Excerpt submitted by Michael Hall, Government Relations Lead at Movement: Metro Vancouver Transit Riders.
Written for Daily Hive Urbanized.
Read the full article by Michael Hall at the Daily Hive Urbanized
In October 2023, Vancouver City Council voted unanimously in favour of a member motion by city councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung to add bus priority measures on major bus corridors in the city, including Hastings Street, Kingsway, 49th Avenue, and Granville Street. The goal was to improve travel times by at least 10 per cent by 2026. This motion passed over 800 days ago.
With no progress over the subsequent 10 months, in July 2024, City Council again voted unanimously in favour of a member motion by then-city councillor Christine Boyle to add corridors to the list of projects, add guidelines on the level of bus priority, and impose conditions on the pace of the work: “achieving four completed corridors by 2026, at a rate of at least two corridors per year.”
In stark contrast, the City of Toronto put in emergency bus lanes in just four days when issues with their busiest streetcar route necessitated deploying buses. It was not perfect, but it shortened travel times significantly.
If Toronto can do it, what is holding Vancouver back? Often, with projects like these, street parking acts as a roadblock. In a growing city, businesses — and therefore politicians — continue to rely on the finite capacity of curbside parking to sustain, nay, grow businesses. Yet curbside space has never increased; the amount of space available for patrons to park their cars has remained unchanged since the road was first built.
Or perhaps it is City staff capacity that is holding these projects back. It cannot be capital funding — TransLink is providing all of that…
Read the full article by Michael Hall at the Daily Hive Urbanized