Love this time of year – when canopies of virgin green create corridors of foliage.
The use of planting boxes to line our cycle tracks – as here in the 800-block Hornby – was a great idea. But the landscape architect for Robson Square, Cornelia Oberlander, was said to be uphappy with their cheap plastic look next to the smooth concrete solidity of Arthur Erickson’s design. Maybe someday a more permanent complementary solution might be found with privately raised funds for the planters and sponsors for an annual garden show.
A big problem with the plastic planters is they are too light. Motorists and other hooligans keep pushing them into the bike lane and it becomes narrower and narrower. It happens on Hornby but it is a disaster on Beatty – especially the 800 block. They need to be made of concrete.
I believe they are being replaced with something more permanent as part of the Robson Square project. It was clearly in the preliminary planning report that they would be fixing up the ped and bike infrastructure on:
Hornby, from Smithe to Georgia;
Robson, from Hornby to Burrard, and
Robson, from Howe to Granville
It’s not like this is the only green corridor in the downtown area – pretty much every street is lined with trees. Seems to be the opposite of eco-gentrification to me.
Here is a comment that Tanya Paz left when this this post was shared on Facebook: “A few blocks of Hornby – including this one – will soon be transformed from temporary protected bike lanes (PBL) to permanent PBLs. Now would be a good time to provide your thoughts directly to the City to
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155115663385170&set=a.10151989848490170.1073741825.712845169&type=3&theater
Vancouver might want to consider tempering some eco-gentrification lest the segregation separates the resort from the rest of the story.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/06/dangers-ecogentrification-best-way-make-city-greener?CMP=share_btn_fb
As the article alludes, planting street trees is the most common alternative to ‘ecogentrification’ (a word that is a tortuous distortion of the language if there was one). Thousands of street trees have been planted all over, east, west, north, south, rich areas, poor areas, even on top of luxury towers and on DTES streets and parks.
Trees are part of the Commons.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/06/dangers-ecogentrification-best-way-make-city-greener?CMP=share_btn_fb
I agree that it’s time to make the bike lanes permanent with good quality structures. I just hope they don’t give the planters and paved medians the same ubiquitous treatment as for roads. Even simple form inserts with cool graphics (bears, whales, bikes, people, abstract bas relief ….) would add much interest to what will likely be reinforced concrete barriers. Embedded LED lighting can also add a lot of interest. And of course automatically irrigated hardy planting.
Cornelia Oberlander fought the city long and hard to realize her vision of medium-sized street trees planted 5 m on centre surrounding Robson Square. It’s still a fight to plant them this tight. However, with underground soil-filled tree root vaulting under the sidewalks it is now possible to more or less meet abourist’s demands for tree planting on city streets. The roots run throughout the vault instead of along the surface breaking the pavement, and the trees are a lot healthier in almost every study conducted on recycled plastic vaulting. The vaults also accommodate services.
Case studies:
It’s now possible to achieve very healthy tree growth in paved areas without breaking the pavement:
http://www.deeproot.com/blog/blog-entries/before-and-after