There’s an area about half the size of the Olympic Village, mostly owned by the city, that could be used for all kinds of interesting things… But the idea of using that land to create something with public value could turn the conversation. (I personally am intrigued by the idea of putting housing back in the couple of blocks where it was taken away, when the viaducts were built in the 1960s, right next to Chinatown. That’s where former councillor George Chow’s family lived when they first moved here.) Or perhaps not, in this paranoid town.

FB

First, an observation about the entries for the viaduct part of the City design competition. They fell into two categories:

1. Those who would keep them; and

2. Those who would blow them away to kingdom come!

Fair enough. However, the suspicion started to grow with me that among entries in Group #1 there were a bunch of folks that couldn’t have any ideas if the viaducts were not there. Empty urban land? No! I’m not up to suggesting what to do with that. So in came the decisions to cover the damn things with vegetable matter; put swimming pools in them; anything, since the perception is that they are “free” urban space. No matter if they blight the ground plane below.

So, let’s see what the jury decides.

My favourite was a “Rene Magritte” entry that Photo-shoped the underside of the viaducts to look like a blue sky. Subliminal message me-thinks: even if we fear it, we gotta bring them things down if we are ever to see the sky!!

If you look at the competition brief, then the City comes off as not too shy to show its naked thinking. On the site of the viaducts there is a “View Cone Analysis” that veritably puts the towers and podia down on the ground for ya… “This is what WE want!”

But, my kudos for the City for hosting the second ‘ideas’ competition. It is a healthy thing to air our opinions about. It builds the culture of the design professions to have that “piss or get off the pot” moment.

Most of all, I am whole-heartedly grateful of the young designers that chose to wade into waters where their ‘ideas’ may not come off as well as one would hope. Yet, they will take their lumps with pride, and live to design in anoday—stronger for having stuck their necks and ideas out.

Yunno when you look around the world and see what can be done . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGkmgnprrIU&feature=player_embedded

. . . you have to ask, what de-palpitated organism at thu hall chose the Busby to secretly do the viaduct thingie?

Yes, Clr. Reimer, “Vancouver planning is broken”, and NO Lewis half-baked nineteenth century Krier would be worse!

Go back to sleep!

I should add that in San Francisco the Embarcadero viaducts came down in the early 1990’s with strong opposition. The structure had been damaged during the 1989 earthquake. The Mayor of the day gained the necessary state and federal support and a wonderful boulevard was created in its place. But, it cost the Mayor re-election.

I was in Pioneer Square in Seattle yesterday, near the Alaskan Viaduct. That one too, I hear, is due to come down. It will transform old town and the waterfront by allowing better physical and visual connections.

This notion of ‘traffic in the sky’ is an old modern planning paradigm. Whether it is the El in Chicago, the elevated ‘subway’ in Paris, the elevated line in Queens N.Y., or our own Skytrain and Millennium lines, all you have to do is look out the window from the car or train, or walk the site down below, and you will see blight. Yet, there are many that are okay with that.

Terminal Avenue in Vancouver is a good local example. It is both a traffic conduit to the viaducts, and the corridor for the Expo Line.

The cars started coming en masse in the 1970s. That much traffic kills places. Then Skytrain opened in 1986.

We’ve had 25 years to look and see. The latest developments on Terminal are storage warehouses for the dwellers in the micro condos of the point towers beyond. A Starbucks has opened in the ‘going to work’ side of Terminal—I interview the baristas often. Place is dead by closing time at 7 p.m. or so. Nothing is going to change.

However, there will be many who will be opposed to tearing down the viaducts, just as there has been strong support for building the Evergreen Line in the air, and between continuous chain link fencing on the ground in Port Moody.

As many of the entries to the RE:connect competition amply demonstrate, it is not easy to get the urbanism right. A local culture has to evolve. To boot there is another model out there.

We stayed in Lake Oswego, Oregon, this weekend. A place built on the Orange County paradigm.

There was a Starbucks there too, just on the other side of the street. Except that the street was not made for walking, neither was the block the hotel stood in, or the neighbouring one for the strip mall & Starbucks. Getting there on foot meant finding your way to the edge of one superblock, waiting for the light to cross the river of a local street with six lanes, and then walking on the parking lot to get to the coffee shop.

All of it less than 20 years old. All of it just fine for an entire segment of our population. We grew up in suburbs and we like it that way.

Time to fill-in False Creek?

@ Roger Kemble, guess you can’t help the nastiness. Have a civil conversation and debate, but save the condescending comments. YOU bore me.

“Mr. Meggs said some of the stakeholders in the area – landowners like Concord Pacific and Aquilini Developments – as well as neighbourhood groups need to get involved in the debate about the viaducts’ future.”

Well, if the City Councilor who has been championing the removal of the viaducts doesn’t know what the Planning Department is doing (and who they are hiring to do it) behind closed doors, it’s probably gonna be kinda hard for the rest of us to be involved in the debate, other than in the ether of the blogs….

But I guess we have no cause for “darkly suspicious” thoughts regarding the planning department’s process, seeing as they are so open, transparent, and have such a stellar record of public consultation? I mean, who in their right mind would go to the trouble and expense to set up an urban design competition, then hire private firms to create a parallel plan, and schedule the land-use hearing with the UD Panel BEFORE the competition was even judged?

The end result may or may not be seen as beneficial, but the process, yet again, is suspect.

There has been a lot of archive postings of old photos here of the previous “Georgia Viaducts” that lead to Keefer Street on the eastern side. You can still see the sudden drop off where the old steel structure came to Main.
Part of this is the fault of having the Lion’s Gate Bridge lead to the city and trucks and most people trying to get __Through__ the city to beyond.

Cambie and Burrard bridges are/were not sufficient.
And there was daily blockages of Hastings by freight train crossings.

I know that Traffic still has the plans in their drawers to go along Venables-Williams Street (only 25 houses to expropriate) to link to the 401 freeway.

@ A Dave #11,

The city needs to scope out the issue first, before it can come to the public. They’d need to understand the context and background, then present something to the public and get their feedback. You need to be able to answer public’s questions, which means you need to understand the issue from multiple angles beforehand. I’m cautiously optimistic and gonna wait and see what they come forward with.

Frank @ #13

Frank I understand your dilemma. You have been an employee of the planning department for what, thirty years. You no doubt feel partially culpable for the disastrous performance of the planning department. As Clr. Riemer pointed out, “Vancouver’s planning process is broken”.

It is time, as Lewis would say, for a new planning paradigm. Dredging up examples from another country at another time, Lewis would agree, is not appropriate for a self-respecting contemporary community.

False Creek Flats. What a wonderful opportunity! Once the viaducts are removed, a new slate: an open opportunity to redefine ourselves as a city.

May I suggest an approach to start the conversation? A living mix . . .

1. Economic: Small-scale owner operated, import substituting manufacturing (i.e. haberdashery etc) and wealth creating opportunities: home office, home-work, live-work.
2. Social: emulate False Creek south mix: coop, social subsidized, high end residential, affordable residential.
3. Affordability:
a. Circumvent off shore speculation.
b. Ownership, Is it the best way to go?
c. Is market rental better?

4.Transportation: Prioritize,
a. Walk.
b. Cycle.
d. Emissions free pedestrian scale TX.
e. Goods and services.
f. SOV.
In that order.

4. Aesthetic: the ambulatory experience determines the quality of public urban space, i.e. interconnected unique, varied public urban spaces with defined purposes: interstices, envelope, shadows, geometry of figure-ground space.
5. Regulatory: As a long service planner do you agree? Based essentially on a 1940’s UK military model, planning regulations are unwieldy and redundant . . . vulnerable to pressure.
6. Name the new community appropriately granting a modicum of local control so the community has control over its destiny.
7. These priorities come way ahead of corporate architects working in private.

Hope we can see eye to eye: if not, sorry. Better luck next time!

We need to put jobs into that area that match the cost of the housing.

I wept salty tears when I read of the (gasp) 2 whole blocks that disappeared along with the Chow home in order to construct the viaducts

Almost as many tears as were shed for the many homes as disappeared from thedowntown peninsula during the 50s and 60s.

Let’s stop the nattering and get back to ideas.

The urban design potential regarding the viaducts alone is superficial without considering the land below them.

And the land is considerable not just for the reasonably large area it covers, but for the fact it is largely publicly-owned. The land is not constrained to being a preordained high-rise condo giveaway to some developer. The public has every right to decide its potential.

My preference is to have the viaducts removed. This doesn’t mean all the roads have to be removed. Accommodating the traffic can be accomplished on the surface via Pacific Blvd + Quebec + Pender + Hastings streets. Downtown has seen a minimum if 12% decrease in car traffic onto and off of the penninsula even while the residential population there has nearly doubled. If traffic remains a primary consideration, then transit and commercial vehicles need to be given priority.

The viaducts are a monument to the untold damage last century-era traffic engineering and planning have done to our cities, and thank the god of your choice the freeway was stopped at Main Street rather than ramming through the Grandview Cut to the Trans Canada, or along the Burrard waterfront.

The False Creek Flats were largely rich tidal marshland before the dominant society erupted here from its European roots and suddenly filled in half the creek. Half the project should be a remediation strategy to return a sizeable portion of the land back to this state, perhaps connecting a waterway to the pond outside of the Dr. San Yet Sun Classical Chinese Garden.

I’d like to keep only one column from the expansive, overshadowing viaducts. Let it appear that it’s thrusting up from a small estauarine lake, and let it have a rack on top for an osprey or eagle nest. Let it speak to the tragic folly of the freeway madness that consumed North American cities for the past seven decades, and let it get covered in layers of seagull shit and erode slowly into the mud over the next seven.

It seems almosy too easy to suggest the viaducts can be replaced with a reconfigured Pacific Blvd on the surface. The speed could be calmed, and a very generous median could accommodate triple rows of trees, perhaps a tram. The edges could be lined with low of mid-rise housing and continous street retail, all of which wouild benefit from the aforementioned park and water feature.

Lewis, I think you are confusing a public transit amenity with publicly-funded infrastructure meant to serve the private car. And it seems intentional. That’s a pity.

The SkyTrain guideway consumes only about 15% of the sky that the viaducts occupy, and its mass is perhaps 1/100th the mass of this remnant divided freeway. You’re comparing a possum to a pig.

This doesn’t mean that local surface trams won’t work on Quebec + Pacific + Cordova in tandem with — and greatly benefitting from — the adjacent regional SkyTrain connection, all in the absence of the viaducts and with a new injection of parkland and a viable new community.

MB @ #23

Let’s stop the nattering and get back to ideas.” Oh please let’s . . . read post 17

My preference is to have the viaducts removed . . . Me too!

Interesting conversation.

I’m surprise that there is virtually no discussion about removing BOTH viaducts and keeping access up/down the escarpment at BOTH Dunsmuir and Georgia.

This could be done without having to rework any traffic patterns outside the area.

No need to wait until we are all dead.

This option was submitted late to the reCONNECT competition, so it might not be seen by the City planners and Perkins+Will. The maximum possible new development is shown in orange. Obviously, if less building mass is desired, that is possible. The orange buildings are really just suggestions.

The point of this submission is that BOTH viaducts can come down and create lots of new land, without affecting traffic and without taking 15 years to do it.

See PDF (4Mb file): http://s3.amazonaws.com/viaductscomp/other/147/submission.pdf
See Comments: http://www.viaductscomp.ca/view_submission.php?ID=147

This would involve:

1) Tearing down BOTH viaducts.

2) Replacing traffic capacity of BOTH viaducts with roads on the ground and ramps going up/down the escarpment.

Georgia Street: Connect Georgia St to Pacific Blvd with a down ramp at a perpendicular intersection beside the hockey rink. Ramp could have same capacity as current viaduct or could add a lane going up (west) making the ramp 2-way and taking some of the traffic off of Dunsmuir ramp. Georgia St is 2-way downtown, so this would continue that. There could also be integrated walkways with BC Place Stadium and bike lanes. There’s quite a bit of width here.

Dunsmuir Street: Connect a 2-way Pacific Blvd to Dunsmuir St with a one-way up ramp with two lanes for cars and one for bikes and pedestrians. Traffic would come from Quebec St or Main St, turn left at a normal intersection, travel west along a two-way Pacific Blvd, flow up a Dunsmuir St ramp, just before the hockey rink.

Pacific Blvd: Make into a two-way Blvd. This would also help connect to the two-way portion of Pacific Blvd west of the mess of Cambie St Bridge off ramps and viaducts. Pacific Blvd would need some extra lanes, but would be comparable to other arterials in the city.

Skytrain: Would be best to raise it. The above could be done leaving the Skytrain alone, but not nearly as nicely. Raising Skytrain would allow Pacific to run directly onto Prior St through normal intersections at Quebec and Main streets. It would also increase the land available for the park.

This will free up lots of land for whatever use and/or profits the city wants. From Parks to high-rises. Anything.

Over 4 Hectares of land can be created in the heart of one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world.

Why waste valuable downtown land right beside Skytrain? Do we prefer urban sprawl and paving the Agricultural Land Reserve? Wouldn’t affordable housing be better than a kilometre of highway experience?

This site is right in the middle of several important areas: Main Street, Chinatown, North East False Creek, North West False Creek, Downtown East Side, Yale Town, City Gate, False Creek Flats, Olympic Village, and Downtown Proper.

This site can connect all of these areas with a walkable, bikable, drivable, inhabited community.

Or we can keep a 2 minute highway driving experience.

What are our values?

I’m interested, perhaps encouraged, that at the “competition” website the Creekside Park extension (decades awaited so far, and I suspect to be awaited for decades more) is still shown at its originally planned size. I had the impression that the developers already had managed to get the city to give part of it to them.

I will admit to being one of those who has dark suspicions about this entire viaducts question, since the city seems to cave in whenever the developers come knocking, claiming they just can’t get by on what they promised when the original agreements were made. The fact that the city did not laugh in their faces at the idea of giving up part of this parkland (or “reconfiguring” it), after letting the developers sit on it with a ridiculously low tax rate for decades, makes me angry.

If there were an iron-clad guarantee that the viaducts would be replaced right away by parkland or some other purely public amenity, then I would be in favour of getting rid of them. But if there is any chance that it is just going to be sold off for one more set of condominiums – high rise, low rise, “affordable,” or whatever they choose to call them – or be left as an empty ruin most of the time except when it’s rented out a couple times every year for multiple times its supposed value, then I am against it.

Craig 27,

I didn’t comment on entry #147 because I thought it was—to repeat from the top of this thread—“This is what WE want!” (i.e. the City). The entry shows 5 towers, maybe that’s $5 million in land-lift to the City. Maybe more. Without a working plan for urban intensification local governments have to practice urban ambush to raise cash.

I didn’t click to see more than the posted image. It was drawn on CAD and is shown from high above the ground plane. This kind of abstraction is being had at a price. I believe it ushers in the last phase of modern planning, but I could be wrong.

I have walked the Viaducts, at least the north one, and photographed from it. I agree that it is a very central location integral to our historical areas.

But you have to be mad, or doing some research in urban design, or run out of gas, or got a flat on your bike, to walk there.

Good urbanism is made of the other kind of stuff.

@ Lewis #31,
Lewis, I quite often walk from my place in the West End over to Tinseltown. I’ve often walked from my place over to Home Depot on terminal.
Waves on Pender and Main is a coffee shop that I travel to when i’m bored.
It’s really not that far.
Humans were made for walking, not shovelling fast food into the mouths while siting on their ever expanding butts doing nothing more than pressing either the brake or gas and turning a wheel for exercise.

Lewis, you seems very opinionated on what to do with the Viaducts area, why didn’t you have articulated your ideas in a submission?

yes, I have seen your proposal in the Wild category, suggesting a Vaporetto to go from VCC clark to UBC…interesting (BTW, wasn’t it the same proposal which give birth to the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas? ) but not on the viaduct topic.

Think, Sorry about that. I conflated “most expensive” with “least affordable”.

For those who live and work here, it’s practically the same thing. Affordability links price with local incomes.

The study also only looked at these countries: Australia, ­ Canada, ­ Ireland, ­ New Zealand, ­ United Kingdom, ­ United States, ­ China (Hong Kong).

It’s from:

7th Annual Demographia, International Housing Affordability Survey: 2011, Ratings for Metropolitan Markets

http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf

“Hong Kong ranked as the least affordable major market (82nd), with a median multiple of 11.4. Sydney ranked second most unaffordable, at a Median Multiple of 9.6 (81st), having slipped behind last year’s most unaffordable market, Vancouver at 9.5 (which ranked 80th).”

ah #125 I guess Lewis…
…But I see it retains the Dunsmuir viaduct?…
(that is probably the reason why you didn’t want put your name on it)

…Nevertheless you need to get rid of the Skytrain one to realize the idea

“. . . what they also found in the Charrette”. I was there!

Lewis @ passim was a rehashed version of the Krier bros discarded plan for Luxembourg, Liechtenstein . . .

http://www.nanaimo.ca/UploadedFilesPath/Site_Structure/Corporate_Services/Corporate_Administration/2004_Minutes/C041115M.pdf . . .

replete with inappropriate Lombardi Poplars Cllr. Krall dubbed, “an abandoned, eighteenth century mining village”.

My input left me bewildered. Aw shit Lewis you screwed up a magnificent opportunity!

Your Nanaimo tumbrel (charrette) had you do all the talking and strutting, and then a week later you showed up to do it to Nanaimo. And the mayor and council walked out after your insults.

You’re lucky your admirers here have never worked with you (Frank D., listening?).

Doing our little ride ‘round Mount Pleasant I realized, hey this guy has no ideas: just obsessions!

SUNN, another predatory lunge at DTES: forty odd students misled, all comfortably numbed, not one allowed input. Check the link.

What a fiasco: you put “charretting back a century. As for the viaduct thingies, Lewis, I take you with a pinch of salt!

JJJ @ #40 Don’t root. None will see the light of day. That’s the nature of the beast.

Gall and hubris beats out sentient creativity . . .

How sad!

@ Lewis 28: “We won the freeway fight but lost the war.”

Not yet. The one thing that will overpower everything will be the much higher prices in fossil fuels expected to manifest themselves this decade. We’re well on our way now, because the affordable oil has already been exploited, now it’s deep sea, shale, arctic and tar sands.

Consumers and businesses will make their own choices independent of corporate and political influence when their economic well being is threatened by higher energy costs.

If we cannot make the decisions to live in compact communities and consume less voluntarily now, I am confident given the information at hand that such decisions will be forced on society.

Three dollar per litre gasoline will make the viaducts (and the sheer astronomical rate of car dependency they represent) even less relevant in future.

@MB #45,

You write: “Three dollar per litre gasoline will make the viaducts (and the sheer astronomical rate of car dependency they represent) even less relevant in future.”

Out of curiousity (and for the sake of discussion), would your prediction change if electric cars or something like that (say cold fusion cars) became economic to the point where they replaced cars using fossil fuel?

IMO, you are correct in stating that the increasing cost of fossil fuel will eventually render cars using that fuel source obsolete, but there are other sources of energy to power cars.

@MB 45

The manner in which “we lost the freeway fight” can best be felt standing in the 600 block E Cordova, the cottage block, and seeing and feeling the cars zoom by.

When the freeway that wasn’t traffic was re-routed on Water-Powell, Cordova, Hastings, and Prior-Venables we lost the war.