Vancouver’s Olympic Transit Demonstration

The Vancouver Olympics may be over, but Jarrett Walker at Human Transit writes that the legacy for public transportation in that city could be a lasting one. During the games, the city moved nearly 1.7 million people per day on its transit system. Walker sees it as a sort of Olympic exhibition of what the future could hold:

The skyline of Vancouver. (Photo: janusz l via Flickr)

Why should a growing city with high ambitions for sustainability
host a big blockbuster like the Olympics, with all the risk and
nuisance that it entails? 

So that everyone can see exceptional
transit ridership, and exceptional volumes of pedestrians, and exceptional limitations on private car traffic, and can ask:
“What if that were normal?”  Here’s how Gordon Price put it yesterday:

“You now have a public that sees the possibility,” said (SFU City Program director Gordon Price). “We just conducted the greatest controlled traffic experiment in North America.”

In a growing city, a big event like the
Olympics is an imperfect but vivid glimpse of what “normal” might
be like 10, 20, 30 years in the future, when there will be that many
people moving every day. 

As Walker points out, this kind of real-world demonstration is worth a thousand policy statements or pronouncements from politicians. 

More from around the network: Car Free With Kids has some useful tips on how to raise a kid who likes to walk. The Bus Bench writes about the United States’ gender divide in cycling and transit — and why there’s a link to our nation’s lack of affordable child care. And we’re now following Ditching the Car for Forty Days, the blog of a guy who has chosen to give up his car commute for Lent.