Todd Boulanger, a well-known transportation planner and former Alice B. Toeclips award winner (2005), has been laid off by the City of Vancouver.For us bike geeks out there, Boulanger's lay off is a really bad sign, since it means that livability concerns are getting short shrift. And even Boulanger acknowledges this:
...
City Transportation Manager Thayer Rorabaugh sent an email to staff on Monday that he had decided to eliminate the Neighborhood Traffic Program that Boulanger oversaw.
Boulanger feels the loss of the program will hurt the city’s ability to respond to neighborhood requests for livability improvements.This also raises the question for how ultimately the CRC bridge design plays out for the biking community. With Boulanger's departure, local bicyclists just lost an experienced planner, and I'm much less sanguine about the prospects for a decent outcome on the CRC.
Transportation and livability improvements were a top priority for City Council in those days, says Boulanger, but in recent years transportation has fallen down the rung of priorities. These days City Council’s top priorities are waterfront development and police and fire services.
Bicyclists in many ways have been promised much with the CRC, but we seem to be ending up with a design that shoves bike riders literally under the bridge. So in essence what you'll have is one long tunnel full of glass shards. How fun.
Perhaps the CRC should snap up Boulanger before he wanders off to Portland?
1 comments:
Hi Aneurin, thanks for the words of support.
Though from my perspective of working with the PBAC group over 25 meetings and biking across the I-5 Bridge in all weather conditions (10 years)...the stacked bridge is the best transportation design option for bicyclists being offered by the CRC - at this point in time.
All the other options will be under very severe cost pressure ('value engineering') to be narrow (current design standard minimums) and not world class. (Just pick up any newspaper...this week.)
Though the three bridge option does allow for one opportunity - the ability to bridge the LRT/ ped bike bridge first and thus get green commuters through the larger construction work zone easy.
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