Transformation of Pacific Boulevard
It’s happening! At least one section of Pacific Boulevard – the surface expressway that runs through Yaletown – is being rebuilt according to the Jacobs/Macdonald Plan.
Allan Jacobs and Elizabeth Macdonald, they of “The Boulevard Book,” worked up a design for the conversion of PacBlvd some years ago, though City Council didn’t have money to pay for it. However, whenever and wherever adjacent redevelopment occurred, the design would apply.
You can learn much more about all this in Price Tags 19.
First section to be rebuilt: the blocks adjacent to Concord Pacific’s Beach Neighbourhood – just where the boulevard curves at Homer Street, east of the Granville Bridge.
It will be much more like a Parisian boulevard in concept: a side street to the right, separated by a minor median, will handle neighbourhood traffic, while the through traffic will still have two lanes in each direction, with a major median between them. There should still be bike lanes.
What a difference! Wouldn’t it be great to transform the boulevard with the new design (complete with streetcar) by 2010.
Sounds like a cool concept. I was wondering why they were redoing some of the streets down there. Do you know if they are building it with the possibility of the Downtown Streetcar going through the area? So if the Streetcar ever gets built, it’ll be easy to add in..
Instead of concrete sidewalks it would be nice to see them use paving stones as well.
The middle lanes are definietly narrower than they used to be. Hopefully there will be a roomy bike lane.
I wonder whether the separation of the parking areas onto their own parallel roadway will have the unintended consequene of speeding up traffic on the “express” lanes in the middle, since parallel parkers are now funnelled into the parallel roadway and do not hold-up the main flow of traffic.
As currently planned, the streetcar would turn up Drake Street (one block east of Homer); therefore, nothing we see in the section currently under construction would be affected directly by the streetcar.