The Georgia Viaducts proposal

The Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts: part of Vancouver's future or relics of a project the city rejected?

The Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts, a residual fragment of Vancouver’s rejected freeway system, closed Feb. 5 for the first time in their 39-year history.

The 22-day shutdown, required by 2010 Winter Olympic Games security rules, gave neighbourhoods east of the viaducts their first traffic-calmed days in more than a generation, a real-life test of what life without the viaducts might be like.

Now the City of Vancouver is beginning a study that could lead to consideration of removing the viaducts for good, reconnecting the roads for goods and people movement in a new way and opening up the possibility of a new, sustainable neighbourhood that knits together Yaletown, Gastown, the Downtown Eastside, Strathcona and Chinatown.

Removing the viaducts is not a new idea — many have dreamed about it since they were built — but an article I wrote for The Tyee last year proposing the study  was one of the most-read pieces on the site all year.

Many are struck by the fact that the viaducts are duplicated by Pacific Boulevard on the ground beneath them, and that the surrounding land, once home to warehouses, railyards and a gas plant, now offer the potential for a new inner-city neighbourhood.

The viaducts are all that remain of a massive freeway program that city planners of the 1960s expected would ring the city, driving a wedge through Chinatown and diving under Burrard Inlet in a submarine tunnel dubbed the Third Crossing.

But in a series of citizens’ revolts, Vancouver voters defeated each effort to build the system, often by convincing the federal government it should not share in the projects’ massive costs. Ultimately Vancouver was left with the only part it could both afford and build on its own: the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts, completed in 1971 to replace the original 1915 viaduct built over CPR’s False Creek yards.

So, in time for the closure, I’m pleased to offer this Georgia Viaducts Archive, including this short video to give a flavour of the battles that were required to stop Vancouver’s freeways: