After living in my apartment for over a decade, the sound has become familiar, expected.
Sometimes there’s a screech followed by a bang. Other times it’s just a bang.
It’s always followed by silence — an elastic moment before the world understands what happened. I understand immediately.
My building sits on the corner of Broadway and Woodland in Vancouver, an intersection notorious for fender-benders. I know this because I routinely hear them and go out onto my balcony to witness the aftermath.
This chaos also follows a routine. Once the impact has settled, some people leap from their vehicles in anger or fear, but most take their time, opening the door and stepping through as if the air itself were pushing back.
This careful pace is, I assume, a mix of shock and the process of taking account of things. Checking what body part does or does not work. They squeeze their necks. Pat the small of their backs. Reach for their cellphones. Deflated airbags hang from vehicle interiors like the skin of a popped blister. Soon, a first responder will arrive.
This happens with such regularity that I’ve kept an unofficial tally. Most years, I’d hear that screech and bang at least once a month, some cosmic collisional rent due. However, in the last couple of years, something changed. The frequency increased. Two or three times a month I’d find myself rubbernecking over the balcony railing.
It wasn’t until ICBC released its 2023 traffic accident data that the anecdotal bore out into reality, as Maria Stanborough, a local urban planning consultant, wrote in the Georgia Straight. “In 2022, there were 13 accidents at the intersection of Broadway and Woodland,” she wrote. “This number escalated to 22 in 2023. The number of accidents involving a pedestrian increased from zero to one.”
So what happened? If the data and Stanborough are correct, a number of things, all of which are approximately 45 centimetres tall, three metres long, 998 kilograms and painted bright yellow.
Eight of them are lying on the road outside of my apartment building.
Colloquially known as “banana barriers,” these formed pieces of concrete are designed for traffic control.
In the particular case of the ones outside my apartment, they were installed as a part of Vancouver’s Slow Streets program, an ongoing initiative born out of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when the city endeavoured to “provide opportunities for walking, cycling and rolling and make it easier for people to exercise and access businesses in their neighbourhoods.”
The barriers were intended to slow down vehicle traffic and calm residential neighbourhood streets. A welcome effort, but something Stanborough says wasn’t necessary for the majority of the places they were deployed.
“I looked at the data for 20 of the 37 intersections where the banana barriers were installed to see if they are having an impact. What surprised me is that none of the 20 intersections were overly dangerous places for cyclists or pedestrians prior to the barriers going in,” she wrote in the Straight.
“From Alder and 12th Avenue in the west to Kitchener Street and Renfrew... in the east, most of the intersections had no accidents involving pedestrians or cyclists between 2021 and 2022.”
While the banana barriers may not be affecting traffic in the way city officials had hoped, they’ve found other uses. For what are these large strips of hazard-yellow concrete if not prime real estate for the community to express itself?
Their original message was, of course, “Slow down,” but enterprising citizens have co-opted them for their own aims.
A space for agitating... and friendship
Almost as soon as they were installed, the phrase “No 15-minute cities” was scrawled across the barriers beside my building in bright red spray paint. This is a reference to one of the more mind-numbing right-wing conspiracies floating around the internet.
One strain claims bike lanes, pop-up parklets and any urban updates that prioritize walking, cycling or pedestrians in general — like Slow Streets — are all part of a nefarious plot to take vehicles away from ordinary people and harm the oil and gas industry.
The 15-minute city conspiracies also take a darker turn. The original concept, developed by Carlos Moreno, a professor at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, argues for developing communities in such a way that all of a resident's necessary amenities are a 15-minute walk or bicycle ride away.
It’s a reasonable and, for most, a desirable ideal.
But for those lost in the conspiratorial mire of QAnon and the like, it became, as one academic study shows, a belief that the concept was “a global form of social engineering with hidden agendas to restrict private freedoms.”
Moreno himself started receiving death threats.
The “No 15-minute cities” tags and accompanying stickers were so prevalent on banana barriers around Vancouver that they even earned themselves a USA Today fact check.
Thankfully, these barriers have room for more than one missive. I’ve seen promotions for local bands, love notes to names who may or may not requite that love, and messages to the barriers themselves, most along the lines of “F*ck these stupid f*cking things,” scribbled in Sharpie.
In early December, “Free Gaza” was painted on a banana barrier across the street from my apartment. It stayed there for the workweek before being yellowed over.
Notably, the “No 15-minute city” tags stayed up for months at a time.
Farther north on Woodland, just before North Grandview Highway and a bridge over the railway tracks, sits a solitary grey sentry.
This barrier, while not yellow in hue, is still a part of the Slow Streets initiative, partitioning off the bridge from the use of vehicles.
Residents from neighbouring apartment buildings have taken to it as a friendly muster point to meet up and hang out. They bring lawn chairs and music. At one point, they installed a planter on the signpost informing drivers the bridge is for bicycle traffic only.
While biking past in early January, I stopped and introduced myself to a pair of barrier regulars, Tajai and Logan, who were enjoying the unseasonably warm afternoon.
They told me that their group, which can run four to five deep, started spending time there regularly last April. Tajai had been making use of the space for over a year before that, eventually meeting Logan and another friend at the Trout Lake farmers market.
Eventually, they’d cross paths on the bridge and they’ve been congregating there ever since.

This flat expanse of asphalt, protected by a lump of concrete, gave them an opportunity to develop a community.
“It's bringing everyone together.... We have bubble machines on the bridge, chalk on the bridge, and [the barrier] just makes it nice, safe and friendly,” Tajai says.
For Logan, who has a variety of health issues and “can't go into spaces that are scented of any kind,” he says the bridge “provides me with a safe space to hang out with my friends because I don't have to worry about those kinds of things.”
It’s not perfect, mind you. Cars still run the stop sign at the adjoining intersection, weave around the barrier and speed across the bridge. The city can also be slow to do general upkeep, which led to the duo witnessing a father and his young child wipe out on their bike after riding over leftover “leaf sludge” buildup from street-cleaning efforts. Someone also destroyed their planter, which Tajai says was malicious.
However, those are minor things when the barrier has given them so much.

Taking back the streets
Turning a roadway into a place for pedestrians to gather and play is moving. A reclamation of sorts. That bridge, now (mostly) free of cars, is a surprisingly scenic spot to take in the sunset as it dips behind the glowing dome of Science World.
Just across the bridge, on the other side of Grandview Highway, sits another set of banana barriers. My friends and I have used these in another way: skateable obstacles. Because if there’s one thing that’s sure to attract the attention of skateboarders, it’s a painted piece of concrete.
All over the city, skaters have been sliding and grinding the barriers in opposition to their purpose of halting and altering movement.
Ultimately, that’s what these bright, multi-tonne masses have done to the city. They’ve forced its people and neighbourhoods to adapt in various ways, to varying degrees of success, whether that’s moving around them, writing on them, crashing into them and each other, or making community in the spaces they’ve cordoned off.
Seemingly small initiatives like this can have unexpected, far-reaching effects. Those can be hard to spot at times, and you may hear them from your apartment before you first see them. But these bright yellow barriers, you can’t miss them.
Read more: Transportation, Urban Planning
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