Posts from — August 2009

Canada Post has dropped plans to sell the Vancouver Mail Processing Plant, shutting the door on possible major redevelopment.

Canada Post has dropped plans to sell its Vancouver Mail Processing Plant on Georgia St., ending speculation that the massive, block-long landmark could be the location for a new Vancouver Art Gallery or other major development.

Once the largest welded steel building in the world, the Vancouver plant featured the latest technology when it went into service in 1958. It had a helicopter pad on its roof and a two-kilometer underground tunnel to the waterfront rail station. The tunnel was never used, but management landed helicopters on the roof during a strike in the early 1990s.

Canada Post’s plan was part of the Harper government’s 2007 decision to sell off government property across Canada, a policy that led to the controversial sale of the Sinclair Centre to Larco Investments.

Canada Post linked the sale with its own national scheme to modernise the post office by moving out of downtown cores to state-of-the-art mail processing plants in the suburbs. These gigantic facilities, built on former military bases in the US, are costly, land-hungry monsters that require fleets of trucks. (Winnipeg’s new plant has been completed.)

But the Vancouver sale was immediately challenged by the Musqueam First Nation, which sees the property as part of a potential treaty settlement. Despite significant interest in the building from many quarters, including a VAG board committee seeking a larger building, talks stalled. [Read more →]

Vancouver’s city engineering department has responded to concerns raised by its independent truckers with a new web-based system that allows them to track the entire fleet’s call-out rankings and earnings.

The city paid more than 60 trucking firms more than $3.5 million for their services last year, so slight variations in the dispatch order can make a difference of thousands of dollars in take-home earnings.

A move up or down one or two spots in the call-out order can have even more dramatic consequences: the top three to five contractors can receive one-third to one-half of the work from a given city department.

Convinced that annual evaluations were too subjective, their rankings were wrong and that their complaints would not be heeded, a number of independent truckers approached me for assistance earlier this year. [Read more →]

Here’s the full text of the VPD media statement last night after 3,000 Critical Mass cyclists toured the city:

CRITICAL MASS RIDE RECAP

Vancouver- Vancouver Police are reporting no incidents of note during the Critical Mass ride this evening.
The route was lengthy and unpredictable, making it challenging to predict traffic disruptions. Despite this, tensions seemed to be reduced from previous rides and there was more cooperation from ride participants.
There were several liquor pour-outs and some marijuana consumption observed during the ride. One casualty occurred when a female rider fell off her bike and injured her arm.
The Vancouver Police will continue discussions with members of Critical Mass with the goal of further reducing tensions between riders and motorists and establishing set routes. This will ultimately improve safety, assist riders in their cause and facilitate the flow of traffic during the event.
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