Fairview Heights

If you ever go by the northeast side of the Highway 1 and Highway 15 interchange, you will notice that there is an empty lot with a road that goes from nowhere to nowhere. Originally, it was going to be home to a Thrifty Foods grocery store and various other big box retailers. In 2008, a mixed-use development with 841 units was proposed for the site. On May 9th, the proposal was revised to reduce the number of units to 596 due to market conditions.

Fairview Heights - Proposed Mixed Use Development. Click Image to Enlarge

Even with the reduction in units, this is still a pretty large development. What I notice about this development and others in the South of Fraser is that we do a good job with residential development and density. A surface parking lots is usually hard to find in a residential developments, but it still seems that commercial developments are focused around a parking lot and this project is no exception. I can think of a few reasons why this is the case. The first reason that pops into my mind is that while surface parking lots are all but banned in municipal bylaws for most multifamily developments, this isn't the case for commercial developments. The other reason could be that because there is still so much greenfield developable land, surface parking is still considered "cheap" to build as we haven't been forced to be smarter with what we build.

Hopefully the new Highway 1 RapidBus will make a stop at this project when it opens.

Vernon

This weekend, I was back in my hometown of Vernon, BC attending a friend's wedding. I haven't really spent much time in Vernon since I moved away in 2001 to the big city. I took a few pictures of the changes in downtown Vernon including some new office buildings and I also took some pictures of Vernon's mixed-use downtown.



One of the exciting things that I saw in Vernon was the introduction of multi-use bike/walk corridors and tons of on-street bike lanes on exciting roads that didn't exist in 2001. It's amazing that a city of 38,895 can afford this as we've been told that building this kind of infrastructure in Langley with a population of 130,555 in unaffordable.

Multi-use Trail in Vernon, BC

Environmental Petitions

So I didn't know this, but if you are concerned about the federal government and its roll in protecting the environment, the Office of the Auditor General of Canada has a solution. It's call an Environmental Petition.

In 1995, the government of the time passed a law that allows citizens to bring their concerns about sustainable development and action requested. The federal government must reply.

Anyway, have a look at previous petitions and watch this video.

More on Surrey Rapid Transit Study

Following up to yesterday’s post, I also talked to Jeffrey Busby and Dan Freeman about what they see as the primary difference between bus rapid transit, light rail, and SkyTrain technology. When talking about bus rapid transit and this is the assumption in the Surrey Rapid Transit Study, it is fully separated from traffic and has similar station and guideway design as light rail. The only true bus rapid transit we ever had in our region was the No. 3 Road Busway in Richmond for the old 98 B-Line. The 97 B-Line and 99 B-Line are not bus rapid transit; they are just express buses.

Anyway with that out of the way, the difference between bus rapid transit, light rail, and SkyTrain boils down to total people carrying capacity, capital cost, and operational cost according to TransLink. The following chart is meant to give you a rough idea of capital costs per km, operating cost per passenger, and total people carrying ability.

Comparing Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), Light Rail, and SkyTrain

Now, I’m a big fan of light rail because I believe it offers the best value and is the most flexible and scalable form of rapid transit, but I invite you to look on TransLink's website to see how they view things.