Streets for people: An urban design conversation with former Vancouver planner Sandy James

Vancity Lookout sat down recently with Sandy James, a former Vancouver city planner and current executive director of Walk Metro Van. We discussed how cities make (or don’t make) accessible and inviting spaces for walkers and rollers to move around town, among other urban design topics. With over 20 years experience at city hall, James was able to highlight some of the minutiae of Vancouver’s streetscape evolution and draw some useful comparisons to best practices in other major cities. 

This a long one but we think you’ll get a lot out of James’ insights and observations from this free-flowing conversation. 

Editor’s note: The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Vancity Lookout (VL): Why is pedestrian infrastructure important in a city?

Sandy James (SJ): The thing with pedestrians is we don't have something shiny. You guys have a bike, a pedestrian is just a pedestrian, and normally it's the two ends of the population, similar to the way with housing affordability, they're most impacted. The really young and the really old. The really young aren't allowed to have a car, and may not have a car, but may need to get somewhere, and every trip starts with a walk, right? And an older person [who] should probably not be driving, or has had the keys taken away, or maybe never learned to drive, and they need to have a safe and accessible way of accessing schools, shops and services.

But in the way that we developed in North America in the 20th century, we're really concerned about the car. And thank god for the bike advocates, because they carved a way to talk about biking. And as you know, in Vancouver, once you start biking, it's really, really hard to stop, because everything becomes so quick. 

The whole term ‘pedestrian’ is actually a really negative term. And it actually came in the 1700s and 1800s if you were in Britain or Europe and you're bored, you're in your stagecoach going from town to town, you would just talk to the person in the stagecoach beside you and do a wager with two of your servants. And those servants would be sent off on a foot race ahead of the coaches. It was called pedestrianism, and you would wager with the other stage coach who is going to be there first, and that's where the term pedestrian comes from. So it's actually even worse than a colonial term. It's a class term about what pedestrians were. 

VL: Could you describe the area where we’re sitting right now?

SJ: It's a closed section of Yukon Street. And Yukon comes up to King Edward, and it's now closed [for cars] crossing north-south. There is a large grass median in the middle. There are two very well-marked north and south bike lanes that are demarcated. And there's a crosswalk crossing. It has a correct accessibility ramp, but there's no striping for pedestrians to go across the street, the big white lines that should be on either side of it, and there's no indication here on the signage that there's a pedestrian or a cycling crossing.

We're looking at this green podium light, but it should be lower, just so that it comes into the scale of what a driver is seeing on the street. Normally you would do something at 12 feet or 18 feet, and I think it should be lower. There's no indication [of the intersection] for the driver coming down [the road]. But did you also notice something else? The slope of the street is going eastward. For the drivers, you see what they're doing is actually accelerating. There are a lot of things for the driver that make them think that this is their space.

For a city like Vancouver that came into development game late, I think part of looking at that in the 21st century, is mixing it up and making it okay that instead of a pyramid, you've got people that are walking and biking [prioritized first and second], transit third, and car traffic and deliveries fourth.

VL: And how have we done in terms of mixing it up?

SJ: We've had moments of glory and moments of not doing a good job.

I know this will sound weird, but when Mayor Gordon Campbell was here in the 1990s he was actually fairly progressive, but he had noticed at that time there was a real start of development in Vancouver. And Vancouver was kind of a sleepy place, until the ‘86 World's Fair happened. 

So Campbell knew that development was starting to happen in the city, and he actually put together what he called the Urban Landscape Task Force, and it included a gal that was head of Landscape Architecture at UBC. Her name was Moura Quayle. It had people that were engineers and citizens and landscape architects, and they wanted to look at how to make the city easier to get around in. What they came up with was about 14 routes that went border to border, north and north, north to south and also east to west. 

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