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Streetcar desired for Arbutus Corridor lands

12th & Cambie
streetcar
The last time Vancouverites got to ride a streetcar in the city was during the 2010 Winter Games when Bombardier ran a train from Science World to Granville Island as part of a demonstration project. Photo Dan Toulgoet

Lots of excitement last week about Mayor Gregor Robertson’s announcement that the City of Vancouver purchased the Arbutus Corridor lands for $55 million from Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd.

It’s a beautiful and sizeable chunk of land, with 42 meandering acres of open space running about nine kilometres from First Avenue to Milton Street, near Southwest Marine Drive and West 75th Avenue.

So what’s the city going to do with it?

Well, you probably heard – develop a transportation greenway for pedestrians and cyclists. The mayor mentioned New York City’s High Line public park and the Galloping Goose trail on Vancouver Island as inspirations for the project.

All sounds very cool.

But here’s a question: How do you fit a streetcar along such a route?

I ask because buried deep in the city’s news release was a brief mention of reserving space along the corridor “for future light rail/streetcar.” Maybe you had the same reaction: Mixing streetcars with bikes and pedestrians sounds like more work for paramedics and firefighters.

Yes, I know streetcars run all over the world, including Toronto where I once lived. Without much trouble at all, they run along major thoroughfares next to cars, bikes and daring joggers, who choose to use the road instead of the sidewalk.

But the section of the Arbutus Corridor I’m familiar with -- having worked at Sixth and Fir for more than a decade -- is the stretch that runs from Granville Island into Kitsilano.

It’s fairly narrow and I can’t picture a streetcar running through the same swath of land proposed for pedestrians, joggers and cyclists. I guess that’s why I’m a reporter and Jerry Dobrovolny is the city’s general manager of engineering. I spoke to Dobrovolny Monday near the section of existing rail track at Sixth and Burrard.

“You’re actually pointing to the two sections that are the biggest challenge,” he said of the stretch. “From Sixth Avenue here and then going north from here are the narrowest sections. They’re might be some places there where we do things off-street.”

Off-street?

“We’ll look at all of our city holdings, not just the rail right-of-way that we purchased,” he continued. “So it may be that the streetcar runs in the street on Sixth Avenue in that section. That’s the thing about streetcars – in downtown Toronto or San Francisco – is you can run in and out of traffic. If you’re able to keep it separate from traffic, obviously you can move more quickly with less interruptions. But there’s no reason you can’t operate in traffic when you need to.”

All this talk of a streetcar has plenty of folks excited, including former COPE city councillor Tim Louis, who has proposed using the unused space above a streetcar line to build housing; the Vancity building above the Skytrain tracks at Main and Terminal is an example.

Interesting idea and so is the streetcar itself.

But let’s get back to planet earth for a sec. For starters, the cost to run a streetcar from First Avenue to the Fraser River would cost a bundle; back in 2006, I wrote a story based on a city staff report that estimated a streetcar network from Granville Island to the downtown waterfront would cost up to $200 million.

The other fact is this: The city’s number one transportation infrastructure priority is getting a $1.9-billion subway built along the Broadway corridor. Dobrovolny made that clear in our conversation Monday.

“Broadway has been our priority for over 15 years,” he said. “The ridership numbers would make it the transportation project that moves the most people out of any project that’s ever been built in the province -- on opening day.”

Dobrovolny hopes to have a better sense of how soon or long it will take to get a subway built when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government delivers its first budget next week. Trudeau promised during the election campaign to work with the city and provincial government to extend rapid transit along the Broadway corridor.

So, for now, it appears the closest Vancouverites ever got to riding a streetcar in Vancouver was during the 2010 Winter Games when Bombardier operated a train from Science World to Granville Island as part of a demonstration project. That’s unless you were around in the 1950s and rode the interurban train that ran from Vancouver to Steveston.

From Vancouver to Steveston!

Imagine that.

mhowell@vancourier.com

@Howellings