Green Streets Vancouver
Green Street Vancouver has just come out.
It’s a beautiful book, mostly photographs, commissioned by the City of Vancouver to give away. It’s easily read – 75 pages, with only the occasional page of text to interrupt the flow of images, mainly flowers, grown by volunteers who plant and maintain the boulevards, traffic circles and corner bulges – over 300 in all.
St. George and Fifth
Concentrated in the streetcar suburbs – Mt. Pleasant, Fairview Heights, Kits, Dunbar – where traffic calming led the way, and where people then adopted the dirt.
There are perhaps too many pictures of flowers in this book and not enough of people, or of the streets on which the flowers bloom. The book is perfect for guests of the city, easily skimmed in a few minutes, with the message implied, but clear. Where gardens bloom, so does community.
The City’s Green Streets home page is here. And pics of the gardens are here. But no mention of the book Green Streets Vancouver or where to get it. I don’t know; I got it as a gift.
Yukon and 15th
Love the gardens in the circles and corner bulges. The one thing I can’t help but notice in those pics is the height of the plants. They appear to take away visibility to pedestrians, bikers and cars alike. Maybe planting plants with a lower height could alleviate that, other then that great job.
Having higher plants in traffic circles is actually a good thing, because it signals to drivers to slow down much sooner, and they get that message sooner, which then improves safety. That may in fact be because of the effects on visibility, that they instinctively look for the unexpected.
Tessa, that might be the case with most drivers, but do you want to be the pedestrian crossing the street when one of the other drivers comes along. I prefer to trust myself more then others, if I can’t see them coming then to me it’s not safer.
“Concentrated in the streetcar suburbs – Mt. Pleasant, Fairview Heights, Kits, Dunbar – where traffic calming led the way, and where people then adopted the dirt.”
I have heard this term “streetcar suburbs” before, and I understand it to mean “older”. However, in this application it seems to also mean either well-to-do or gentrifying (becoming well-to-do) areas.
In Maple Ridge our municipality is spending heavily on street landscaping in the central business area, some of it a waste induced by “free” senior Govt stimulus cash. In some instances mature trees will be removed and replaced with newer ones, though Parks and Rec assures us they will be installing new trees of about 30 feet in height or more. We’ll see about that.
But the biggest annoyance is that when other streets are calmed with curb bulges, the new bulges are simply paved with concrete, not landscaped. I asked about that and was told that plants would be too expensive to maintain, so concrete it is. Sad.
When I travel to Langley I notice far more abitious langscaping along principal routes like 88th Avenue. If they can do it, why can’t we?