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Douglas Todd: The idea of SkyTrain excited Metro Vancouver residents 40 years ago. What do they think now?

Douglas Todd: People weigh in, with affection and gripes, on how SkyTrain has impacted getting around, population growth, property values, congestion, panhandling and highrises.

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Imagine no highrise cluster at Burnaby Metrotown. No elevated views of Metro Vancouver backyards. No SeaBus crossing Burrard Inlet. No bustling station at Vancouver’s Science World. No sleek Skybridge across the Fraser River.

Douglas Todd: The idea of SkyTrain excited Metro Vancouver residents 40 years ago. What do they think now? Back to video

Metro’s first SkyTrain line opened just over 40 years ago. Media reports from the era, including mine, show most were excited by rapid transit, even before the tracks went in. Only a niggling minority worried about neighbourhood disruption and noisy transit cars.

In the mid-1980s, the highest building in Metro was Park Place, at 666 Burrard St. It was only 35 storeys. Now, since politicians have intensified population density around SkyTrain stations, hundreds of towers soar much higher.

Metro’s original SkyTrain line, which runs for 21 kilometres from downtown Vancouver’s waterfront to North Surrey, was built by the Social Credit government for $854 million. Try not to snort.

Now the SkyTrain network is four times longer. It stretches to Richmond, Coquitlam and beyond. TransLink boasts that 1.5 million people board the system each week, giving it the second highest per capita ridership in Canada. It’s in the process of being extended to Langley City and along Broadway in Vancouver.

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What does the public think of it now, compared with when it was just a political promise set to coincide with the opening of Vancouver’s Expo 86 world’s fair? I went to find out this week.

Back in the day, one of my first assignments as a reporter with the Columbian daily newspaper, which served the suburbs, was to find out what the public thought about the idea of the region’s first rapid-transit line. It was 1982.

I interviewed 25 people. The headline above the article read: “Rapid transit brings gleam to residents’ eyes.”

The first person I talked to in New Westminster, Morris Crandall, was born in the historic city in 1909, when horse and buggy were the only way to get around.

The new SkyTrain “will be really good,” Crandall told me, as he cut the lawn of Emmanuel Pentecostal church. “It might even liven the place up a bit with some people.”

Indeed it did. New West soon became one of the fastest-growing cities in Canada and now ranks as its second densest, after only Vancouver.

The population of Metro has swelled to 3.1 million in the meantime, up from just 1.3 million before SkyTrain opened.

In the 1980s many were exhilarated about SkyTrain pumping up property values. The owner of the Darby Inn hotel, Don Sears, told me: “I wouldn’t settle for anything less than a couple of million” from B.C.’s transit authority. Then, considering for a moment, Sears added: “Hey, wait a minute, maybe you shouldn’t print that.”

A few days after that interview three people died in a fire in the Darby Inn hotel. According to historian Jim Wolf, it eventually became the site for the massive New Westminster SkyTrain Station.

At the same time, over at 6949 Royal Oak Ave. in Burnaby, Sandy Wong was gleeful as he peeked out from behind the candy rack of his small M & B store.

“It will be good for my business. I hope so,” Wong said, since the proposed Royal Oak station would be across the street from his isolated grocery store.

In 2026, M & B is still there, filled with soda pop and flowers. Peter Pang bought the store from Wong 32 years ago. And he’s glad the Royal Oak station was built, since it provides customers. Pang still worries though: “Now business is so slow. No one has any money.”

This week Cora McDonald, 75, and Lari McCauley, 75, were chatting over a coffee inside the labyrinthine Metropolis shopping mall that forms the core of Metrotown town centre, which before SkyTrain was a lowrise expanse of retail stores and three-storey rental buildings.

The women said SkyTrain is fantastic, since it connects them to the airport, downtown Vancouver, Coquitlam and many other places. McCauley sold her car 10 years ago and relies heavily on rapid transit.

But the two weren’t exactly enamoured with the development SkyTrain has enabled.

“I hate Metrotown, with all its masses of people. I like the small shops where I live in Mount Pleasant (in Vancouver),” said McDonald.

And while McDonald dislikes the residential towers that have sprouted around many SkyTrain stations in the past four decades, McCauley is fine with them. She once lived on the 20th floor of a condo complex.

About six kilometres away, on Columbia Street in downtown New West, Chantae Lester, 34, and Kaci Martens, 35, were also enthusiastic about SkyTrain.

“I love our transit system, really. It’s well-used and eco-friendly and gets people out of their cars,” said Lester, while acknowledging she drives to work from Langley.

“I don’t like the highrises that have come with SkyTrain. They take away from the beauty. Still, it’s nice people have a place to live.”

Both added that sometimes the SkyTrain experience can be on the “shabby” side, with a few too many “weirdos” riding the trains and hanging around at the two downtown New West stations. But both usually feel safe when they use it.

Enjoying a beer at Kelly O’Brien’s Neighbourhood Restaurant near the New West station on 8th Street, Geoff Watts, 70, said SkyTrain has been “fantastic” for moving people around without cars.

Still, the longtime New West resident isn’t head-over-heels about the rapid population growth, congestion and towers that have come with SkyTrain: “That part really sucks.”

Like others, Watts is also concerned about illicit drug use and panhandling he believes is worsening around the New Westminster SkyTrain Station, which he said seems to be a magnet for trouble. In the past year he’s witnessed two overdose deaths.

While serving tables at the restaurant, Amanda Tubbs, 32, concurred on the chronic scenes of homelessness and addiction around New West’s two downtown stations. But overall she thinks SkyTrain has been a boon to Metro, especially since “a lot of people now don’t drive.”

Tubbs’s ultimate judgment on SkyTrain?

“It’s like life. It brings benefits and challenges.”

Why is the B.C. government ignoring this low-cost passenger rail network for the Fraser Valley?

There are cons, not just pros. for a subway to UBC

New Westminster is paying the price for becoming Canada's second-densest city

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