Photo: Daily Hive
Tsawwassen Mills Mall had a great consumer opening with some setbacks, such as a big traffic hangover and the death of the prized four-foot long sturgeon fish in the freshwater tank at the Bass Pro Store. We like the idea of seeing things that are truly of this place and we take pride in it-like the rare sturgeon fish. The mega mall, all 1.2 million square feet of it, and the associated 6,000 parking spaces were built because it is assumed that we are a car oriented culture, that will spend a lot of time at one place, one very big place, shopping. We are the fish. The mall is the pond. And surprise,some people locally like to walk and cycle to the mall.
The Delta Optimist reports that the Delta Council is continuing attempts to get the Province to build a five million dollar pedestrian overpass across Highway 17 and 52nd Street connecting the Tsawwassen community with the mega mall. Instead of normalizing the intersection, making proper pedestrian curb bulges, refuges and medians, and slowing traffic to allow pedestrians to safely cross, Council is advocating for a HUGE multimillion dollar pedestrian overpass. There is already a fully signalized intersection with pedestrian activation at this intersection. There are just no improvements at the intersection for people who are walking and biking at grade, or a pedestrian light long enough for folks crossing with baby buggies or wheelchairs. Instead of advocating for an improvement of the current at grade crossing of the highway, Delta Council wants a big pedestrian bridge overpass engineering solution that allows for the smooth flow of vehicle traffic, not the comfort and convenience of other users. This is classic 20th century motordom thinking.
Except on major highways where traffic is not stopped at intersections, pedestrian overpasses simply serve to further separate walkers, wheelers and cyclists from the street plane. Those overpasses are really tough on people with mobility challenges and wheelchairs, or pushing prams. In the aptly named Perils for Pedestrians, there are three instances where pedestrian overpasses can be considered:
1. Crossing huge highways where stopping traffic is not an option;
2. Crossings when there are no roads crossing major highways;
3. Crossing river, ravines, natural obstacles, train tracks.
Part of the construction of these pedestrian overpasses is the mandatory use of them, complete with fences and guardrails to ensure that users like cattle are guided across the pedestrian overpass.
Delta has already gone to the Province and the Ministry of Transportation has already done a study on the overpass, and deemed it had no significant benefit. Instead of working on improving the experience for bus passengers, pedestrians and cyclists using this at-grade crossing, Delta is continuing to press for their overpass, saying that “pedestrians have to traverse a 40-metre-long crosswalk across seven lanes of traffic and two additional turning lanes beyond the pedestrian refuge islands. Pedestrians trying to cross at night are placed at even further risk. Ferry traffic exacerbates the situation.”
All of this can be mitigated by an enhanced at grade crossing with good lighting, a reduction and redesign of the two turning lanes and actually building the facilities as if pedestrians and cyclists truly mattered. Road speed on Highway 17 should also be reduced between the 52nd Avenue and 56th Avenue intersections to 60 kilometers an hour anticipating different car movements as well as the pedestrian crossings. Delta also notes that the 52nd Avenue intersection’s pedestrian refuges are filled to capacity, and people are crossing the street to get a bus on the mean concrete transit stops plonked on the highway. If that is so perhaps it is time to redesign this intersection to allow Delta residents who love to walk and cycle the chance to get across this intersection safely at grade. Our lives depend on it.
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Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.
The developer should have been made to pay for any necessary pedestrian improvements!
Usually the developer pays for all necessary road, sewer, water or pedestrian infrastructure to a new development. Of course that is harder to enforce if the developer is their own nation.
What authority approved this mall and its surrounding infrastructure ?
The road in question is a provincial highway, the responsibility of MoTI.
Yes, but developers tend to have to pay for or actually do upgrades, if deemed necessary fo large developments, such as new intersection, traffic lights, exit lanes, nose barriers etc .. hence the question: who approved this mall if it is built on a FN property that is outside of the normal development approval cycles ? Delta ? Ladner ? MetroVan ? Province ? no one ? Anything goes as it is a nation ?
The First Nations have approval rights over their lands, just as Richmond, Delta or any other Municipality.. Delta had no right to any approval, including the Provincial Highway upgrade..
In Delta I’m sure we would have required the Development Conglomerate to provide such a pedestrian amenity.
Why would you say it is outside of the normal development approvals? This isn’t the original reserve land, it is part of the treaty settlement. In this context, perhaps it is better to think of the TFN as a municipality.
See the TFN Land Use Plan for more details, including the distinction between reserve land and Tsawwassen lands.
http://www.tsawwassenfirstnation.com/pdfs/TFN-About/Information-Centre/Strategic-Planning/TFN_Land_Use_Plan.pdf
Thank you. *Comment deleted as per editorial policy*
Indeed if we treated FN as municipalities which owned their own land that would be a far better solution for all.
*Comment deleted as per editorial policy*
Developers usually finance the up-front servicing costs to mitigate the impact of their projects on the community, but if you followed the money it invariably gets transferred and embedded in the lease, which in turn are embedded in retail prices with a mark-up.
Sometimes a city will ask a developer to conduct scheduled upgrades to unrelated but nearby services or roads and will pay that portion. This is very efficient because you have one contractor on site instead of two, and a larger tendered project results in lower unit prices which saves money for several agencies and taxpayers.
A conversation I know we have in my community, especially at our active transportation committee: is a $MultiMillion overpass really a pedestrian amenity, or is it a car amenity?
If we can build a safe pedestrian crossing at grade, but that will result in delay-inducing pedestrian lights, narrowing of the street or other engineering solutions to calm traffic, and this results in unacceptable travel delays and extended queues for cars, then it is the *cars* that need/desire the overpass, not the pedestrians. So lets not define it as a pedestrian amenity.
It probably depends a bit on the size of the road to be crossed. For a highway or big busy road an overpass or underpass is usually more convenient and lower stress than an at grade crossing.
Having to climb up a long, high hill that adds considerable extra travel distance via spirals or switchbacks in order to walk over traffic is NEVER more convenient, particularly if you are riding a bike or pulling/pushing a wheeled cart, and most especially if you are using a wheelchair.
The convenience is for the cars, NOT the pedestrians.
Waiting at traffic lights isn’t convenient either, nor is it healthy to spend time waiting around in polluted air. Extra distance and grade are drawbacks of over and underpasses. I’d say if the road to be crossed is of a certain size and traffic volume the extra distance and grade are lesser evils than wait times and air pollution exposure. Even for smaller roads (relatively) like the causeway I’m happy to have an underpass at Lost Lagoon rather than an at grade crossing. Better safety is another benefit of grade separated crossings.
Lost Lagoon has a much shallower grade and less elevation difference than the overpasses that the MOT builds over highways. Let me know when the MOT starts building those kinds of underpasses and I might be a little more sympathetic to your point of view.
It’s a transportation amenity. If several modes of transport use the same corridor or intersect they all need appropriate infrastructure. It’s not one vs the other.
While in the Netherlands, my cousin showed me some new pedestrian/cycling infrastructure in the city of Breda. We were at the intersection of two arterial with the two way ped/bike paths a good distance from the arterials. In order to cross the roads, there was the option of using tunnels OR using a protected intersection at grade. The designers realized that some people might be nervous using the tunnels – especially at night – so both options were provided.
Lovely. That makes sense in dense flat countries with a history of biking. Vancouver being hilly, not too dense outside the core and British inspired will take a few decades to get there. Note the British ascent to Olympic biking gold and the Tour d’France in the last decade or so, and they too now do more bike lanes in London. Leave London and not too many bike lanes anywhere. Similar to MetroVan.
Speaking of the Dutch: why don’t we dyke more land like they do in the Fraser River Delta or off Boundary Bay ? Loads of free land for housing industrial use, recreation or retail. Loads of bridges that open and close too. We could build 2 or 3 of those across False Creek and Fraser river for bikes and pedestrians, too.
We are already way ahead of London in terms of cycling. I was impressed with the cycle touring opportunities in UK and saw impressive cycling infrastructure in Newcastle, Edinburgh and other cities.
Note also that South Delta is probably flatter than the Netherlands. We certainly won’t get more people cycling and walking if we do not provide safe intersections. To my knowledge there are only two protected intersections which are safe for cycling and walking in Metro Vancouver and those are at Burrard/Cornwall and in Steveston at 1st and Moncton. Maybe Main/Union is also protected.
Please stop your nonsense about diking the delta – this is a major feeding ground for migrating birds and if we destroy that, we destroy yet another bit of mother nature’s life support system on which we all depend. You should go out to the Richmond west dike or Reifel Refuge and see the huge numbers of snow geese that are there this time of year. Any you want to replace this with more sprawl? (Sorry – I guess I should have said spacious leafy lots?). Our port has created quite enough damage already.
Birds will get new marshes, plus we can keep a few, unlike in Ontario where birds get killed by new “green” windmills by the thousands http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/the-untold-ontario-green-energy-scandal-is-that-its-devastating-our-rural-areas
The issue of providing pedestrian crossings across major arterials to access an isolated mall surrounded by a sea of tarmac, like that perfectly indicated in the aerial photo above, tends to illustrate the difficulty (or impossibility) of converting these disconnected monsters into walkable communities. They may well die slowly on their own, with or without pedestrian overpasses.
It won’t die but morph into a town centre (or be under water).
This one is too isolated to achieve even a modicum of the economic success of the other rapid transit-linked town centres.
A car accessible mall will not die as many people love malls with car access, be they south of Fraser dwellers or visitors from the US or Islanders even !
The death of the sub-urban car is also widely mis-forecasted.
Planners and politicians better understand what their electorate wants. They pay their bills, afterall !
The “electorate” hasn’t been offered a viable alternative to the suburbs. It’s the same stultifying formula everywhere. Light rail-linked compact villages and towns dotted over the agrarian landscape (as opposed to carpeting the landscape) don’t need megamalls, and certainly not as many cars.
Sandy, perhaps in an ideal world where all jurisdictions work together and share costs cooperatively, a pedestrian-friendly solution could be accomplished. But not in BC. As others have pointed out in the comments, the Tsawwassen Mall case is even more complicated by the TFN aspect.
But leaving that aside, there are simple explanations why a ped-friendly solution is not happening.
:
1. Hwy 17 is a provincial highway. The ministry of transportation works on a long-standing warrant system. Every project proposal is run through a demand analysis process. If the situation does not warrant the project, then it is not approved. Simple and quantifiable province-wide.
2. Let’s say that the province and the Corp of Delta agree to devolve Hwy 17, or even just the intersection itself, from the province to the municipality. Then the Corp of Delta could build what they want there. They would ask the head of Engineering and Public works what he/she thought of it. She would say, if you build one big piece of concrete infrastructure such as bridge, it will cost x to maintain over the long term. If you build lots of smaller pieces of infrastructure such as sidewalks, curb bulges, ped refuge islands, signage and signals, it will cost x + y to maintain, repair and replace (snow removal, dirt/leaves removal, accident repairs, etc. Do you agree to raise municipal taxes to choose the second option?