Let’s assume – I hope this isn’t my usual excess of kindliness – that West Vancouver councillors read the daily Vancouver press.
If so, they should be much troubled by any analogy between the so-called Arbutus Greenway and what’s in the cards – held close to WV town hall staff’s chest – for the Argyle Avenue chunk of the Spirit Trail.
City Paved Arbutus Paradise, Critics Say was the Vancouver Sun headline over a Matt Robinson report. It strongly suggests the “greenway” was greener under the benevolent neglect of former owner Canadian Pacific Railway than it’s shaping up under green-talkin’ Mayor Gregor Robertson and his enabling honcho, Jerry Dobrovolny.
Dobrovolny, city engineering manager, is the bloke who produced a preposterous graphic of a future Granville Bridge metamorphosed into a treed linear park with the odd motor vehicle puttering alongside cyclists and pedestrians. (A New York City takeoff.)
Do the planners and Robertson, immortalized in a recent outrageously hyping photo-op – cycling sweatlessly with senior staff – have any more bright ideas about how actual people will move in the already strangled city and throughout Metro?
Reporter Robinson implied the Arbutus Greenway visionaries are pandering to “a new group of users, including cyclists, skateboarders and others.” (Right, skateboarders, a universally loved lot.) As would the repurposed Argyle Avenue section of the Spirit Trail.
Protesters, a few brandishing placards, pushed Dobrovolny into some concessions like temporarily halting the paving. Classic government appeasement, no material change.
Getting back to Argyle Avenue, West Van councillors, except ill Coun. Michael Lewis who was absent and has since died, unanimously agreed to buy this pig in a poke, without telling the public a few trifling details (or do they know themselves?).
Such as: How would beach-users cross it? How would the prized Harvest Festival’s booths and wares be trucked in and out? Where is any benefit for high-priority Ambleside-Dundarave business renewal? Where would, could, Argyle’s lost 100-odd parking spaces be relocated? Not least, where would the Spirit Trail continue westward from John Lawson Park?
I’m repeating myself because I’m convinced this project, a block from Ambleside centre, would be a character-changing blunder favouring narrow interests over the broader public now happy with the status quo.
On the question of who actually would use the trail, WV Mayor Michael Smith muses that the dedicated bicycle commuters – whom I applaud, most of them skilled and with well-equipped bicycles – won’t choose the trail, preferring to stay on Marine Drive.
Town hall declares that Ambleside waterfront improvement has been discussed for 40 years with no action. Now there’s a clue. It was working fine for all those years with minimal bureaucracy or regulation – just people-sense. If there’s been friction among users, it’s been kept quiet. Elementary, my dear Watson. To repeat: The project is a classic solution looking for a problem.
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Coun. Michael Lewis, who served West Vancouver in so many ways other than politically, left an ironic farewell legacy – stressed drivers and jammed parking lots because of the vast numbers attending his funeral services at the Gleneagles golf facilities last week. Surely one of the biggest public funerals ever in West Van.
Mayor Michael Smith signalled, in characteristic plain-speak, that he grieved for Lewis beyond a sense of personal loss. As quoted in this paper’s report of Lewis’s death: “With all the politicking and the posturing that goes on in council … he wasn’t there to promote himself or play any games. He didn’t speak just for the camera.” For slow learners, Smith repeated the tenor of that sentiment at the funeral. Did anyone in the overflow crowd squirm?
A career businessman, the mayor has long denied he’s a politician. His sharp words showed again his indifference to consensus-building and all that good textbook stuff. But he must be privately hoping that the replacement councillor is a Michael Lewis clone.
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It’s the little things that can trip you up. In casual conversation the charming Lalli of the delightful lalli loves it! antique store in Horseshoe Bay mentioned she’d moved here from the U.S. Logical assumption, she was an American, as reported here.
Wrong. Lalli holds both French and proud Canadian citizenship. So in the first two weeks of July she celebrated three national days. For Canada Day, there was a store-window display of things Canadian, including a biscuit box portraying a Mountie encircled by maple leaves. Quirky, collectable Canadiana.
Former Vancouver Sun columnist Trevor Lautens writes every second Friday on politics and life with a West Vancouver bias. rtlautens@gmail.com
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