The Park(ade) of the Covenant

For much of the twentieth century it was there, balanced on those dozens of bare metal supports drilled into the ground, standing between the city and its waterfront. The New Westminster Waterfront Parkade appears to be the single largest assembly of parking spaces in the downtown area, with seven hundred and forty-nine spots available, but at the cost of completely overshadowing Front Street and acting as a physical and psychological barrier - not to the same degree as something like the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto, but a barrier nonetheless. The approaching completion of Westminster Pier Park may change this, but for now the parkade is, for all its potential utility, a definite eyesore that means downtown perpetually has one foot in the 1950s.

What's worse is that it's not even heavily utilized. Back in 2008, the city government found that demand for the parkade's spots was such that there was only a 38.3% usage rate; I visit the parkade fairly regularly on the weekends, as its top deck provides an excellent vantage point for photographs of the bridges, the mountains, the river, and the Surrey waterfront, and in my experience it's never seemed as if even a third of the spaces were being used. Meanwhile, down underneath the business of Front Street soldier on in obscurity, with handmade signs placed at strategic Columbia Street intersections to let people know that, yes, there are actual things underneath that hulking assembly of green-painted steel. Only to a degree, though; Front Street is a wasteland between McKenzie and Begbie, and I can think of only a single business that actually operates there between the shuttered doors and newspapered windows.

Recently, though, downtown New West has begun to experience a renaissance. Much of the preparation for this was made before I arrived, but even in the last year I've seen the development of downtown with the opening of River Market and the transit-oriented construction around New Westminster Station and the work on the Pier Park and the Multi-Use Civic Facility. Downtown New West may be leaping into the twenty-first century, but... there's still the issue of the parkade; there's a small but growing divide between those who want to maintain it and those who want to tear some of it down.

It's the business owners of downtown New West, by and large, that want the thing to stay up. Last week the New Westminster News Leader covered some of the issues surrounding the parkade; Bill Shannon of the Downtown Business Improvement Area led off the article with concerns about how a lack of parking could increase uncertainty for businesses, particularly with so many new people coming to downtown in line with the new developments. I can understand where the BIA's concerns come from, but I can't help but feel they're rooted in a view that is becoming increasingly out of step with the modern world.

The upper deck of the western end of the downtown parkade, photographed on Sunday, January 8 at 2:30 PM. This is the section currently being considered for removal by the city.

The BIA's concern is that a more people coming to downtown New West to live or to visit will create a parking crunch; based on what I see, I can't take that view. The civic facility will include a small parkade of its own when it's finished, and there's already significant on-street and in-lot parking in downtown for visitors to the pier park. What I take issue with in this is what seems to be an unconscious twentieth-century bias; all people are assumed, as a matter of course, to be reaching downtown by car.

My own view is that private vehicles will bear an increasingly small percentage of the modal share for transportation to downtown as time goes on. It's easy to get to downtown by transit; it's bracketed by two SkyTrain stations, an advantage that many cities in the Lower Mainland lack. Beyond that, I don't see how an increase in downtown's population will be the salvation of the parkade; it seems to me that people who live downtown would patronize downtown businesses as pedestrians, not drivers.

My own view is that the city should remove the underused, western portion of the parkade. It would open up an entire block of Front Street to the sky and to the riverfront. If additional parking does become necessary somewhere down the line, I'd rather see the city investing in a new structure that's far more integrated with its surroundings, and which doesn't look like it'll come down like a bunch of Jenga blocks in an earthquake.

I'd like to see downtown really move into the twenty-first century. Re-evaluating the parkade would, I think, be a good place to start.

They Knocked Their Block Off!

It's been in slow motion for a while, but starting tomorrow, the VCR is going to be set to fast-forward. The Royal City Record of New Westminster reported yesterday that New West's sole and solitary Blockbuster Video store will be closing its doors on Friday, just the local dimension of the closure of two hundred and fifty-two other stores across the country. Already, the video vultures are circling in anticipation of going-out-of-business deals from Zeballos to Zt. John's. That is, assuming there are any chains in Zeballos, and bearing in mind that I misspelled St. John's for the alliteration factor.

I can't say I'm sorry about the impending collapse of the Blockbuster Canada rental empire... not that I haven't had a while to get used to it; shuttered Blockbusters seem to be everywhere these days. Still, considering the ruthless manner in which the chain came to prominence back in the 90s, driving independent video stores out of business, it's almost satisfying to see corporate karma come around in this manner. I'm upset for the workers, especially in this sort of environment; that kind of front-line customer service is one of the rapidly diminishing types of jobs that can't yet be outsourced to overseas call centers.

The disappearance of Blockbuster from the Canadian retail scene leaves a key question: what happens now? While Blockbuster didn't have a monopoly on the video rental business - there's still a Rogers Video in downtown New Westminster, if you consider Columbia Square Plaza "downtown," and smaller chains like Jumbo Video still exist in addition to the independents that survived Blockbuster's onslaught, the whole business model of video rental is under constant assault by technologies that just weren't an issue ten or twenty years ago, when the video store was king.

The Beladean Motel along King George Boulevard in Surrey has nothing to do with Blockbuster except for the fact that they're both closed and they both start with the letter "b" - but that's close enough.

For many people the answer is simple, and sometimes accompanied by the DreamWorks smugbrow - Netflix. But it's obvious immediately that that solution won't or can't work for everyone. For one, I don't like the idea of paying a subscription for a service regardless of whether or not I use it at all - $7.99 a month may not be much, but it's the principle of the thing, and it's not as if Blockbuster or Bandito Video ever charged me a fee for the privilege of being able to rent from them. But that's just small potatoes. The biggest issue with Netflix here stems from the insanely anti-competitive environment that dominates in Canadian telecommunications, which makes it easy for ISPs to gouge us. When people have to take care they don't go over their usage cap, lest they start getting dinged dollars for every extra gigabyte they pull down, it's not exactly fertile fields for a business model based on downloading.

This is just the start. It seems to me that the biggest and most apparently-dominant companies in a given industry also tend to be the most vulnerable; it's difficult for them to change their course away from that which took them to the top. Nevertheless, this pattern of change isn't going to end with Blockbuster. It's going to remake the video retail landscape. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if a growing percentage of video stores eventually settle into a pattern similar to used book stores - based around physical media in general, selling and reselling media from DVD and Blu-ray to laserdisc and Betamax, finding an exploiting a small but comfortable niche while direct downloading and grocery store rental kiosks take increasingly larger pieces of what remains of the physical market.

I suppose we'll see in a few years.