GAS WORK SNARLS TRAFFIC
Vehicles crawl along 1st Avenue on Monday. The route is down to one lane in each direction before a two-month shutdown to replace a five-kilometre stretch of gas line. Area residents say they are troubled by the increased traffic in their neighbourhood.
Stop to talk traffic with residents on Vancouver’s East 2nd Avenue and you’ll find the conversations run long — and hot.
Not only do locals have a lot to say about the chaos-inducing closures on 1st Avenue that began this week, they also have to pause to let the booming racket of throttle-heavy, detoured commuters fade away.
Work crews have fenced off block after block of one of Vancouver’s key arterial routes so Fortis B.C. can swap out roughly five kilometres of 20-inch gas line in favour of 30-inch line. Several weeks of partial closures and a nearly two-month full closure of East 1st Avenue are planned to give crews space to complete the major project. For now, eastbound and westbound traffic are sharing the northern half of East 1st Avenue between Nanaimo and Rupert streets. Each direction has a single travel lane, effectively halving — at best — the number of vehicles that can pass through the arterial during peak periods. That partial closure is expected to last to the end of July.
Residents like Mike Colbourne, who neighbours the construction area, are already noticing the spillover effects the closures are having on nearby side streets.
“There’s been major increased volume — like ten-fold,” Colbourne said Monday morning.
Colbourne said traffic on his block of 2nd Avenue, not far from an elementary school, had steadily increased in the 15 years he’s lived there and is already bad enough.
“I’ll see a row of cars. You have to wait for the (passing) procession before you can pull out,” he said.
In the past, Colbourne had called the city in the hopes of seeing roundabouts or speed bumps installed on his avenue, but said all he received was “lip service.”
A few doors down, another neighbour spoke of aggressive standoffs between drivers travelling in opposite directions down the narrow avenue. Like Colbourne, she said she tries to avoid 1st Avenue altogether.
The detours won’t help traffic woes in the area and in fact, the closures are slated to worsen.
A full closure of East 1st Avenue from Clark Drive to Nanaimo Street is planned from July 3 to the end of August. Another partial closure on East 1st Avenue between the Highway 1 overpass to Boundary Road is scheduled May 28 through to mid-June. East 1st Avenue from Rupert Street to the Highway 1 overpass is slated for partial closure from mid-July to the end of August.
Staff at the City of Vancouver directed questions about the closures to Fortis B.C. and said there was nobody available Monday to explain how it planned to manage the changing traffic patterns.
The city’s website has a page that lists scores of ongoing and upcoming road closures and construction projects. There are eight major projects listed on the site, and the city has provided extensive information for seven of them. The outlier is the 1st Avenue project.
Construction details and updated closure information for that project are hosted on Fortis B.C.’s website. Fortis B.C.’s gas line upgrade project has also prompted closures in Burnaby on Gilmore Avenue from Graveley to 1st Avenue and Douglas Road, south of Carleton.