Side-street shortcuts not endorsed
Don’t be using side streets to get around East 1st Avenue street closure, city warns
Who doesn’t love a good shortcut down a side street?
Lon LaClaire, that’s who. A major Fortis B.C. project that began this week will see parts of East 1st Avenue in Vancouver fenced off for months this summer, and that has sent drivers on the hunt for the speediest circuits around the key thoroughfare.
Residents on quiet side streets near 1st Avenue say they are already feeling increased traffic flow, and that is something LaClaire, the city’s director of transportation, doesn’t want to see.
“That is definitely not part of the plan,” he said in an interview Wednesday.
But it is something city staff can help remediate.
The plan LaClaire was speaking of is a traffic-management plan that Fortis B.C. developed before it started its work to replace about five kilometres of gas line under East 1st. LaClaire said third parties like Fortis are obliged to develop traffic-management plans around their projects, and the city is responsible for reviewing them.
“The reason for that is it’s hard for us to know exactly what work is involved. They know how deep their trench is going to be or if the connection requires extra width and an excavation, or what’s the duration of that activity,” he explained.
“We can challenge them on a lot of things and often we do, because if we can push (disruptive work) into the evening or onto a weekend we will do that …”
After a project’s traffic-management plan is approved and work gets underway, monitors with the city are dispatched to make sure things go as planned, LaClaire said.
When they don’t, as in the case of vehicles using side streets to get around construction work, city employees “can be very reactive” and step in with solutions, LaClaire said.
“If we see a traffic pattern developing as a result of arterial traffic finding a way through the neighbourhood and it’s working for them — and it’s a true shortcutting issue — our solution will be to drop in a barricade and close the street,” he said, adding that “if the problem goes away, that’s great, we can leave it there at least for the construction period, and then if that creates a problem somewhere else then we need to be responding to that.”
For this project, LaClaire said it would be best for commuters to rely on Hastings Street or Broadway, or to head farther south to Grandview Highway.
“Even though it’s really disruptive to close an arterial like this … the fact that we have a relatively good grid system has always been a real benefit for us and it’s one of those things that’s kind of a silver lining in not having a freeway to downtown. If 1st Avenue was the only route, for example, then we’d have a real challenge,” LaClaire said.
Fortis crews are digging open trenches to lay 30-inch pipe along most of the route. But the company plans to use trench-less construction methods under major intersections so that cross traffic can continue to flow.
The shifting closures on East 1st are scheduled to continue through to the end of August.