Friday at noon on Hornby Street:
The Engineering Department has occupied the Hornby Street corridor with an impressive display of logistics. Military-like? Kinda. Whenever big machines are coordinated with people in uniforms, the result is impressive when it’s all working together. And it’s all underway on a kilometre of Hornby Street, to build the cycle track from False Creek to Coal Harbour.
Citizens may think this transformation is just about a bike lane. There’s so much more.
A complete street grind for repaving –
Major re-curbing, shifting of boulevards and trees, new sidewalks, drop-down ramps and curb-cuts – for walking, for the disabled, for kids in strollers and for everyone pulling wheeled luggage – all integrated in the new design.
Trenching for conduit – for the nerves and veins of the urban organism.
Sewers, signals, aging infrastructure – it all gets attended to as part of the
bike-lane intervention. That`s efficient planning, executed with skill – when it works. But often all we see is disruption.
And, ironically, Engineering is on the spot because of the speed with which it started. Some who criticize government as inherently inefficient are now criticizing it for acting too fast, implying that no preparation should have been undertaken until the final vote of Council was taken.
That’s inconceivable in the orderly management of the City. Not doing planning and logitistics – until Council approves the project and expenditure – would bring things to a halt. And the costs of such delay have probably never been calculated because such a prohibition makes no sense – to tell a department not to plan ahead in any serious way lest the public believe “the decision has already been made” before the vote has been held.
Frankly, a project or proposal shouldn’t even get before Council unless there’s a reasonable chance it will be approved. And I’d guess that almost 100 percent of Engineering projects get the go-ahead – or are pulled beforeforehand.
But among the surging platoons of traffic, between the pieces of heavy machinery, in the midst of all the trucks and hundreds – no, thousands – of pedestrians, there are the Flaggers, out directing it all. These are amazing women (at least every one I saw) doing a high-pressure job, executed with elan and a certain toughness.
So appreciate the sheer display of organized power – of machines, of workers, of plans – of the way we’re able to do incredibly complex and complicated public works in the midst of a complex and complicated city.
The outcry on how fast this project started amused me to no end. When is the last time you heard people complaining because the government was *too efficient* ?
Kudos to the city I say.
It really gives you pause to stop and ponder for a moment about the uncounted millions of little details that underlie our modern lifestyle. I’m often amazed a how well society functions considering everything that has to be constantly going on in order to make it all work.
Thanks for the photos. Can’t wait for it to be done!
Thank you for recognizing the sheer number of people involved with building the cycle track, especially the often-unheralded flaggers.
On a related note, this past Thursday night there was a bad car collision on the Burrard Street Bridge. The police shut down the entire bridge to automobile traffic but allowed cyclists and pedestrians to cross. It appeared to me that a vehicle crossed the centre line and hit two oncoming vehicles head on before crashing into the concrete barrier on the east side that separates the road deck from the cycling sidewalk. The impact was strong enough to throw the concrete barriers back a good three-quarters of a metre. All of the vehicle occupants seemed okay, though pretty shaken up. I think that in the long run the bridge would be made safer with a centre divider for the vehicle lanes. We all know that people routinely speed on the bridge and some treat it as a little strip of autobahn, but that takes a heavy toll in lives, labour (there must have been two dozen emergency responders on the bridge), health care costs, and a forefitted sense of safety for pedestrians and cyclists. The protected cycle tracks make such a difference in this respect.