The first stage of the City of Vancouver’s long-awaited bus priority expansion plans is finally upon us, and it’s going to be focused on Granville Street, all the way between 10th Avenue in the north to Marine Drive in the south, going into effect in stages beginning this summer and ending next spring. 

While the plan is not perfect, we are putting out a call to all of you to come out in support of the proposed changes. We need to make it clear to the City and all involved that there is strong popular support for improvements that could prove somewhat controversial, and to embolden more ambitious changes in the future. City staff don’t tend to get much positive feedback, so we’d like to give them lots of support!

The Granville Street improvements can essentially be broken down into three segments: Marpole, Central Granville, and South Granville, each of which has their own challenges.

1. Marpole

The situation in Marpole between 63rd Avenue and Marine Drive is likely to end up being a sticky one. Currently, the Marpole Village section of Granville Street has one-directional peak-only bus lanes on weekdays, with the lane existing only in the northbound direction in the morning and only in the southbound direction in the afternoon. The proposed changes will give buses priority in both directions at both AM and PM peaks, extend the duration that these “peaks” last for, and add a small section of all-day bus lanes in the northbound direction between Marine Drive and 70th Avenue.

These are pretty subtle changes, but will nonetheless save valuable time for people travelling to and from Marpole along routes 10 and 100. Despite the small scale of the changes, however, we expect there to be a backlash due to the restriction of on-street parking availability, particularly from certain local businesses, who consistently overestimate the fraction of their clientele who drive and require on-street parking. Indeed, the Marpole Business Improvement Association has already signalled their opposition to these changes, showing the need for organized groups like ours to show that there are more widespread benefits and supporters of improved bus priority, which would be beneficial to businesses as well as to those travelling through the neighbourhood.

The changes proposed on Marpole are just a start, but without your voices our decision makers may get the mistaken impression that those who believe the changes would be to their detriment outnumber and outweigh those who would benefit from them. We should not have to be playing defence on such small changes, but that is unfortunately the world that we find ourselves in today. 

2. Central Granville

The simplest and least likely to be controversial section is the long stretch in the central part of the corridor between 16th and 63rd Avenues, which consists primarily of low-density residential areas. The changes here are also the simplest to implement, with the changing of the existing peak-only bus lanes to all-day in both directions, which only takes changing some paint and some signs, and the moving and removal of certain select stops along the route in order to balance out stop spacing to be more in line with TransLink and international standards, speeding up trip times. Given the simplicity of the implementation, which would go into effect around June of this year, we expect that this is the most likely part of the plan to emerge intact.

3. South Granville

The third segment of the changes apply to South Granville between 10th and 16th Ave, easily the busiest and thus most congested segment of the corridor. As a result of this congestion, bus service through this section is at its slowest and least reliable, and as such it is the section that has the most to gain from improvements. With the upcoming South Granville SkyTrain station opening in the near future, this area is also likely to become one of the busiest transit hubs in the entire region. Here too, the changes are quite modest, with the plan calling for the construction of “bus bulbs”, platforms extending out from the curb so that buses don’t need to pull over to stop, at a handful of bus stops through this section. This would be a good change, bus bulbs are known to be effective at speeding up trip time by saving the time that would have been lost merging into and out of the curbside lane.

That being said, we would like to suggest that the slowest part of the route is also the part that demands the most intervention, and we would like to push for more ambitious measures to match this. These might take a variety of forms, including but not limited to offset bus lanes, transit signal priority, barring private vehicles from turning at certain cross-streets, or several other possible options.

These are not being proposed at the moment despite their value, and they will not happen unless people have the courage to push for them. We would like to ask you, alongside those of us at Movement, to stand up for the thousands of people who take a bus along this route every day, and to build support for even more ambitious projects in the future in order to create a true transit city. 

The Granville Glow-Up

As this is just the first stage in a longer process of rolling out bus priority upgrades across the city, we need to get the ball rolling quickly and effectively. A strong showing here will set the bar going forward as to what’s expected and what’s possible. A watered-down measure here will weaken the case for and coherence of all the other bus priority proposals, while a more ambitious one will open the door of possibility even further. We know that these are popular measures with a ton of support from ordinary Vancouverites like you-but our decision makers tend not to hear much in support when projects like these are proposed. Let’s change that, and let the bus get the respect it is due, on Granville and across the city!