‘No choice but to drive’: Impending e-scooter expansion not enough to alleviate South Vancouver transit woes

The City’s Lime shared e-scooter stations are emerging further south and east than ever before - but they have yet to reach Vancouver’s most underserved transit areas. 

Since launching in September 2024, riders have taken more than 1.12 million trips at the city's more than 190 e-scooter stations. The most recent additions were those installed in Renfrew-Collingwood, which now includes the city’s southernmost station at East 41st Avenue at Wales Street.  

“E-scooters are a great solution for ensuring that people have a last-mile connection from public transit to where they live, especially in areas that are less dense and transit can't serve them door to door,” said Nav Sharma from Movement BC. 

Unfortunately, he added that, while helpful, e-scooters and other forms of “micromobility” won’t be a sufficient solution, particularly in South Vancouver neighbourhoods, which are the most notably underserved by public transit. “We need to make sure that people have options and are not falling behind because they can’t drive.”

e-Scooters are only one piece of the transit puzzle

Due in part to population growth in the area, particularly the new River District development, residents have been forced to face increasingly congested streets during their commutes. 

“They have no choice but to be car drivers because there is a lack of transit options for them to move freely into other parts of Metro Vancouver,” said Prabhi Deol, a member of the Reframing South Vancouver Initiative, a group advocating for improved social services and transit in the neighbourhood. 

Neighbourhoods such as Sunset, Victoria-Fraserview and Killarney are all highly residential, hilly and lack much of the transit infrastructure afforded to other areas in the city, like SkyTrain stations, said Cherry Wong, who also works with the Reframing South Vancouver Initiative. 

“South Vancouver is often overlooked in terms of infrastructure and investments by the city and other governments,” Wong said. One factor contributing to this is the high number of racialized people and immigrants living in the area.

South Vancouver is home to roughly 100,000 people, with the largest share of racialized residents (80 per cent) and immigrants (56 per cent) in the city. 

“They don’t necessarily speak up when it comes to issues like transportation or lack of social service,” she said. “[Back in their home countries] if you speak up, you endanger your life, [especially] for newcomers coming from political oppression or refugee backgrounds.”

With higher rates of population growth among seniors and nearly a quarter of youth under 15 living in South Vancouver, transit options in the area are essential. 

“Factored in with all of the hills for seniors and new parents with carriages, it’s really hard for them to move around freely,”  said Deol. 

The Reframing South Vancouver Initiative pushed for a city council motion in 2023 named “Addressing Historic Inequities by Improving Infrastructure and Access to Services across South Vancouver and Marpole Neighbourhoods,” which passed unanimously at the time.

Since then, a number of the motion’s items have been accomplished. However, a lot of work on transit in particular is still needed. 

Some of the major issues flagged by the group included severe overcrowding on the number 20 and 49 buses, “banana buses” that do not arrive on time and then arrive in a bunch all at once, and the dire need for additional routes and increased frequency along Kent Avenue in the River District. 

With the push of development in South Vancouver, Deol said the need for advanced transit is all the more urgent. “If there’s going to be an increase in development, then…there has to be an increased [investment in] transit, otherwise we’re just introducing more motorists to the city and making it more congested.” 

Improvements for South Vancouver hopefully around the corner

With additions like e-scooters likely moving further south and the Kent Avenue Greenway slated for construction later this year, transit access in the area is set to expand. 

“Neighbourhoods like Renfrew-Collingwood and across Southeast Vancouver are part of a phased rollout,” Clare Laverty, community engagement manager for Vancouver at Lime Canada, wrote to Vancity Lookout. 

Danielle Wiley, associate director of Street Use Management with the city of Vancouver, likewise noted in a statement that “the SES [Shared E-Scooter System] is intended to expand to provide a safe, accessible and affordable transportation option city-wide, including in Southeast Vancouver.” However, neither Lime nor the City could provide a timeline for the rollout. 

In March, Translink released its Burrard Peninsula Area Transit Plan, which outlined a long-term vision for transportation throughout the city, including “providing more connections to rapid transit within Southeast Vancouver” and extending a number of bus lines throughout South Vancouver and the River District. 

For Deol, while the targets in the Burrard Peninsula Area Transit Plan are promising and mirror much of what the group has been advocating for, “it’s now a matter of actually allocating dollars towards these plans.”

She added: “Plans are amazing, it’s just a matter of them actually happening in our lifetime.”