Quote:
Originally Posted by WarrenC12
I salute you, supreme troll. These parks should be bulldozed and malls built, immediately!
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I think that's a bit of hyperbole of his argument. I don't think he is saying anything about removing parks, just saying we are not in dire need of more by pointing out that they are rarely, if ever, at maximum capacity. The only counter to that troll was an equally opposite troll showing the park packed during an event.
Even a google image search of David Lam park returns no images of the park being busy outside of Jazz fest. If someone has a picture of the park being "rammed" on a Tuesday at 2pm, please share.
Just to show how much an effect weather has on parks, here is David Lam a few years ago during Jazz Fest, a great event that should draw out thousands of people.

credit: me
I think the argument is we are going to tear down road infrastructure that is useful every single day or not build much needed housing so we can build a park that might have more than a couple people in it less than 5% of the hours of the year?
I'm not exaggerating either. Only about 22% of all hours (1938 hours) of the year are "Sunny". Many of those hours fall during working hours of weekdays (there are 2080 hours of work in a year) and during colder winter days (when the fields are wet and soggy) when parks are never going to be fully busy. So really, what percentage of the year are parks in downtown Vancouver maxed out?
To compare, we have about 6 hours of rush hour a day in Vancouver. For just weekdays that's 1560 hours a year. So around 17% of all hours in the year, the Viaducts are busy (not counting when they are busy on weekends or busier for longer due to events).
And is being at maximum capacity at some point preventable or even a bad thing? Roads are busy at rush hour; restaurants are busy at dinner time; movie theaters are busy on Saturday nights; parks are busy on Sunday afternoons. Sometimes meeting maximum demand is unsustainable. Just because people wait for tables at a restaurant doesn't mean the economy could support more restaurants. Just because I can't see a movie at 7pm Saturday doesn't mean there needs to be 20 more theaters. Just because I can't play Frisbee in a park on the first weekend in July doesn't mean we need more parks.