Dear Editor:
Re:Businesses Bristle at B-Line Plan, Dec. 7 front-page story.
The recent opposition to the proposed bus lane along Marine Drive, coming from a tiny, vocal minority of the community, is concerning to me.
Opponents of this bus lane seem to not understand the message that our municipality would send to TransLink by rejecting the mild bus priority measures they’re mandating for new B-Lines.
Firstly, the concerns about congestion and parking being worsened by the bus lane are incorrect. These changes would remove only 15 of 766 parking spots between 25th Street and Park Royal; that’s less than two per cent.
Regarding congestion, what’s being proposed is a lane for buses, accessing parking, and turning right, but also an entire lane that is dedicated to through traffic – no left turns from it, as they plan on adding left turn bays at certain intersections. This would improve traffic flow; for example, no longer will cars simultaneously turning left/right westbound at 15th Street be able to prevent any cars from going through for an entire green light.
Marine Drive already falls vastly short of the capacity that two-lane roads usually have; these changes would improve the current situation with parking and turns strangling the road’s through traffic capacity.
Of more concern to me is that, by refusing to co-operate on the B-Line, we’d be telling TransLink that we aren’t interested in them improving bus service in West Vancouver, period. It’s foolish to think that they’ll even consider increasing capacity on the 250/255 routes, or extending service hours west of Dundarave, if we tell them that their plans – ones created by people with, cumulatively, centuries of transit planning experience between them – are useless.
The improvement in east-west capacity created by the B-Line is a pre-condition to them doing anything that would increase transit utilization on Marine Drive (such as more buses to Caulfeild); if we turn that down, they’ll most likely give up on us for the next decade or so.
In that case, local businesses will have an even harder time getting employees in; West Vancouver cannot function without the many workers here who might never be able to afford cars. If we want our businesses here to survive, we need to make it easier and faster for service workers to get to our municipality.
I know from experience that service workers already find the commute to here excessively long and unreliable; failing to improve that will worsen our labour shortage, imperiling many businesses along Marine Drive.
Matt Rowan
West Vancouver
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