Homeless in Vancouver: My neighbouring condo’s latest effort at self-defence

by Stanley Q. Woodvine on January 31st, 2016 at 11:15 PM

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Here’s another follow-up involving bollards, this time updating the story of the hapless brick-facade condo across the alley from the parkade where I sleep.

As I’ve mentioned previously, in 2012-2013, the condo was built out to the absolute edge of its lot. At the same time the parkade entrance was rebuilt to jut several more feet into the alley. As a result, between the two properties, the alley narrows like the neck of a wine bottle, to no more than 10 feet in width.

Most of the damange to the brick occurs at the southwest corner.

This results in a tight squeeze for motor homes, moving vans, delivery vehicles, and garbage trucks. And whatever trouble these big vehicles have is always at the physical expense of the alley-side brick wall of the condo.

Already rebricked in two places, the wall still has a mess of gashes and grooves from successive truck scrapes and impacts.

Over the last three years, both the building owners and the City of Vancouver have taken successive small steps to protect the condo. None of these steps, however, have involved reducing the incursion of the parkade in order to actually widen the alley any.

Instead the condo owners first put up two retro-reflective signs warning westbound traffic in the alley of the extreme narrowing. Then the owners placed orange, water-filled construction barriers against the condo as buffers. (These barriers were repeatedly moved by drivers and ultimately removed for good.)

At some point the city added “No Trucks” signs flanking the eastbound entrance of the bottleneck. (These are wisely spaced wider than the alley itself so that garbage trucks and the like don’t flatten them on the way through.)

Now, I see that the condo owners have permanently fixed three steel bollards in place along the alley-side brick wall, thus further narrowing the bottleneck by another half-foot or so.

And by “permanently fixed”, I mean the bollards have been indifferently bolted directly into the asphalt. So I expect that the slightest tap from a big truck will uproot them.