Pedestrian Friendly Streets

The suburbs

For transit to be successful, riders must feel comfortable walking to and from transit stops. Unfortunately, many areas of Greater Vancouver do not provide an environment which considers pedestrian travel as a serious mode, even for short trips. This ambivalence makes using transit in these areas impractical as walks to the transit stop are inevitably long and unpleasant.

In newer, pedestrian hostile developments the bias against the pedestrian is obvious. Zoning regulations prevent residences, service businesses and places of employment from being within reasonable walking distance of each other. Housing subdivisions are frequently constructed such that a walk to the corner store for milk is a major expedition. Few sidewalks and massive garages and driveways serve as disincentives to walking.

Worse still are the grossly misnamed office parks with their reflective glass pill boxes sitting in a sea of parking lots and broad roadways. These developments, which rely on subsidised road access for their existence, draw businesses from established areas based on their artificially low costs. For the employee who wants to do a little shopping at lunch or meet with friends, the only option is to get into the car and drive. An employee in an established business area could accomplish these tasks with a short walk down the street, not so in the office park. Not only does this lead to numerous polluting and congesting short car trips, it creates a tremendous appetite for land. Parking must be in great supply with a space for each employee and customer. This is inherently inefficient as each space will only be used for a small part of the day. In more traditional business areas, the same space could be used for different purposes at different times of the day: commuter parking in the day, shopper parking in the late afternoon, and entertainment parking in the evening. The vast space required for parking and access roadways in office parks means walking and transit are a choice travel mode only for the hardy few.

Office parks have proliferated in many of the suburban municipalities of the Lower Mainland. Richmond even seems to be proud of the state-of-the-art office parks within its borders. Richmond has also provided poor examples by nearly relocating its city hall out of its regional town centre and approving the construction of a new aquatic centre in a remote area, over a kilometre from the nearest transit route and housing of any consequence. Municipalities which promote office parks and low density, automobile oriented housing are foregoing the chance to create a multi-purpose town centre in favour of anonymous, destructive urban sprawl.

The city of Vancouver

Despite the rhetoric put out by the City of Vancouver and GVRD that pedestrians and cyclists are to receive greater priority than the automobile, most traffic signals indicate otherwise.

Pedestrian controlled crosswalk signals give priority to cars by delaying activation of "walk" signals. This is often done to co-ordinate traffic signals, in theory reducing the delay to traffic. However, in many cases the traffic flow is not consistent enough for this to be successful. A better approach would be for the traffic signal to begin to change as soon as a pedestrian button is pressed. A minimum green time for traffic could be used to prevent undue traffic congestion. Giving the pedestrian more priority could result in fewer accidents as fewer pedestrians would become frustrated and cross against the light.

In downtown Vancouver pedestrians are faced with delayed walk signals while paralleling automobile traffic gets a head start to turn across the crosswalk. This inconveniences pedestrians and can result in "phase theft" where a stream of turning cars prevents the use of the crosswalk during the ensuing walk phase.

In Montréal many downtown signals are set up to give pedestrians priority by prohibiting turning traffic for the duration of the "walk" signal. Turning vehicles must wait for pedestrians, not vice-versa. Vancouver traffic engineers could learn some lessons from Montréal.

Overly wide streets, such as Cambie at 16th, and Pacific Boulevard, acquire "freeway" characteristics which make them pedestrian hostile. The City should take the messages of CityPlan seriously and take steps to calm the speedways it has created from Vancouver's streets.