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© 2008 PageFiller Ltd and Associates www.pagefiller.com

LETTITOR

 

 

A funny thing happened on my way to the suburbs...

Liam Britten
editor in chief

t seems like all my friends, for some

strange reason, chose to be born between

February and May. This means, like the
good friend I am, I spend a good number of
my weekends travelling to various birthday
festivities during these months.

Like most parties attended by 20-
somethings, pubs, clubs, bars and house
basements are our usual venues, any place
where the drinks flow plentifully, really. And
since I’ve been making friends with people
my age who maybe didn’t go to my high
school or live in the neighbourhood, these
partying expeditions have been taking me
farther and farther afield.

Now, I may not be the smartest guy in
the world, but I’m not dumb enough to drink
and drive. I’d rather not lose my license,
thanks. This means that whenever I make a
trip to party someplace, my good friends at
TransLink are doing the driving. This works
out okay when I’m going someplace like
Vancouver or Burnaby, but really, anywhere
else in the GVRD is brutal when it comes to
transit accessibility.

It’s not just late night transit riding that
bites this hard. From my house in Southside
Port Coquitlam, it takes me about 40 minutes
to take a bus and the SkyTrain to the New
West campus. However, if I want to go to the
David Lam campus, in Coquitlam, it takes
me anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour
and 15 minutes, depending on if I make the
connection in time (a rarity).

How does this make sense? Three
quarters of Metro Vancouver’s population
lives outside of the City of Vancouver, yet
very little of these areas outside Vancouver
proper have anything more than infrequent bus
service for transportation; unless, of course,
you count privately. owned cars, which we’re
supposed to be abandoning in favour of public

transit that doesn’t exist.

I’m not one of those global warming
sceptics or anything like that; I’m 100 per
cent convinced that over-reliance on privately
owned cars for transportation is a very large,
very solvable contributor to our carbon output
in Canada and global warming overall. But I
think that if policymakers are encouraging us
to avoid using cars and adding disincentives
like gas taxes and higher parking rates to
curb their use, there needs to be a practical
alternative.

The chief dollars-and-cents arguments
against improving transit services is that the
way the Lower Mainland is built doesn’t make
transit cost effective. Sprawling suburbs make
transit too expensive to serve a large number
of people, they say. It would cost too much to
service far-flung areas of the region. Why not
change things, then?

I think the first step ought to be a GVRD-
wide plan for future construction, particularly
of residential areas, that increases density
and decreases urban sprawl. The government
could start by taking a bold stand against
property speculators and others who drive up
the cost of real estate in the Lower Mainland
by putting some sort of price control on
land purchases; otherwise, in a free market
economy like ours, why would a developer
choose to build his project on expensive land
that improves density when he could just buy
cheap land out in the boonies that will only
contribute to urban sprawl and make services
like transit more expensive and difficult to
provide?

Is this pie-in-the-sky thinking? I don’t
think so. If governments at all levels are
serious about climate change, let’s start by
improving transit. There are easy ways to do
it, so why not start now?

Your friend in high fidelity,
Liam Britten
Editor-in-chief

The Other Press

 

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