From comments presented to the Transportation Committee, Feb. 2008
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© Clive Doucet 2007
Both Vancouver and Seattle have many transit and transportation challenges.
They are divided by waterways and harbours. Neither are easy places to get around. Seattle has very steep hills and even more challenging water courses. Lake Washington, at the back of the city, is 67 miles long and is on a fault line so deep that it is impossible to build anything but a floating bridge across it. They have had an earthquake that shattered their double-deckered ocean side freeway. The geographic challenges that both Seattle and Vancouver have are much greater than the city of Ottawa. It makes their accomplishments even more impressive.
Vancouver
I’ll start with Vancouver. The first thing that strikes you when you get to Vancouver is that Ottawa really, in comparison, does not have a transit system. We have a bus company that delivers an east-west commuter service.
A transit system is an integrated public transit system which includes all modes of transport. If you go to Vancouver you see their famous SkyTrain which has 2 lines, 33 stations with 49.5 km of track. At peak hours it delivers a car every one minute and at off-peak one every 8 minutes. There is also a SeaBus ferry service that carries 400 people in each direction across Burrard inlet every 12 minutes. They are now building a third boat.
The SeaBus unloads from both sides of the boat in under a minute. It is coordinated with bus service so that buses are waiting for the SeaBus passengers. The whole transfer from ferry to buses takes about a couple of minutes. It is very, very impressive.
There are 228 brand new trolley buses in Vancouver for neighbourhood service. They also have small buses that carry 20 passengers operating in the suburban areas.
A third element is bus rapid transit called the B-lines which provide (Ottawa) Transitway levels of service with articulated buses, with a limited number of stops on dedicated bus lanes on city streets.
Overall, what strikes this observer is how every part of the city is served and not by a one-size-fits-all mode. The service is fitted to the situation, not vice versa.
They are in process of building the Canada Line which will connect their Waterfront Station in downtown Vancouver to Richmond, one of their suburbs, with a spur to the airport much the same way as our North-South line would have although their line is shorter at 19 km.
The SkyTrain, the bus system and SeaBus all connect at the Waterfront station as well as up to 200 scheduled seaplane based air shuttles that fly in and out of it. If you go to the Waterfront Station you can go to any part of the West Coast region including Vancouver Island quickly and easily. The transit options there are constant and convenient.
Nor surprisingly, there is terrific inter-modality. The Waterfront Station also serves the regional ferries that cruise up and down the coast plus the international ferries to Alaska.
And you will be able to book your flight, check your baggage and get your airline boarding pass at the Waterfront station. So the only thing left to do when flight time comes is get on the Canada Line train to the airport.
Funding Vancouver’s system is: fares 36.7%, fuel tax 31.7% property tax 25.4% their parking and area tax 2.5%, hydro levy 2.1%, and a parking tax of 1.4%.
While I was visiting, the BC Premier Gordon Campbell, a former mayor of Vancouver, announced 14 billion dollars for BC transit. This compares favourably with Move Ontario fund of 17 billion in Ontario for the south-west area of our province.
Vancouver has grown by 23 per cent since 1990 but there has been no increase in car usage. Plus the cars that are owned by residents, are being driven 30% fewer kilometres.
The BC and Vancouver investment in transit is working. Their investment in densification strategy is also working with a tripling of pedestrians trips. In other words, as the car usage goes down the pedestrian and transit usage has gone up. They firmly believe that densification is one of the big keys to public transit and the best public transit are legs and feet, which is also the cheapest .
One way to achieve this is by having communities that are live-work-play area. We have this in our Official Plan but they are doing it with much greater effectiveness.
Ottawa’s North-South line
One of the things that came across to me is that we certainly got it right with our North-South line – it was half of the price of their Canada line and yet is 11 kilometre longer and serves the same geography, distant suburbs from downtown with a spur to the airport. Yet they had many of the same challenges: rock cuts, underground, new bridges and so forth.
The underground stations are a really major piece of infrastructure. They are quite intimidating to see. They are wall to wall. Business shrivels during the course of building of a station. They have hanging sidewalks at the edge of the trench.
Seattle
Seattle is not as dense as Vancouver. You see that as you fly into it. They do not have the same transit uses as they have in Vancouver but they do have the same basic transit management structure. They have a regional transit facility called Sound Transit and they have the City of Seattle transit system. They are in the process of building a second tunnel under one of their mountains to build a new electric rail-line, which will go from the airport to downtown then to the university. Again they have selected a light rail project similar to what we had with our North-South line connecting major institutions, the universities, the downtown and the airport.
It was interesting to realize that Ottawa, Seattle and Vancouver independently made the same choice for their first light rail line. But again Seattle spent 3 billion dollars as opposed to less a 1 billion for Ottawa, in part because of extensive amount of tunnelling they have to do through glacial moraine which is fairly tricky engineering.
I visited the downtown bus tunnel now converted after two years of work into a light rail tunnel also. What is really impressive was the cost of the bus tunnel. It is so much more expensive than an electric rail line. The stations are triple the width of a rail station because the buses take up so much room to manipulate and require larger platforms and rights of way.
Seattle has not been successful using the electric/hybrid buses underground. They now use diesels, shutting off their engines at the stations and platooning them through in convoys of six at rush hour.
Seattle doesn’t have anywhere near the density of service in this tunnel compared to what we have in our current downtown Transitway. I found it impossible to imagine the platooning, engine off/on routine being applied to our Transitway with 600 buses through the city centre at rush hour.
I asked them how long they plan to continue using buses. They replied that the tunnel has already been converted to light rail and as soon as the surface rail system is finished they will move the buses out of the tunnel. The tunnel buses have never taken away all the surface buses.
The message I got from their experience is that if you’re interested in a very expensive interim solution, buses are a possible option but if you want a long term, less expensive, higher capacity system, build a light rail tunnel ―and this is what Seattle is doing with its second tunnel project.
Another thing I learned looking at the Seattle and Vancouver systems is the cost of retrofitting anything is prohibitively expensive and sometimes impossible without closing the system down entirely. One of the stations they are retrofitting in Vancouver is costing 15 million dollars and the planner told me without having to keep up service they could have done it for 2 million (almost an 8 fold increase in cost). When Seattle had to retrofit their original tunnel for rail they took the tunnel out of service for two years.
The other thing I learned is that actual tunnelling compared to the stations isn’t that pricey. It is the stations that are the enormous costs. Imagine tunnelling from Lebreton Flats to Centretown through the cliffs at the escarpment to the surface in Centretown for a station and then running it back underground to avoid intersections, they up again for the next station.
Seattle streetcar system.
Seattle is also putting in a streetcar system. It is half funded by business (by business improvement district and the city at $26 million each and the city brought it in to rejuvenate a part of the city that was old but well located.
The differences between Seattle and Vancouver are not just geographic. Seattle is much more dependant on large businesses like Microsoft and Boeing whereas Vancouver has become a service city that sells quality of life rather than industrial locations.
Seattle has six municipal garages but have no plans to build more. They feel parking garages are a step backwards. The Tacoma highway has a carpool lane. It is limited to two people or more in a car and they argue two people in car is better than one person but in terms of moving people I didn’t see it as that effective. It was just as loaded and slow as any other lane. I think it confirms our sense that car pool lanes have limited value.
Parking and Fares
I looked also at parking in Seattle. They have something called performance based parking. It based on use and they have 15% vacancy as the perfect target. If the vacancy rate of the stalls drops below 85% they drop the cost of parking, if the take-up is 100 per cent, they increase the charges. Parking rates are adjusted every six months. Thus the costs of parking charge varies across Seattle. They couldn’t imagine arbitrarily raising the cost of parking without consultation. Seattle funds their transit system on the fare, the property tax, an employee head tax, and a commercial parking tax for transit.
In Vancouver there has been no increase to transit fares beyond inflation.
In conclusion
Seattle certainly has greater commuter challenges than Vancouver with its very hilly terrain, the lakes and the indentations of the sea, floating bridges – one of them sunk – and their double-decker expressway broken from an earthquake. The Seattle rail line has also had some challenges. They had 110 change orders and they are in court over those change orders. It is not operating yet. Curiously, even without operating, it has already begun to rejuvenate the neighbourhoods abutting it. So has the pilot introduction of the streetcar. The Gates Foundation is thinking of moving into that neighbourhood and the city is planning for three million square feet of new office space and 10 to 15 thousand residents moving into the area.
Vancouver SkyTrain
Vancouver - new transit tunnel construction
Vancouver Waterfront Station
Vancouver SkyTrain at the Waterfront Station. Multi-level station for intermodial transit.
Seattle Monorail
Seattle - Light Rail trains.
Seattle - Light rail tracks on median
Seattle light rail station under construction
Seattle Bus tunnel - Weekday at 4 p.m.
Seattle bus station
Seattle electric (non-polluting) trolley bus
New Seattle streetcar