Anthony Perl knows the ugliness of highways. “I grew up in New Jersey so I know an urban highway when I see one,” says the director of the urban studies program at Simon Fraser University. When he moved to Vancouver in 2005 – the latest stop in a career that has included stints at City University of New York and Université Lumière in Lyon, France – he arrived with the impression that Vancouver had no highways running through its core. Then he saw the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts.
What is your one big idea to make Vancouver a better city?
Vancouver presents itself to the world, quite correctly for the most part, as the North American city spared the desecration of an urban expressway network. That’s what enabled and made possible the Vancouver miracle of green and livable urban space throughout the downtown and other inner-city neighbourhoods. My view is we have one small exception to that – the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts, originally built as first steps in the metropolitan urban highway scheme. Since we have abandoned that plan to build the highways, it’s about time to take down the infrastructure meant to be part of that.
It sounds like these little viaducts are standing in the way of a lot of potential for central Vancouver.
It’s an impediment. We need to get rid of this no man’s land. If we’re going to complete the development of downtown and add more space for affordable housing, it’s going to be in the eastern part and as long as we have this no man’s land created by these elevated roads, it’s going to be an obstacle or a limitation on how we can do that. Now is the time to be bold.
Do you think there is the political will to do something like this in Vancouver?
There will be people who will just resist it because they will feel threatened whether it’s very specific automobile interests to just general driving syndrome. Most people who drive have trouble imagining other ways to get around but then it turns out when we do have an occasion to break our daily patterns and habits, like during the Olympics or in San Francisco after an earthquake, people find other ways. There’s some evidence that reducing the role of the auto and the space for the automobile actually makes the city work better. So hopefully people will see that, but it will still take leaders to listen to reason and stay the course rather than being scared off.
What impact do you think removing the viaducts would have on traffic?
Very little. I think traffic is a very dynamic function, much more like a gas than a liquid. Some of the simplified engineering explanations are, ‘Well. It’s like water. If you plug one tributary, it will just flood another one.’ But it actually doesn’t work like that. During the Olympics, there wasn’t the gridlock people were worried about. People adapted, travelled differently. When there’s shocks to the system, whether it’s road availability or, as we have seen, when gas prices went through the roof in 2008, travel adapts. People do things differently.
From a purely aesthetic point of view, what would removing the viaducts look like?
It could be our Champs Élysées going along the north end of False Creek. This would be a great chance to showcase some of the best of urban street design. This could be a chance to design a great street which would add value to the neighbourhood that it goes through. There would be value in the real estate. If this were done properly, it would generate more value that would also pay for the costs of dismantling and replacing it with something better.
What kind of demolition project would it be to get rid of a viaduct?
I am not an engineer, but you can implode these things, or you can take it down piece by piece. It would involve some road closure. There would be some disruption, but the good news is since these are sort of non-places – I mean there’s no one living underneath these viaducts – taking them down should not require displacing anyone or having sort of undue disruption, compared to some of the other construction projects that happen in the city.
And what could other Canadian cities learn from Vancouver tearing down the viaducts?
Toronto has been talking about their Gardiner Expressway for decades now. I lived in Toronto in the 1980s. They have sort of run out of steam recently and they’re focusing more on budget and social problems that could have been prevented if they would have put more effort into the sustainability initiatives like getting their waterfront connected back to the city, but that’s just my wishful thinking perhaps. Just like Vancouver may inspire other places to build rapid transit to the airport – we were the first in Canada to do that – we should be the first in Canada to decommission what little highway space we have and show other places like Toronto there is a huge benefit, an economic value that can be generated in such a bold manoeuvre.
This interview has been edited and condensed
