The Cement Feather-Bed: Traffic Calming, Corner Bulges and Roundabouts

The Bureaucratic Oath starts with the words “Always Look Busy…” and nothing makes that clearer than the City of Vancouver’s traffic calming program. If you want to understand more about the program, there’s an interesting memo on the Vancouver.ca website entitled: “Neighbourhood Collector Streets Traffic Calming Toolkit and Priority Guidelines” dated January 26th 2007.

This document leaves no room for dissent about the benefits of “traffic calming”. It’s clear that calming is a good thing because it’s a priority and that it’s a priority because it’s a good thing. Once you succumb to the tautology, you’ve accepted the City’s laundry list of strategies:

i. Corner and Mid-block Bulges
ii. Medians
iii. Intersection Re-alignments
iv. Roundabouts
v. Narrow Travel Lanes
vi. Curved Streets
vii. 30 km/h Speed Limits in School and Playground Zones

So, what does this list really represent? Well, with the exception of the last item, which has been the practice for decades; it’s all about creating an endless supply of construction work for city workers. It’s “Always Look Busy…” made real on the roads of our city.

And how’s this working out for those of us paying for it? Well, living near Blenheim Street in the newly calmed zone, I’m not seeing any positive outcomes. It did provide some amusement, though. When the first big rainstorm hit in October 2009, the newly installed “decorative gravel” shoulder and parking areas washed down the hill turning the stretch from 18th north to 16th into a creek bed. While City Engineering places a premium on planning for traffic calming, basic storm sewer design seems to have migrated beyond their grasp. The result was two more weeks of construction while the City cleaned up the mess, paved the shoulders and fixed the drains.

Other than the ability of the Blenheim calming strategy to create civic busy-work, it hasn’t made much difference. Now, it is true that there have been fewer emergency vehicle sirens recently. “Calming” has basically rendered the only north-south corridor west of Oak Street unavailable for public safety use. Oh, and it’s made parking on Blenheim much harder to find, pushing it off onto side streets. From a “look busy” standpoint, traffic calming on Blenheim was a roaring success.

From a community point of view, the benefits are hard to discern. After all, Blenheim served its community well for the previous eighty years as a plain old street; suddenly according to the City’s new “calming” religion, it wasn’t good enough. Millions of dollars and more than a year of construction work converted a road strewn with potholes into a road strewn with cement obstacles. A simple, six-week repaving job was all anybody living here actually wanted.

So, the next time you see a Vancouver City work crew digging up old sidewalks to build corner bulges or a roundabout, remember the first three words of the Bureaucratic Oath “Always Look Busy…”. And try to smile. Wave, maybe.