Residents of Burnaby Heights upset with new Bus Rapid Transit proposal

BY ELLIOT MOFFAT-SHOJANIA

TransLink’s proposal to build a bus rapid transit line from Park Royal to Metrotown is frustrating business owners and residents of the Burnaby Heights Area because the line would remove parking spaces along East Hastings.

Sandro Massullo, who owns Massullo Music in Burnaby Heights, said without street parking in the Heights, people will drive on by the businesses.

“It’s tough as it is now with the lack of parking. We eliminate parking on the street completely, I don’t see too many businesses like ourselves being around,” Massullo said.

TransLink is proposing the bus route because it says the new service will make it faster for people to get to the two biggest shopping centres, Park Royal and Metrotown, as well as the Metrotown SkyTrain station. TransLink has presented two options, one is having the bus go through East Hastings and Willingdon, the other connecting via Boundary Road and Lougheed Highway. Advocates for the East Hastings route want the bus to provide service to where the shops are, rather than going along the highway. On Oct 2, TransLink wrapped up a series of community engagement surveys on the two routes, and will be releasing a report of what it plans to do early in the new year.

According to Isabel Kolic of the Heights Merchants Association, the local business improvement association, approximately 40 to 50 per cent of their business comes from customers who travel by car, including elderly people and the disabled.

“We want to remain multimodal to allow us to retain the widest variety of clients that we can so that they can support the widest variety of merchants. With the loss of parking, that’s a giant loss,” Kolic said.

Kolic said when the city of Burnaby put an HOV in lane and removed parking spots in 1996, merchants lost 20 per cent of their revenue overnight.

“It just vanished. It didn’t materialize on a different day. It was gone,” Kolic said.

Coun. Daniel Tetrault said transit in general is lacking and his main hope is that they get better transit built between Metrotown and the North Shore, whether it goes on Boundary or Hastings. He says transit is only going to get worse as the city grows, especially with the BCIT student housing project being built nearby.

“That’s going to bring in a lot more people and a lot more people are going to be dependent on transit there to get around,” Tetrault said.

Tetrault said parked cars in the Heights provide a buffer between pedestrians and traffic during rush hour.

“It’s quite a bit busier and hectic if you’re a pedestrian and it loses that feel of a smaller neighborhood,” Tetrault said.

TransLink says the new line will have up to 60,000 daily riders, and will help bring more business to the Heights if it runs through East Hastings.

Gabriel Hasselbach, a resident of the Heights, disagrees with the idea that it will bring a lot of business to the Heights.

“If they’re trying to get on a rapid system anyway, they’re not stopping in the Heights, they’re just trying to get to the North Shore,” Hasselbach said.

Kolic said business owners in the Heights feel like they will be finished if the rapid transit line goes through.

“Merchants whose leases are coming up and they’re already considering, ‘OK, when my lease comes up, I’m going to go somewhere else because this is too much of a threat to my ability to sell my business,’” Kolic said.

Denis Agar, executive director of MovementYVR, a non profit advocating for faster and more reliable public transit, said these merchants are undervaluing the business coming from transit.

“It’s not as though those parking spaces are going to disappear and nothing is going to replace them. They’ll be getting a $100 million transportation infrastructure investment in their community that would bring customers,” Agar said.

Agar said that Burnaby Heights’ population has been flat in the last decade, while merchants’ rents continue to go up.

“How are you supposed to run a business when your rent goes up, your taxes go up and your customer basis stays flat, right? You need new customers to come from somewhere,” Agar said.

Agar added that there is no reason the parking has to go away. In a Dec 9 Burnaby city council meeting, members of MovementYVR presented the city with the idea of removing a lane of traffic for the BRT instead of losing street parking. In their opinion, this would both keep the merchants happy as they get to retain their parking, while also maximizing the de-congesting power of the BRT.