Interesting commentary from Vancity Buzz columnist Kenneth Chan on maintaining the status quo for the Vancouver viaducts. I have to admit given Kenneth’s usual pro-transit stance and excellent feel for what makes cities work, I was a bit perplexed as to his seemingly pro-Motordom stance … that is until I read his thoughts on the hottest urban design topic in the city at the moment.
.
.
There are some great points here. I for one advocate for keeping areas of the city funky, gritty, cheap, by celebrating the Rough versus the Refined as my old professor Moura Quayle once taught us. Kenneth’s vision asks the question what if we tried to work with the space instead of hitting Vancouver’s seemingly default button of bulldoze and replace?
In addition there is the concerning shell game regarding traffic design that needs to be addressed; why remove a pseudo freeway in the sky and replace it with a 6 lane Pacific Blvd decapitating the much celebrated shiny new park space? If this is deemed necessary, can we ramp up the park on either side to bridge an at-grade arterial creating a continuous park experience/connection? After all the site is reputed to be contaminated so capping the park with clean fill is more than likely required and would alleviate the high cost of tunneling Pacific Blvd.
If we do go ahead with removing the Viaducts lets strive to create a world class space that will leave a legacy of such a bold decision. Vancouver’s version of Millennium park perhaps, or taking a cue from Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture park or learning from Toronto’s evolving great new urban lakeshore spaces.
Look for the proposed Pacific “Highway” intersection with Main Street to rival Terminal and Main as the worst one in the region.
It’s a good point about the size of the new surface road. Its size could be an intimidating barrier moving along the North/South axis. The advantage of a surface road however is that should our requirements change at some point in the future, it can easily be given a diet, whereas that is harder to do the same with a viaduct.
Another very good point from this article is that there’s no reason the underside of the viaducts have to look as terrible as they do. The city has tried nothing and they’re apparently all out of ideas.
Related to this I just saw today that Toronto will be building a park under the Gardiner http://www.dezeen.com/2015/11/18/under-gardiner-park-waterfront-toronto-landsdcape-urbanism-public-work-ken-greenberg/
Yeah, the 6 lane Pacific Boulevard will do wonders for the new park – just like the Stanley Park Causeway adds to the ambience of Stanley Park.
***
On the “build around them” stance – that’s exactly what Westbank and BIG’s Vancouver House will do to the Howe Street ramp on the Granville Bridge – also a viaduct – but there’s the ever pervasive east-west divide in the city.
You’d never take down the Howe Street ramp – it serves the westside.
The Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts? They serve the east side and suburban commuters … they can deal with adversity…
Apologies for the length of this post. But it’s heartfelt.
There is some inexplicably contorted logic and several contradictions that should be explained by Kenneth Chan, who has otherwise produced some excellent op-ed pieces before.
He waxes poetic about the decrease in road traffic to the downtown peninsula during the Olympics due to the massive increase in transit services. If that fact is so obvious and married to the well-known 20% permanent decrease in traffic to downtown resulting from creating walkable, dense neighbourhoods, then why not simply propose more transit and walkable neighbourhoods instead of maintaining ugly, expensive elevated road infrastructure meeting only half of its capacity?
He conflates the ability of traffic to disperse (or to “disappear,” as Aussie transportation planner Jeff Kenworthy puts it after analyzing several freeway removals around the world) with an unproven post-removal increase in traffic on local streets, “… putting pedestrians and cyclists at risk.” Where is the author’s research on that, and on the proposed surface replacement road?
He is being disingenuous to so quickly diminish costly seismic engineering and life cycle cost-benefit comparisons while drawing undue attention to the preliminary $200 million demolition estimate. These structures may have decades more life in them, but they will come down free of charge in less than a minute during a large earthquake without tens of millions in upgrades. The lack of a replacement road will increase the chaos afterward. Add the annual maintenance costs and the demolition contract value will eventually be surpassed.
Then he surmises that the viaducts would be crucial to the ambulances that will be attending the new St Paul’s hospital on the flats. Well, traffic is funneled onto the viaducts with no alternative route for ambulances to escape traffic blockages once they enter, unless they can sprout helicopter rotors from their roofs. A surface road will present one direct AND several alternative routes for ambulances via cross streets.
He goes on to diminish the viaduct’s powerful legacy by verbally separating them from the planned freeway network of the 60s that would have punctured and blasted their merry way through entire communities and shoreline to the east, northwest and south of the viaducts. Every one of these massive surface, elevated and double-decked structures would have converged in a basket weave interchange near the east end of the viaducts just west of Main Street after obliterating perhaps 6,000 homes, businesses, waterfront industry and parks in land acquisition and demolition sprees. We avoided a demolition, social and financial cost orders of magnitude greater than the projected viaduct demolition cost by stopping the freeways after these first tiny remnants were built. Now somehow the viaducts should be treated like heritage buildings or vital economic assets, like the downtown peninsula will collapse without them?
To propose keeping the viaducts to maintain downtown road capacity and avoid the cost of removing them, and to propose repurposing the land below with paths, lighting, art, etc. as per Ken Greenberg’s work under Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway hardly does justice to full cost accounting, seismic issues and long-term land planning. I highly respect Greenberg’s work and writings, but Gardiner doesn’t represent the Vancouver situation. To also cite the Vancouver House re-use is also not really applicable because it’s a small area under a ramp that can never be removed. It is the proverbial lipstick on a pig.
I lived in Strathcona for two years and believe the residents will be greatly relieved once the viaducts are gone, especially after their long and hard-won victory fighting the viaduct freeway that, only because of their effort and sacrifice, stopped at Gore Street instead of ploughing a swath to the Trans Canada, with the very sad exception of Hogan’s Alley. I suspect the through-traffic impacts on Prior St will diminish once the dispersal effect comes into play, but have no research to back that up.
Daily Scott named Maura Quayle in an effort to project a preservation and re-use ethic on the viaducts. Did Scott actually consult with her? Next time I run into her downtown I’ll ask her about it. The Maura I know probably would not have wanted to preserve a freeway legacy, and in fact would have thought of the derelict, dark, degraded and devalued land under them in re-use terms, as I do. She gave us a lecture once on the central Parisian version of freeways, which incidentally are called “boulevards” and which accommodate great volumes and many kinds of traffic, some even with graduated speed limits and small separated side lanes for commercial access. I like to think that the proposed Pacific Boulevard extension could be re-examined in these terms and perhaps expanded. Doubling or tripling the width of the median and boulevards could result in a linear park-like refuge for pedestrians, sextuple rows of majestic trees, public art, maybe a dedicated light rail easement, generous separated bike lanes, the all-important but invisible underground utilities, and if expanded into nodes or conjoined with park space at key locations, pocket parks and allotment gardens for local residents.
I suggest a part of the viaducts should stay up … say, a 15m long segment balanced on one remaining column as a Monument to the Victims of Motordom. Grow three kinds of climbers on it to soften it, and set it in a big pond symbolizing the original salt water marsh that was there. Then let it slowly crumble back into the Earth. That is the one way I can accept keeping even a part of them.
Make Believe all you like the vote is 10,283 for no and 4,742 for yes. The Viaducts are not coming down anytime soon. The remediation bill will be the final nail in this ill begotten idea. Now let’s think about the best way to develop this area of the City by building on previous investments.
A VanBuzz vote is not the vote that counts.
I thought they were coming down because Council voted to take them down about a month ago. You are suggesting that they are staying up because of a web survey held prior to that?
There are two more “its ugly” votes today, I assume one from you and one from Make Believe.
MB – My commentary was simply looking at both sides of the issue. I am for taking down the viaducts so long as the roading solution on the ground works, not an over engineered impassible arterial. In addition if the land is given away for unoccupied luxury apartments then we have an issue there as well.
IF the viaducts are to remain, there are a lot of possibilities for flexible, gritty spaces which the city has yet to consider. Not once did I mention that Ms. Quayle advocated for the preservation of the Viaducts, I was simply recalling an excellent lesson from her regarding side by side edgy verses sterile environments an acknowledging her use of the definition/theme. Please tell me I am at least allowed to recall my educational experiences and how rightly or wrongly, they have shaped my current views whether you agree with them or not.
In summary I posted the Chan article to get us thinking about the other viewpoints and issues regarding the viaducts. As always, lets get the discussion going.
Cheers,
Scot
Fair enough, Scott. As an aside, I was sad when Maura left teaching to work in Victoria. She was excellent.
MB: “These structures may have decades more life in them, but they will come down free of charge in less than a minute during a large earthquake without tens of millions in upgrades”
The seismic report said $50-$65 million in seismic upgrades. But that didn’t keep them up. It was more like building a safety net structure to catch them, with structural steel, so that they didn’t fall too far and crush things below them. At that level of upgrade, they weren’t expected to be usable after a significant seismic event. Upgrading them to survive a seismic event and remain usable afterwards implies a cost-prohibitive replacement. All from the staff reports.
Oh jeez. Just take ’em down already. I skimmed a staff summary a while back but didn’t burrow into the detail. Nonetheless, this info only reinforces my opinion.
I once worked in a large architectural firm located adjacent to the Granville Bridge. One day I just walked out the side exit on my way to lunch when a 100-pound chunk of concrete from the bridge above and landed not 8 paces behind me, bits flying everywhere. The concrete on the underside of the bridge was spalling in several places and the rebar had rusted. They roped off a big section on the busy walkway to Granville Island due to the safety hazard and spent about two months repairing it. I think about that everytime the viaducts come up.
thank you for writing a well-researched and thoughtful reply.