There is an energy injected into Granville Street lately: coloured smoke bursting through the thick crowd, extended liquor-serving hours, and being able to catch the train home late. Hosting FIFA has brought many changes to Vancouver and some of these should be made permanent, especially with transit. This includes longer service hours and more Mark V trains.
TransLink has been a mode of travel for fans of sports, concerts, and community events. In 2024, they helped transport fans attending Taylor Swift’s concerts. Now, for the World Cup, trains and buses wear festive wraps, and 12,000 more bus service hours have been added. Some SkyTrains run more frequently, and on match days, service will run an extra hour. Signage has cropped up around town, too, including a large mural-sized map at Renfrew Station. What’s new is having longer Millenium line trains that run more often meaning I lose less time waiting on the platform, and share much less elbow room with fellow commuters. TransLink has started putting larger trains running on the Expo line by supplementing its fleet with the Mark V, a five-car train with 25% more capacity than the previous generation, Mark III.
I would be less enthusiastic about keeping the new 11 FIFA Fan Festival routes. These run “every 5 minutes from two hours prior to gate open to two hours following gate close” at the expense of the 145 route between SFU and Production Way. Articulated buses (the 60-foot long accordion ones) have been conscripted for the FIFA Fan Express. There seems to have been a mismanagement in priorities somewhere. Train stations with bus connections to SFU get packed with students forced to jam themselves into buses 65% the size of the old ones without an increase in frequency. I wondered why police officers could be imported from Delta, Calgary, and Edmonton but extra buses/operators couldn’t have? So yes, the displacement is temporary, and yes, demand for the 11 routes seem to be there on game days. Maybe my real issue with the bus re-routing isn’t that I feel like externalities facing students weren’t priced fairly. Out of the $22 million spent on transit, how much of that was on ornamental soccer balls!?’
As Metro Vancouver continues to develop, a need for increased transit frequency and capacity will be impossible to ignore.
As Metro Vancouver continues to develop, a need for increased transit frequency and capacity will be impossible to ignore. The Mark V is the longest train possible due to existing platform lengths, so FIFA’s constant application of a rush-hour schedule could be a valuable alternative. Housing developers are pushing boundaries of what is possible, with Pinnacle’s new plan for Lougheed Town Centre including an 87-storey tower. With mixed use planning including nearly 2,000 strata units among commercial space, traffic in the area is guaranteed to surge. There just isn’t room for car traffic at this scale: Lougheed highway is just four lanes. Widening the road isn’t a viable solution, either. As shown in Los Angeles, it creates “induced demand” where traffic becomes congested again as demand catches up with increased breathing room for drivers.
The FIFA upgrades are a fantastic step in the right direction to increased service. SkyTrains cannot operate 24/7 because there is “no safe way to maintain the 30-year-old transit system if it were to run around the clock on weekends,” according to the findings in a 2019 report. I don’t think non-stop service is necessary, though, Transit just has to continue their increased bus and train service to keep cars off the road.
