The Pillage of Cambie Village

The success of the Canada Line is wonderful and should be celebrated. I ride it every day and it’s a delight to use. However, the Line has a sour taste just the same. The folks that built it have certainly done no favours for Cambie Village and as far as I can tell, they got away with it.

If you live in the Lower Mainland, it’s impossible not to know about the devastation that Canada Line construction wrought on the Cambie merchant community. What was supposed to be a tunneling job became cut-and-cover, and then it transformed into cut-and-wait-wait-wait-then-wait-some-more-and-finally-cover. Business came to a standstill. Merchants were devastated.

Well, the wait is finally over for the ones that survived. Well, no, actually it’s not. The City, for reasons that I don’t understand, has rendered Cambie (the surface street) almost impassable with traffic lights every block or two for the full stretch from the Cambie Bridge to King Ed.

Now, back in the good old days before this all began, Cambie was an efficient way to get out of downtown heading south. No more! It’s crawl and wait, wait and crawl. While the theory probably was that calmed traffic was more business friendly, the real outcome is that I, and many more like me, will simply stay away. I’m thinking that the well intentioned (but misguided) goal was to remake Cambie Village in the image of South Granville.

But our planners (probably the same folks that forgot to put storm drains on the Blenhiem repaving job) forgot to build a Fir Street-style through-traffic bypass route. South Granville is a successful commercial area because Fir Street channels the through traffic away. Cambie has no bypass route. I know because I tried Ash one day, figuring it was one street to the west and it had a three-letter tree name just like Fir, so maybe it would work the same way. No dice. You can go east or west off the Cambie bridge fairly easily. South? Well, it’s a traffic jam every time.

Well, if the roads aren’t helping the merchants, what about the Canada Line? Well, while people in cars can’t move because of all the stops, people on the Canada Line can’t stop. For reasons that totally baffle me (safety perhaps) the Line built a station at Second Avenue. It’s labeled “Olympic Village” but frankly it’s the stop nobody needs. It was the tunneling machine entrance point, so they built a station there. For the moment there are a small number of buses that intersect it, but otherwise it’s a long way from, well, pretty much everywhere. Olympic Village station could have been left out and nobody would have missed it.

The place they absolutely should have built a station and didn’t is Cambie and Sixteenth. When you look at the Village, it’s obvious that a station there would have been transformational. It would be within walking distance of everywhere that people want to go. Pedestrian traffic from Richmond and downtown would have access to great restaurants, stores and other attractions. After all the disruption that merchants endured, it would have been a real return on investment for them. Instead, tens of thousands of potential customers hurtle by under their feet every day. So near and yet so far.

So, the Cambie Village merchants got pillaged coming and going. Surface streets are impassable most of the time, transit has abandoned them, and they’ve graced with a beautiful new neighborhood that’s designed to be hard to get to.

I wish them all the best.