Thanks Officedweller for the info on the Burrard Building.
A friend and I took a walk and I brought along my camera so now I have a handful of new photos to share. These were taken by me on July 2nd.
Harbour Green Park and a portion of the Seawall in Coal Harbour, downtown Vancouver. On Canada Day, July 1st, there were fireworks out in Burrard Inlet and Harbour Green Park was the preferred viewing location. It is always hard to judge crowds but a newspaper said attendance was 150,000 for the Coal Harbour component of the fireworks celebration. I would guess that there were several thousand people in the park and who knows about many watching from the Seawall and other locations around the harbour. It was a pleasant experience, though it certainly wasn’t on the scale of the Celebration of Light which attracts as many as half a million a night for four nights.
These three photos are of the Mole Hill housing co-operative in the West End neighbourhood of downtown Vancouver. It is an entire city block of old Edwardian and Victorian homes that were saved and beautifully restored. Many of the houses now contain multiple dwellings and there is a range of options for different household sizes and mobility needs. Of particular interest is the traffic-calmed alley (last photo) that is barely recognizable when compared to most alleys in the city. I have been told that there was a real knock-down, drag’em-out fight to get the City of Vancouver’s Engineering department to agree to the proposed alley configuration. Everything seems to have worked itself out now and the Engineering Department has got themselves a working laboratory to gauge how such an unconventional laneway will hold up to use over time.
Progress on the Pacific Boulevard boulevard. That isn’t a typo. The absurd original six to seven-lane Pacific Boulevard lacked a median and is now being scaled down to a much more sensible four to five lanes, I would imagine with bike lanes in each direction. The road was widened in the early 1980s to convey crowds traveling to and from BC Place stadium and at the time, with no mass transit alternative, the expectation was that everyone would arrive exclusively by car. So ends an era of exclusively automobile-oriented planning in another section of Vancouver.
In addition to the narrow central median, a second median will separate on-street parking on the south side of the boulevard from through traffic. This is both a reflection of a desire to make the street more pedestrian scaled, it is currently as wide as the region's largest highway, and to reduce road capacity in light of declining vehicle use. Despite adding tens of thousands of new residents to the downtown core, there are now more than 90,000 people living downtown, the number of vehicle trips has been steadily falling. In their place is a dramatic rise in pedestrian and transit trips, and cycling. From 1994 to 2004 the City claims the number of vehicle trips fell 10% city-wide, vehicle trips entering downtown by 7%, and vehicle trips within downtown by 10%. Walking is up 44% city-wide during the same time frame and walking trips now account for 65% of all trips downtown and 27% of trips to downtown. Cycling is up 180% city-wide to 50,000 trips a day and transit is up 20% to about 330,000 trips a day within the City of Vancouver. All of these figures are from the City of Vancouver's Transportation Plan Ten-Year Update.
The proposed downtown Vancouver streetcar will eventually travel along the inner through lane once that service is up and running some time in the next decade. The Pacific Boulevard section is slated to be phase 2.5. Phase 0 will connect Granville Island with the Canada Line subway, the emerging Southeast False Creek/Olympic Village neighbourhood and Scienceworld/SkyTrain. Phase 1 will continue the line through Chinatown and Gastown and terminate at the Waterfront Station multi-modal transit hub that ties in cross harbour ferry, commuter rail, buses, and it is the northern terminus of the SkyTrain network, including the under-construction Canada Line subway expansion. Phase 2 will connect Waterfront station to Stanley Park by way of Coal Harbour. Phase 0 is seeking funding and the City of Vancouver has indicated that it considers it a major transportation priority, though decididly behind the extension of the Millennium SkyTrain Line along the Broadway corridor and out to the University of British Columbia. The bus rapid transit line that plies this route is already well beyond capacity and moves 60,000 people daily.
It is an observation of mine that the more one is out and about observing a city, the greater the likelihood you will come across bizarre sights that exist for only brief periods of time. I happened to find a Pepsi machine in the middle of a side street in Yaletown, a block over from Urban Fare and the Roundhouse Community Centre (second photo).
This is the Yaletown Park part of the Yaletown Park residential project. I’m not sure what to make of it yet. It needs to weather and it needs some people. The Starbucks that is opening should help somewhat with the people but I don’t know what people will
do at the park. The benches are nice but they’re at the sides and made of metal. The cobbles are interesting, certainly a departure from poured concrete or pre-cast cement pavers, let alone grass. I’ll hold off my own judgment for a year to see how it turns out.
The station box for the Yaletown RAV/Canada Line station. I haven’t been by in a while and I was surprised to see the steel bracing. I deliberately violated the “no pedestrians on bridge” rule as a quiet protest over the bridge's lack of consideration for pedestrians.
A shot of the emerging Coopers Quay precinct by Concord Pacific taken from the Cambie Street Bridge. The Seawall component of the build out appears to nearly be complete and I’m looking forward to it being opening soon. I don’t have a picture, but the Plaza of Nations sure looks strange without the glass space frame. I never realised how much the space frame tied the space together, nor did I realise how ugly I found the buildings flanking it to be on their own.
The last shot looks back at part of the Yaletown neighbourhood. The amount of surface parking that still exists is amazing and underscores the point that the final build-out of Yaletown is still some ways off, despite the breakneck pace of construction over the last decade plus.
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