Talk:Cambie Street

Cambie planned as a rail corridor?
I removed this line from the article:

"plus an infinitely poorer quality journey for the millions of visitors and commuters using the system."

Because it's not clear why an underground system would result in "an infinitely poorer quality journey" and the "millions" figure is conjectural.

Also, can someone confirm the plans to use Cambie as a rail corridor? I'm not surprised at the concept (Guildford Way in Coquitlam went through the same thing, with space left for Skytrain but after NIMBYism they abandoned plans to build rail transit through that corridor when they finally got around to it), but this seems to be an unconfirmed statement for now.

Kelvinc 08:02, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I removed this statement:
 * The original Vancouver City Plan, as laid out at the beginning of the twentieth century, made provision for rail transit along several corridors. Three well-preserved examples are First Avenue, Twenty Fifth Avenue (now known as King Edward Avenue) and Cambie Street.


 * Those rail transit corridors can be seen today.  They form grassy boulevards down the middle of the streets.  Somehow, this original plan was lost, misplaced or forgotten.  For example, in the intervening decades several trees were planted along some of the boulevards, including non-native redwoods on Cambie Street.

I am quite certain that this is incorrect. I believe that the wide park boulevards was just the fashion at the time that these streets were built and had nothing to do with a rail corridor planning. I could not find any support of this theory anywhere, but there are a number of other wide boulevards that were built in other cities at that time. -- Webgeer 21:16, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

E. First Avenue was a rail corridor and accommodated the Burnaby Lake interurban line. As a result it is one of the only wide boulevard avenues in East Vancouver. The one other example of this in the Lower Mainland is Garden City/Granville/Railway in Richmond which follows the Marpole-Steveston Interurban route. In both these cases, a wide tree-lined boulevard street was build after the beside the road rail line was removed. I am not aware of any rail corridor planning related to the original layout of King George and Cambie. -- kpgokeef 21:54, May 20, 2008 (UTC)

POV
I think the following passage is a bit biased towards the Provincial Government. The introduction paragraph immediately jumps to the protesting along the corridor rather than providing an overview of Cambie's relationship with the Canada Line. The phrase "..successfully persuaded authorities to put the rail line in a tunnel instead of running it as a surface route" is an example of the below POV statements:

When proposals to build the Canada Line (formerly known as the Richmond-Airport-Vancouver or RAV Line) along Cambie Street first emerged, they were heavily protested by residents and business owners who wanted to keep the street as a heritage boulevard. They argued in favour of using the existing Arbutus Street rail corridor instead.

Once the decision was made to use the Cambie alignment for the Canada Line anyway, residents along the corridor successfully persuaded authorities to put the rail line in a tunnel instead of running it as a surface route. Nonetheless, the cut-and-cover method (which will be used to build the tunnel) will likely introduce much disruption to traffic and business along the corridor during the construction. As such, even though it costs less than using a tunnel boring machine, the plan still draws heavy criticism, especially from area residents and businesses. -- Selmo 07:31, 12 August 2006 (UTC)