Jim Drives a Car

 

Setting the Stage

Last month Irene had an appointment at the pain clinic at Royal Jubilee hospital. She's been having back pain for several years now, it's often triggered by walking, and it's been getting progressively worse. In fact, her back pain is the reason we bought e-bikes (which have been life changing), but that will be a different post.

This post is about our trip to Royal Jubilee and ubiquity.

Ever since the City added traffic calming to the Kings-Haultain corridor, it's been easy to get to Royal Jubilee by bike, and the hospital has some bike parking, so Irene assumed she'd ride there. When the clinic called, the conversation went something like this:

Friendly clinic person: Hello, I'm calling from the pain clinic at Royal Jubilee. Your appointment at such and such a time. We're located in the Memorial Pavilion, right across from the parkade! You'll see us as soon as you come out from parking your car. Remember to bring a driver for the trip back, since you won't be able to drive yourself.

Irene: Thank you. I was planning on biking. Is that OK?

Confused yet friendly clinic person: silence… we wouldn't recommend that.

We could have both ridden on my cargo bike. It's designed to carry an adult passenger, and we've installed rear handle bars and a seat. We travel that way that all the time, especially if we're going out for a meal or visiting the rowing club. It's fun, and I think it amuses passersby!

On the other hand, an adult passenger on a cargo bike, just like a passenger on a motorcycle, plays a more active role than a passenger in a car does, and a woozy adult passenger might not be safe. We could also have taken transit, but that might not be fun after a procedure. We booked a Modo car share.

As an aside, car share services like Modo and Evo are great enablers for people who drive, but are interested in owning fewer cars. We've been building car oriented infrastructure for a century now, and sometimes it's just the easy way to get places.

The Trip

To keep things consistent, the map shows the trip from the Galloping Goose at Harbour Road. It's a straight shot down Bay, which is fine if you're driving, and a good way to die otherwise. This was typical Victoria car trip:

• The roads were well marked.
• The ride was smooth and easy.
  
• Traffic signals made navigating intersections easy.
• The road never suddenly disappeared.
  
• There was plentiful and inexpensive parking at our destination.

To make the experience complete, I even got to curse at a cyclist! I do not like being close passed on the right in either a car or a bike, even if I see the other person coming.

As another aside, practically every time someone on social media talks about being injured or threatened by someone driving, a helpful soul will chime in and say something like "I saw a CYCLIST do XXX." This is a bad faith argument. It's a common form of Ad Hominem logical fallacy called Tu quoque. It's very similar to Whataboutism, which may be more familiar. It's a trolling tactic to derail an argument. But, as with many such things, there's a kernel of truth inside.

The truth is that SOME PEOPLE behave inconsiderately. SOME PEOPLE DRIVING A CAR behave inconsiderately. SOME PEOPLE RIDING A BIKE behave inconsiderately. SOME PEOPLE WALKING behave inconsiderately. When it comes to public policy, though, it's the human cost that should be paramount. If a person walks into you, you might be annoyed. If a person clips you with their bike, one or both of you might get bruised (serious injuries happen, but are rare). But if a person hits you with a car, you stand a good chance of ending up in the hospital or the morgue.

The Procedure

The procedure was uneventful. I sat in a chair. I got up to visit the washroom. I sat in a chair some more. Then Irene walked out and we went home.

That was my perspective. I'm sure Irene's was different.

The Return Trip

The trip home included a detour. Heading back on Bay, just before crossing Government Street, Irene, mostly recovered, exclaimed "I'm hungry!", and I was struck by a vision of fresh coffee and a delicious breakfast sandwich at Union Pacific. Unfortunately, we'd reached the point of no return on Bay and had to cross the Point Ellice Bridge and come back on the Johnson Street Bridge. Easy enough.

We turned left onto Store Street, then right onto Herald. There were several parking spots along Herald, so I pulled in, took out my cell phone, and opened the Park Victoria App. There was also a nearby kiosk for those who enjoy that sort of thing. Paying for parking was easy, too.

Union Pacific did not disappoint. We ordered and payed by waving my phone at the point of sale terminal. We enjoyed their excellent coffee, breakfast sandwiches, and a scone on their beautiful patio. Then we went back to the car and drove home.

What's the Point Already?

So, why am I telling you about this utterly uneventful, even boring, trip?

• The car share was simple, easy to use, and effective.
• Driving was easy.
  
• Parking at Royal Jubilee was easy.
• Using the parking app on Herald Street was easy.
• Paying for our food was easy.
  

But… why was it easy?

• The car rode smoothly on safe auto infrastructure that cost $$$$.
• The car was easy to park because someone spent $$$$ on a parkade.
  
• Spots on the street were available for me to store my car in because the City dedicates hugely valuable land to car storage and provides a sophisticated system to regulate its use.
• Buying food was easy because we've invested billions of dollars in making electronic payments fast, cheap, and effective.

The City of Victoria maintains about 276 kms of paved roads. Strong Towns looked into the cost of building roads back in 2020. One of the less expensive road types in the table is the "small urban minor collector". If we pull out that number, convert USD to CAD, and run inflation up to 2023, then we can estimate the cost of reconstructing a lane at just under $1,000,000 a kilometre. That's a very back of the envelope calculation. Also, if you look in the City budget and pull out street related costs, you'll find that Victoria spends about $4,000,000 a year on street operations, and about another $8,000,000 a year in capital expenditures on streets. Another way to look at it is through the BC Community Lifecycle Infrastructure Costing (CLIC) tool. With default values, a four lane arterial like Bay is projected to cost about $2,095 per meter, so the 3.7 km section of this trip cost just under $8,000,000. Any way you slice it, it's a lot of money.

What about the parkade? It's a bit hard to tease out costs, but it looks like a typical cost for an above ground parkade is around $35,000 per spot. There are 368 parking spots in the RJH parkade, so figure something like $13,000,000 to build the structure. And this doesn't count all of the surface parking at the hospital, or the cost of staffing and maintenance.

In comparison, there seem to be about 25 bike parking locations for all of Royal Jubilee Hospital. If each of those locations had four inverted U style racks (enough for eight bikes), the total cost would be in the neighbourhood of $40,000. Again,that's rough, but the total amount spent on bike parking is going to be in the range of one or two parkade spots.

You can also look at where we, as a city, province, and country, spend our  money.

The province recently completed the McKenzie Interchange at a final cost of $96,000,000 dollars.

In comparison, Amsterdam had a bad parking problem at their train station. There were too many bicycles, and they were tight on space. So they built a 7,000 bike underwater parking garage for their train station. It cost €60,000,000, or about $86,300,000 in Canadian dollars. So less than one McKenzie.

Oh, and they built a second, 4,000 bike facility while they were at it. Photos of both facilities are available at the Dutch Cycling Embassy.

It should probably come as no surprise that when you look at major Dutch cities, you see mode shares like this:

 

City	Automobile	Train	BTM (Bus/Tram/Metro)	Bicycle	Other
Amsterdam	21%	1%	16%	48%	13%
Rotterdam	38%	1%	15%	31%	15%
Den Haag	31%	1%	15	38%	16%
Utrecht	29%	1%	6%	51%	13%

 

When you spend real money to make transit and active transportation easy, then people use more transit and active transportation.

 

As Brent Toderian says:

 

The truth about a city's aspirations isn't found in its vision. It's found in its budget.