Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 104: Urban Mobility and Transportation Policy 鈥� with Anthony Perl
Speakers: Melissa Roach, Am Johal, Anthony Perl
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Melissa Roach 0:01
Hello, I'm Melissa with Below the Radar. A knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar, our host, Am Johal is joined by Anthony Perl, an 丁香园AV Urban Studies prof and co-author of . They talk policy issues in urban mobility and transportation infrastructure across major Canadian cities. I hope you enjoy the episode.
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Am Johal 0:38
Hi there. Welcome to Below the Radar. We are joined this week by Anthony Perl from the Urban Studies program at 丁香园AV where he's a professor and also former member of the at the City of Vancouver. Welcome, Anthony.
Anthony Perl 0:54
Thank you, Am as the fellow planning commissioner, it's great to be talking with you today.
Am Johal 1:01
Great, so I'm wondering if you can just introduce yourself a little bit.
Anthony Perl 1:05
Sure. I'm an immigrant. Not that new Canadian. I came here to Toronto in 1984. To do my, at that time, my master's degree in Urban Politics. I was really interested in what had made Toronto in the mid 1980s such a successful city and it seemed like urban transportation was one of the leading factors and I liked it so much and was lucky enough to stay on. So, after my PhD in Toronto, moved to West, to Calgary in 1993. And taught there for 12 years and then came to 丁香园AV in 2005 to be the first full time director of the Urban Studies program. And I've been happily beavering away here ever since. And when I came here, one of the people I met through the Urban Studies program early on was , who's my co-author on this book. So, this book connects to my journey into and through Canada very well, I think.
Am Johal 2:11
So, the book is called Big Moves. You collaborated with Matt and another author. So maybe you could just talk a little bit about where the book project was conceived. What got you started?
Anthony Perl 2:23
Well, it really did begin with my first home in Toronto, in Canada. When I moved up there. , for whatever reason, had made a celebrated quote, which stuck with me and it's still you can find it on the internet. He said, "Toronto was like New York City run by the Swiss." It seemed to be a city in the mid 1980s that had everything going for it. And it was most obvious to me, as sort of a transportation geek person, in their excellent streetcars and subway system, clean, punctual, frequent, and very effective in getting people around the city. Toronto, of course, was also the home of , who I met during my time there, and she had gotten there just in time to stop building the downtown expressway infrastructure that would have destroyed the area around the university and Chinatown and some other key neighborhoods in the city. So, Toronto seemed to have been a place that puts the pause on expressway building and had its public transportation at a globally high standard at that point.
Anthony Perl 3:33
And I also over time, of course, moving west, but also moving and traveling around Canada began to notice that Montreal and Vancouver, the next two biggest cities were very distinct places in terms of urban form and urban mobility in particular. Montreal had a rubber-tired Parisian style metro system. And Vancouver, of course, had the, unique at that time, SkyTrain, the automated linear induction powered system that was kind of homegrown. And it led me to wonder, and then, of course, each city had a different mix of expressways as well, led me to wonder why and how Canada's three largest cities had gone in such different directions when developing their urban major mobility infrastructure.
Anthony Perl 4:22
And I got onto other things in my career as a political scientist and public policy scholar. But eventually, after settling here in Vancouver, and after wrapping up my term as director of the Urban Studies program, it seemed time to try and explain that. And fortunately, Matt Hern, who I've gotten to know here, was very willing to collaborate on that project and my other co-author is one of the world's leading experts in terms of urban mobility data and data analysis. So, we had a great team, Matt being able to look at the community-based ways in which cities encounter these major infrastructure plans and projects, Jeff, being able to put it in a global perspective as to where Canada as a whole sort of stands, and myself looking at the policy and governance dynamics behind this. And that's how the book came together.
Am Johal 5:20
So, I wonder if we can maybe jump into each of these cities a little bit. Right now, when we talk about the city of Toronto. From a kind of urbanism point of view, there's a lot of discussion around the lack of investment in infrastructure or crumbling infrastructure often times gets mentioned, related to Toronto in terms of the kinds of investments that are needed? How would you characterize kind of the state of play right now, in terms of its public transportation system?
Anthony Perl 5:49
Sure, well, Toronto is playing catch up. And it's, I think, going to get there eventually. But it shows that it's very easy to rest on one's laurels and fall behind the need for sustainable urban transportation and very hard and time consuming to catch up on it. The book's major thesis is that there are two dimensions, it's sort of a dialectic, that are constantly in tension in terms of cities and their sort of major mobility, aspirations and impacts. One is the relationship between the city and global circuits of capital and other flows that are going on. And Toronto, of course, became Canada's Alpha City in the 1980s, just around the time I got there.
Anthony Perl 6:38
And then the other part of the equation is the local community visions and values that may be intentional, particularly when it involves inserting major infrastructure into urban spaces. And cities negotiate that. And I think what happened in Toronto was that the global dynamic went into overdrive, after free trade, and then NAFTA, where Toronto really became Canada's Global Gateway hub, which was just starting in the mid 1980s. It took another five or ten years, but that really made our financial sector, the Global Gateway in Toronto. And most of the foreign companies that came in, particularly American ones, set up their Canadian headquarters in and around the Greater Toronto Area. All of that produced huge inflows of population and demand for mobility. And it was at about that time also that a small c, or maybe a large C, Conservative government at the provincial level, and at the city level, small c conservative, dialed back on ambitious plans for urban transportation infrastructure. So that imbalance kind of led Toronto to fall behind. I mean, they've added another million people, or maybe more, a million and a half people since I lived there, and very little transportation infrastructure. And not surprisingly, that leads to gridlock and frustration and a real deficit in mobility in that area. So, they're in catch up mode. They've been building slowly, but it's going to take them time to get back to where they might have been had that relationship between the global and the local, worked differently in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Anthony Perl 8:36
Yeah, in areas of Toronto, they're going through rapid growth like the Peel Region, Brampton, other suburbs in and around Toronto. How do you think the city has sort of dealt with the growth of the suburbs, or what is lacking in the present infrastructure, that isn't keeping up with what other cities are doing around the world?
Anthony Perl 8:59
Well, when I was in grad school in Toronto, the chief planner for the Toronto Transit Commission, who's gone on to become a corporate finance executive, Juri Pill, coined the term for Toronto, spatially as, And when that was said, for the first time, because I was there at the time, it wasn't said as ironically as it might sound to those people hearing it for the first time today. It was actually said with a form of achievement like Toronto had proven somehow that you could square the circle and have your cake and eat it too. Those people who wanted to live in a dense, diverse mixed use sort of Jane Jacobs paradise of Vienna style urbanism could live in downtown Toronto or in some of the other lovely neighborhoods in the city, or even the Metro at that time, area of Toronto, but then those who wanted to live in Phoenix and have big yards and extra rooms for kids that it's a sleepover in and all that sort of stuff could live in the suburban areas in Peel and Brampton and Mississauga and Oakville and those types of places. And it seemed like in the sort of idealized Canadian world where, you know, we live and let live, everyone could have what they wanted. You could have suburbs and for people who wanted that lifestyle, and cities and they all coexisted.
Anthony Perl 10:26
The problem was that equilibrium only lasted, maybe, at most, a decade. And then it turned out, that no, they're actually not that compatible and Phoenix begins to strangle Vienna, literally, in terms of air pollution, but also figuratively in terms of costs of trying to supply sustainable transportation. If you stop and think about it, if you have that Vienna surrounded by Phoenix, metaphor continue, which sort of has in these Greater Toronto Area communities, to adequately serve people's mobility needs in a landscape that has both Vienna and Phoenix juxtaposed right against each other, you actually need to provide twice the infrastructure, because you need both the expressways, the road system for the Phoenix part and then you need to add in the Rapid Transit trams and metros for the Vienna part. And that actually turns out to be a fiscally unsustainable formula. You can't have Vienna and Phoenix without paying at least double for the kinds of infrastructure that's needed to allow for effective mobility.
Anthony Perl 11:35
So, the challenge that they're having, especially in the Greater Toronto Area, beyond the city's boundaries right now, is how to adapt Phoenix to, maybe not be Vienna, but at least to be more of sort of the suburbs of Vienna, as opposed to Phoenix. And that means, you know, electric rail, which they are developing at the GO train system. It's going to become much more of a transit style operation with frequent services and electric trains. And they're spending many 10s of billions of dollars on this, which shows that the retrofitting of Phoenix is not cheap, but, and it's going to take another 10 to 20 years to build that out. But I think that they have made the commitment to do that. And hopefully, we will see that the Greater Toronto region will start to look more like Vienna, or Berlin, or Paris in the sense that even the suburban, lower and middle density areas have sustainable options for not just having the automobile is your only way to get anywhere, which still is the case, unfortunately ina lot of these communities.
Am Johal 12:52
Toronto often times gets compared very favorably to Chicago and might be just a proximity to the Midwest or some sort of friendly version of New York. I'm wondering around in Montreal, which, you know, of the three cities has also maintained a kind of affordability of housing prices and rental prices, that there's a kind of inflection in inside its own transportation system, but also its connections to France as well, in terms of types and modalities and approaches to public transport. Wondering if you could talk a little bit about, you know, the formation of Montreal and its sort of transportation choices.
Anthony Perl 13:30
Well, Montreal was the Alpha city of Canada in the 20, the first half the middle part of the 20th century. And by that, I mean, it was our Global Gateway to both Europe and the United States. That was where, you know, the banks had their headquarters before separatism scared them down the highway to Toronto. It's where the stock exchange and other corporations had their headquarters. It was the only city in Canada to have the United Nations agency headquarters, the International Civil Aviation Organization, which you usually only hear about when there's plane crashes or terrible things that happen, but it does a lot of regulation globally in aviation. Anyway, Montreal up through the mid 1970s or early 1970s, I guess the October crisis might be an inflection point, was this global sort of gateway for Canada.
Am Johal 14:27
It feels like the Olympics were like the last hurrah for Montreal, at least in that vein.
Anthony Perl 14:32
That's right. And it started with an Expo, in 67, of course, and there was a playbook that Vancouver will talk about maybe has read and adapted but was invented in Montreal. One of the things about Canadian urban infrastructure that is unique in the major countries that were often compared with in Europe, United States, Australia, is that for constitutional reasons, the federal government has been basically self-isolating, in this case. We don't have a national transportation urban transportation program the way most countries do that the fed fund consistently and have regulations and rules and standards for. We don't have a national urban program. It's much more ad hoc and in our view, one of the things that that does is it leads to a much more open and unmediated relationship between the global and the local. In France, in Germany, in the United States, you have the national government that keeps an eye on cities, and sort of says what the some of the rules and regulations are when they build and do things. And in Canada, each time, a city has decided to do something major, a big move, let's say, it's an open book, and they construct a plan and a formula and then negotiate the funding at the national and provincial levels and go accordingly.
Anthony Perl 15:56
And what mayor , in Montreal in the 1960s figured out how to do, was to take a global mega event, like the Expo and then an encore of the Olympics and turn it into a vehicle to fund and implement mega projects like the metro system, and others, the Olympic Stadium. There's some of them are seen as white elephants, others are quite functional, but during his reign, and I would call it that because he was sort of a very established political leader during that time, he was able to come up with a municipally led urban development policy in Canada that kind of dragged the province and the Feds in to do things that in other countries, they would have set up frameworks and programs from a top-down kind of approach. And the way it worked was pretty simple. You put these bids out for these mega events and buried in the fine print, there's commitments to build infrastructure like metros, like stadiums, like convention centers, and things like that. And then you go and get the expo committee or the Olympic Committee, with probably a few bribes and other things, to vote you, you know, accept and award you these big events. And then you go into cabinet tables and negotiations with premiers and prime ministers and say, you know, the world is coming. The world is coming to Montreal in 1967. And we promised them a metro and a stadium and these other things, you really want them to show up to not have this stuff here. That will make us look pretty bad. And all of a sudden, the check books figuratively start to come out.
Anthony Perl 17:39
And this was what Montreal did in the 1960s and up through the 76 Olympics, that put their infrastructure on another level and got those big moves for better and for worse, it also involves building some nasty urban expressways. Nasty in the sense that they destroyed very vibrant communities and the people there really had no chance to, I mean they resisted bravely and made all the same arguments that were going on in Gastown and Strathcona and Chinatown here in Vancouver. The difference was that once you had it built into your Olympic plan, and the world was coming, that was a huge global cudgel that was used to sort of push through the bulldozers, literally, in these neighborhoods. So, they got expressways and Metro and as a result, Montreal has the most fully built out urban mobility infrastructure in Canada. It's got a completely developed expressway system, including some nasty ones through downtown areas and it's got a relatively well-developed metro system. And Toronto has a half-built expressway system that stopped in the mid 1970s and a half built rapid transit system that they slowed down after the 1980s building. And Vancouver of course, has almost no expressway system, but there's a tiny one which I'll talk about, if you want, and our SkyTrain and rapid transit system. So, Montreal went the furthest and built the most urban mobility, major infrastructure in its city, of any Canadian city. And that's because I think they were able to figure out this formula to sign up for global mega events, and then use that to leverage or intimidate senior levels of government to follow what they wanted to do.
Am Johal 19:36
Do you think that the building out of the system in Montreal, in that context that you talk about, does it relate or doesn't it relate somehow to the affordability question there. There's something to do with the culture of Quebec that has a more social democratic orientation more consistently, but there's something about the affordability of the city, both in terms of home ownership, renters, tenancy rights, that relate to these neighborhoods that's very different than the orientation of Toronto and Vancouver?
Anthony Perl 20:07
Well, I think that nationalism has to be seen to play a part in it along with social democratic values and politics. And it's a very murky intersection between nationalism and socialism. We know what happens when you put National Socialism together. And that's not good. But Quebec has those ingredients and has managed to, fortunately, I think, combine them in a slightly less nefarious more than slightly less nefarious way, actually a very progressive way, in many circumstances in the ways that you described. I think it was easier for two reasons. One was that, thanks to the municipally led mega project mania that Mayor Drapeau was the architect of, Montreal did build out a global infrastructure, a globally appropriate infrastructure that would fit with being Canada's global financial hub and centre. And then at the same time, all those separatists and people who were busy blowing up mailboxes and kidnapping, unfortunately, murdering government officials scared the rest of Canada's Anglo financial leaders into fleeing the city for Toronto. And then NAFTA came along after that. So, if you put all that together, you get Montreal being the city that actually built itself up to be Canada's global anchor and hub, and had all the accoutrements and the infrastructure available for that, at the same time as the economic actors got sort of the vapors from all that nationalism and some of the terrorism that was associated with it. And then the economy shifted its center of gravity away from the city. It's a bit like Vienna in the sense that Vienna was the capital of a global empire in its day. And then that didn't continue. The Austro-Hungarian empire was over with. And that left a city that had been built out to be an imperial capital, with a lot of space, and a lot less pressure and a lot less sort of global forces to impose top-down values on the communities. And as a result, the communities were able to build that but much more social purpose values in the policies and programs for the space that was left. And I think that happened in both Vienna and in Montreal. And it's not a coincidence that they're both much more livable, and affordable places as a result of that legacy.
Anthony Perl 22:38
So here in Vancouver, a city that we both live in, there is certainly a little bit of that story from Montreal in terms of an Expo and an Olympics, certainly both of those events are tied to rising inequality and increasing housing prices. But for transportation, they were both quite prominent investment vehicles, tied to those events that have structured and shaped, but I guess prior to that, as well, transportation choices, like not having a freeway come through the city, but you know, different forms of it exist, as you said, but wondering if you can talk a little bit about sort of historically how we came to be the way that we are and what are now some features of Vancouver's transportation that are quite unique to the city and the region.
Anthony Perl 23:28
Sure. Well, Vancouver was affected by the same global forces that have their role in Toronto and in Montreal, but at different times, and with different mixes of the engagement and the conflict and resolution of that conflict with the local values and aspirations. During this pandemic, I've been spending a lot of time wandering around Stanley Park, because I live near it. That's my sort of backyard these days. And when we wrote the book we used, by the way, this book is the first one to actually add up the specific infrastructure and the costs of it in these three cities during the 20th century. Like how much did it cost to build the Montreal Metro? The only place that I know, because we looked, that you can find that is in this book. How much did it cost to build the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto, same thing. It says something about Canada's urban ambivalence that we never really put all that, no one ever bothered to put all that together.
Anthony Perl 24:30
But anyway, when we started doing that with Vancouver, and getting back to Stanley Park, if you go by the Transport Association of Canada's definition of what an urban expressway is, limited access, no traffic lights, you know, no cross streets, and certain geometric design functions. The very first expressway that was ever built in Canada is the euphemistically named Stanley Park Causeway that goes from Denman Street to North Vancouver across the Lions Gate Bridge. That was built in the 1930s, early 1930s. And it is about four kilometers worth of urban expressway through the cathedral of our city's green consciousness. And when I've been wandering around Stanley Park, I've taken the interior trails a lot these last six months, you can hear it, you know. It's well hidden visually, fortunately, because of all the great tree cover in the park, but you hear an expressway in the heart of Stanley Park, all these cars and trucks zooming by continuously. I don't go there at two in the morning, maybe it's quiet then. But during the times that I'm there, we built that, and we built it for a global purpose.
Anthony Perl 25:43
The came and bought huge amounts of land, which were bankrupt, the City of West Vancouver had taken them back for tax arrears, and they bought them in a great deal for them. And it was then euphemistically called the British Properties. And of course, if you wanted to develop all those mansions in the British properties, you had to be able to give people a quick route to downtown so they could work in their offices. And that's what the Stanley Park Causeway and the Lions Gate Bridge, which was funded directly by the Guinness family, global capital.
Am Johal 26:16
In fact, during Expo 86, , who was a minister at the time, went to the Guinness family to get them to fund the lights on the Lions Gate Bridge, I think as the story goes, and it was known as . I briefly worked in highways in the late 90s, when the bridge was being renovated at the time, deck by deck and so a lot of that history was coming through in the process of it, it just fascinating. But there were actually literally pieces of that bridge falling off at that time.
Anthony Perl 26:51
Right, because you know, the value of the bridge to the Guinness family was in selling off the properties in West Vancouver. And once they sold off more than half of them, it was much better to give the bridge, I think they sold it to the province for $1 or $10, or some. And then of course, the maintenance and rehabilitation costs would become public along the way. That's a perfect example of how the global and local dynamics of major mobility infrastructure work when you have no national program. I mean, you can't imagine the Guinness or any other family, you know, building the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, you know, or places like that, similarly. The national and other governments have these frameworks in place that would not have allowed it. Here, it was a blank slate. You want to build a bridge to connect your properties and you're willing to pay for it? Well, sure, we'll chop down, you know, 10% of Stanley Park and put a highway through that for you, we'll call it a causeway and put lots of trees around it, so no one sees it, and everyone will be happy. And then that's what happened in our very first encounter between the global and the local in Vancouver.
Anthony Perl 28:03
But then I think the dynamics changed, of course, and the plans to develop the Strathcona-Chinatown Expressway and turn basically the Waterfront in Downtown Vancouver, where Gastown and 丁香园AV's Harbor Centre campus is, into an expressway to feed huge mega towers. That was a globally prominent idea. But it was rejected because a very active and effective community resistance. The difference was, compared to the Montreal community resistance, was that they didn't have an Olympics or an Expo at that time in the 1970s to use as leverage to push that sort of stuff through. Fortunately, they hadn't read Montreal鈥檚 playbook yet. But by the 1980s, or maybe the late 1970s, we had a generation of municipal and provincial politicians, including Mike Harcourt, who was one of the people who helped stop the, legally resist, the downtown expressway, who had a bigger picture perspective and realized that Montreal got a lot for its infrastructure by doing these kinds of global mega projects, mega events leading to mega projects. The difference was when we signed up for the expo, there was no chance anymore of building a downtown expressway. So, the mega project was the SkyTrain and that's how our rapid transit got started again with a global mega event. And then of course, the global mega event sequel, just like Montreal, if you get the expo and it works, we'll go for the Olympics, which we did along with Whistler. There it was a little bit more of a mixed blessing. The global mega project in Vancouver was the Canada Line which runs to Richmond and the airport. That was built into the Olympic package. But then we also built a big expansion, basically turning the Sea-to-Sky Highway into an expressway outside of metro area going up to Whistler.
Am Johal 30:08
And that's an interesting question of opportunity costs as well, because what some of these mega events do, although it does leverage some federal money that wouldn't otherwise be there, we had go into a meeting of Cabinet to say that this needed to be funded, and well probably wouldn't have been in the top 10 of transportation projects, all of a sudden got pushed forward. And that investment came through. I think that the RAV (Richmond-Airport-Vancouver line) Line was already on the books and probably would have happened anyway. But certainly, the Sea-to-Sky Highway was something that was definitely fast tracked by the Olympics in terms of opportunity. And interestingly, when the SkyTrain was built during Expo, you know, it did go out to Scott Road, there were a couple of additions put in later, but there wasn't really an expansion until the Millennium Line in the late 90s. And then later, the RAV Line. And just with some of the older systems in Toronto, with the subway, and in Montreal with their subway, it doesn't seem, it's an expensive infrastructure, it's built sort of above ground, predominantly, the RAV Line was below ground. But the complexity of a system that needs to be around the region for it to be functional, in the way that other geographic centers or cities with a deeper history of building them do. There's limitations to what has happened in Vancouver. And partly, it's an issue of time and the age of the city, I suppose.
Anthony Perl 31:31
We've been building about one rapid transit line per decade in the region, the Expo Line in the 80s, the Millennium Line in the 90s, the Canada Line in the 2000s, I guess you if you count the Evergreen Extension in the 2010s, that we've done one per decade, two out of the five have been tied directly to global mega events, Olympics and Expo. And we've somehow managed to scrape together the money for the other bits and pieces ourselves. But we are going to need to do it differently going forward. The book sort of ends at 2002 or so in terms of collecting the data, which was no mean feat, because in countries that have national urban transportation programs, you can go online like for the US right now, if you want to see how much was spent to build, you know, a metro line in Los Angeles, or Portland or something like that, and find it in 15 seconds, if you're good at searching. In Canada, what it requires is going through municipal, provincial, and sometimes federal budgets, line by line, and finding all the places where they did their specific, you know, one off deals like you described with Jack Poole and the cabinet, and to put together these financing packages. And so, we did it through the 20th century. It took a PhD student of mine, Michael Orem, who we gave credit for in the appendix of the book, over a year, and he had some help with some other research assistants.
Anthony Perl 33:01
But anyway, the point, I guess, is that it's been a bigger struggle in Canada to put together these major infrastructure programs because we're more set up for one off projects. And when you build, you know, the Canada Line, or the Millennium Line, once that's done, it doesn't have any kind of follow on or programmatic structure that keeps in place. We just shut it down, cut the ribbon, and that's the end of it. And then you have to start from scratch. That takes years, like doing the SkyTrain extension along Broadway. And now mayor about extending it to UBC, each one of those projects is like buying made to measure clothing. It fits tailored to whatever your waist and other dimensions are at that particular moment in time. But it's more expensive doing it that way. And more time consuming than just buying off the rack type clothing. And other cities in countries with national programs can do the off the rack stuff. In China, right now, in Beijing and Shanghai, where it's half the world's largest urban metro systems. And I'm not saying biggest isn't necessarily best, but there they just don't stop. When they finish building one line, they keep the same people, the same equipment, and the same organization going and start building the next one. Here, when we finished building something, we pat ourselves on the back and then wait and start a few years later saying well what do we do next? Then it starts all over again. That's not a terribly efficient or effective way to develop urban infrastructure, which, maybe, we'll have to evolve from but how we do that will be interesting to figure out.
Am Johal 34:44
Now I know it's obviously beyond the scope of the book, but if we were to read historically into the situation with the mayor of Surrey coming in and wanting to move away from a streetcar system to SkyTrain. That was interesting how that played out because there seemed to be a general consensus around the streetcars and then a move to SkyTrain that would extend eventually to Langley. It'd be interesting to get your take on what you think is happening there.
Anthony Perl 35:15
Well, I think Mayor he might not appreciate my analogy. I think he's channeling John Drapeau from the great beyond there. What he's saying is that, you know, Surrey is going to be a globally important Alpha city someday, and we deserve the top tier rapid transit infrastructure. No, you know, for us, we want SkyTrain just like Vancouver. We want to have a metro type rapid transit system for the city that we aspire to grow into. A Global Gateway for the region, you know, they were always talking about how they're going to have more people than Vancouver.
Anthony Perl 35:51
And in our book, we do say that, you know, the 21st century seems to belong to what Matt coins, "the Canaburbs." These globally connected suburban areas which actually become quite diverse and urbanized, and actually could well be Canada's greatest connection to the sort of global urban networks that are out there, more so than the early, you know, initial downtown cores like Vancouver or Toronto.
Anthony Perl 36:20
So, in that sense, Mayor McCallum is trying to say Surrey will not take second tier status anymore, we want the most expensive, most deluxe form of rapid transit that we have in the region. The problem is that the streetcar system that had been planned was three times, two and a half times more coverage because it was much cheaper to build at grade in the street medians and using that ground space than the SkyTrain is and a few other technical reasons, too, as well. SkyTrain is a very expensive transportation infrastructure. It does great things, but it's not cheap. And so, they're going to get much less. Right now, they can only afford half of the extension to Langley, it'll get to Fleetwood, I guess. And it's going to require the province to, and maybe the feds, to put some big checks in to keep it going. And maybe that will happen. Maybe Mayor McCallum or his colleagues will come up with the same alchemy that Mayor Drapeau did and figure out how to you leverage the senior governments to get them to fund your grand plans for infrastructure. But that's the way I see it. If you take it in this, you know, big moves context from the book, that Surrey is saying they want, they won't settle for second class infrastructure, they want the big ticket, high price SkyTrain or nothing and they're getting at least some of that as a result.
Anthony Perl 37:52
There are things that have been put on the table or trial ballooned and are now being taken seriously like a potential gondola to Burnaby Mountain but I'm wondering from your perspective, if a streetcar system were to land down somewhere in the Metro Vancouver region, with you being a transportation expert, where do you think would be an interesting place to try it out just to sort of function beyond the modalities we've used so far.
Anthony Perl 38:19
Right, well, I have a I have to declare a conflict of interest because I live in Coal Harbor and there was a plan which unfortunately got politicized a couple of mayoral elections ago because put it forward as her project for running for mayor and she didn't win and the other side, , didn't really see much value in it politically as a result. But there's a downtown streetcar that would run from very close to outside my window through Downtown Gastown, Chinatown then it would sort of head west and go along with False Creek South all the way to Granville Island, Science world and you know, Olympic Village, that area. We had a little test of that during the Olympics. It was, I didn't win a lot of friends or influence people by saying, we borrowed streetcars from Brussels, Belgium. We actually traded them for Olympics tickets our government, I don't know whether it was the province or the city you know, gave the council in Brussels a huge whack of front row seats to various Olympic events and they gave us two streetcars built by for six months straight from the production line before they were going to be put into service in Brussels. They're probably riding around Brussels as we speak right now. But they came here first, and they set up the Olympic streetcar, which ran from the Olympic village to Granville Island during the Olympics. It was a great success.
Anthony Perl 39:44
The feds put in $8 million if I recall right, either 6 or 8 million, to rehabilitate the tracks that run along South False Creek there and some of the 丁香园AV students in our program volunteered there, since it was totally outside of TransLink. This was done as a sweet, generous kind of an operation for the Olympics. They were all volunteers, they didn't hire drivers or anything, but they would train people to drive the streetcar as volunteers and a couple of our students did do that. So 丁香园AV is actually contributing to this event. And at the end of it, as I said, I didn't win friends by saying, this was the equivalent, at least when I was growing up, of putting on airs, you, when you went on a hot date with someone, if you didn't have a fancy car, you would borrow someone else's car and then pretend it was yours for the date to try and impress who you were dating. And the same thing happened here during the Olympics. While the Olympics was there. We built this beautiful streetcar line, we borrowed the streetcars from Brussels, and pretended they were ours. And as soon as the date was over, we had to give them back. And that was the end of it, unfortunately, but I think it showed that a downtown streetcar project could work very well. And it would be a great place to try it out in the city, I think. The infrastructure, the right of way is still there. Unfortunately, I think it's been left to rust in peace since that period. So, it probably needs some rehabilitation. But I think that, you know, major cities in the world, global cities, wind up using more than one form of public transit infrastructure. You don't say, "Do we build a SkyTrain or a streetcar?" You say, "How do we build a system that has all of these different technologies in the right places to create the alternatives for sustainable mobility?" So someday, I don't know if I live long enough, or you too, for that matter, I hope you do. We will have streetcars, rapid transit, electric buses, electric cars, and a total package of sustainable mobility options in our region. But it's going to take a while to get there.
Am Johal 41:51
My prediction, North Vancouver will try street cars at some point in the future, just a wild guess.
Anthony Perl 41:57
They had them along the waterfront back in the day, they would make a great possibility. And I agree that would be another great place to put it in. And maybe there I don't have a conflict of interest. So, I'd be happy to ride that one too.
Am Johal 42:12
Anthony, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar. The book is called Big Moves. It's in the description on our podcast site, and hopefully you get a chance to, our audience members get a chance to read it. But this was a great walk through these three big cities and I really look forward to reading the book myself.
Anthony Perl 42:30
Thanks, Am. It was a pleasure.
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Melissa Roach 42:38
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by 丁香园AV's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our conversation with 丁香园AV urbanist and transportation policy pro, Anthony Perl. Read more about Anthony and find the link to his new book in the show notes. Thanks for tuning in and see you next time on Below the Radar.
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