With three fully-built light-rail lines and an interconnected bus network, Vancouver’s transportation system is like Seattle’s, just a couple of decades in the future. But the Canadian city differs in its rock-solid commitment to building housing right on top of transit.
By
David Gutman
Seattle Times staff reporter
[...] Metro Vancouver — which comprises Vancouver and 23 surrounding cities and towns — is a region being built, more and more, around its thriving and ever-expanding light-rail system.
As the Seattle region embarks on its own multi-decade light-rail expansion, and as local transportation officials try to dissuade solo car commuting, our neighbor to the north provides one glimpse of what a regional rail system could look like, with housing and land-use plans to match.
[...]
“There’s different attitudes about density than in Seattle, that’s for sure,” said Kevin Desmond, CEO of TransLink, the agency in charge of transit and roads in Metro Vancouver. “But if you’re going to manage congestion, which is getting worse and worse in Seattle, you’ve got to get people nearer to transit.”
Desmond would know. Before joining TransLink
in 2016, he ran bus service in Seattle as general manager of King County Metro.
“I don’t know that there’s any comparison in North America, where station area after station area has huge towers and in some cases have developments that envelop the stations,” Desmond said. “It all fits in with the land-use plan that this region has to densify around transit.”
Throughout the region, 146 developments are being built close enough to a SkyTrain station or track that they need special permission from the rail agency.
In 2012, there were only two such developments.
“There’s this misnomer that density breeds congestion,” said Guy Akester, the director of real estate for TransLink. “But it’s the urban sprawl, that really low density, single-family neighborhoods that you have to get in your car to do everything, that causes really bad congestion.”
[...]
Heavy bus use
For anyone who relies on Seattle buses, or even more established but flailing subway systems in other American cities, SkyTrain is, well, different.
Its three lines cover 50 miles of track and have no drivers, the biggest fully automated train system in the world.
Seattle’s light-rail trains come every six minutes during rush hour, and every 10 to 15 minutes otherwise. They can’t touch SkyTrain.
During peak hours, trains come every 100 seconds. During off-peak hours they come every three minutes. Even at the ends of the Canada and Expo lines, when the track branches in two to reach more suburban communities, a train is never more than six minutes away.
“Traffic and parking are so bad downtown,” said Cathy Yin, 32, who takes SkyTrain between the two jewelry stores she works at in Richmond and downtown Vancouver. “I save a lot of time.”
But even with a built-out rail system, buses in Vancouver still carry nearly 65 percent more people than SkyTrain.
The 99 B-Line, which serves the University of British Columbia, is the most-used bus line in North America outside of Mexico City. It has 56,000 daily passengers.
At any given stop on the route, more than 250 B-Line buses arrive every weekday.
[...continues at length with maps and comparisons...]
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