Some Upcoming Sporting-related Event

The Olympics are less than a month away and the city of Vancouver is in the last throes of preparation. Road closures will start soon, almost all ground-level parking lots are now home to giant vinyl barns to house equipment and/or people, and most advertising on billboards is exclusively Olympic-oriented. The purpose of this post isn’t to lament the Olympics - what’s the point, now? - but just to observe how parts of downtown Vancouver are changing.

On my walk to work, there’s a parking lot with a large concrete wall, that until three weeks ago was covered in graffiti. Not the lame teenage-gang-sign graffiti; I mean actual art, and it was apparently commissioned by the Steve Nash Foundation (read a bit about this here, and you can see photos of the graffiti here). I like good graffiti. It’s an art form that predates any other, and when done well, it’s a breath of fresh air in an otherwise boring cityscape. However, the decision was made to get rid of it, since the parking lot is an Olympic site, so early in the new year I passed by city workers painting the entire block of graffiti with blue paint. It made me a little sad - during the summer, almost every day I walked past it, locals and tourists would be taking photos of it. It stuck out in condo-land, and now it’s gone. And probably won’t be back, because that parking lot will eventually become more condos.

On the opposite end of the Olympic-change scale: transit hubs. Every Skytrain station has received a bit of a makeover - most now have large lit signs with the letter ‘T’, so you can spot the station from more than a block away. They’ve been more clearly named, and every station also now has route signs, so passengers can see which stations the east or westbound trains will take them to. Voice announcements of stops and transfer points are also added, and platforms in transfer stations have been numbered. For example, a train arriving at Broadway/Commercial will instruct people that they can transfer via an overhead walkway to Platforms One and Two. Previously it only said “the next station is Broadway.” It’s nice to see transit start to get some small improvements for people who don’t live here.

Finally, one odd change has been the removal of almost all newspaper boxes from transit stations. You cannot nab one of the lousy daily free papers, nor the Georgia Straight, nor even the Province or Sun when you step off the train or bus at a main station downtown. I figure this is a combination of newspapers not being approved sponsors and fear over another Atlanta-style Olympic bomb. Or maybe it’s to deprive homeless people from using them as bedding … although, they’ll be in jail during the games, so perhaps that’s not it.