all of my favorite missions were ill-defined

Sometimes big environmental crises and other types of crises can feel more like thought problems than emotional problems to me, in a manner that makes me empathize with this fellow, and I think is in part because big crises are usually very hard to understand.

But some crises are not at all hard to understand. Some are so overwhelmingly dumb in an across the board meta-ideological kind of way where the hardest thing to understand is how they arose at all, and it is for these that I reserve my anger. One such crisis is the BONE-HEADED PLAN TO TWIN/REPLICATE THE PORT MANN BRIDGE FOR 3.1 BILLION DOLLARS.

This kind of planning is so bone-headed that it doesn’t even belong in the complex-nuanced-conflicted pile with most other bone-headed decisions, like no-to-STV or yes-to-fish-farms. How can it be so out of synch with everything else? Mayor Gregor Robertson wants to make Vancouver the greenest city and there is no way he can ever do this when seemingly all the provincial heavy hitters have joined the  1950s urban planning  frenzy.

I’m not terribly up to speed on the New Urbanism,  but I know enough to know that adding lanes to the highways that link a city with its ever-reaching sprawl is going to get you the very very opposite of a green city.  Adding lanes adds traffic.

The story of the Cypress Viaduct, which famously collapsed during the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, is a handy way to illustrate the point. The Cypress viaduct was a double decker stretch of Interstate 880, and it carried hordes of commuters in and out of Oakland. After the collapse, one of the big challenges was to decide where to put it, since the double-stack was no longer considered safe. Surveyors set out to find out which alternate routes the Interstate traffic had shifted to, and what they found was that IT HADN’T GONE ANYWHERE; it had just gone.  The increased bottle necking on the remaining routes had shifted incentives for drivers, a certain percentage of whom had made the choice carpool or transit or move away or stay home.

Of course, no one should have to move away or stay home because of bad traffic, but in our case, that wouldn’t be necessary. Because for anyone who might have missed it, here is what else 3.1 billion dollars of provincial money can do to address congestion in the Lower Mainland .

The reason this gets me so angry is that the choice at hand, with billions on the table, for a while there represented an epic, momentous, and potentially very exciting decision to either build the kind of Lower Mainland that lives up to its geography and its modern green ambitions, or to keep plowing myopically towards a 10 million person gridlock .   And once the call to go ahead on the bridge has been made (which by all accounts it seems to have been), there isn’t really any going back on it.  Maybe it’s just the sallow afterlight of the election that’s tainting my vision but I feel a little disenfranchised in this great town.  Though if anyone can prove me wrong it is probably the good folks at Rail for the Valley, so maybe I should ask them.