Living in a living city
"We learned how to survive. Now we have to learn how to live." So says Gil Peñalosa, Executive Director of 8-80 Cities and keynote speaker at the Moving the Future conference here in Vancouver.
Mayor Gregor Robertson noted in his welcoming speech that the transportation decisions we make— or refuse to make— will profoundly shape the future version of the Metro Vancouver area. He said that there was already “an incredible amount of agreement about what we need to do,” but the very existence of this conference suggested that such agreement is not universal. Robertson said that we definitely need to invest in more transit, as well as promote walkability: "We’re not going to attract the best and brightest students from all over the world... if they’re spending a couple hours a day in transit.”
After all, as was repeated over the course of the day, Metro Vancouver is expecting another million people to call this area home by 2046, not getting ahead of the transportation issue will knock Vancouver off its most-desirable-city pedestal. Robertson was optimistic, though, saying, “We have every reason to believe that we can take our transportation network from good to great.”
Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts lamented her own commute to the Convention Centre this morning: the drive took over an hour when leaving at around 6am. Had she opted to take the SkyTrain, it would not have helped much: Watts would still have had to drive 30 minutes to the nearest station.
Watts was the first to mention The Gateway, our portal to the rest of the Asia-Pacific region. Watts said that we have 28 major marine cargo terminals in 16 metro-Vancouver cities, as well as over a million trucks crossing the border annually and $1.9billion worth of goods transported by train. Congestion, said Watts, costs us $1.5 billion annually. “Getting people out of their cars, cars off the road, you’re lessening congestion. It’s not rocket science.”
It is, however, political science, which Peñalosa would mention later on.
“The investment we make in this region has to be significant, "Watts insisted, and that we must “put politics aside and ensure we’re doing the right thing for the future.”
Service industry
The British Columbia stereotype may involve lumberjacks, but our real industry is veering towards the service economy. Ken Peacock, Chief Economist and Vice President of the Business Council of BC, noted that our trajectory takes us towards a stronger connection with the rest of Asia-Pacific. Basically, we’re hitched to China’s rapid-development star. Metro-Vancouver growth eclipses that of any other part of BC said Peacock, “more than double what’s happening in the rest of the province."
Peacock (who also had a crappy commute) noted that our exports to the Pacific Rim are now equal to what we export to the USA, adding that the transportation and logistics industry plays an important role in the expansion of that service base.
Roads, tracks, and SkyTrain lines are the circulatory system of Metro-Vancouver, and we need a strong cardio program to get our region through this next growth spurt. That growth will come from education and training, business and tourism markets for the rest of the province, employment opportunities, head offices of companies that operate elsewhere, and gateway connections, Metro-Vancouver is the linchpin for British Columbia’s health; and a healthy metro region depends on efficient growth of our transportation infrastructure.
Guess which one of these modes of transportation is in the crosshairs.
UBC President and Vice-Chancellor Stephen Toope was the first to tie this issue to the upcoming Broadway Corridor referendum. The Broadway Corridor connects most of the tech industry in Vancouver, as well as 40% of the healthcare industry. Toope compared it to London’s tech city, SD’s Connect, and Toronto’s MaRS Discover District, though we did not come off well in the comparison. We don’t have that sort of infrastructure support in Vancouver, he said, “and we’re going to suffer for it if we don’t create it.”
Peacock drily predicted the near future: "I don’t think that the risk is that we’re going to over invest.” Toope agreed, and by doing so disagreed with Robertson's assessment of our current transit arrangement. There is, Toope said, "a lot of positive talk about the Vancouver development model”, but “the one place we have failed is public transit.” He added, “I don’t think it’s more than adequate.” It's not a problem Vancouver can solve on its own, warned Toope: “We have to think about partnership as the model”, from civic governments on up. He added that there's a “huge risk that this won’t happen.”
Gavin McGarrigle, BC Area Director of Unifor, said that we should start with with the low-hanging fruit: more fuel-efficient vehicles and more transit. Why, he wondered, doesn't Canada have anything like the USA's Cash for Clunkers program? (The Car Allowance Rebate System was not the economic boon the public had hoped for, though it did work in terms of fast-tracking the retirement of nearly 700,000 gas-guzzling vehicles. So, that may answer McGarrigle's question.)
McGarrigle described the 2012 Olympics as “transit nirvana”, noting that TransLink's network was widely available, and widely publicized. (There was a stick as well as a carrot, though: if you were driving in from outside the Vancouver core, the traffic would have been agonizing.)
Peacock, a “technology optimist”, sees self-driving cars on the road by the end of the decade. Such vehicles have the potential to reshape traffic patterns, but, as Toope pointed out, they’re still single-occupancy vehicles.
As a Google image search for "Beijing traffic jam" will demonstrate, it makes no difference how efficient or automated your car is: only so many can fit on a road at once.
One ride in Bangkok makes the hard man humble
Michael Goldberg, Dean Emeritus of the UBC Sauder School of Business, spoke to Vancouver's emerging importance in Asia while not missing a chance to ruffle the feathers of those involved our city's ongoing real-estate development debate.
Goldberg said that Vancouver used to be the back-end of Europe, but is now at the front door of Asia; pointing to our shift towards services. The aforementioned Gateway, insisted Goldberg, is part of our reality: it's not just about the movement of goods, but the people attached to them.
Goldberg placed us between Hong Kong and Bangkok when it comes to transit integration. He mentioned a recent trip to Hong Kong, during which he had 13 meetings in one day. He relied on the transit system and its many redundancies, and was therefore “always on time, never stressed.” Bangkok was pretty much was the opposite of that: it's a sprawled city where transit hasn’t caught up or innovated. Hong Kong managed transit growth well; Bangkok has not. “Unfortunately, we’re looking more and more like a Bangkok... unless we get transit investment right," warned Goldberg. Otherwise, “Bangkok is our future.”
Robertson had mentioned the potential for Vancouver to attract great minds from around the world, but we face the flip side if we can't scale up in a commuter-friendly way: brain drain.
Goldberg champions a “highly-focused, compact region” focused on transit nodes, which will also reduce pollution, since we'd be living close to the arteries through which we travel. “When I look ahead, I see an economy that’s very robust... we need a transit and land-use system that’s equally robust.” Achieving this, he said, requires a “significant rethinking” of how we move people and goods. TransLink has huge responsibility, but no authority. It's just the service provider and occasional public-opinion punching bag.
He turned to Commercial and Broadway, Ground Zero of the Grandview-Woodlands showdown.
Goldberg described the area as “Safeway and a parking lot, and a whole lot of junk retail”, adding that building high-rises there makes sense> He said that the locals opposing the Emerging Directions plan were “uninformed” and making decisions “based on fear”. Was he considering who would live in those high rises? If they're unaffordable to workaday East Van residents, they'd end up moving further east, and therefore towers would not be solving the density problem at all. The argument that density equals affordability is just too simplistic, and is not really borne out by our city's experience.
(Peñalosa's keynote speech hit on that point again and again: we are not army ants who only go to and from our places of employment. We live in the city, which means we play in the city. We hope and dream and laugh and love and cry in the city. How we develop has to take this into account, or conferences like Moving the Future are a colossal waste of time.)
Goldberg said that transit has to “go where people live.” At the moment, it doesn't, he noted, saying that Vancouver comes second only to Los Angeles in terms of traffic congestion, second only to Hong Kong in terms of housing costs. Not a great combination. “Our affordability problem can be helped enormously,” he said, by integrating our transit and land-use policies.
Andrew Ramlo, Executive Director of Urban Futures, told the audience that 2.7 million of us live in Lower Mainland as of 2013. The projection for 2046: 4.3 million. That's a 56% population growth; and 1.6 million more people will be moving around the region. Going forward, Ramlo said, seniors make up the largest growing demographic. Aging into retirement will of course affect where they go and how they get there. Also, speaking to the notion that we do more than just work here, two-thirds of transit journeys are for purposes other than work.
Ramlo noted that not everyone wants to be stuffed into a 600-square-foot condo on Kingsway. What about single-family homes, he wondered. What about ditching RS-1 zoning and allowing duplexes?
The podium tower is not Vancouver's only option: Paris-style medium-density development is also possible, and can lead to healthy, street-life-friendly communities without blocking out the sun. To this end, Goldberg mentioned Europe's track record of developing first around the bicycle, then around transit.
You gotta fight for your right
In his keynote, Gil Peñalosa tied many of these thoughts together by presenting the city as a shared life experience. Therefore, he said, everyone who lives in a city should be able to move around easily and safely. His company, 8-80 Cities, takes its name from the idea that an eight-year-old and an 80-year-old should be able to navigate an urban landscape with ease. As he put it, "We gotta stop building communities as if everyone was 30 years old and athletic!"
Peñalosa got switched on at Habitat Forum 76, during his first visit to Vancouver. That event brought about a fundamental change in how its attendees saw life in the city, and what that life could be.
Peñalosa would go on to plan and develop over 200 parks in Bogota, Colombia; as well as consult on human-friendly urban development all over the world. He clearly loves his work.
In dissing Toronto Mayor Rob Ford ("Arrogant and ignorant"), Peñalosa stressed the value of a proactive mayor. Bogota has 1/8 the GDP of Vancouver, insisted Peñalosa: a healthy transit system is a political problem. You can't half-ass these things: a single bike lane is useless unless it's part of a larger grid. Walking and cycling, said Peñalosa, "should be a right."
If you want rights, you have to do what the song says and fight for them. In Peñalosa's ideal city, the car is the first casualty of that fight. This is so it can inflict fewer casualties on people (over 270,000 pedestrian deaths a year caused by cars: Stephen King wrote a book about that, right?).
While nobody would take your car away by force, the city's development path would make driving the least attractive option: you'd have buses, subways, buses that behave like subways, bicycles, and, of course, your own two feet: that's how all journeys begin and end. Peñalosa said, "Birds fly, fish swim, people walk."
Dollars and sense
For her part, Nancy Olewiler, Chair of the TransLink Board of Directors, also pointed out an aspect of transit ridership that's both responsibility-deflecting and sanity-nurturing: “Nothing is your fault anymore. If you’re late, it’s the driver’s fault.” Congestion still exists, of course, but you have no control of it at all. All you can do, and therefore all you should do, is sit back and finish your Sudoku.
Expanding a transit system costs money, and that's the crux of the political problem. Exacerbating it is the fact that, as Peñalosa said, politicians and public-sector decision-makers are rewarded for avoiding change, or at least enacting change as detrimentally as possible. That won't be good enough, though, he added.
In contrast, he pointed to Cheonggyecheon, a two-level mega-freeway that was torn out and replaced with a linear park. A slap in the face to car culture, and a profound reimagining of space usage in the big city.
Imagine if the High Line replaced the West Side Highway instead of an unused railway. Insane? Yes, so much so that then-Mayor Lee Myung-bak went on to become Prime Minister of South Korea.
New York Metropolitan Transit Authority Chair Tom Prendergast, who once ran TransLink, put it bluntly:“You don’t run public transportation systems at a profit, that’s why they’re in the public sector.”
New York City's transit system moves around eight million people a day The concept of Bridge and Tunnel doesn’t only provide stereotypes, but also tolls. Prendergast said that those tolls added up to a $950-million cash infusion last year.
Where are the ladies who move the future?
Peñalosa and Prendergast both mentioned the New York City dream team of Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, who were instrumental in New York's people-friendly makeover.
Why weren't they on a Moving the Future panel? In fact, no women appeared in any of the panels; it was like going to a stereotypical tech conference. When asked why the ladies were restricted to a few short speeches and TransLink Chair Nancy Olewiler was only on moderation duty, a staffer for the Pace Group, which organized the conference, said that she had “no idea” why there are no women on the panels. A (female) TransLink attendee with whom I was sitting noticed it as well. She told me, “Transit is traditionally male-dominated, but that’s changing.”
Hopefully we'll see that reflected in our urban development conferences.