Granville Street Plan
Transit mall vs. pedestrian-only mall
The city has released a proposal for Granville Street downtown.
Currently it’s a major transit corridor, with bus routes running directly past Vancouver City Centre station and Granville Station. In the wake of Covid, public safety is a major concern, there’s not many pedestrians during the day, and there’s a fair number of vacant storefronts.
The proposal is to move bus routes to Howe and to Seymour, and to make Granville a pedestrian-only mall. The idea is that this will encourage people to visit Granville, which will be good both for business and for safety.
Weighing costs and benefits
Making a decision like this involves weighing costs and benefits.
The main cost here appears to be moving the bus routes, so that people have to walk farther to get to or from the SkyTrain stations. It’s a small cost, multiplied by a large number of people.
The main benefit is that a pedestrian-only mall could potentially encourage more visitors.
At this point, it seems to me that the cost outweighs the benefit. Making a street a pedestrian-only mall works best when there’s already a lot of pedestrians. If you create a pedestrian mall, and there’s not many people around, it’s not going to be very attractive. Advice from the Global Designing Cities Initiative:
Explore pedestrianization when pedestrians overflow onto the roadbed on a regular basis.
Carefully select streets to be pedestrianized based on immediate context. Lack of pedestrians can render these streets unsafe and uninviting. Pedestrian-only streets should be situated in high-density, mixed-use office or commercial areas where pedestrian numbers are high.
More
City website with the proposal
January 2023 staff report with the initial scope of work
September 2022 vision document from the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association. The list of issues on Page 11 has “high crime levels” and “vacant storefronts” at the top.
As Vancouver unveils Granville strip revitalization plans, businesses struggle. Jon Hernandez, CBC News.
This is the proposed car-free transformation of the Granville Entertainment District. Kenneth Chan, Daily Hive.
Cost-Benefit Analysis as an Expression of Liberal Neutrality. Chapter 5 of The Machinery of Government (2020), by Joseph Heath.
The transit advocacy group Movement has issued a press release opposing the proposal.
This proposal runs the risk of getting buses stuck in traffic, and making vulnerable riders less safe.
If the buses aren't running on Granville, they'll be running on Howe (southbound) and Seymour (northbound). Those are streets with narrow sidewalks, poor lighting, and no bus lanes. They are further away from connection points to SkyTrain and other buses. And they are further from the retail businesses on Granville that many are travelling to.
Some of these concerns can be mitigated by redesigning Seymour and Howe. For example, the sidewalks can be widened, street lighting added, and bus lanes can be added too. But other challenges can't be mitigated.
Right now, transfers between buses and trains at Granville and Georgia are very simple. The stop you get off at is generally beside the stop you'll want to board at. All the stops and stations are easy to see. Moving that transfer point a block away will make things more difficult to understand for occasional riders and tourists. It will add at least 150m of walking or rolling, which will be especially hard for people using wheelchairs or strollers.
The press release also notes:
Granville Street's buses serve nearly 80,000 trips per day. With two bus-only lanes, Granville has more capacity than the eight vehicle lanes on Howe and Seymour. It certainly isn't perfect, but it does enormous heavy lifting in the city's transportation network. 16,000 of those trips start with someone boarding a bus in the Downtown segment of Granville.
The press release links to a couple examples of attractive streets which include transit:
Maybe I’m missing some nuance here. But it seems like “no cars” and “yes busses” are being treated as mutually exclusive when they don’t have to be?
The compromise doesn’t seem too out of bounds compared to similar projects: narrow the street to two bus only lanes, use the reclaimed area for pedestrianisation, and use natural speed-reducing features- like brick roads, raised pedestrian crossings, and trees lining the road- to make it feel pedestrian-owned and safer