Category — Georgia Viaducts

With Vancouver moving closer to release of a new staff report on the future of the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts, a new US report says the benefits of freeway removal are clear cut.

In fact, a review of freeway removal in five cities by New York’s Institute for Transportation and Development Policy says the benefits are so significant that its time for a national campaign to tear more of the urban highways down.

In an assessment of removals in Seoul, Portland, San Francisco, Milwakuee and Wisconsin, the review concluded that the cities’ benefits included:

• increased property values and economic development in adjacent neighbourhoods;
• better urban design through reconnecting neighbourhoods to parks and waterfront;
• reduced maintenance costs for expensive freeway infrastructure; and
• reduced air pollution and traffic impacts in nearby neighbourhoods.

All four benefits are relevant to Vancouver, where earlier studies have already confirmed that traffic volumes are declining across the Viaducts and could be accommodated on nearby streets or in future rapid transit investments.

The Georgia Grind, a re-imagining of the Viaducts as combination Grouse Grind and Tower of Babel, one proposal for "Tangential Vancouverism."

As Vancouver’s housing costs force condo units to dwindle in size, if not price, the quality of life outside becomes a more important consideration. That’s the jumping off point for Tangential Vancouverism, a provocative exhibit of proposals to enliven the city’s urban fabric. It’s running until the end of the month at 221a Artist Run Centre at 221A Georgia St.

One admitted fantasy project is the Georgia Grind, which would twist the venerable viaducts into a rising spiral of concrete that is part Tower of Babel and part Grouse Grind. It is, according to the proponents, “an argument for a dialog between what was and will be; for an architectural memory that reaches deeper than the notional.” Okay, right.

More accessible is an exploration of the massive emerging digital archive of photos of the city, sorted by the location from which they were taken. The Artist Run Centre is itself a sign of the changes reshaping Chinatown, a new gallery on a street that retains some green grocers and a Chinese herbalist as well as a coffee bar and a pub.

Jason Morden, of the Lost Creek Fen Project, at the "duck pond" at 339 East 1st, a remnant of Brewery Creek in Mount Pleasant.

The swampy depression at the foot of Sophia St. at 1st Ave. may not look like much, but it’s a tiny remnant of False Creek’s original biodiversity, as a marauding coyote there yesterday could attest.

The “duck pond,” on private property, hemmed in by Great Northern Way campus on one side and an old industrial site now storing heaps of asphalt on the other, is the mouth of the original Brewery Creek that once cascaded down from Mount Pleasant to the marshes and mud flats of east False Creek.

Now the neighbours are organizing a the Lost Creek Fen Project to work for preservation and expansion of this piece of the city’s past that may provide a key to the future. (An organizing meeting is scheduled for Thursday, March 15, at the Native Education College, 285 East 5th, at 7 p.m.)

When Fen defender Jason Morden and I looked at the big puddle Saturday morning, it was hard to imagine the flats as they once were, teeming with bird life and fish, although song birds were numerous and a coyote kept an eye on us throughout our visit.

But Morden has discovered that this “duck pond” was never covered with landfill because of Mount Pleasant residents’ concern to protect some waterfowl habitat as development began to hem in the Creek in the early years of the last century. [Read more →]

Thanks to Steven Godfrey for pointing out this useful summary of five case studies where freeway removal resulted in tremendous positive benefits, all relevant to consideration of the future of the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts.