Did the Olympics permanently change transit use?
Posted November 23, 2010 6:24 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – More than 60 per cent of trips to downtown Vancouver during the Olympics were by transit, bike or foot, according to research out of UBC.
But did the Olympics permanently change the way people in the Lower Mainland use transit?
Transportation economist Stephen Rees says the Olympics did open our eyes to a whole new way of travel.
“The Olympics showed you could close streets and give buses priority to use those streets, and you could get people to leave their cars behind and still get around,” he observes.
But Rees notes after the Games people started bickering over how to pay for bus service, and now we’re pretty much back to where we started. “The momentum has been lost. What happens is that people return to the patterns that they’re used to.”
Rees says, though, people still remember what service was like during the Olympics, and believes that if the service levels go back to where they were, people will go back to using it.
