Many in Yaletown think the proposed location is asking for trouble and will only make existing congestion worse
William Boei
Sun
Plans for a Canada Line station at Davie and Mainland don’t impress the Yaletown Business Improvement Association’s Stephanie Clarke, who thinks the area is already too congested with traffic to include a rapid transit station. Photograph by : Ian Smith, Vancouver Sun
There’s light at the end of the RAV Line tunnel for Yaletown businesses and residents.
Just when it appeared the locations of the rapid transit line’s Yaletown station and its entrance were a done deal, Vancouver planning director Larry Beasley has raised neighbourhood hopes that change is still possible.
“Nothing is fixed,” Beasley told The Vancouver Sun. “I’m not ruling anything out.”
Beasley said the city is launching one more round of community consultation, starting early this month, which he hopes will lead to a consensus by early January, if not before Christmas.
That could be a huge relief for area merchants and residents who have been butting heads with Ravco and InTransitBC — the TransLink company overseeing the project and the contractor that will build and operate it.
Their problem is that the station “box” — the concrete underground enclosure — will be built under Davie Street, from Davie and Pacific Boulevard to Davie and Mainland Street. At street level, the entrance is planned for Mainland, on the northeast corner of Davie and Mainland.
That intersection in some ways is the heart of Yaletown, the historic district of rail yards and warehouses on the edge of downtown Vancouver that is being transformed for the second time in a decade. In the 1990s it changed from rough bars and cheap housing to high-tech office space, which is now giving way to newly renovated up-market condos, clubs and restaurants.
Nobody in Yaletown objects to the RAV Line (officially the Canada Line) coming through.
But Yaletowners had thought the station would be built under Pacific Boulevard, a broad thoroughfare with six lanes of traffic, two lanes of parking, bicycle lanes and extra-wide sidewalks.
Not so. Davie is less than half the width of Pacific, but that’s where the station is going. Next May, Davie is scheduled to be ripped up from sidewalk to sidewalk and it won’t reopen for traffic until August 2008.
Unless there’s a last-minute change, the station entrance will be on Mainland, where it will further narrow a badly congested traffic bottleneck.
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“Look at that,” Caralee Randall shouts as a pedestrian darts between moving vehicles to cross Davie at Mainland.
It’s a near miss. The pedestrian’s view is blocked by a truck, and a car he can’t see coming barely misses him.
“People are being knocked over on this crossing all the time,” says Alex Barker, a partner in the Obsessions gift boutiques, whose Yaletown outlet overlooks the intersection.
Randall, a realtor who heads a neighbourhood condo owners’ association, argues the intersection will become even more chaotic with vehicles dropping off and picking up RAV Line passengers heading to or from the airport and carrying luggage.
She thinks the station should be built under Pacific near the Roundhouse community centre or failing that, three blocks up Davie at Richards, where Emery Barnes Park provides open space.
“They could have a little roundabout there for dropping off people and picking up luggage,” Randall said. “And you wouldn’t have pedestrians getting hit.”
Barker dreads two years of construction discouraging potential customers. He’s not sure whether the company — with three shops in all — can survive it. He thinks the Roundhouse centre, an old railway maintenance depot, would be “the perfect and most sensible place to have the station for Yaletown.”
He says he’s also worried about the fate of Bill Curtis Square, the small, shady park at Davie and Mainland that marks the onetime shoreline of False Creek and is the only piece of real public space in historic Yaletown.
“Given a choice of digging a hole at the Roundhouse where you wouldn’t be affecting any merchants or small businesses,” Barker asks, “why the hell would you choose to shoehorn it into one of the most densely populated squares of Yaletown, destroy 15 businesses, take away permanently up to 18 car parking spaces and destroy the ambience of Yaletown’s only quaint little park?” Barker asks.
“Why would you do that? It just makes no sense.”
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Kitty-corner from Obsessions, Daniel Craig, general manager of the luxury Opus Hotel — rooms start at $220 a night, suites at $750 — thinks Mainland is the wrong place for the station, and especially for the entrance.
“We are in support of the RAV project,” Craig said. “We think it’s going to be great for the city.
“But this is a very constricted area. I think [the station] would make more sense further down Davie, perhaps near the Roundhouse, or further up Davie near Emery Barnes Park.
“Yaletown is a very special little neighbourhood. It’s a heritage district and I have my concerns that this not an optimum location for a station entrance.”
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For Stephanie Clarke, executive director of the Yaletown Business Improvement Association, this has been an exercise in frustration because even at this late date, it’s almost impossible to pin down what the plans are.
With two lanes on Davie to be closed in January so utility lines can be moved and the whole street to be dug up in May, Clarke has still not seen an official plan, “so we still haven’t been able to do an analysis.”
If the entrance is at Mainland, she fears it will jeopardize six years of planning for a new street and garbage disposal plan.
Railway tracks used to run along Yaletown’s Hamilton and Mainland streets. Freight trains would unload on to the brick-paved platforms at the backs of the warehouses.
Now the trains are gone and the platforms provide patio space for coffee bars and restaurants catering to condo dwellers, office workers and a growing night life. But where the tracks used to run, there is just enough room for two lanes of parking and a one-way lane of traffic.
The more people and businesses move in, the more garbage they produce, and there are no back lanes. So ever more street space is occupied by overflowing dumpsters. Mainland is so tight that one badly parked car can make it impassable for a large vehicle like a garbage truck. Once a truck is stuck, cars pile up behind it: instant gridlock.
The business association and the city are close to a solution. They expect a proposal to be put to city council in six months to a year that would put a garbage compactor in the middle of each block, get the dumpsters off the street and eliminate most garbage-truck trips.
But narrowing Mainland at Davie for a station entrance threatens to trump all the planning, Clarke said, and that shows “enormous disrespect” for community volunteers who have put in hundreds of hours.
Clarke was resigned to the station going under Davie, but held out some hope that the entrance could be moved, if not to the south side of Pacific at the Roundhouse, then at least to the broad sidewalk on the north side.
“We support the station,” Clarke said, predicting it will benefit Yaletown in the long run even if it hurts small businesses during the construction period.
“Any of these businesses around here are going to run the risk of going bankrupt, let’s face it,” she said.
Clark also doesn’t see how emergency personnel will negotiate Mainland with an even narrower bottleneck when they respond to anything from a heart attack to a terrorist attack on the Canada Line. Tour bus operators already avoid Yaletown because they risk getting stuck on its narrow streets and blowing their schedules. At night, she fears the underlit street with its dark nooks and crannies will draw crime to the station area.
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InTransitBC, the RAV Line builder and operator, says as far as it is concerned, the station and entrance location are fixed. Architects are being hired for the final design and while there will be more consultations about design details, if anyone wants them moved, they will have to talk to Ravco.
Chris Crombie, InTransitBC’s vice-president of public affairs, said the tunnel has to be drilled deeper under False Creek than originally thought. Rapid transit trains can handle grades of up to 5.5 per cent, which won’t let the tunnel climb fast enough from False Creek to put a station at a reasonable depth on the south side of Pacific: the deeper the station, the lower the ridership.
Another reason the station has to go on the north side of Pacific is its catchment area — the 400-metre radius beyond which people are not likely to walk to a rapid transit station, Crombie said. A station on the south side of Pacific would have a catchment area extending well into False Creek, and that won’t do anything for the line’s ridership, adds Naina Sloan, Crombie’s counterpart at Ravco.
Nor would it be realistic to close Pacific Boulevard for two years of construction, Crombie said, adding: “We’ve tried to explain to [Yaletown residents] how this works, but they’re more interested in the outcome than they are in the process. They don’t necessarily like what they’re hearing.”
The reasons Davie and Richards was rejected for a station location are less clear. Crombie said he thinks it has to do with Davie sloping uphill and more grade problems. Sloan was uncertain about what the problem was.
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Unlike Crombie, Sloan said she thinks the location of the station entrance has not been determined, although there are “constraints,” especially on the south side of Pacific.
The entrance will be part of the detailed design consulting stage, which is about to begin, Sloan said.
Michael McCoy, a condo owner in the building that houses the Obsession boutique, says he thinks the entrance will be on Mainland because the city doesn’t want anything interfering with a grand redesign of Pacific Boulevard it has in progress.
But Beasley said nothing is final, not even the location of the station box.
He said he’ll heed technical advice, “but I’ve noticed in my old age that when things appear absolutely fixed, creative technical people find solutions if those emerge as urgent things to do.”
Beasley called on all parties to step back from their positions “and then see what solutions can be found working together.”
“I think we want to get out of the woods on these issues, I’m hoping before Christmas or certainly early in the New Year. The citizens that are feeling anxiety should not be left hanging out there for months.”
HOW RAV WILL BE BUILT:
The serious work on the Canada Line — also known as the RAV Line — has begun.
– Lanes are closed on Cambie Street.
– Crews have started to dig a very big hole — 13.7 metres deep, 18.2 metres wide and 60.9 metres long — at Second Avenue next to the Cambie Bridge, which will be the tunnel entry pit for the giant boring machine that will dig the tunnels under False Creek and downtown Vancouver; boring will likely start in April.
– InTransitBC, the contractor that will build and operate the line, has started hiring architectural firms to work on station details. In most cases, station locations and entrances have been finalized, but communities will be consulted on design details.
– Cut-and-cover tunnels running south from Cambie will be built with concrete tunnel sections poured in place, rather than prefabricated off-site as originally planned.
– InTransitBC vice-president Steve Crombie said the pre-fab method would force construction to halt whenever the line hit a technical snag such as unexpected groundwater. Now, crews will simply work on another section first and come back when the problem is solved.
– Pouring in place will also eliminate the need for a huge gantry crane — 18.2 metres high and 60.9 metres long — moving up and down Cambie to lift precast sections off large flatbed trucks and into the excavation.
– The hole won’t need to be quite as wide or deep as it would have been with precast concrete, and that means less dirt to be excavated and dumped.
– The project will need to use many concrete trucks, but Crombie said the changes will mean a net reduction of 50 truck trips a day.
© The Vancouver Sun 2005
