drive to work but when I do, I always take Hastings now. 1st Ave has become very crowded, Grandview Hwy is not too bad.
I made a post a little while ago more or less along the same lines of what you’re saying, Donald.
My idea was to have a one-way expressway with no interchanges branching off at Grandview and running through the cut that would link up to the Georgia viaduct and have it operate in counterflow with two congestion toll lanes and a free HOV lane.
Cliff Wrote:
>> Vancouver doesn’t have the transit capability or ridership to support the “no freeway” position we have now. We never will. We never could have.
According to Wikipedia, the Expo line carries 200,000 people a day, and the Port Mann bridge carries 127,000 vehicles a day. Sounds to me like the Expo line is already replacing a freeway’s worth of traffic. And that’s just one line…