Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by Denis Agar, who is a transportation planner living in East Vancouver and the executive director of Movement: Metro Vancouver Transit Riders.
Over three days, between last Friday and Sunday, there was a lot going on in downtown Vancouver: over 160,000 attendees at Taylor Swift’s final The Eras Tour concerts, 37,000 spectators at two NHL Vancouver Canucks Games, and seven Cirque du Soleil shows with a combined capacity of around 18,000 spectators.
Miraculously, Vancouver’s transportation network seems to have handled it. Commenters on Reddit expressed shock that traffic was basically fine.
On Saturday afternoon, just before Taylor’s second concert, I had to drive from the West End in downtown Vancouver to East Vancouver, and I was stunned that Google Maps sent me down West Georgia Street, directly past BC Place Stadium. Despite the massive influx into the downtown core, West Georgia Street was barely affected.
How did we pull that off? As a transportation planner, here are two explanations I can come up with: psychology and geometry.
The psychology of traffic
When traffic is going to be horrible, people adjust. Sure, you might think this isn’t some groundbreaking observation, but it’s considered blasphemy by a large segment of the engineering profession.
Traffic is often compared to water; streets and highways are expected to have a certain number of vehicles per hour and there’s no changing it. But the main difference between water and traffic is that motorists have a brain, and they use it. If we spend weeks talking about traffic chaos, many motorists will use that brain of theirs and either switch to a different mode or just stay home.
The most notorious example of this was “Carmageddon” in Los Angeles. Construction necessitated the closure of I-405 through the Sepulveda Pass for two weekends in 2011, disrupting a highway that usually moves 300,000 people per day. The government spent months telling people that “Carmageddon” would be a disaster, but when the time came, so many people stayed home that traffic was actually better than on an average day.
This has serious lessons for the way we plan transportation — that our transportation choices are shaped by the options we have. I-405 doesn’t move 300,000 people per day because that’s the natural order and way of things. It moves all those people because those individuals have decided that I-405 is the best way for them to get where they’re going. If something changes, and I-405 is no longer the best option, people will adjust.
Sometimes, I get asked, “Will people really shift from driving to public transit?”
I always say that people will take the best option they have. It’s difficult to convince someone to take public transit if it takes three times as long as driving. But if things change and public transit becomes their best option, they won’t even think twice.
Google Maps
The trip from Metrotown in Burnaby to downtown Vancouver is a great example. At the moment I am writing this — 3 pm on a Monday — driving takes twice as long as public transit. So, how do we get people to shift from driving to public transit? We do it by making public transit a better option for more people. As a public transit advocate, that’s my main focus.
Geometry
Here’s the other reason that we escaped traffic mayhem this weekend: geometry. It’s the same reason that Walt Disney World Resort in Florida has one of the continent’s busiest public transit networks.
Florida is notoriously one of the most car-oriented places in the world, but to access the theme parks, hotels, and other attractions, you have to leave your car behind and get on a bus (or cart, ferry, monorail, gondola, etc.).
Walt Disney World has significantly better transit than most cities in the US.
Its 12-train-set monorail, 325 buses would make it the 16th most ridden transit system in the nation.
America’s fantasy world, it turns out, is a place you can get around without getting into a car. pic.twitter.com/oF65z6JKvI
— 𝚃𝚊𝚛𝚊𝚜 𝙶𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚌𝚘𝚎 🚇 (@grescoe) October 19, 2021
This is #Disney Skyliner – newly opened, one of the world’s largest gondola transit systems.
It moves a ton of people, connecting 2 theme parks with resorts over 3 gondola lines. Totals 10km.
It’s a system #TransLink can learn from for the #SFU Gondola. #Vancouver #vanpoli 1/9 pic.twitter.com/p5inanrt10
— Kenneth Chan (@iamkennethchan) January 26, 2020
Why would Disney World, one of the most intentionally designed environments in the world, rely so heavily on public transit in a state that actively suppresses public transit?
At big events, theme parks, and popular tourist attractions, cars simply fail. In disaster scenarios, it’s the same story. Every year, we see endless queues of cars stuck in traffic fleeing a hurricane.
Highway in Tampa, Florida. (Andriy Blokhin/Shutterstock)
Comparison of road space required for cars, a bus, and cyclists. (City of Munster)
Cars take up a lot of space. That’s fine if you’re driving down a country road — there’s lots of space available. But when you’re in a place that a lot of other people also want to be, like a theme park or a hockey game, the space that car takes up really begins to matter.
BC Place Stadium was the only North American venue on The Eras Tour that was over 3 km away from the nearest freeway. Vancouver is actually famous for being one of the only cities on the continent without a freeway link to the downtown core. It’s something we fought for.
That total absence of freeway is a bright, flashing signal to people that they should avoid driving. Many people either walked or took public transit to get to the concerts.
Instead of a freeway, our predecessors invested in SkyTrain as the main high-capacity link to get into the city. That was a stroke of genius, and the graphic below illustrates why. A SkyTrain line can move something like 15 times more people than a lane of cars.
Comparison of the capacity of various transportation modes. (NACTO)
By that math, the capacity of rail public transit into downtown Vancouver already matches or exceeds car capacity:
- Road capacity into downtown:
- Expo Boulevard/Pacific Boulevard: 2 lanes
- Georgia Street/Dunsmuir Street: 2 lanes
- Keefer Street: 1 lane
- Pender Street: 1 lane
- Hastings Street: 1 lane
- Cordova Street/Powell Street: 1 lane
- Lions Gate Bridge: 2 lanes (sometimes)
- Burrard Street: 2 lanes
- Granville Street: 2 lanes
- Cambie Street: 3 lanes
- Total: 17 lanes; 10,000 to 27,000 people per hour per direction
- Rail public transit capacity into downtown:
- SkyTrain Expo Line: 15,000 people per hour per direction (future capacity: reaching up to 25,000 people per direction with frequency increases and lengthened trains)
- SkyTrain Canada Line: 9,000 people per hour per direction (future capacity: reaching up to 15,000 people per direction with frequency increases and lengthened trains)
- West Coast Express: 3,600 people (That’s for one train, which is what they ran this weekend, but they could obviously run more.)
- Total: 27,600 people per hour per direction (future capacity: up to 40,000 people per direction for SkyTrain’s Expo and Canada lines combined, not including West Coast Express)
If you’ve ever wondered why people become so obsessed with public transit, this is one key reason. There are some things cars simply can’t do, which is why Houston, with its 18-lane freeways, still gets traffic.
By keeping freeways away from downtown and building SkyTrain, Vancouver has a massive competitive advantage over pretty much every other city in North America. We can handle major events in a way that Las Vegas only dreams of.
In fact, according to TransLink, Metro Vancouver’s public transit ridership broke new records from the surge in Swifties descending on downtown Vancouver.
But there’s so much more work to do. In the short term, bus lanes can speed up public transit access to the downtown core for all those who don’t live near SkyTrain. They cost next to nothing, can be installed in a day, and they quadruple the capacity of a regular road lane. Some of you may remember the bus-only lanes implemented for the 2010 Winter Olympics and then sadly eliminated right after.
Road closure map in downtown Vancouver during the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. (VANOC)
Road closure map in downtown Vancouver for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour concerts. (Pavco)
In the long term, there’s a missing piece in our public transit network that almost every other serious public transit city already has: a regional rail network.
Toronto has GO Transit, and Paris has RER. We need faster trains linking downtown Vancouver with Whistler and the Fraser Valley. Some bright people at Mountain Valley Express, a non-profit advocacy group, are trying to make this idea a reality.
At the end of the day, I’m not trying to convince anyone to ride public transit if it makes their lives worse. I’m trying to convince those in charge to improve public transit so it becomes an excellent option for more people.