Ask a cyclist, skateboarder or inline skater to design the perfect commuting route and it might look a lot like the temporary path Vancouver is constructing in its newly acquired Arbutus Greenway.
When finished, it will be nine kilometres of wide, smooth-surfaced path flanked by gravel and trees, blessed with perfect sight lines and ideal for swift riding. But it’s far from everyone’s idea of what a green space should look like — even a temporary one. It’s also well out of step with current trends in landscape architecture, experts say. Though there are competing philosophies over parkland, wilder environments — rather than manicured spaces — are in vogue.
Mark Battersby lives a few blocks from the greenway, which the city bought from the Canadian Pacific Railway a few months ago. When the city began to pour asphalt where the railway tracks once lay, the image that came to Battersby’s mind was of “a bike freeway.”
“We had in mind something that would be much more attractive to walkers and children,” he said.
Battersby, displeased with what he saw, produced a simple video slide show using before and after photos of the greenway and the Joni Mitchell song Big Yellow Taxi. One image shows a gravel path lined with unshorn grass. In the next, the path is covered in a river of black asphalt so freshly laid you can almost smell it. Over the images, Mitchell sings: “They paved paradise.”
City staff plan to consult on the future design of the greenway in the fall. The temporary path, they say, is to encourage those unfamiliar with the space, including cyclists and those with mobility issues, to try it out and get invested in its future.
Jerry Dobrovolny, the city’s general manager of engineering, said that while some residents have been surprised by the path’s width (four metres in most spots), the city has repeatedly said it would be primarily used as a transportation greenway. “Just to be clear, the definition of a greenway in the city of Vancouver is a transportation corridor for walking and cycling that also has horticultural components,” he said.
Battersby didn’t offer — in his video or during an interview — an anti-bike argument. Rather, he suggested the city could have put in a permeable, crushed surface that’s bikeable and much nicer to walk on. For Battersby, that would make for a more useful and natural space. “A commitment to wilding or re-wilding … would be greatly appreciated in such an urban environment as ours,” he said.
Patrick Condon, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of B.C. and the school’s chair of urban design, was surprised to see the asphalt.
“People have gotten quite used to the Arbutus Corridor as kind of a romantic landscape — the kind of unkempt quality of it,” Condon said, adding that “it’s level of decay has become something that people kind of like, that they’ve gotten used to.”
He said the path (“A little wide to be called a bike path and way too wide to be called a pedestrian path”) makes some sense from an engineering perspective. It would have been easy to plan and cheap to install — ideal for a temporary path, Condon said. Meanwhile, its foundation of crushed stone would offer drainage and stability.
“I think from a political perspective, they maybe today wish they had not acted so quick,” he said.
Battersby and his wife, Diana Davidson, are concerned that the city won’t remove the path even if they hear it’s not what residents want. “Nobody takes down asphalt. You only ever replace asphalt with more asphalt,” Davidson said.
Maureen Ryan, who also lives near the greenway, shares their concern. Ryan does want to see cyclists in the corridor, but on a crushed-stone surface rather than a paved path, to limit cycling speeds.
“We had a beautiful, beautiful green space,” said Ryan, who is a member of a coalition calling itself the Concerned Residents and Corridor User Group. “What we would like is a surface for bikes and wheelchairs that is, in fact, green.”
Susan Herrington, a professor and the chair of UBC’s landscape architecture program, said it’s possible for a wilder, more natural public space and bike path to coexist.
“Just to have a bike lane would be, probably, a more outdated look at urban open space. We now know that it can contribute to habitat, it can contribute to ecosystems,” she said, adding that there is room for a range of activities as well as the plants and animals living in the city.
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