Citizen Vancouver

RSS Feed Homepage

Articles: 1, 2

Anti-what? That?s so last year, dude.
2007-03-18 09:32:00
When I use the word ante - it’s usually in the context of poker where everyone posts a bet to the pot before the pocket cards are dealt. Pretty harmless unless you’ve got a small stack of chips. But in the context of Vancouver, Anti has become a buzzword that pollutes our technologies, ...
More About: Dude , What , Hat , Last , That

Knight street traffic.
2007-03-15 05:01:00
Knight is an interesting street in the history of Vancouver. Where most cities built large freeways that circumvented growing communities, Vancouver created a 6 lane corridor right through the city. Today this main artery is Vancouver’s loudest, busiest, most dangerous corridor with speeders, red-light runners, commercial cargo vehicles, construction vehicles, and of course ...
More About: Traffic , Night , Knight , Street , Tree

Vancouver Barbie Dolls
2007-03-14 04:15:00
Commercial Drive Barbie : This doll is made of actual tofu. She has long straight brown hair, arch-less feet, hairy armpits, no makeup and Birkenstocks with white socks. She prefers that you call her Willow . She does not want or need a Ken ...
More About: Vancouver , Dolls , Doll , Barbie doll

Shopping cart rage
2007-03-01 22:59:02
With all the shopping I’ve been doing lately, I’ve been experiencing a familiar sense of anxiousness, anger and impatience: getting cut off, bumped into, caught waiting behind a slow driver… Not road rage - but supermarket rage. In the last ten years we have seen stores adopt a supersize approach to shopping — large volume packaging to minimize per unit costs passing savings to the consumers. The savings come with it’s drawbacks, however, as you are essentially buying in bulk… Bulk eggs, bulk milk, bulk toilet paper. Whatever though, cause it all fits in the back of our Suburbans and Expeditions, right? But what about the shopping carts - those are bigger right? You betcha, especially at stores like Costco and Superstore. What about the aisles, are they bigger too? Sure, some aisles can fit two SUV sized carts side by side. So what’s the problem? Well, volume is one problem - more people, more carts, more congestion. Another problem ...
More About: Shopping , Shop , Rage , Ping , Cart

Crime Stats In Vancouver
2007-02-23 10:55:01
Remember seeing the video of this strung out crack head on the evening news? He was apparantly driving this stolen bait car at speeds of 130km/hr while screaming “oncoming!!!”. This kinda thing scares me - this guy is out of control and us innocent people are in the way. It’s really sobering when you see videos like this, even moreso when you realize that Vancouver ’s crime statistics aren’t isolated to any one criminal type or area but that it’s widespread issue across the GVRD. A couple of hotspots to note are Central Business District (encompassing area of Downtown Eastside) and Strathcona. The CBD alone has seen almost a doubling of assaults (1120 to 1820) as well as offensive weapons (240 to 560). These two numbers make up a third of the GVRD stats numbers. Below is a map of Vancouver’s regions which segment the crime numbers for 2002 to 2006 found in this PDF. Hotspots for Auto Theft on Feb 14th to Feb 20th focused around the Do...
More About: Crime , Stats , Stat , Rime

Gung Hei Fat Choi Vancouver
2007-02-23 10:55:01
This past Sunday was one of those days you’re proud to be a Vancouver ite. Chinatown, a normally bustling town with exotic foods, chatter, and rich culture, even with East Hastings’ drugs and crime slowly deforming the community into a rough neighbourhood, came alive again with young and old filling pender and keefer streets with celebration. The lunar year is 4704 or 4705 which is considered the extra-lucky Year of the Golden Boar, which only occurs every 60 years. Many Lunar New Year’s celebrations transform shopping malls into grand stages for cultural performances, while the New Year’s parade takes over the streets of Vancouver’s Chinatown. The Chinatown Parade attracted tens of thousands who witnessed colourful fan dancers, lion dances and multicultural clan support for the chinese community. The parade continued on with the blessing of chinatown shops and businesses where cabbage heads hung. The Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden was pack...
More About: Choi

Vancouver, in the eyes of Ahmad Kavousian
2007-02-16 22:50:04
I’ve been noticing some beautiful local photography on flickr and wanted to showcase one photographer in particular, Ahmad Kavousian.  His photostreams are mostly of Vancouver scenes which first peaked my interest but it was his “street people” photoset that arrested my senses.  His is a sincere perspective of the faces that we ignore.  Such as Philip the philosopher: “Philip left Toronto and the business of truck driving to come to Vancouver for a better life. He is now homeless on the streets of Vancouver. His new business is collecting. Philip wanders the back alleys, searching through garbage bins for cans, bottles and anything else he can return or sell for money. “ Check out more of his work here.
More About: Eyes , The Eye

Overheard in Vancouver
2007-02-16 22:50:04
While surfing through Vancouver Blogs, I came across overheard in Vancouver, a unique voyeuristic approach to the city’s oneliners: “Have you ever been walking down the street or in line at the grocery store and couldn?t help but overhear the person next to you?” Here’s an overheard submission that is so relevant to Citizen Vancouver, December 29th, 2006. Over heard on East Hastings, Homeless Guy: I got what you want, weed, rock, helly hansen pants! Vancouverite to two tourists: Yeah. So that?s pretty much East Hastings.
More About: Hear

Is all this yelling really about homelessness?
2007-02-16 22:50:04
Having posted to Citizen Vancouver for 2 months now, I’ve noticed a consistent trend when I rant about crime, drugs and prostitution in Vancouver - I hear from a small but boisterous group of misguided, off-topic and malicious bloggers. For example: my article describing how crack houses in our neighbourhoods bring uninvited crime to families’ front doors has elicited a long string of emails stating that homelessness in Vancouver is an issue brought on by the likes of my liberal leftist pragmatic thinking…….. Huh? I have a pretty good grapple on the problem of homelessness in Vancouver, I’ve lived here for 30 years, watch and read the news incessantly, work near and walk through East Hastings occasionally and talk with some of those down on their luck on the street. Is there something I’m missing to merit those abrasive emails?  In comes Google. Besides the city of Vancouver reporting some numbers and citizen reports and rants, I came across th...
More About: Home , About , This , Real , Homeless

Garbage
2007-02-06 10:48:01
I remember living in an apartment building before trash chutes were outlawed.  Those were the glorious days when taking out the trash could be done in your slippers… DONE!  Now that I live in a house, and use those spiffy new garbage bins and blue recycling boxes, I’ve been dealt a glancing blow to my cushy lifestyle naively thinking that I put the trash on the curb, and the city does the rest.  Instead I have lost 3 blue boxes to ‘accidents’ and my trash can may not last too much longer past the brutality of the city garbage trucks.
More About: Garbage

God forbid you get hit by a bus?
2007-02-01 10:43:02
How ironic that not even a week ago I posted “yield, it’s the law” and today I nearly get hit by a bus. In fact, it’s safe to say that had I not banged against the side of the bus as it turned onto me, I would have been on the six o’clock news as the latest Translink speedbump. Here’s what happened… It was 5:15pm, there were loads of people on the sidewalks and traffic was crawling in the evening rush hour. I was walking south on the west side of Seymour when the light was about to turn yellow, I made up the tail end of a group crossing Dunsmuir. When I was halfway through the intersection the light turned yellow, and this is where the bus enters. Trying to beat the light, a bus travelling north on Seymour turns west onto Dunsmuir, and turned into me with no sign of slowing down. I tried to run out of the way, but had to bang my hand on the side of the bus to alert someone in the bus before I was run over. He stopped and I ran over ...
More About: God

Vancouver construction - another ingredient for road rage.
2007-01-30 22:42:01
Is it just me or are we, as communters, under attack?  Detours, roads closed, 3 lanes merging to one, pylons, flashing lights and orange vests.  Thanks to 2010, road work is everywhere and it’s paralyzing Vancouver traffic.  And while public transit is failing us as an alternatic, we’re stuck stewing in this crockpot of traffic. I’m always a proponent of improvement, there’s nothing wrong with bigger, better, faster — right? Umm sure, but at what cost?  Well for one, road rage, if it were measurable on a barometer would be contributing to global warming at a dangerous level.  It’s not enough to piss us off on busses, the city planners have to jab us in our cars at the same time.  I can’t pretend that this is on purpose, but how could the city be so poor at planning this whole process? Here’s a map of all the main construction throughout the GVRD, courtesty of the city’s The Road Ahead website.
More About: Other , Construction , Rage , Another

Picket fences and crack dens
2007-01-25 22:38:02
A crack house in the neighbourhood is an easy thing to spot. Look for the worst kept house with overgrown weeds, bed sheets for window treatments, grafitti all over the garage, and the most telling sign: continous foot and vehicle traffic in and out. Forgiveably, any new home owner could gloss over those signs since it could all look harmless, after all a crack den could be mistaken for the residence of students renting and hosting numerous study groups? But with a bit more observation, the occasional raid by the Vancouver Police K-9 unit, and awakening to a shouting match between a pimp and his crack head employee, and you’ll quickly sober up to the fact that yout neighbour’s house is actually owned by a slum lord and used to house prostitutes and traffic drugs. Peachy, no? What do you do, call 9-1-1 and report a crack house in your neighbourhood? Well that’s not a bad start except it’s not considered an emergency. And trust me, insisting it IS an eme...
More About: Crack , Rack , Pick , Fence

Stanley Park loss.
2007-01-25 22:38:02
Over the past few weeks, Vancouver’s weather has been extreme, to say the least. Apparantly we’ve weathered 14 storms of tremendous downpours of rain, 100+ Kilometer winds and large dumpings of snow. Is this El Nino, La Nina, or the Day after Tomorrow? Whatever you want to attribute these strange weather patterns to, it’s causing large amounts of damage to our city including Vancouver’s darling Stanley Park . When I did my own assesment of the damage I didn’t expect to actually feel any bit of remorse, after all, what’s a few fallen trees? But the experience was much more emotional than the news tried to convey. What I saw was a war zone, a crash site, victims sprawled out everywhere, pushed aside to keep traffic moving. The traffic, however, was barely crawling. Onlookers slowed, stopped and stared out to a new face of stanley park. The west side bluffs, hit the hardest, look like a clear cut logging zone. Previously, driving along that r...
More About: Loss

DirectBuy phone tag.
2007-01-25 22:38:02
Everyone knows how fun it is to receive a telemarketer phone call just as you sit down to dinner with your family. After all, you just spent an entire 8 hours working at your job, maybe an hour stuck in traffic, and this 1 minute call shouldn’t take ‘too much of your time’, right? Now, imagine a persistent phone call from a specific number every evening at the same time, except there’s no one at the other end when you answer. The number belongs to Dire ct Buy Vancouver: 604 215 4582. According to their website, “DirectBuy, a buying organization established in 1971, is the #1 way to buy most everything for your home direct from brand-name manufacturers at wholesale prices, plus shipping and handling.” Apparantly, membership to this service costs $4300.00 - wow, quite a price to save. Fishy? You bet. But what about those dead air phone calls? After several months of those calls. I called the number on the call display and of course I got an a...
More About: Phone , Rect

Umbrella Etiquette
2007-01-25 22:38:02
Walking down the busy streets of downtown Vancouver on any given rainy day is like walking down the streets of Pamplona during the running of the bulls. The likelyhood of getting gored by an umbrella is pretty high. Ducking and dodging to absent minded umbrella donners has become an extreme sport that I never signed up for. But because I work downtown where narrow sidewalks and deep puddles keep me in harms way, I have resorted to Chuck Norris moves to keep me dry and safe - but is that necessary? When it rains, people become vicious. No one is safe without a costco sized umbrella anymore. But why don’t people understand that when carrying an umbrella they are not the only ones on those narrow sidewalks. How can they still keep their head down not realizing who they’re bumping with their umbrella. How is it that those of us not carrying an umbrella can get pushed/hustled/herded into the rain from under the dry shelter of an awning by an umbrella carrier. DoesnR...
More About: Etiquette , Umbrella , Ique , Ella

Yield, it?s the law.
2007-01-25 22:38:02
Were you aware that the little yellow triangle on the back of every translink bus symbolizes a giant middle finger to the general public? Yielding to a translink bus is the law, they have the right to cut you off in traffic, to run a red light, to block an intersection, to verbally assault paying passengers. That little yellow triangle removes any accountability. Like James Bond, Translink operators have a license to kill. So let’s see what the News media are saying about all this. As 2010 approaches, we’re hearing lots on the development of new train lines, more buses purchased and more operators needed for the growing fleet at Translink. There are also stories covering Translink bus driver abuse: in fact the Coast Mountain Bus company says there’s an average of one instance of driver abuse per day. We’ve even seen terrorist-like incidents on the news involving chemical weapons and anonymous bomb threats. Wow, how could anyone be so enraged as to thr...
More About: The Law

East Hastings
2007-01-25 22:38:02
As you will gather, from the tone of this blog, I am not a big fan of drug peddlers, prostitutes, street crime, and it’s impact on our communities. I wish I had a giant broom to clean everything up but the solution is much more complex and requires an in depth understanding of this whole ecological system of crime. I hate to say it, but I think just as we are victims to their crime, they are victims to our neglect. Every once in a while I take a walk along East Hastings at a very busy time for foot traffic and drug dealing. I want to see what they see, street level. However, I don’t see much, because eye contact is a lead up to interaction which at this point, I’m not sure is safe with my lack of experience. So I race through, up one side of hastings, back the other, and catch glimpse after glimpse of addicts, pushers, pimps and hoes doing their thing. Everyone’s eyes dart around, keeping their actions secretive and inconspicous. Ironically, no one lo...
More About: Sting