The evening rush hour slowed to a near-crawl for motorists on West Broadway between the cross streets of Burrard and Cambie—basically through the entire length of the Fairview neighbourhood.

Motorists who planned to turn north off West Broadway and onto South Granville—in order to cross the Granville Bridge—had to keep going straight, to the Burrard Bridge, if they were travelling west, or the Cambie Bridge, if they were traveling east.

The problem was a police incident on the Granville Bridge, which began some time between 3 p.m. and 3:30 p.m.

According to my friend Dustin, who was an eyewitness in the afternoo, a man could plainly be seen standing on the west side walkway of the south end of the bridge, just where the bridge begins to cross False Creek.

Dustin described the man as older and with a scruffy beard. The man had climbed over the railing and was standing on the outside edge of the walkway. He was holding onto the railing with one hand and leaning out over the water.

The first clue something was wrong was the terrible transit jam

Having spent the entire afternoon, incommunicado, collecting returnable beverage containers through the back alleys of Fairview, I missed the beginning of the police emergency.

When I returned to the 1400 block of West Broadway at about 6 p.m. I had no idea what was going on but I could not believe my eyes. Westbound transit buses were backed up bumper-to-bumper, from the middle of the 1400 block and eastward for nearly two blocks!

Nearly three hours into the incident, none of the people I spoke to, who were all waiting for buses on the south side of the block, had any idea what was happening. At this point there were still no emergency responders at the intersection of West Broadway and Granville and nothing else to suggest that the traffic problems had anything to do with the Granville Bridge.

I received my first real information nearer to 6:30 p.m., from a bus driver and it wasn’t until just before 7 p.m. that police and barricades finally arrived to block access to the northbound lane of Granville.

It is now 9:21 p.m. The police are gone from the intersection of West Broadway and Granville but the barricades remain.

And apparently the man is still on the Granville Bridge.

I spoke to another friend of mine named Tom, who lives in the West End. He walked over the Burrard Bridge not 40 minutes ago and he told me that he saw the man pacing back and forth on the west side walkway of the Granville Bridge.

At least, according to Tom’s description, the fellow was doing his pacing on the proper side of the railing.

I just hope that the incident is finally resolved peacefully and without injury.

Update: Just after 5 a.m., Saturday morning (April 28), Vancouver police announced on Twitter that the incident had been resolved peacefully and that the Granville Bridge was open to traffic in both direction. Little additional information has been released but a post-incident report by News1130 quotes VPD Const. Jason Doucette as referring to the emergency response in the context of incidents involving a person in crisis.