Why is there a shack blocking the seawall?
It is on the most valuable piece of public waterfront in the city, connecting Stanley Park and downtown. And by now it should be gone.
Here’s the motion moved by Council on June 11, 2010:
A. THAT the Director of Planning be advised that Council would favour the approval of Development Application Number DE413848 for the continued use of the Temporary Float Plane Terminal in Coal Harbour for a further period of time, not to exceed two years from permit issuance or the completion of the new permanent facility at 1001 Canada Place, whichever is first and with no option to renew.
June is here and yet the temporary float-plane terminal is still there, caught in the unpleasant negotiations among four different parties. You can find the backstory here and here. City Hall says they expect to resolve the problem this September.
We’ve heard that before, and seen the half-hearted effort to properly sign the route through the site.
But why wait? Why can’t the shacks be moved a few feet back right now? Or simply be demolished, with the operations shifted to available office space?
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It needn’t involve the movement of the docks themselves, and at least provide a clear public right-of-way during the summer.
Why not?
Annals of Walking – 10
A pedestrian perspective.
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WHY DON’T CONSERVATIVES LIKE TO WALK?
Will Oremus follows up on Tom Vanderbilt’s series on the crisis in American walking:
I noticed something about the cities with the highest “walk scores.” They’re all liberal. New York, San Francisco, and Boston, the top three major cities on Walkscore.com, are three of the most liberal cities in the country. In fact, the top 19 are all in states that voted for Obama in 2008. The lowest-scoring major cities, by comparison, tilt conservative: Three of the bottom four—Jacksonville, Oklahoma City, and Fort Worth—went for McCain. What explains the correlation? Don’t conservatives like to walk?
More here in Slate. [Conclusion: "It may be easier for a city to turn liberal than for a city to turn walkable."]
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ZERO PEDESTRIAN DEATHS? IS IT POSSIBLE
Chicago is going to try. Sweden already has:
The idea of aiming for zero traffic deaths may be novel in the United States, but in Sweden, it’s national policy. In 1997, the Swedish Parliament passed the Vision Zero Initiative, with the “ultimate target of no deaths or serious injuries on Sweden’s roads.” Currently, the plan calls for an interim goal of reducing deaths and injuries to 50 percent of 2007 figures by 2020.
Has it worked? Zero is still some ways off – 2050 is the target date now — but the absolute number of traffic fatalities in Sweden continues to fall even as traffic is on the rise. And compared to the United States, their numbers are impressive: In 2009, Sweden had 4.3 traffic deaths per 100,000 population, while the United States had 12.3 (the European Union average was 11 in 2007).
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A WALK IN THE CEMETERY
I love how Mountain View is upending the morbid associations we typically have with cemeteries.
FOOD! A WALKING TOUR OF MOUNTAIN VIEW CEMETERY
SUNDAY, JUNE 3 – 10:00AM
CELEBRATION HALL – 5445 FRASER ST (ENTRANCE AT 39TH Ave)
$10 cash only.
Chris Mathieson, community historian, discusses the history of Vancouver’s relationship with food through introductions to fishermen, farmers, hunters, shopkeepers and more. Food traditions associated with death and cemeteries will also be explored.
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The City as Workout – Best Places
In this week’s Price Point, I noted how important was to integrate opportunities for exercise into the fabric of the city. Readers came back with a couple of examples:
From Tessa:
North Vancouver has its very own version of those stairs in Calgary just north of Marine Drive at Pemberton, connecting the neighbourhood of Pemberton Heights down a steep cliff to transit and shops on Marine Drive.
It’s 165 stairs, a very beautiful trail, and buried in the woods (map here).
Theseboots recommends Signal Hill in St. John’s, Newfoundland (map here; photo by Mark Muschett).
I want more!
Send me ideas, pics, map locations – whatever – of great places to work out that are part of the infrastructure of the city.
A 1974 Bicycle Ride: The Long Version
This is even better than the original below: a slower version, labelled, with freeze frames intercut with contemporary shots from 2011 – and a radio soundtrack from CKLG and CFUN, with an extraordinarily familiar newscast from ‘NW, c. ’75. And of course the VW Beetle count.
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A bicycle ride through Vancouver in 1974
I don’t know how BLAH City comes up with these videos – but this is an amazing find: a 1974 bike ride around Vancouver by hanssipma.
Shot with a Braun Nizo Super 8 camera mounted on a bicycle. The camera had an intervalometer so it automatically shot a frame of film every so many seconds. This is one continuous film, miraculously the film ran out just as I arrived back home.
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Home appears to be in Grandview, the start and stop, with a loop around Burrard Inlet, bridge to bridge , through Stanley Park and over to the south shore of False Creek. While some aspects of Vancouver don’t appear to have changed all that much (though it would be great to get a comparable video done today), there are some highlights.
Cyclists who don’t remember Lions Gate before it was rebuilt will be shocked to see the sidewalk we rode on back then, as well as the lack of a separated lane on Burrard. There’s also a quick shot of the old Englesea Lodge on English Bay before it burned, and a detour up to the Burrard Bridge given that the seawall went no further.
Most significantly, you’ll see the South Shore of False Creek under construction, with the seawall completed but not much else. Also some shots of the great industrial buildings where the Olympic Village is now. And a general absence of trees. The city looks relatively barren compared to the lushness that has filled in the streets in the last 38 years.
But that’s though my eyes. Anything else you notice, please add to Comments.
Pete McMartin, in a depressing sign of the times, references sprawl apologist Wendell Cox in his column today:
… densification, Cox maintains, rests on a mistaken assumption – that if a city is dense enough, we’ll get out of our cars in sufficient numbers to make a difference.
Instead, Cox wrote, densification does exactly the opposite. Most people continue to use their cars, but in a slower, less efficient flow of traffic.
“Behind this attempt to concentrate new housing near transit stops throughout the urban area is an illusion that by forcing people into higher densities, they will use cars less. There is little hope of this. A recent Statistics Canada report indicates that once the distance from downtown exceeds 10 kilometres, the travel behaviour of residents is virtually the same.”
I suppose Cox is right – if we simply ignore contrary evidence, namely everything noted in the following post, and add that lovely little qualifier: “once the distance from downtown exceeds 10 kilometres, the travel behaviour of residents is virtually the same.”
A 10K radius looks like this:
In other words, Cox’s argument that people won’t get out of their cars requires that we exclude Vancouver, most of the North Shore and some of Burnaby.
Interestingly, that 10K radius is almost exactly the extent of the original streetcar system (and today’s Frequent Transit Network): the transit that shaped this city. Beyond it, with the exception of places like New Westminster, is Motordom: the part of the region designed and built to be car dependent.
Not surprisingly, the statistics don’t yet show the drop in car use in Motordom – at least so far. Until the combination of sufficient density, mix of uses and transportation options are provided, people have no choice but to drive. (And the Province, dramatically expanding the road-and-bridge system while rejecting sustainable funding for transit, is doing its best to make sure that car dependence continues.)
What Cox and others maintain is that Motordom was the consequence of market choice, not the social engineering that was the basis for the transportation engineering that characterized the last half the the 20th-century.
Vancouver took a different direction in the late 1960s by rejecting freeway infrastructure – and its success remains a source of annoyance to those who require its failure to justifty the status quo. So they simply ignore and discount the last half century of our experience, and reject the idea that behaviour responds to changing conditions and incentives if it results in behaviour inconsistent with their worldview.
It raises the question as to who exactly is living an illusion.
The City is rolling out the next stage in its Transportation 2040 plan – an update to Council this morning by Jerry Dobrovolny, the Director of Transportation
Of special note: the plan will set targets for what’s called the modal split, or the percent for each mode of activity – vehicles, transit, feet and bike – used by travellers.
In 1976, for instance, the car was the choice of 90 percent of everyone who moved around within Vancouver’s borders. The plan of that time called for the percentage to drop to 75 percent. (There was no target date, likely because the planners and engineers never thought it would be reached in their lifetimes.)
So what actually happened?
By 1992, the number was down to 70 percent for vehicles. What might have seemed an unrealistic target in the heyday of Motordom was surpassed.
Next up: the Transportation Plan of 1997. It forecast driving would drop to 58 percent by 2021. Even that far out, it seemed ambitious.
What actually happened?
We got to 58 percent by 2008.
So now the next plan, Transportation 2040, calls for a split of 50 percent by car in 2020, 50 percent for everything else. Then, to up the ante, by 2040 driving would be down to 33 percent. In other words, two-thirds of all movements would be by foot, bike and transit. That means a drop of 25 percent in driving in roughly the same time it took to drop 32 percent from 1976 to 2008.
Seems unlikely? Not, apparently, as unlikely as the odds in 1976.
If you want to take a look at the details of the plan – there’s so much more, including 140 policies and actions – as well as participate in the feedback, check out the Transportation 2040 site here.
Alan Garr provides some background in his column here.
