Vancouver Viaduct Conceptual Plan Revealed

i think we have the dumbest city planners/councilors possible….

Can you qualify your statement? You can’t say something like that and not offer an explanation. I’m genuinely curious.

That was meant to read ”
on average took 20 minutes longer” not 20 minutes.

I like the idea, as your boyfriend states, as that is what Vancouver is trying to work towards. However, for some reason, they seem to have put the streetcar plans on the back burner. If we want to tear down the viaducts I think there should be more alternatives put in place, the streetcar being one of the main ones as well as more use of bike lanes.

I completely agree with him. Building more freeways and road space has shown to only increase traffic, so removing car infrastructure will only reduce traffic in the long run. Designing cities for people should be the priority. Only small minds are that worried about traffic, this project is still going to be a long way away and obviously issues with redirecting traffic will be well thought out still.

Let’s see how this plan is finalized. It may not address all the concerns about traffic and blocked spaces but everything will be better. We will need help from the best urban planners out there.

Seriously?  You’re arguing that, as a city, we should design an entire new neighbourhood development around the viaducts, and condemn the city to more decades of supporting the viaduct infrastructure, in order to make 4 blocks of traffic flow a bit smoother?

The cars are coming from non-freeways and going to non-freeways.  Having 4 blocks of expensive freeway in the middle is hardly doing much to help the overall traffic situation.

You make a big leap in assuming that I have not educated myself, ArchiNed… and really you should know better given that I post using my actual identity and don’t hide behind some anonymous pseudonym.

I know better than to undertake an argument with someone for whom a fixie is likely the state of the art in transportation.  However, my wife commutes from Yaletown to Port Coquitlam daily.. a journey which, if she undertook it using public transport, would last 2.5 hours each way and require two different skytrain connections and two different bus connections.  That’s five hours on transit per day.  In the car on a bad day it’s 45 minutes each way.

We have created a city where public transportation is an absolute joke, where bicycling is impractical (we have HILLS and RAIN here), where no meaningful connections are provided to interface the two, and where we are criminalizing the act of driving.

All that is made so much better by the fact that housing is increasingly unaffordable, even by professionals earning substantial incomes, and therefore we are forced to move to increasingly far-flung suburbia.  We are placing residents in a Catch-22, and our best and brightest are literally leaving.

City officials don’t need to be bribed or influenced by developers.  Each functions in pursuit of complementary interests.  Policies which drive up the cost of living in Vancouver fill coffers with higher property taxes and line the pockets of developers even more.  So much the better then if we can divert millions of dollars of those funds to building bike lanes and tearing down long-standing, effective, and already paid-for infrastructure like the Viaduct and accelerate those gains even further.
Other cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam have invested heavily in public transport, urban and interurban rail, and even provide free bicycles.  In Vancouver, we do none of these things… yet we expect cars will vaporize simply because be build a bike lane.  Other cities have very little in common with Vancouver and the case should be made for a mix of solutions that interconnect.

And before you attempt to argue that we have great interurban rail in the West Coast Express… come on… it runs 2x daily each way.  It travels at 35km/h.  If you miss it, you’re screwed.  I can think of no major metropolis in the world that has dedicated less to interurban rail.

Ian, that assumption is based on your comments regarding the development permit processes. What you suggest is simply not the case. Never in a single meeting with development planners, city officials or design panel members have I ever had an inkling of concern regarding increasing property values to boost revenues. If they want to increase revenue in this arena they would simply increase the DCL’s (Development Cost Levies) which are applied to all new constructions in the COV. In fact all the concerns typically raised by these people circle around liveability, affordability and context. They are constantly at odds with developers who are attempting to maximize their profits. To allude to a collusion (whether overtly as I suggested or covertly as you suggest) is an insult to all the people up there who care about and work hard to shape our city for the future. 

Your wife CHOOSES to work in another city. I have a car and a motorcycle, for that matter, but I choose to work close to my DT home. Her job may be wonderful, but we as a city must start to realize that there are very real societal and environmental costs to commuting the way we currently do and  it’s time that we personally start to bear this cost. This post war dream of everyone having a car and driving even 45mins a day each way is a dead end and KILLS cities. If it were not so easy for her to drive out there every day, she would do one of three things; find a job closer to home, move closer to her job, or demand public infrastructure to get her there. Having her current option is a LUXURY and one that should not be propagated in its current form in the future.

There is no doubt that the current state of public transit is not ideal, but that’s because resources that could go to expanding this system is currently allocated to maintaining extant road systems. You say that we have paid for this infrastructure, but let’s remember how much it costs to maintain. A raised Viaduct costs 5-10X to maintain as does a surface street. (Let’s remember that this whole thing is about the NE Falsecreek Proposal) A comparable would be the NYC High Line which costs 4.5 million to maintain per year and that is considerably smaller. If we take that money back and use it to pay for this project, that alone would pay for the project in 18yrs, which is normal payback period of infrastructure projects.  

Look, nobody is saying that tomorrow we’re going to arbitrarily change the whole road system system, but propagating or even maintaining this infrastructure just doesn’t make sense for the future. We have to make small choices on a proposal to proposal basis that incrementally moves us in one direction or the other. If we are consistent in the direction of our choices eventually we will change the culture and infrastructure of our city to one that engenders a healthy liveable city that benefits us all. This proposal is one of those opportunities.

If you are serious about educating yourself on this subject and have not already done so, I suggest that you read Jan Gehl’s “Cities for People.” It is widely considered a foundational text for contemporary urban theory. 

I assume that you’re talking about the Rize project at Broadway and Kingsway. Firstly yes the RAMP group was vocally against it, but that hardly represents the majority of residents and yes they were heard and listened to. But that and any proposal must be judged against the official development plan for the area, which in this case ALWAYS called for higher density on that lot. If you take issue with that, then why didn’t the residents raise this issue when the ODP was being developed? 

In fact there are, I believe, three more lots in that neighbourhood also designated for higher density. Cities MUST densify and doing so on the backbone of a future Skytrain line only makes sense. You have to look big picture and not myopically looking at your backyard. I do agree with the residents’ complaint regarding the so called 9 storey podium (that was heavy-handed), but the revision of this aspect of the project was a condition of the approval.

In regards to the cost of the NE Falsecreek project, it’s estimated at 80 million for the whole project which includes:
-demolition of the Viaducts
-the new streets & ramps to Georgia St.
-the new parks & facilities
-the new seawall & beach 

The majority of this cost could be recouped by the sale of the city land between Quebec and Main & east of Main that was expropriated for the construction of the viaducts in 1971. The land could then be returned to the original residential occupancies that had existed there for nearly 100 yrs prior to the erection of those monstrosities. We would then all have some nice spaces in what is currently a nothing neighbourhood.

It seems without the viaducts traffic will be much more conjested. There are individuals such as businessmen who rely on cars for transport for a daily routine. Does the city expect them to some how take several different busses and/or trains while wasting even more time to get to their destination. As the world heads on into the future, more and more people will drive cars. We must consider the population of Vancouver and surrounding cities is increasing rapidly. We need the viaducts. As for the parks, just build them around the viaducts. Just to point out, TAX PAYERS (US!) will need to pay much more to tear them down. It costs much far less to maintain them. In all, to be the most livable city in the world, convenience and accessible roads and drive ways must be kept. Vancouver is the only major city in North America that does not have a highway leading throught the city. The lack of convenience will only lead to citizens moving to somewhere else. Considering all of the flaws, it just shows that the politicians of the City’s government are not making a smart move (or they are not that smart themselves!).

I would love to see more park built, more bike lines, more bus routes and less cars on the road. I commute on my bike every day (including taking my kids to daycare)… but we leave on East Pender, so just one street off Hastings around Victoria Dr. and I would hate to see more traffic, speeding cars, trucks etc. along Hastings. We have enough of that. I like the current plan without the viaducts and I agree that the only way people will drive less is by making it less enjoyable. That way people that CAN bike, take bus etc. will do so leaving the road for the ones that have to commute longer distances. Too many people that leave in East Van use their cars to go downtown. It’s crazy!! they should bike or take public transport it would make so much more sense. In any case with or without the viaducts that area can be beautify as long as taking them out doesn’t mean creating more traffic somewhere else… Live and see I guess.

“They don’t care if they make it a snarl for
people to drive, because people will then switch the the easier, cheaper ways
of getting around the city”

Well, no. Taking a bus in those same ensnarled streets is not “easier and quicker for anyone, and for some of us, public transportation is not an option; ie those of us who have to haul around the heavy tools of our trades, or who need to work at different sites throughout the day, etc. And can we please not forget that a good chunk of people driving downtown are not actually GOING downtown, but trying to get to the Lions Gate Bridge for points on the North Shore, ferries to the island, Squamish-Whistler, etc. Believe it or not, I am pro-environment and walk or cycle where I can for fitness, but I am getting a little sick of this city deliberately creating gridlock in the hopes that we are all going to throw up our hands and bike to Horseshoe Bay and points beyond.

Money is city hall . I wonder how they get it . Your best interests don’t u wish . Removing the viaducts is easy money cars are our future 2 bad idea cars downtown good condos taxes better .