Just keep piling people up on top of each other...

...and squashing them together. Ah yes.... I can see the future according to the Great Planners:

Everyone living squashed together in small areas, piled up high in little cubes of shared air, little cubes of shared air selling for $1.5mil each. Get rid of the viaduct to build more little cubes of shared air. Force them out of the suburbs with expensive tolls, taxes and fuel prices and squash them together and pile em high on top of each other in their little prison cells made to look like home.

Then get rid of the auto mobile in the name of “sustainability” and give them little pedal bikes so they can leave their piled up high prison cells and peddle down to the shopping mall to pick up their packaged food and a Starbucks, peddling around downtown feeling a free as a bird until they get fined for peddling down the wrong lane, or peddling at the wrong time or peddling without a peddling permit.

What a beautiful future of a bunch of domesticated morons trapped in prisons but actually feel they are free and enjoy their servitude. Until someone they serve at the top turns off the supply line and watches them all slowly die like rats trapped in an incubator in some grand scientific perverted experiment. Observe them in amusement as they scurry around in a panic on their pedal bikes in search of basic sustenance but can find none.

Just keep pilin them high....

I like puppies.

I also like long walks on the beach, moonlit diners loaded with crackpots and Strathcona as an affordable neighbourhood for (though I loath their style) "hipsters".
20 minutes after they knock that concrete slab down, house prices in Starthcona will skyrocket and put ever more pressure on the skinny jean, headband wearing, I have a cool bike bunch to return to Mommy and Daddy in some dumpy part of Richmond.
I like kittens too.

More room for condos, of

More room for condos, of course!

Writing on the wall if you live in Strathcona.

A silly idea.

Thought up by someone with not enough to do. Kinda like, Oh! Let's change the corporate logo.

Instead of restricting access.....

to downtown Vancouver by tearing down viaducts (no thanks, I paid for them, keep them there)....

Perhaps we should restrict Gordo's access to BC.

We would all be better off.

South Fraser Perimeter Road?

Many of us here in South Delta are fighting so the SFPR has the same fate as Vancouver freeway.
Campbell's 2 billion dollar road to nowhere.
Who benefits? Land developers, not the community, farmers and the creatures and habitat of Burns Bog.

STOP THE SOUTH FRASER PERIMETER ROAD!

pedal paradox?

"Then get rid of the auto mobile in the name of “sustainability” and give them little pedal bikes so they can leave their piled up high prison cells and peddle down to the shopping mall"

Fewer roads means more space for houses, more supply, lower prices, and so on. I understand urban cyclists are the latest group we love to hate, but making cycling safer and easier is about the sanest policy a city can have these days.

Hey Meggs, We're a city...not a petrie dish!

What a boneheaded idea! I swear, sometimes I think councillors like Meggs and Kerry Jang think they're just playing a big game of SimCity, where they can conduct real-life social experiments and ignore the real problems facing our city.

Traffic needs to move. Period. Cars are not going away...they're just going to use a different means of fuel...Period. Why is it that every civic politician of any stripe looks at Vancouver and feels the need to reinvent the wheel? There's dozens of successful cities that move traffic and encourage transit, but we need to everything from scratch...yeesh!

The road to Nowhere is paved!

I suppose the big shake (earthquake) will put an end to the 'experiments'.

But would Vancouver re-build the same way, or re-design something better?

The Planners Dream Went Wrong ; from: The Gift; The Jam, 1982

Cars are going, going, gone.

"Cars are not going away...they're just going to use a different means of fuel...Period."

A car's utility decreases every time you add another one to the road. No amount of wishful thinking can erase this reality.

There will always be a place in the transportation network for personal vehicles, especially in places without the population density to support transit, but given the immense subsidies necessary to make driving affordable to average people, it's only a matter of time before we see fewer and fewer cars in urban areas and a greater emphasis on solutions that are scalable, sustainable, and affordable. We can already see that the S.O.V. is none of these things. Continuing down this path strikes me as unlikely.

Another Pipe Dream

While on the surface the concept has its merits, it would cause other problems. Remember that the Georgia/Dunsmuir Viaducts were a replacement for the original Georgia Viaduct circa 1970.

Getting rid of the viaducts would cause further traffic chaos heading into/out of the downtown peninsula. Two main downtown arteries would be blocked off - Georgia St. and Dunsmuir St. at the downtown escarpment. One can't simply tear down the viaducts and have Georgia/Dunsmuir "land" at the bottom of the escarpment.

Expo/Pacific Boulevard runs near the base of the Georgia viaduct and Cosco and GM Place loading access facilites are curently extant at that location.

At the eastern end, 1st Ave./ Terminal Avenue/Venables traffic will have no where to disperse and would further heavily congest the Terminal/Quebec/Expo Blvd corridor making life more unbearable for future residents of North East False Creek. Would that be "liveable"?

In fact, instead of tearing down the viaducts the City of Vancouver is moving in the opposite direction - building new viaducts!

1. The $50 million 310 metre Powell St. viaduct whereby funding was just announced earlier this week;

2. Another 400 metre Malkin Avenue viaduct, which is the city's next highest priority;

The Malkin Avenue viaduct will entail the upgrade of Malkin Ave. to 4-lanes and a viaduct to connect to Clark Drive.

And the purpose of the Malkin Ave. viaduct/Malkin Ave. upgrades? To connect the eastern end of the Georgia/Dunsmuir viaducts to Malkin Ave. with the concurrent closure of Venables St., which currently connects to the viaducts.

http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/currentplanning/fcflats/pdf/oct08railcorridorstrategy.pdf

Tear Em Down

The viaducts should definitely be torn down. And the money form the new development should be used to build a comprehensive street car system through the area.

City Planning Genius

Clearly the rejectionists who voted down the downtown freeway were envisioning a glorious future with silent, electric flying cars and a metropolitan population no greater than 300,000. That can be the only explanation for their enslavement of the tens of thousands of commuters who must endure hours on the road daily to get to their jobs downtown.

So by all means let's replace unsightly concrete traffic routing mechanisms with block after block and kilometer after kilometer of idling vehicle-infested traffic jam clutter. That will make for some beautiful neighbourhood building!

Let's face it. We restrict the possibility of commuting by car and provide no functional alternatives. Try going 25km from UBC to coquitlam (a frequent car commute) by bus and see how long it takes you: 3 hours each way. No one loves the environment that much.

The Embarcadero freeway was indeed an eyesore but when it wasn't rebuilt commuting over the Golden Gate became a non-starter... growth north of the bridge ceased and moved to the South Bay.

We can build more aesthetic efficient auto byways or we can make beautiful neighbourhoods ugly by clogging them with traffic. Your choice.

Oh..

... and I'm still waiting for my flying electric car.

Any day now, right?

3 hours?

" Try going 25km from UBC to coquitlam (a frequent car commute) by bus and see how long it takes you: 3 hours each way."

Can I ask how you arrive at this figure? It seems inflated to me.

Further, factor in the additional time you have to work to pay for your gas, insurance, car, etc, lost productivity for time spet behind the wheel, and it may well be that the bus is actually faster in terms of total time spent on travel.

Try going 25km from UBC to coquitlam (a frequent car commute)

For how many people? 128,000 people in Coquitlam. Roughly 35,000 students and faculty at UBC. What's the total number of people driving from Coquitlam to UBC every day do you think?

Gateway Project

A friend from East Vancouver expressed concern about the other component of the Gateway Project the new Port Mann Bridge and Highway 1 expansion and all the traffic those will be bringing into Vancouver, because without Freeways East Vancouver just becomes a giant parking lot for all that traffic. So that of course will end up being justification to build freeways all over Vancouver.

Unless someone sees the light, (there is still time) and decides to focus on improving transit and train options for moving commuters from the Fraser Valley into Vancouver.

Buses could easily be put on the existing Port Mann http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uelQTsTZRfU and they managed to do it when the Patullo Bridge was shut down. So how hard would it be to try it for a while and see about saving a few billion dollars that could then be used for more important things like schools, hospitals and more.

As for trains, the tracks are already there. Again a test project would cost considerably less than the freeway / bridge option that is underway now.

If these work and there are studies that show taking freeways out of the equation encourages people to use transit options if they are provided we could avoid some very environmentally destructive projects and setting our selves up for a future congestion nightmare.

Another lame brain idea by our Mayor?

For heaven's sakes! Just what we need; to lose more lanes when we don't have enough as it now stands. When is this Mayor going to wake up and realize that the cars are not going away. If we don't wake up to this reality we're going to be in an even grander mess twenty years from now. Only by then there will be more buildings that weren't built with any consideration given to traffic and parking. It will be too late to do anything about it by then.

cars are not going away.

I think similar sentiments have been expressed at one time or another regarding almost every technology from the trebuchet to the steam train. There's little doubt our over-reliance on cars has about run its course.

Tear them down. We're trying

Tear them down. We're trying to limit traffic in the downtown core, and to limit through-traffic of single-occupant vehicles. Removing the viaducts will mean Georgia and it's westbound parallel, Dunsmuir, can become city streets rather than half-highway, half-street as they are now. Everyone said there would be terrible congestion when one lane was closed on the Burrard Bridge--well? Where is it? We adjust. Traffic adjusts, usage adjusts. With the Canada Line and the increase in articulated buses, we are seeing an improvement in greening the city and in reducing car use. Tear them down. Quick, while everyone's attention is diverted by the Games!

What a worthless

'Let them eat cake " idea!Do they ever think about anything other than creating opportunities for developers to make money? You`d think campbell was running city hall, then again maybe he is.

circle A

Well, the mayor has a very high regard for the premier as his own words demonstrated.

Perhaps Mr Robertson is planning on running for the Liberals eventually?

Actually - Meggs is asking an important question

I don't always see eye-to-eye with Geoff Meggs, but he is a thoughtful guy and deserves some respect for asking an important question. What kind of city do you want to live in?

He's correct in saying that the Viaducts are indeed a remnant of a failed vision of the 1950s American city. I do not relish living in a city filled with speeding smog blasting SUVs and minivans - regardless of how aesthetically pleasing the freeway looks. Crying like a wounded cat and looking down on people who live in small footprint housing and who choose to live closer to work is head-in-the-sand.

In a few years time, the people living in 5000 square-foot McMansions on an acre cut out of a farmers field and commuting four or five hours a day will be like smokers. Pathetic and stupid.

Yes, and don't widen Grandview

Most of the viaducts should be torn down, maybe keeping part as a ramp to get down off the escarpment. The freeway age is over, with the end of cheap oil and the climate crisis.

But the provincial government wants Vancouver to widen Grandview so that freeway traffic can flood into East Vancouver once they widen the Hwy 1 freeway. Vancouver council said NO to more traffic and pollution, but some city engineering staff want more cars and wider roads so they have been pretending they don't understand plain english.

It is time for City Council to show that they are in charge, not a couple of dinosaurs in the engineering department who are completely out of step with the rest of the City (including most engineers).

You can't be the greenest city and facilitate freeway expansion at the same time.

Public Roads, Private cars ...

... can only lead to congestion - a classic 'tragedy of the commons'.

Ending freeway sprawl by LRT:
http://www.edmonton.ca/transportation/ets/lrt_projects/lrt-network-plan.aspx

Haven't been to Van/Vic/BC yet but...

Why not aquaducts for cars? Build big boat buses to ferry people from downtown core to dwellings and carparks near the Burrard Inlet. BC should have a company like "General Boaters" that mass produces aqua transportation. A local BC Ferries type service in and around Vancouver. Floating, permanently moored/anchored cruise ship like living arrangements. What if new immigrants in the future came with massive ships to live upon starting out in Canada. Imainge if countries purpose built massive ships and towed them to Vancouver to dock somewhere. Even better...build huge floating homes/habitats with all that wood that might rot in the BC interior. How hard would it be to build big infrastucture along Burrard Inlet and/or Fraser River and link up those floating (or dockside) property with an excellent bus boat system?

Go for boat buses...build more floating real estate.

The Viaducts

Tear down the viaducts. They are, without doubt, the ugliest component of the city's downtown. Get rid othem and immediately you open up access to the Tinseltown area, Livingstone Park, the north side of False Creek and Strathcona.
It's a great idea.

If there was an earthquake

would 'we' design and build the same way?

repurposing the viaducts

why tear them down? there is a tremendous amount of embodied energy in the concrete, and the structure offers an impressive view of the city.

why not repurpose the viaduct? a park, a running path, elevated urban agriculture, multi-use residential/retail/office could built on top, an aqueduct, etc.

NYC just converted a disused elevated tramway into a park: the highline. If New York can do it, why can't we?

http://www.thehighline.org/

What to do with the viaducts?

As Meggs says, infrastructure like the viaducts can't be discarded lightly. New road connections would be needed. The need to connect the upper ends of Georgia and Dunsmuir streets to the eastern suburbs will remain (as will vehicles for the foreseable future, regardless of fuel type). The question is how?

Maybe there is a way of maintaining the connections but without the elevated viaducts, i.e. a route that gets down to existing grade as soon as practically possible, thereby eliminating the overhead structures that currently blight this area. So by all means let's study the options (I for one would like to see whatever work Bing Thom has done on this that Councilor Meggs refers to), but let's not be naively idealistic about the reasons or results: we cannot wave a magic wand and get rid of transportation infrastructure and the cars that go with it in one fell swoop. Nor should we assume that this will unlock a whole lot more value for private landowners/developers: there will still be traffic and a need for roads connecting the CBD and the eastern suburbs, not to mention the elevated SkyTrain guideway. And if there is added land value created, the City will need to offset some of that value against the costs of the new infrastructure that will be needed to replace the viaducts.

But do let's keep an open mind and explore the options. I would submit however that one of the options which should be explored is whether we could 'tame' the viaducts by building up beside them and creating an extended ground plane, changing them into streets more than elevated freeways.

Traffic

They should build more freeways, to get the traffic out of the city, faster. One day, very soon, zero emission vehicles will be all over the place. A very vocal minority, hate the car, but still use one to get around. Hypocrites!

hypocrisy

I find it hard to understand how auto-proponents can say cars are the only way to get around efficiently given the current system and then call people hypocrites because they have no choice but to sometimes use a personal vehicle due to said system.

Also, zero emission vehicles won't solve all the other problems with a system that uses road space inefficiently, that's why GHG emissions are only one of the reasons sane cities are discouraging over-reliance on the automobile.

GHG and "sane cities"

GHC? You mean CO2; that stuff plants breathe, that stuff we all exhale, one of life's essential elements without which life on earth could not exist?

"sane cities" as opposed to "insane cities."

Pile them on top of each other in "sane cities" and carbon tax them according to the amount of CO2 emissions they exhale while peddling around town.

who is Meggs kidding

Meggs writes: When other cities picked the car in the 1960s, Vancouver picked community, neighbourhoods and sustainability.

Just who is he kidding...perhaps if one was to remove oneself's clutches from the outside door frame of the Mayor's office, perhaps they would see how Vancouverites love their cars, no not the folks from outside the city but the city residents themselves.

Up to 1972 transit was financed entirely by those who boarded and not by everyone through property taxes, fuel taxes, hydro levies.

The public use of transit was affordable to all working people in the city, all students were given a discounted fare, not just a few.

The population of city of Vancouver doubled between 1941-1971 yet has only increased by 30% in the last 40 years. However, the number of cars owned by Vancouverites since the days of scrubbing freeways in the city increased by 450% and transit is no longer funded by just those who board.

One has to wonder whether Megg's desire to blow up the viaducts has more to do with those who own adjoining lands and may have financed the visionless comrades ruling the hall these days. And if you think I am being cynical then what would you call someone who has embraced the Games since his days clutching the pant legs of former premier Glen Clark and now heads up the city's Olympic team...????

It is no wonder Dali gave up surrealism...the world of the Megg's has overshadowed this artform.

while we are on the subject

why not tear down UBC and SFU...why would any planner worth their weight in brains place both of these institutions with their transit dependent at the outer edges of its core regional boundaries?

wouldn't it make sense spending money building new campuses beside the urban rail lines that already exist?

Imagine not having to have a massive fleet of buses rolling down Broadway or spending almost $3 billion building another line to UBC.

Tearing down the viaduct is a pip squeek vision...embrace moving UBC to the Terminal and Main lands and then watch the level of redevelopment Meggs and his developer buddies, Jack Poole and David Podmore could only dream of.

Scrap the UBC line!!!