Ahhh - a rather bigger audience! I think we'll try & make an effort to see it properly next year, esp if they have a bike valet. Always fun to support these things and I never see much of 12th.
Did you go? We haven't before but were cycling home around 4pm and crossed 12th - looked like a lot of good music and a decent number of stalls... didn't get a chance to wander around though... end of a long day. New West is a festival every weekend in the summer :)
sometimes it’s better to take the Evo than my own car just to avoid parking and dodging traffic on the way back.
I know right? Sure, the Evo concept is not a solution to every traffic/vehicle related problem but there are so many use cases where it's hellishly handy. I've definitely done the same - an Evo into town and no worries about parking... lock and WALK AWAY :)
If this is successful then I'd like to see them consider staffing the bike parkades at Main St, Commercial, Metrotown etc. At the moment there's too much theft going on there for me to ever think about leaving my bike there.
All you'd need to provide is a desk and staffing - all the infrastructure is obviously there already.
One Evo can replace a fair number of parked cars…
A rep from Evo told me once that their data suggests each Evo takes 7 privately owned cars off the road. (I know that's worded badly and yes I've seen the way some people drive Evos...)
I don't disagree with you... I think developers would be adverse to investing time and money into a no-parking development. But what's the indicator for them to be watching that purchasers don't value parking stalls?
Absolutely - I think there's some real estate mantra about how land is the only thing they're not making more of. Using 18 sq m of it for possibly storing one vehicle is a heck of a waste. I saw some stat that there's apparently 8 parking spaces per vehicle in the US - they need one at home, one at work, one at every mall that you might want to visit. So that's 144 sq m of asphalt for storing each car.
True re condo prices... it might work if there was competition and sufficient supply... but we all know that's not the case.
I would love to see the occasional development that goes hard against parking. Build it over or across the street from Skytrain, provide 10% or more Modo/Evo spaces and zero or near zero residents parking. Then cut the price of everything by $60/120K given you're not having to build the cost of underground parking into the prices.
But even if you could persuade the appropriate council to do away with their parking minimums AND there was some way to discourage car owners from buying (have a neighbouring building with lots of parking? Sign some sort of contract?) I know people's lives change. Just because you work downtown and can take the Skytrain today, doesn't mean you're not going to be working in White Rock or Maple Ridge next year. Or a bunch of people are going to shrug, lie about car ownership, buy the cheaper unit and plan to park on the street somewhere - then complain about how they don't have parking in their building.
Actually, my GENIUS PLAN is for nobody to "own" any parking in a building. Have all the spaces owned by a parking organization that rents them out on a month-by-month basis. That way you reduce the price of every unit by the $60K that each space costs to build and the family buying a 2-bed who don't need parking don't pay for it and the couple buying a 1-bed who need two spots can get it too. Also there's none of the "I drive a monster truck but my unit came with a 'small car' space" or "I'm disabled but my unit's space is miles from the elevator" issues... you just rent out appropriate spaces to each unit depending on their needs.
But obviously the developer is going to want their money up front for the parking they built so whatever organization owns & manages the parking is going to need DEEP pockets and the return on investment is very very slow.
New West kinda breaks down into several areas where this pretty much applies already - uptown, downtown, Sapperton etc.
Obviously there are places where you can live and not be within 15mins of everything but it does have multiple centres not too far from each other. Maybe setting this as policy might make it easier to add things like neighbourhood corner stores.
I think the ship has already sailed for Surrey. Even if the city wasn't designed around cars, council seems too busy focusing on themselves and police forces to do anything useful for their residents.
Small and dense Canadian city here... not sure we even have school buses although I've seen them in other nearby school districts where I assume the catchment areas are wider.
And yes, they're the standard yellow school bus 🙂
There is a nice sweet spot when they're old enough to have phones but not old enough to complain about having you track them 🙂
It's great to have them walk, even when they're very young and you need to walk with them.
Back in my day (insert grandpa Simpson gif here!) I had a 10min walk to a bus stop and caught a public bus. Felt sorry for the adults that had to catch the same bus with 40 wild children.
These days I think my friends' school age kids all walk or cycle - we're in a small city with fairly good bike infrastructure.
...and yes the bike valet was there and we did use it :)
Wasn't the most amazing showing of food trucks - although that's probably because we attend so many events with food trucks in New West it was a case of "eaten at that one before... and that one... and that one..." ( Although I got some awesome bread pudding from the "Crack On" truck that mostly sells egg sandwiches :) )
Great event though - it's lovely not being penned-in because I want a beer. And the tables & chairs were smartly located in the natural shade along Columbia. And plenty of water stations. And the fore-mentioned bike valet. Lots of little improvements on last year... which was effectively the first running of it after the relaunch.