Another bad reason to…
Reason #2?
- “The bridge is unsafe, isn’t it?”
Actually, according to the City’s own Engineering Department: no, the bridge is not unsafe.
Yet somehow, since the City initiated its hurried advance into replacement, many people are suddenly certain that the hulking brute of a bridge is a danger to life and limb.
As I noted in my June Focus Magazine article, Blue Bridge blues, I was at the April 23 meeting where City Council voted, in principle, to proceed with replacing (rather than refurbishing) the Johnson Street Bridge.
At that meeting, council asked Peter Sparanese (Director of Engineering at the City of Victoria) and Mike Lai (Assistant Director of Transportation & Parking Services) directly about the bridge’s safety. Both assured the council (and thereby the public) that the bridge is inherently safe. The City’s minutes (opens in PDF) of that April 23 meeting state:
Mr. Lai advised Committee that preliminary findings based on the April 2, 2009, presentation showed that the bridge is safe but significant work is required.
The minutes are cut and dried; at the time, and hearing the proceedings first-hand, I was struck by how emphatic the assurances about the bridge’s safety were.
The idea that the bridge is about to fall down has taken hold, however. We’re supposed to spend an inordinate amount of money to protect ourselves from something that isn’t out to get us.
Maybe people believe the bridge is unsafe because there are aspects of it that are unsafe. Yet those aspects could be fixed – without replacing the structure itself. Take the cycling infrastructure, which Mat blogged about in his Johnson Street Bridge Cycling Lanes post.
Mat’s entry features a YouTube video that shows some of the dangers (or obstacles) cyclists face when crossing the bridge. But as a comment from another cyclist points out, the video’s cyclist is breaking the law by riding in the pedestrian crossing.
At the same time, if cyclists do what they’re supposed to – namely, ride in the center of a car lane while on the bridge crossing – they’re in danger of abuse by ignorant automobile drivers who don’t understand that this is what the cyclist is supposed to do.
At any rate, there’s no enforcement of the traffic laws, so that cyclists and pedestrians both feel under siege.
Is this a sign that the bridge is unsafe? Not structurally, no. Could it be made safer in terms of how it’s used? Definitely. Some enforcement would help, as would a redesign of the existing lanes and pathways for cyclists, pedestrians, cars, and rail.
None of this requires replacing the bridge, however.
Bad reasons, 2
[...] got a couple of entries up on the site (start with Bad reason, 1; now there’s also a Bad reason, 2 up), as does Mat, who informs us about Johnson Street Bridge jobs! and reports on the City’s [...]
Hi Yule, and all JSB fans!
During a time such as this, with many people becoming unemployed, the homeless problem worse than ever, residential property taxes rising unsustainably, mortgage forclosures, etc., it is the height of fiscal irresponsibility for Victoria City Council to borrow $63,000,000 to demolish and replace the Joseph Strauss bridge with something yet to be designed by a committee with computers in Ontario, when, as you so aptly prove here, Yule, they have not produced a shred of engineering evidence that it is necessary to do in the first place.
Thanks very much for providing this very important piece of public interest information here, as I have never seen it anywhere else.
The City of Victoria has no commitments from senior levels of government to support the Council’s mad plan of destruction and philistinism, and both those governments are not likely to be ideologically disposed to helping a Socialist-Green dominated Council.
The use by the City of the counter-petition process is highly unusual. It is usually used by opposing citizens’ groups to try to force a referendum on a given issue.
The City should be providing equal amounts of public funding for organization and publicity for both sides in the run-up to the 30 day counter petition end date.
I must confess my ignorance in this regard as it pertains to the JSB.
I do know the opposition to the new arena received no public funding, but the City spent more than $100,000 in publicity for the YES side.
Hiring the Ontario outfit to manage the project for $3M+ seems premature (to put it mildly) and exposes their management structure as being a classic public-private-partnership (that is expressly designed to evade accountability), but the whole thing is, after all, very hush-hush and rush-rush, notwithstanding the new website and media spin….
Mr. Fortin is obviously completely contemptuous of due democratic public process, and is apparently only using the counter-petition process to give some semblance of due process, such as it is.
By hurrying along as if the whole thing is already a fait-accompli, he sends the not-too-subtle message that ‘thing is going to happen no matter what so don’t bother yourselves too much organizing opposition to borrowing the $63,000,000 because it is too late anyhow…’
He has said as much by repeating the tiresome mantra, ‘We have only five months to get this bridge built,’ supposedly the months of November to February being the only ones suitable, according to some bureau somewhere…
This sense of urgency is another huge topic in itself.
May I suggest that it is the third really bad reason not to tear down the good old JSB (‘Joseph Strauss Bridge’), officially known as the Johnson Street Bridge a.k.a. ‘the Blue Bridge?’
As far as I am concerned, the only sense of urgency in terms of the imminent need to destroy and replace the Strauss Bridge is in the fevered opportunistic mind of Mayor Dean Fortin, and nowhere else.
He really went nuts with avarice when the Harperites and Campbellites announced their spending sprees.
But why would these so-called ‘Conservatives’ and ‘Liberals’ want to give any money to tin pot regimes like those of his Socialist-Green spendthrift Council?
Gregory Hartnell, Editor
CCC BLOG: gregoryhartnell.wordpress.com
President, Concerned Citizens’ Coalition
goyodelarosa@gmail.com
[...] on daily with recent blogs – like Yule Heibel’s series ‘Bad Reasons’ #1, #2, #3 and #4 – and new pages: Bridge Photos and [...]
[...] the bridge must be an imminent danger (”unsafe”), although as I’ve pointed out here, the City’s Engineers admitted that’s not the case at [...]