Vancouver Olympics: Road closures add to people's problems

The 2010 Winter Olympics are being held in Vancouver . Locals are just realising that it won't be business as usual during the 17 days of the Olympics, especially if they live on Cambie Street where parking restrictions will be in force.

In a year’s time, the Winter Olympics will have been over for a fortnight and the Winter Paralympics will just be starting in Vancouver and Whistler. The Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) will be hoping that a number of things either will or won’t happen. They will hope that there aren’t any gangland shootings during the period of The Olympics. There has been an average of one shooting per day for the last month and there is a gang war going on, according to the Vancouver Police Chief. VANOC will hope that it doesn’t snow in the city and at the airport during the Olympics. The city almost ground to a halt around Christmas when it snowed. The Skytrain rapid transit system doesn’t run very well in the cold and the escalators at the above ground stations got clogged with snow and slush and stopped working. It takes Translink, the authority that runs public transport in Greater Vancouver, around a week to fix an escalator. The buses couldn’t get up some of the hills around the city and the snow ploughs didn’t clear the bus lanes. The snow was piled on the pavements and made life difficult for pedestrians. If this happened with the expected 150,000 Olympic visitors in the city, the transportation system would have ground to a halt - daily transit journeys are expected to increase by around 30% to 960,000 during the 17 days of the Olympics. The airport suffered in the snow. My outbound flight to London was delayed by nearly 3 hours; though thankfully British Airways caught up some time and I made my connection. On my return, the plane was diverted to Seattle/Tacoma because Vancouver International Airport (YVR) was closed due to the snow. Eventually, we arrived 24 hours late. Closing the airport during The Olympics won’t be an option. VANOC will hope that if it does snow on the North Shore Mountains, then the right type of snow falls. On February 15th, the World Cup Parallel Giant Slalom on Cypress Mountain was cancelled. The snow was of the wrong kind and this meant that the base of the course wasn’t hard enough for the snowboarders to use safely. VANOC put a brave face on the situation, saying that races are cancelled at short notice in various parts of the world and then intimated that this sort of late cancellation might occur next year too. The International Olympic Committee will tell VANOC that no cancellations will be made as this impacts the whole timetable of the Olympics. The TV companies will find this unacceptable as it will affect their schedules and when all is said and done, they are the ones who keep the Winter Olympics going. The schools in Vancouver may also be closed during the Olympics, though not because it will allow the children to attend some of the events. The reasoning is that if the schools are closed, the number of school-related trips will be cut by 600,000 per week, a figure that almost matches the anticipated increase brought on by people going to events in the city of Vancouver. Finally, VANOC will hope that the Skytrain on The Canada Line from Richmond and YVR to the downtown works well. The trains on this line are a different specification to the trains that run on the other Skytrain routes, the Millennium and Expo Lines. Yes, Translink will have to maintain two different types of train. Translink also has to ensure that at least 100,000 journeys take place each day on The Canada Line, otherwise they will have to pay a fine. The construction of The Canada Line in Vancouver involved the digging up of most an avenue called Cambie Street. This inconvenienced all the businesses on this important Vancouver arterial road, causing some to close and some to relocate. The ones who stayed and survived this huge handicap have now been hit again. VANOC has announced that Cambie Street will be subject to a 24 hour parking ban during the Olympics to allow traffic to get downtown almost unhindered. No deliveries will be allowed. This ensures that the inside lane remains solely for the use of Olympic traffic. The parking ban on Cambie Street is part of a $157Million transportation scheme that includes road closures and parking restrictions on more than 800 blocks of city streets. The city will lose around 20% of its road capacity, making gridlock a certainty unless normal daily traffic volume is cut by a third. This was the main reason behind John Furlong, the CEO of VANOC, asking firms to allow their staff to take time off during The Olympics so that they wouldn’t be commuting when visitors are attending Olympic events. With the economic downturn, few firms can afford to allow this to happen. For purposes of security, the bill for which will eventually approach $1 billion Canadian, the roads around the Olympic venues at General Motors Place and BC Place will be closed, as they will around the media centre at the Vancouver Trade and Convention Centre. There will also be increased security on all the bridges that cross the Fraser River, False Creek, and The Burrard Inlet. More than anything, VANOC hopes that a lapse in security doesn’t happen as this would have severe implications, not just for Vancouver, but for the whole Olympic movement.