Extra density,rail transit all wrong in Vancouver?

[vanman]

This was originally posted by en at SSC:


From newspaper: Expert: Density, Rail Transit All Wrong

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wrong way to make a region livable
Randal O'Toole
Special to the Sun


Tuesday, June 12, 2007


Property owners in the Lower Mainland face some of the strictest land-use regulations in Canada, with more than two-thirds of the region off limits to development. Not coincidentally, Vancouver also has the least affordable housing in Canada.

TransLink, the Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority, is building expensive light-rail and other transit lines, and has given relief of highway congestion the lowest priority for funding.

Not coincidentally, Vancouver shares with Toronto and Montreal the record of most time and fuel wasted per commuter of any urban area in Canada.

In 1995, the provincial government asked the Greater Vancouver Regional District to write a "strategic plan" for the region. The legislature gave planners 14 goals, including maintaining housing affordability, providing efficient transportation and protecting the unique character of communities.

The GVRD responded with its Livable Region Strategic Plan. But rather than meet all 14 goals, this plan focused on just two -- "avoiding urban sprawl" and "minimize the use of automobiles." Unfortunately, achieving these goals meant discarding several of the others.

To avoid sprawl, the GVRD closed more than 70 per cent of the region's land to development and mandated that all cities in the region accommodate growth by increasing population densities. The result has been skyrocketing housing prices and, for most families, an end to the great Canadian dream of owning your own single-family home.

To minimize automobile use, TransLink spends a large share of the region's limited transportation funds on various forms of rail transit. These expensive projects will not get a significant number of people out of their automobiles.

The growing congestion that results will only waste the time of the 90 per cent of people in the region who rely on autos as their main source of transport.

Meanwhile, the mania for density is destroying the unique character of communities. District planners directed cities and towns to move more of their residents into five-story apartments and condo towers.

Cities are also supposed to provide a "jobs-labour balance." This means cities like Surrey that have almost twice as many workers as jobs are expected to add more than 100,000 new jobs.

Meanwhile, cities like Burnaby that have more jobs than workers are supposed to discourage new businesses. The result will be that everything looks exactly alike.

Where will it end? Vancouver is already the densest major city in Canada, 14 per cent denser than Montreal and 27 per cent denser than Toronto and Victoria. The only incorporated Canadian town of any size that is denser than Vancouver (by a mere one per cent) is the Montreal suburb of Westmount.

Vancouver's Mayor Sam Sullivan says even more density is needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This argument is without foundation. Research shows that building, heating, and operating highrise condos emits more greenhouse gases than single-family homes.

Density also increases traffic congestion, and cars produce the most pollution and greenhouse gases in congested traffic.

The region will not reduce carbon emissions by forcing people to waste fuel in stop-and-go traffic.

Just who decided that "avoiding sprawl" should be the paramount goal of the region's planners anyway?

This goal should be laughable in a province that has some of the lowest population densities in the world, all of whose cities, towns, and villages cover less than one-half per cent of British Columbia.

Planners have their priorities upside down. In a province such as B.C., which is 99 per cent rural open space, or even a region such as Vancouver, which is more than 70 per cent open space, keeping housing affordable is more important the preserving every last acre of undeveloped land.

Nearly three out of four Canadians aspire to live in a single-family home with a yard. The yards people want to own are some of the most valuable sources of open space and outdoor recreation a city can have. Denying this goal to most of the region's residents makes Vancouver less livable, not more.

Discouraging driving is even dumber. Besides being the most convenient form of urban transport ever invented, autos have given Canadians access to better jobs, housing and recreation, and Canadians are not going to give them up.

If driving has problems, such as greenhouse gas emissions, fix those problems. One of the world's leading alternative fuel research labs is located right in Burnaby, yet planners chose social engineering over technical solutions to pollution.

Government strategic planning inevitably does more harm than good. The province should break up the GVRD and TransLink into decentralized, user-fee-driven agencies each focusing on a specific mission such as sewers or transit.

Land-use planning should be turned over to the cities, or better yet, private landowners.

Local governments should focus on providing effective urban services, not on changing people's lifestyles.

Randal O'Toole (rot@cato.org) is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., and author of The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths: How Smart Growth Harms American Cities.

- - -

Randal O'Toole will speak on this topic at the Fraser Institute, 1770 Burrard,at noon on June 20.

For tickets, call 604-714-4578.
__________________
Visit my former Japan student exchange blog
http://ngaie.blogspot.com

[vanman]

Ah, double post, delete.

[CBeats]

I know this is old - I wasn't on the forum when it was posted - but still...



Anti-smart growth? Promote urban sprawl and automobile use? What!? This guy is crazier than any one of our local nutjobs.

[touraccuracy]

O'Tool, indeed.

[crazyjoeda]

Yeah, we have all that land just being wasted to grow food. Vancouver should look to LA for sustainable growth solutions we should demand less transit and more freeways! We have an endless supply of oil and a little more co2 and pollution would only make the sunset look more beautiful.

That guy is nuts, why did you waste my time by posting this ridiculousness.

[geoff's two cents]

I initially thought it was just some crank writing a letter to the editor, until I saw that he actually expects people to pay to hear him spout this garbage. Perhaps, if tickets are cheap enough, we could crash his party. . . .

[rather_draconian]

I think the stupidest part is that he insists that BC has 99% OPEN RURAL SPACE, suggesting that we can build on it or something. Where are you from? Why do you think everyone lives in the lower mainland? Because it's not a big rocky mountain!

[Delirium]

"Vancouver's Mayor Sam Sullivan says even more density is needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This argument is without foundation. Research shows that building, heating, and operating highrise condos emits more greenhouse gases than single-family homes."

duh! but there's more than one family living in a high-rise. multiply 200 single family homes versus one highrise with 200 units and tell me which is worse.
what an idiot!

[djmk]

this article is from Randal O'Toole from the Cato Institute.

the cato institute is this right wing think tank/lobby group which promotes the American values of "limited government, free markets, individual liberty, and peace" within the US and all over the world. These were the ideals of the American Revolution and these people fight for these ideals. I believe they call themselves "libertarians" but i think they are more like uber-capitalists.

if you re-read this article, what Randal is saying is that we wants market forces to determine how this city is shaped and that people are smart enough to make their own decisions on car ownership and where they build their homes.

of course it all rubbish

[G-Slice]

The Montreal suburb of Westmount?

This guy is pretty dumb.

[nickinacan]

I don't think that he is entirely incorrect though.

I find that these arguments seem to focus on the polar extremes of society. It is always the "More transit, less highways" crowd versus the "more highways, less transit" crowd. We've done the more transit route for the last 20+ years and let our highway system decay, since the eco-hippies have rallied in force to get things like skytrain, rapidbus, community shuttles and more buses. Has it been effective? Has it reduced traffic like they said it would? The answer is a resounding no.

Now look at the flip side of things. Instead of investing in public transit, we could have built giant highways to get everyone from point a to point b and back again. But has this solution worked in other cities? Definitely not.

The solution is to find a balance between the two ideals. Focus on the middle ground rather than the radicals on either end of the spectrum. Build some highways AND some public transit. Give people options to get where they need to go. Sure I am a supporter of Gateway, as it is needed, however it angers me that there wasn't a bigger use of public transit in the project, although other public transit projects have been announced.

As for density, not everyone wants to live in a high rise, not everyone wants to live in a townhouse/condo, and not everyone wants to live in a house. Just that statement should sum up that density should mixed, not uniform. Of course there is a bias to high density on this board...

[Locked In]

Originally Posted by geoff's two cents

I initially thought it was just some crank writing a letter to the editor, until I saw that he actually expects people to pay to hear him spout this garbage. Perhaps, if tickets are cheap enough, we could crash his party. . . .

The original post is almost 2 years old, so I imagine he's long gone and forgotten - hopefully stuck in traffic on a highway somewhere

IMO, this article gets it wrong on an almost line-by-line basis. You almost have to give him credit for having such a mish-mash of partisan arrogance, faulty logic, and short-sightedness published in a real newspaper though! Some personal lowlights:

"rail transit...will not get a significant number of people out of their automobiles" (?)
"the mania for density is destroying the unique character of communities" (?)
"avoiding sprawl... should be laughable in a province that has some of the lowest population densities in the world" (?)

That's not to mention the bits touched on by other posters: a ridiculous comparison between greenhouse gas emissions from SFHs versus multi-unit residential, and the non-sequitar about Westmount.

Anyways, rant off. Sorry for contributing to keeping this thread alive way past its time...

Edit: I entirely agree with nickinacan's comment that a balance is required. However, it doesn't sound like O'Toole is advocating anything close to a balanced, realistic approach to transportation or land-use planning. He seems to be advocating the abolishment of urban containment boundaries, the ALR, rapid transit, and (possibly) land use regulation in general(?). He equates greenfield development with affordable housing. He attempts to portray growth boundaries as being solely responsible for increased housing prices. He entirely misconstrues the role of municipalities under the LRSP in respect to population and job growth. I just think that his positions on a lot of these issues and the various bits of misinformation sprinkled throughout the article make it very difficult to take what he says seriously.

[G-Slice]

Of course people prefer single-family homes to high-density living. You get more space and a yard. The problem is that in order to make that lifestyle affordable, single-family housing has moved progressively further away from the kinds of places the occupants of those homes need to travel.

The result has been a host of additional costs for government to provide services to those areas. From the municipal governments that pay for more water pipes and garbage collection in spread-out neighbourhoods, to provincial governments paying for new highway projects and increased health costs from sedentary lifestyles and air pollution from car travel. Then there are the less tangible costs to everybody, such as having noisy, unsightly, and polluting highways cutting off neighbourhoods from one another. And of course, we can't avoid mentioning climate change brought on by suburbanites using comparatively more energy to heat their larger homes and traveling by car. Even suburbanites who chose to take public transit are emitting more carbon than a city-dweller because there are generally fewer passengers on each bus.

The problem is that these costs are in large part borne equally by everybody, even by those who chose to live a lifestyle that imposes fewer costs on the rest of society.

In spite of everything I wrote above, I am really not suggesting that we should demonize suburbanites or legislate restrictions on urban sprawl. Rather, we need to take steps to more fairly impose the costs of suburban life on people living in the suburbs, rather than forcing city dwellers to subsidize them. If we can manage to do that, people will have a better idea of how much their lifestyle really costs and make choices accordingly.

[Kwik-E-Mart]

Ahh... Let's move on folks. There's nothing to see from the Cato Institute.

[Architype]

There are two sides to every argument, but one side is usually wrong. Increased density does involve some increase in the cost of housing (same in Europe), but it's the sprawl that causes most of the problems such as traffic congestion and long term environmental costs.

[racc]

Originally Posted by nickinacan

The solution is to find a balance between the two ideals. Focus on the middle ground rather than the radicals on either end of the spectrum. Build some highways AND some public transit. Give people options to get where they need to go. Sure I am a supporter of Gateway, as it is needed, however it angers me that there wasn't a bigger use of public transit in the project, although other public transit projects have been announced.

Currently, there is no balance. After decades of almost exclusively investing in roads before the 1980s, our transportation system is way out of balance. To suggest that somehow going forward that "balanced" investment in roads and transit will create a balanced system, is simply not true. Massive investment in transit required to address the current imbalance. Unfortunately, South of the Fraser, pretty much all transportation investments are in roads and highways, creating even more imbalance in the system. To suggest, as the Minster of Transportation does, that the investment in the Canada Line somehow "balances" the investment in roads in other parts of the region is ridiculous. Taking the Canada Line is not an option for people in Surrey and Langley.

If you want a balanced transportation system, which I believe is a great ideal, we need to invest almost exclusively in transit for a couple of decades at least.

[mthq]

I think ShatterStar was talking more about himself when referring to 4 or 5 children which would be no surprise considering his education on urbanism and its solutions were last relevant in the 1950s and 60s.

[vid]

Wow, he was active for what, 45 minutes?

[WBC]

Originally Posted by G-Slice

Of course people prefer single-family homes to high-density living. You get more space and a yard. The problem is that in order to make that lifestyle affordable, single-family housing has moved progressively further away from the kinds of places the occupants of those homes need to travel.

I don't agree with this statement. I prefer not having to do house maintenance and yard work. I also prefer conveniences that a modern condo brings - pools, gyms, being close to shopping, transit, entertianment, etc. And don't also forget that many families living in a house have less space than condo dwellers when you account for the fact that large number of people actually rent out a sizable chunk of the house to support their mortgage payments.

[Whalleyboy]

Originally Posted by nickinacan

I don't think that he is entirely incorrect though.

I find that these arguments seem to focus on the polar extremes of society. It is always the "More transit, less highways" crowd versus the "more highways, less transit" crowd. We've done the more transit route for the last 20+ years and let our highway system decay, since the eco-hippies have rallied in force to get things like skytrain, rapidbus, community shuttles and more buses. Has it been effective? Has it reduced traffic like they said it would? The answer is a resounding no.

Now look at the flip side of things. Instead of investing in public transit, we could have built giant highways to get everyone from point a to point b and back again. But has this solution worked in other cities? Definitely not.

The solution is to find a balance between the two ideals. Focus on the middle ground rather than the radicals on either end of the spectrum. Build some highways AND some public transit. Give people options to get where they need to go. Sure I am a supporter of Gateway, as it is needed, however it angers me that there wasn't a bigger use of public transit in the project, although other public transit projects have been announced.

As for density, not everyone wants to live in a high rise, not everyone wants to live in a townhouse/condo, and not everyone wants to live in a house. Just that statement should sum up that density should mixed, not uniform. Of course there is a bias to high density on this board...

i can agree on lack of transit used for gateway. i am all for gateway but they should have did more transit stuff for it like a bus from central to the ferries along SFPR would be great in my eyes