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Originally Posted by Vin
What about the number of delivery vehicles, buses and others? Have they been decreasing too?
Is a 2-lane Prior Street catering to vehicles? Is there space given for the kind of traffic in the future?
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Yes. Because you kept the 4-lanes of space. 2 lanes are just now permanently parking.
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Originally Posted by EastVanMark
Thanks. Interesting piece, but again the context of the data needs to be taken into consideration. Some of those areas, such as th East Village and Polk Streets are tiny areas (home to smaller, neighbourhood businesses) of the much larger central core. That is the equivalent of studying only the consumer habits of Richards Street in Vancouver.
The viaducts (Vancouver) are supposed to be a major road into the downtown core and the concern is for all businesses, particularly larger-scale businesses that may depend on at least reasonable automobile access. The materials mentioned in the article do not do that.
Did you notice this nugget that is from our neck of the woods by chance?
Vancouver, Canada
This study of shops in downtown Vancouver did find a net decrease in sales after the implementation of a separated bike lane. But the analysis relied on business surveys, rather than actual sales data, which might have led to a response bias among the merchants who took the biggest hit. The little sales data that was received "indicated that the estimated loss in sales was not as high as reported in the surveys."
Again, keep in mind that the article is a little biased.
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...Did YOU notice this nugget?
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the analysis relied on business surveys, rather than actual sales data
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The study was in 2011-2015, the period where most of the DT bike lanes were being put in, the fewest people were likely to use the lanes, and the most people were skeptical about their benefits because of being new.
also:
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Prepared by planning consultants McElhanney and pollster Mustel Group, the survey determined that cycling accounted for 7.3 per cent of all trips taken in Vancouver in 2018, compared to 4.4 per cent of trips in 2013. The share of bike trips by those commuting to work within the city nearly doubled from 6.6 per cent to 11.9 per cent over the same period.
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https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news...-in-vancouver-life-goes-on-chaos-averted
If there was a fall in sales of a few percent, that's gone now for sure. There's a saying- Build it and they will come?
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Originally Posted by Migrant_Coconut
Right. Still pushing for further separation at the open houses.
Expo is useful in the current plan. Pacific would be two lanes westbound and four lanes eastbound, the former being mostly local traffic. Dunsmuir cuts off at Beatty and becomes a cycling/pedestrian path; Expo can't connect to it without having Stadium-Chinatown relocate.
Our bridge cloverleafs and on-ramps will demonstrate that merging two/three lanes into one is like pulling teeth sometimes. Better to have 100% continuous lanes.
Which goalposts, where? Admittedly could've phrased it better, but it's accurate to say that the viaducts are more of an obstacle than an access point when you're walking; NEFC is no longer a suburban area, and a suburban grid doesn't really make sense.
WRT Costco, it's not really about easier access more than easier understanding of access. Spent twenty minutes walking around BC Place on the first go. The stairs don't help much - they're practically hidden.
A second level between Rogers and the "ledge" on Beatty makes sense; beyond Rogers, it becomes less of a connection and more of a plateau. What would the south and east towers connect to? The east one doesn't even get a sidewalk! No, the stadium and its evacuation routes are independent of the viaducts, and for a good reason.
Six of one, half a dozen of another IMO. A day may come when we remove one lane too many, but it is not this day.
Many cities have ring roads instead of downtown freeways. Given our unique geography, the Trans-Canada is basically half a ring.
Convergent evolution then. Oakland, Midtown, Century City - seems that North American metros are too spread out for one single downtown.
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Bad wording.
Not that useful would be a better term.
Why would you relocate Stadium-Chinatown? Grade? I'm not 100% certain of the exact layout, but I'm fairly certain it's not built under the Dunsmuir Viaduct. I'm thinking of only a 2-lane connector to Expo, while Dunsmuir as a whole is 5 lanes wide. Plenty of Room for everything you'd want to put there.
And if there's 8 lanes, 2 head Westbound towards Expo, and 6 onto the existing planned Pacific Blvd- 4 Eastbound, 2 Westbound. Where's the merging? Expo is basically just a mini Pacific Blvd that goes 1 way here.
10 lanes may admittedly be too much to try to fit everything on without merging lanes.
You might even be able to implement something like that after the viaducts go away- though you'd have to cut through the Skateboard Park. I just don't want this to be another case of the classic Vancouver game of building without the future in mind- even if you don't need it in the next 30 years, the likelihood is that this network is going to be permanent. If you really never end up needing it (ie. you never end up building bus lanes), that's better than the alternative.
Costco isn't much more difficult to find than anything else in Downtown in my opinion (I spent 20 minutes trying to find the BCIT Downtown Campus), but

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Not sure how removing the viaducts makes Costco easier to get to either, since it's on Expo- unless a direct connection is built from Dunsmuir to Expo, like my proposed 8-lane plan.
A ring road that gets only as close as 5 km before even Gastown? The border of Vancouver City Center is ~3.5km from Trans-Canada- and we're not even built out to that point yet!
Oakland and Silicon Valley could be argued to be largely due to San Fran probably being the one city more development un-friendly than Vancouver...also, Oakland has anchors (like its port). Midtown is kind of more like Broadway than Surrey- and Century City had Fox to spearhead its development. Surrey has one advantage- it's a potential Skytrain Hub. But we haven't even built
that out yet.