VANCOUVER—April 23, 1947. The last streetcar ever to make a trip as part of North Vancouver’s 41-year-old public transportation system rolled into storage at 1:15 a.m. Over the next two years the tracks it ran on would be paved over and just like in cities across North America, project “rails to rubber” would be complete.

Much has changed in the region since that day in 1947 — governments have come and gone, municipalities have merged and divided — but the one constant has been the lack of public transportation. Instead, infrastructure in the region has centred on cars, trucks, and, where public transit exists, buses.

As skyrocketing real estate prices push people to relocate from downtown Vancouver to points north or south, this lack of public transit has created a situation similar to many other suburban areas across Canada, where the supremacy of the car is the driving force in transportation plans. The result has been people working from home or adding hours onto their day with long commutes.

Anyone who has inched their way through Montreal’s Anjou arrondissement or played a game of soccer to bide their time on Toronto’s bumper-to-bumper highways understands why Canadian traffic jams have long triggered calls for better public transit funding. But in Vancouver at least, help could be on the way.

Two funding commitments totalling $500,000 from three levels of government will produce two studies: one on the feasibility of constructing a rapid transit line between Vancouver and the north shore, and another that will assess the feasibility of rapid transit across the region’s three municipalities.

Community stakeholders say the studies might help the gridlocked region north of Vancouver justify large scale transit investments that would be the region’s first since the streetcar system was dismantled decades ago. They say the prospect of a sea change in how people get around could be do or die, not only for the north shore, but for the development of every community from North Vancouver to Pemberton.

Nicole Sugden is a University of British Columbia post-doctoral researcher who moved to Squamish from Vancouver about a year ago. On a traffic-free day, it takes her about an hour and fifteen minutes to make the 75 kilometre drive between the university and Squamish. But delays, especially on the Lions Gate Bridge connecting the north shore with Vancouver, can easily add another hour.

Sugden gets around that by working from home if possible. When she has to go to the university, she carpools with a friend to the north shore, then cycles the additional 20 kilometres to UBC.

“Even if it’s rainy it’s quite a lot nicer than sitting in the car traffic, not moving, and getting nowhere,” Sugden said of the trip, which takes about two hours door-to-door.

She’s among the professionals who have chosen the Sea-to-Sky region’s lower housing costs and hiking and biking trails over the convenience of living close to where they work in Vancouver. The B.C. government estimates the population of the Sea-to-Sky region grew by about 10 per cent between 2014 and 2019, a bump of about 3,500 people.

The area’s population is projected to increase by another 4,000 people by 2025. While the population grows, there’s no train or public bus that makes the route between Squamish and Vancouver, so the only reliable option to get between those places is to drive.

Sugden knows the marathon bike ride and rigid carpool schedule she uses isn’t feasible for everyone. Since moving to Squamish she’s noticed a surprising number of people along the route who appear to hitchhike as their main way of getting around. She herself would prefer to take public transit — if it was fast, and economical.

A bus connection between Metro Vancouver and the Sea-to-Sky region is currently being considered by the province and Metro Vancouver’s transportation authority, which could meet some of the growing demand to move people without the use of single occupancy vehicles. But experts say cutting down delays along the route also requires tackling the north shore’s reliance on cars, and the paralyzing traffic congestion that goes with it.

Its small population relative to the rest of Metro Vancouver is the main reason the north shore hasn’t been seriously considered as a destination for rapid transit in the past. That changed this summer, when the provincial government, in partnership with the three north shore municipalities and TransLink put out a request for experts willing to study the feasibility of linking Vancouver and the north shore by some form of rapid transit — including the possibility of rail. Then, this week, the federal government announced funds for another study to help the region study rapid transit as a potential solution to traffic congestion across the north shore.

The combined $500,000 in funds drew massive excitement from community stakeholders eager to see a solution to the region’s gridlock that doesn’t include another bridge for vehicle traffic. The last time the north shore got a new connection to Vancouver was in 1977, with the passenger SeaBus between Waterfront Station and Lonsdale Quay. Since that time, the population of Metro Vancouver has more than doubled. More and more time spent waiting at the mouth of the Lions Gate and Second Narrows bridges prompted calls for a “third crossing” vehicle bridge every municipal and provincial election cycle.

The idea of a third bridge is something Bowinn Ma believes is “politically possible.” But the Member of the Legislative Assembly for the area thinks it would be little more than a way of securing the supremacy of the car for years to come.

“Especially when it comes to transportation infrastructure, it’s very, very easy to spend billions and billions of dollars on a project that doesn’t actually make things better at the end of the day,” Ma said. “I want very much for those ideas to actually be useful.”

When she put together the Integrated North Shore Transportation Planning Project, a coalition of municipal, provincial and First Nations leaders from the area, the conversation shifted to rapid transit. One idea the group came up with was that a “third crossing” could be a transit link, instead of another vehicle bridge.

Even though the idea is now being studied, it’s an uphill battle.

In previous versions of regional transportation plans for Metro Vancouver, including the 10 year Mayors Vision — currently in its fifth year — the north shore has been little more than an asterisk. TransLink has usually viewed the area as not dense enough, or growing quickly enough to justify an expensive transit line like rail — at least not when much denser parts of the region such as Surrey and Vancouver’s Broadway corridor have similar needs.

TransLink’s CEO, Kevin Desmond, said the north shore is an “obvious example” of a sub-region within Metro Vancouver that has waited a long time for rapid transit, and now feels left behind.

But with major infrastructure investments underway in other parts of the region, the north shore’s feasibility plan for rapid transit is only the first step in what is likely to be a long-term outlook for the region. In other words, the north shore isn’t going to see a train from Vancouver in the next 10 years — but it’s possible in the next 20 or 30.

“The north shore, when their time comes say for high-capacity transit, is likely going to have to show up in the long-term plan,” Desmond said in an a wide ranging interview earlier this summer. “We’ve done essentially no planning anyways — we’ve done no serious kind of engineering efforts or modelling to say what it would even look like.”

One Simon Fraser University researcher says he has.

Stephan Nieweler, a geography PhD student at SFU, says the future growth of the north shore necessitates better transit connections within 10 years, not 20.

“The region’s growing by a million people in the 30 years or so and the north shore has to take a share of that. Every part of this region has to take a share of that,” he said. “But there can’t be an expectation that the north shore will keep growing in a way that’s oriented to the car.”

He thinks the risk of not delivering on this is that the north shore and the Sea-to-Sky region could atrophy — with traffic making trips to or through the north shore too long to justify.

“We’re going to reach a point here within 10 years where it’s going to be Los Angeles style gridlock on the north shore where you just can’t get across that harbour without taking an hour,” Nieweler said. “It will hurt the economy it will hurt the desire of people to live here, it will hurt the access of three million people getting to the natural amenities here. It will hurt Whistler. We can’t wait.”

Ma cautions community members not to get too excited about the possibility that a rapid transit connection between Vancouver and the north shore could solve traffic problems. More convenient transit usually also means more passengers will want to take it. To reduce the number of cars on the road, it would have to become part of an extensive, practical regional transportation network that would satisfy the needs of the different types of travellers to, from, and through the north shore.

Nieweler has a proposal for that. He thinks a rapid transit connection could be built underwater near the Second Narrows bridge, and link to the Millenium line in Burnaby — a seemingly feasible connection that has been swept aside by the INSTPP group because the north end of the Second Narrows bridge isn’t densely populated.

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But putting the link there could encourage density along the Main-Marine corridor, the same place TransLink is currently implementing a B-Line express bus, Nieweler says. That line could be transformed into a light rail line, linking Capilano University to Lonsdale Quay, West Vancouver and, ultimately, Horseshoe Bay, where passengers can catch ferries to Nanaimo and the Sunshine Coast.

SeaBus connections could be added along the light rail line to link Kitsilano and UBC to the north shore. A bus (or one day, a passenger train) could carry passengers up the Sea-to-Sky to Squamish, Whistler, and beyond.

That’s how Nieweler would turn a two hour drive from Vancouver to Whistler (longer if there are bridge delays) into a reliable public transportation ride taking about the same amount of time — the benefit being that if the trips took a similar amount of time, more people would get out of their cars.

For longtime residents of the Sea-to-Sky corridor, a reliable public transportation option to Vancouver can’t come soon enough.

“The reliability of connections to the north shore... it’s always been part of the Squamish story,” said Eric Andersen, local Squamish historian and district councillor.

The district of Squamish was founded by Moodyville sawmill investors on the north shore, and in the 1800s, residents of Lynn Valley would commute there for logging jobs. The Pacific Great Eastern railway train, later a BC Rail line, was a crucial link between the areas until it was closed in 2002.

Now, with professionals like Sugden moving north, the commuting pattern is the opposite. About 15,000 vehicles travel between Squamish and West Vancouver every day. Andersen knows moving easily through the north shore is key to his constituents’ commutes.

“We are a small part of the traffic going across those bridges but we are part of it,” he said. “The north shore really is a hub — these are hub connections for the province. We all need to share responsibility in managing our circumstances. This is part of our dialogue on regional transit.”

The north shore, and Sea-to-Sky connection should come across as a cautionary tale for the region, Nieweler said. As much as car congestion problems stand to get worse on the north shore, the effects of having a community built for cars is already being felt.

“There can’t be an expectation that the north shore will keep growing in a way that’s oriented to the car,” Nieweler said. “Because we already have these back ups that are growing.”

For ten years, Jordan Sturdy, the B.C. Liberal transportation critic and MLA for West Vancouver and the Sea-to-Sky area, was the mayor of Pemberton, the northernmost point of the Sea-to-Sky highway.

Watching the highway fill up with more and more cars over the past decade, he’s observed as the traffic has increased on both weekends and weekdays, making it more difficult for his constituents to get around. In order to make a regional bus connection up the Sea to Sky useful, it needs to be able to get to and through the north shore without getting bogged down in traffic, he said.

In other words, the Sea to Sky needs regional transit, and to get regional transit working, the north shore needs a connection that takes cars off the road.

Nieweler’s work has persuaded Sturdy.

“My only concern would be that historically, TransLink has not prioritized the north shore,” Sturdy said, referring to transit investments made in more populous Vancouver and Surrey instead. “If (what Nieweler says) is true we need to move on it and we need to move on it now. Not in 20 years.”

For that to happen, it needs community buy-in. Sturdy acknowledged that transportation projects, especially when they involve significant changes to existing infrastructure, can be a hard sell for communities.

Recently, in West Vancouver, local residents protested a planned express bus route and succeeded in pressuring their district council to cut the route off earlier than planned.

“Any time you do these transit services they need to reflect the community,” Sturdy said. But he doesn’t think community buy-in is out of reach when it comes to projects like a bus connecting the Sea to Sky. Ultimately, he said, it will take cars off the road, and the desire for less traffic congestion is shared across the region.

In the meantime, the population growth continues to make traffic worse. North Vancouver and West Vancouver are both struggling to attract more workers, from plumbers to teachers and longshoremen, who balk at the long commute times to the area, and many of whom can’t afford to live there.

Denser development, which could allow more workers to live locally, is a oposed by some at the municipal level for fear of adding more and more cars to already congested roads.

When Ma, the North Vancouver MLA, put together the INSTPP working group, she said she knew these issues would come up. Neighbouring municipalities were bound to disagree with one another on the best approach. But her hope was to do the dirty work of negotiating a blueprint for the future once, with full buy-in from everyone.

“Whether or not we make changes here, the community will change,” Ma said. “Doing nothing is not a good option. The north shore cannot make time stand still.”

Some changes are already coming — on both tranportation and housing. In Lonsdale Quay, the 1977 SeaBus terminal is getting a major upgrade from TransLink, and a new SeaBus is scheduled to begin operating in the fall, increasing the frequency of the service to every 10 minutes.

Overlooking the terminal, a condo development is under construction, adding to the medium-to-high density feel of North Vancouver’s high street.

Part of the approval for the project, called “Promenade,” was that the developer would help fund a new location for the community’s museum and archives on the ground level. As part of that plan, a relic of the region’s old transportation system moved back into Lonsdale Quay this month.

Streetcar 153, the only known streetcar that originally ran on North Vancouver’s streetcar system, was refurbished and moved into the museum earlier this month, where it will be on permanent display for the community.

Construction now continues on the condo building around Streetcar 153, while just outside, cars inch their way along its former route on Lonsdale Avenue.

Correction – Sept. 2, 2019: This article was updated from a previous version that mistakenly said “north shore hasn’t had public transit in decades” in the headline.

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