I’m posting another version of this because, given its implications, it has gone curiously unnoticed.

From the NPA platform:

In making decisions on how to best move people around the city, the NPA will maintain its transport hierarchy, which ranks pedestrians, cyclists, public transit, commercial traffic, and then cars. …

An NPA government will: …

• Create counterflow lanes and utilize technology to reduce congestion on major arterial routes;

This was an idea, I’m told, that came from Kirk LaPointe without a lot of discussion, and I suspect its appeal was based on his own experience as someone who lives in the UEL and works in North Vancouver: why wouldn’t people want an easier way to drive through the city?

There’s the usual rationale: “Vancouver citizens need a transportation plan that not only works for them, but with them: reducing polluting traffic congestion …” In other words, we can reduce pollution by achieving smoothly flowing traffic – something that can only work, logically, if with improvements in traffic flow, there is no increase in traffic!*

But there is also no recognition that reversing a lane in one direction would generate congestion in the opposite direction – and a huge political problem.

To illustrate, let’s take the Marpole Village between West 63rd and SW Marine Drive on Granville Street – surely a candidate for a counterflow given existing congestion and the connection to the airport.

North-bound Granville looks like this:



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Reverse that fourth lane to the left during the morning rush-hour, and you’ve got only two lanes in the southbound direction – one of which is for curb-side parking until the evening from 3 to 6 pm (see sign).

Unless Kirk LaPointe is prepared to allow only one lane of traffic southbound during the morning rush hour, including space for the returning trolley buses, you have to eliminate curb-side parking on both sides of the street during rush hours – at least six hours of the day.

I doubt he has ever had the pleasure of negotiating with small businesses for whom curb-side parking is sacred, but he might want to prepare the rationale for its removal beforehand – or be prepared to live with the induced congestion and transit delays that result from a one-lane arterial flow.

That’s one reason I have called the counter-flow proposal ‘absurd.’ There are others that will become apparent when the costs and logistics are considered. Counterflow lanes are extraordinarily complex interventions (and hence expensive), typically only considered for tunnels and bridges, limited-access freeways and express lanes, and roads with few cross streets – almost none of which we have in Vancouver. Ideally, all that will be needed is a short meeting with the traffic engineers for the idea to get shelved (or as we used to say on council: subject to a report back with no deadline).

But there’s something more at issue.

The 1997 Vancouver Transportation Plan passed by the NPA Council of the day had as its key strategy that “changes to road network would be designed so as not to increase road capacity …” Specifically, “road capacity into the Downtown would not be increased above the present level” (which at that time, as PT has illustrated before, was higher than it is now). Those policies, plus better transit, effective land-use planning and regional shifts, have succeeded in reducing traffic flows into the core and, to a lesser extent, into the city

Given that the increase in traffic on a counterflow lane could, under ideal conditions, be about a thousand vehicles per hour per lane, how could this proposal not be considered an increase in capacity? And if there isn’t an increase capacity, why do it? Isn’t the whole idea of counterflow lanes to facilitate the movement of traffic through the city and into the central core? **

We would have a Vancouver mayor who for the first time since the 1960s be saying to suburban drivers: Come on back. All is forgiven!

It would certainly give a new mandate to EasyPark. And, given the new resources required for the engineering of counterflow lanes, likely de-emphasize time and money spent on active transportation, complete streets, and, yeah okay, bike lanes – which would require ‘community backing’ in any event.

Which leads to the next question: Will the neighbourhoods through which the increased volumes move be asked for their ‘community backing’ as they consider the increases in traffic, noise and air pollution? And if not, why for one and not the other?

And so it goes. There were a lot of other questions in the first post – but not much response.

I’m surprised that other parties have not picked up on the implications of this proposal: it is a reversal of the direction this city has been going for the last few decades, largely under NPA councils.

Given our success and international recognition, a reversal would be devastating.

For those of us who talk about Vancouver transportation in other places around the world (like Portland, see below), we would now have to say, “You know those policies and actions we have undertaken which have worked so well for us, and provide a model to emulate …?”

Never mind.

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* With induced traffic, attracted by the congestion-free flows, you get a return of congestion – only at a higher volume.

** Unless, again, there is some unstated mechanism for limiting traffic to the existing volume, preventing new drivers outside Vancouver from using critical portions of the Major Road Network.

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