Our City Hall has indicated it's ready to make investments in transit and urban public space. Good news! Plans released so far however suggest we have a problem...

The City has recently purchased a property of strategic importance in our downtown. There are indications also that our City Hall is ready to make important investments in transit and urban public space. Good news!

The newly purchased site is inherently urban in nature, more so perhaps than any other property downtown. It fronts the Terminal Avenue inter-city highway and is at the corner of the highway and Commercial Street, Nanaimo’s Main Street.

There is great potential here to repair much of the harm done by the highway to our downtown and to establish the urban design standards and specifications (building setback, build-to line, sidewalk width, the street wall, street trees etc ) that are laid out in our Downtown Urban Design Plan and Guidelines. There is potential here too to leverage improved connectivity by redesigning the intersections where Commercial Street and Esplanade meet the highway.

City streets create value, build community. Urban highways do exactly the opposite. All good urban design starts with the street and the most valuable part of the urban street is the street corner, the crossroads. (The corner bar, the corner store…)

The site itself all but dictates highest and best use. It needs a human scale streetscape, a safe inviting environment for people of all ages and abilities travelling at about 5kph. It needs to support the diversity of activities that make downtowns downtown.

The City may have secured this property however to create a public plaza and a transit exchange here. This would be a regrettable mistake, a lost opportunity. Renderings of plans released to date raise concerns that the highway environment would be not repaired but made worse by buses on open asphalt. And a public plaza with an uncalmed highway at its edge would fail.

You can't repair an urban highway with more asphalt. https://t.co/8MltAP0XHy

— NanaimoCommons (@NanaimoCommons) August 29, 2021

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