Quote:
Originally Posted by misher
I spoke to Gregor Robertson one day about the skytrain system and asked him why he's putting bike lanes everywhere and closing down roads. [...] His response to me was that if he increases the amount of roads, more people will drive. He said that we need to increase congestion in order to encourage less people to drive.
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This is the type of anti-development and anti-working-middle-class numbf*cks we have had running our city for decades and it shows. City of Vancouver has done and continues to do anything it can to make Vancouver roads as congested as possible and they are succeeding. Traffic is only getting worse and congestion has exploded and become a permanent phenomenon.
I also do ride my bicycle (during summer time), but the number of bike lanes especially in Downtown has become ridiculous and all of them run along major streets. I was still on board with them when they ran along side streets, but now traffic flow on Nelson, Smithe and Burrard has been killed. Just wait until Granville Bridge greenway gets built and we will lose also Howe and Seymour (which already allow street parking during most of the day)...
I do commute every other day by car and transit, and I am so happy to be driving against the main traffic flow, which has got absurd. All traffic lanes heading in the direction of the rush are these days basically solid with cars that move at walking speed. It is crazy how much worse rush hour traffic has got in the 6 years I have lived in here.
Great example of how CoV operates is the current closure of 1st Avenue. This has resulted in huge congestion on all other east-west roads such as Powell, Hastings, Broadway and Grandview. If the city would have any capable planner on their staff, they would have temporarily banned all street parking at all times on all those major arterial roads, yet all normal parking rules apply.
This has resulted in East Vancouver side streets be filled with drivers trying to cut congested traffic to which city actually has reacted by adding loads of traffic cones on most entryways and turns in the area.
I cannot imagine how people have the patience to drive with the rush hour traffic anymore. It is no wonder we once again dropped on the list of most livable cities and we will never see number 1 spot again (for this and affordability reasons), and will be out of top 10 soon as well. One can only hope that on its own will help reduce the appeal of our city to more immigrants.