Wet Coast Journals

People and Cars in the West End

One issue that comes up time and again at West End Residents Association meetings is traffic.

The West End of Vancouver gets a lot of traffic. Foot traffic. Bike traffic. Automobile traffic. A lot of this is internally generated (after all, about 40,000 people live here in a small area) but an inordinate amount is through traffic. People going to the beach. People going to Stanley Park. Most offensively, people using the West End as a shortcut to get to other parts of the Lower Mainland.

In the 1970s a previous incarnation of the West End Residents Association fought for and succeeded in gaining some traffic calming measures. Traffic circles were built at some intersections. Roads were blocked off or diverted. Streets were strategically made one way at major entrances, meaning traffic could exit, but not enter, the West End at these locations.

It worked, and it still works, somewhat. However, humans being ingenious and adaptive, people have found ways around these. Drivers go through the diverters, or speed through the traffic circles. They use the laneways as shortcuts, and they blithely ignore the stop signs. So the new version of WERA (the previous incarnation atrophied due to burn-out) has traffic as one of its major concerns. How can we preserve our community as a vital, pedestrian-friendly area? How can we discourage commuters using our streets as short cuts while maintaining the vitality of our neighbourhood?

We're working on several fronts. One group is looking at laneways - how can we calm traffic and discourage drivers from using laneways for shortcuts? Others are concentrating on crosswalks. How can we make them safer for pedestrians and assert the priority of people on foot over those in automobiles? Others are thinking about how to discourage the short-cutters and reclaim the streets for multi-use purposes, not just automobiles.

We are asking questions such as:

• Why shouldn't motorists have to share the streets with cyclists, bladers, pedestrians, children playing?
  
• Why should sidewalks dip down to the level of the road at crosswalks and the intersection of sidewalks and laneways? Why can't the sidewalk stay the same height and the automobiles have to ascend to the level of the sidewalk to go through?
  
• Why can't laneways accommodate various uses? Why not trees and other plants, benches, public art, etc. in our laneways? Why must they be so utilitarian - suitable only for garbage containers and vehicular traffic?
  

We are actively engaging City Council and staff on some of these issues. The City's Downtown Transportation Plan puts the priority on pedestrians first, followed by cyclists, transit users and lastly automobiles. We are determined to ensure they follow through on this. Thus we are engaged in active and sometimes spirited discussion regarding such things as a traffic light at the intersection of Denman (a commercial street that is always busy with both pedestrian and vehicular traffic, linking as it does the Seawall and English Bay to the south with Georgia Street and the route to the North Shore to the North) and Comox, a residential street that runs east-west through the West End. To the surprise of many, WERA came out against the City's plans for a pedestrian-activated traffic light. We opposed it because we think there are better solutions - raised crosswalks, curb bulges, diagonal crosswalks - that could be considered. Traffic lights actually encourage traffic to speed and to act aggressively. Sometimes the best solutions are not the most obvious ones.

More information can be found on the WERA website at http://www.vcn.bc.ca/wera. For a more general discussion of street reclaiming (and the difference between it and traffic calming), check out the Victoria Transport Policy Institute's TDM Encyclopedia.

Posted by wetcoast at July 15, 2003 03:16 PM