Can Vancouver’s public transit be more European?

Image by Tristan Johnston

While Vancouver often scores high on quality-of-life indexes, European cities usually score higher, such on this year’s Mercer report, which put Vienna, Zurich and Munich at first, second and fifth respectively while Vancouver sat fifth. What’s holding Vancouver back?

Quality-of-life ratings usually take into account statistics such as crime rate, pollution, laws, health care and others. Infrastructure often weighs heavily.

Vienna has five subway lines, several trams, regional trains, buses and plenty of bike lanes. Some of the trams and subway lines make each other redundant, meaning you can take the same route over or above ground in some cases. Everything runs at frequent intervals at peak times, and the subway runs 24 hours on Saturday and Sunday, making nightlife much more appealing and safer.

By comparison, Vancouver has three lines and a massive system of buses. Trains don’t run late, which is fine if you’re partying in Yaletown and live in the West End, but problematic if you party on Granville Street and live in Surrey.

In many ways, the comparison is rather unfair. Vienna is a capital city, hundreds of years old, while Vancouver, thousands of kilometres from Ottawa, wasn’t incorporated until 1886. Train travel in general is ingrained in European culture, as is the acceptance of higher taxes for amenities like heavily subsidized (or free) schooling and infrastructure development.

“There are cultural differences, I’d say in two perspectives,” Bob Paddon, executive vice-president of Translink said. “Modes of travel: in some cultures it’s just… People grow up using it and that’s just how they think about getting around. In the denser cities, they wouldn’t think about using cars the way we do. North American cities were built around private car use and that has played a role in shaping our cities. The other would be concepts of taxation, ‘How do we provide for the public good?’ It varies country to country. In North America, there are some strong views that we should limit taxation, and that we should be very, very efficient with anything we use in the public sector.”

Image by Tristan Johnston

What if we did increase taxes? Even if we had more money, or were more willing to spend it, wouldn’t we get more infrastructure built?

“Things vary quite a lot in European countries,” said Paddon. “You don’t have a provincial government, you got the federal government and the city. Sweden is another example. They use income tax revenues to fund transportation investments. We don’t do that here, we’ve funded it in other ways. What’s interesting though is when we visit these cities as tourists, we tend to look at the older areas that are more built up. When you go further out into the suburban areas, they don’t look much different from our cities, and they’re grappling with the same problems we’re grappling with.”

On the other hand, doesn’t Vancouver have a lot of lessons to learn from Vienna and other European cities? There has been some discussion about getting a new subway line between UBC and Broadway-Commercial, although tramways are being suggested. If we were learning from Europe, we’d understand that long-term solutions that are expensive now are superior to cheap solutions that we’ll regret later.

“These older cities have had a lot of investment. New York City hasn’t had a new subway line in 50 years. They’re building a new one now, but they finished it in the ’50s. What are they looking at now? Bus rapid transit,” Paddon says.

The now-successful Canada Line took a lot of work to get built. There was a lot of opposition, but it has been successful, perhaps more so than anticipated. The required break-even point of 100,000 weekday ridership was considered unrealistic in 2004 by mayors of Pitt Meadows and Burnaby, but the Canada Line reached that point a year after opening.

“There was a man I knew in North Vancouver [who said], ‘Who would use such a thing? No one would want to drag their suitcase onto a train to go to the airport.’ I saw him the other day, he can’t imagine life without it anymore,” says Paddon.

Image by Tristan Johnston