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Belleville Terminal Concept | Proposed


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#121 Caramia

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Posted 28 August 2007 - 11:01 AM

Oh wow, thanks for posting those archival photos. Pure gold!
Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
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#122 Galvanized

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Posted 29 August 2007 - 08:58 AM

Mayor Lowe, how can you call a Clipper dock a terminal? That's what it is without the Coho, hardly a terminal. When you say not economically viable you mean under a P3 where a private hotel corp makes a profit instead of our different levels of gov't investing into our harbour. Infrastructure projects rarely offer any type of return profit quickly but a P3 would be a fast buck. This area is too important to make a fast buck on! If you want more Causeway build it in the other side of the harbour, I'd rather keep the chain link fences than have your blue ribbon plan.
Past President of Victoria's Flâneur Union Local 1862

#123 aastra

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Posted 29 August 2007 - 10:19 AM

We believe that a re-energized Belleville Terminal will lead to a re-energized Inner Harbour and downtown.


Did I miss a meeting? Is the inner harbour lacking energy?

Call me a jerk but the vision for the Belleville site that we've seen will only de-energize what we've got right now.

#124 Ms. B. Havin

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Posted 29 August 2007 - 10:22 AM

^ and ^^ Totally agree. That bit about the harbour needing "re-energizing" completely threw me, too. The "blue ribbon" plan would suck its existing energies dry. A chain link fence is preferable to a wasteland.
When you buy a game, you buy the rules. Play happens in the space between the rules.

#125 aastra

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Posted 29 August 2007 - 10:49 AM

So you agree that I'm a jerk?

#126 Holden West

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Posted 29 August 2007 - 11:11 AM

Ha!

Like I mentioned on the other forum, a few days ago I watched along with about a dozen other fascinated picture-taking tourists as the Coho docked and exchanged its load of cars and tractor-trailers.

This happens several times a day, all year long. Can any vast, empty plaza (even with a hot-dog vendor and a lame busker) hope to match this type of genuine vibrancy?
"Beaver, ahoy!""The bridge is like a magnet, attracting both pedestrians and over 30,000 vehicles daily who enjoy the views of Victoria's harbour. The skyline may change, but "Big Blue" as some call it, will always be there."
-City of Victoria website, 2009

#127 aastra

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Posted 29 August 2007 - 11:17 AM

Like I replied on the other forum:

People from around these parts just take it for granted that ships and floatplanes and yachts and whatever else are coming and going all day. We forget that many tourists are from landlocked places or even port cities that don't have the same sort of tourism-oriented traffic.

Even a cursory examination of travel reviews/pics will demonstrate the degree to which tourists are interested in things like the Coho and the floatplanes.

Remember when we were mourning all of the historic buildings that Victorians have destroyed? You pondered what we might be destroying today that we would regret later. Here's your answer. Booting ship and aircraft traffic out of the harbour would be a monumental error along the same lines as ripping out the streetcars or destroying the various magnificent buildings on Government or Douglas Streets.

#128 aastra

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Posted 29 August 2007 - 11:30 AM

Twenty years from now I don't want to be looking at pictures of the harbour from 2007 and mourning how great it used to be.

#129 Nparker

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Posted 29 August 2007 - 11:54 AM

20 years from now we'll be looking at the harbour and saying how nothing has changed, including the lovely Clipper "terminal". Without provincial money this project (in any form) is going nowhere.

#130 G-Man

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Posted 29 August 2007 - 12:02 PM

I concur with exactly what everyone else here is saying. Why is it so hard when you look around the harbour to recognize what makes it great?! It is the movement of boats of all sizes, the seaplanes and the monumental buildings that surround this activity. The Blue Ribbon Plan is to remove some of the traffic and to ignore the monumental architecture by building a suburban plaza. WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?????

We need the Coho to stay where it is and we need something that matches the Empress and legislature in grandeur architectually though not in style.

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#131 Caramia

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Posted 29 August 2007 - 11:01 PM

Maybe if planners drew us a Richard Scarry version of their ideas?


Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900), The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

#132 Holden West

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Posted 29 August 2007 - 11:33 PM

I love Richard Scarry! No wonder I love busy hives of activity!



Of course, if Scarry did a book about the Belleville terminal, it would be called,

"Let's Quietly Contemplate the Vast Empty Plaza"
"Beaver, ahoy!""The bridge is like a magnet, attracting both pedestrians and over 30,000 vehicles daily who enjoy the views of Victoria's harbour. The skyline may change, but "Big Blue" as some call it, will always be there."
-City of Victoria website, 2009

#133 Nparker

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Posted 30 August 2007 - 08:15 PM

"Of course, if Scarry did a book about the Belleville terminal, it would be called, Let's Quietly Contemplate the Vast Empty Plaza"
Probably true.... what this area needs is more studies and less action.

#134 Ms. B. Havin

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Posted 30 August 2007 - 08:28 PM

If Richard Scarry, why not Maurice Szendak ("Where the wild things are")? Both are improvements over "where the dead things are"...

I heard recently that certain air service operators think the "blue ribbon" plan is just grand, fine & dandy, too, which initially gives one pause (as in: This is a grown man running a successful business ...what if he's right?), until you realize that he's just another stakeholder who has very limited vision. Removing the Coho is of course in some people's interest, considering that the Coho just clutters up the flight paths of some businesses.

It's depressing to contemplate that small-minded thinking might be the best that market forces in Victoria can produce.
When you buy a game, you buy the rules. Play happens in the space between the rules.

#135 Holden West

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Posted 16 September 2007 - 08:09 AM

Here's the American perspective:

PA mayor visits Victoria on possible ferry terminal move


September 11th, 2007 - 10:11am
KONP 1450 AM

(Port Angeles) -- Several factions in the City of Victoria, B.C., would like to eliminate the Coho ferry dock from its present location, in the Inner Harbour, near Belleville Street, in order to further develop the area, and make the harbor a more beautiful site for incoming visitors and tourists.

But some people in Port Angeles think that's a bad idea. Port Angeles Mayor Karen Rogers was in Victoria last week to talk with some of the principals. Rogers says she's not hopeful that the Coho terminal will remain in the Inner Harbour. She says compounding the problem is the number of different factions involved, each looking at its own viewpoint.

One idea would move the Coho to where cruise ships dock, on Ogden Point. But Rogers says the prevailing winds in the location could be diasterous for a vessel smaller than a large cruise ship.

As for who's behind the idea of moving the Coho landing area, and why, Rogers says many government entities feel that the area is the Western bookend of the old Parliement and historic buildings, and they want to make it more attractive. But there is also talk that developers would like to build very expensive condos and townhomes in the area. Mayor Rogers said it won't be a quick and easy decision.

===============

Victoria plan undermines ferry Coho


The Columbian, Clark County, Washington
Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Tom Koenninger is editor emeritus of The Columbian

VICTORIA, B.C. - Suppose a boatload of dollars sailed into the heart of your city four times a day every summer day. Suppose that stream of riches had been happening for 47 years. Now suppose some developers coveted the docking area for the boat. Would you kick the boat out in favor of another hotel and waterfront amenities? Certainly not.

Wait a minute! This is Victoria's Inner Harbor. It could happen. The "boat" is the Black Ball ship Coho, which brings in an average 511,000 people (including 197,000 foot passengers) and 131,000 vehicles a year from Port Angeles.

It accounts for 60 percent of the ferry visitors to the harbor, said Ryan Burles of Victoria, vice president and district manager for Black Ball Transport, Inc.

[...]
"Beaver, ahoy!""The bridge is like a magnet, attracting both pedestrians and over 30,000 vehicles daily who enjoy the views of Victoria's harbour. The skyline may change, but "Big Blue" as some call it, will always be there."
-City of Victoria website, 2009

#136 G-Man

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Posted 16 September 2007 - 08:50 AM

Not sure if it has been posted yet but there is also a good article in the Business Examiner against the moving of the Coho. There is such widespread opposition to this that I am beginning to feel optimistic that they would not dare do anything. Hell I will lie in front of the bulldozer ala Arthur Dent if it comes down to it.

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#137 aastra

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Posted 16 September 2007 - 11:58 AM

Why do people keep saying Victoria doesn't need another hotel? The more modern new hotels, the better. There's absolutely no reason the Coho and a new hotel couldn't co-exist as the prime tenants in a new-and-improved Belleville Terminal.

It seems like so many issues in Victoria are reduced to extreme polarities, when they don't need to be. You can renovate the site AND keep the Coho.

#138 Baro

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Posted 16 September 2007 - 01:26 PM

Wait, a hotel full of people mixed with an active ferry terminal??? You'd have people walking around the area, shopping and seeing the sights! It's much preferable to continue our development strategy of tearing down buildings and replace them with what the city truly need, more plazas! The plaza situation is out of hand, Centennial square is bursting at its seems and the new CRD plaza, underbuilt as always in victoria, barely quenched past demand and did not address future demand. With our plazas and open spaces bursting at the seems moving the coho is an excellent idea as it will dramatically reduce the amount of people in the neighbourhood, and the new plaza will give the remaining people a place to .. to.. well do the obvious amazing things one does in an isolated useless plaza. Perhaps one day downtown can reach our targeted "human scale" density of sub 1:1, we could have a plaza for every citizen! What a paradise that would be...
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#139 Holden West

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Posted 16 September 2007 - 01:42 PM


"Beaver, ahoy!""The bridge is like a magnet, attracting both pedestrians and over 30,000 vehicles daily who enjoy the views of Victoria's harbour. The skyline may change, but "Big Blue" as some call it, will always be there."
-City of Victoria website, 2009

#140 Ms. B. Havin

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Posted 16 September 2007 - 07:33 PM

Why do people keep saying Victoria doesn't need another hotel? The more modern new hotels, the better. There's absolutely no reason the Coho and a new hotel couldn't co-exist as the prime tenants in a new-and-improved Belleville Terminal.

It seems like so many issues in Victoria are reduced to extreme polarities, when they don't need to be. You can renovate the site AND keep the Coho.


Interesting question, and I hear what you're saying, aastra, but you have to keep in mind that many who oppose this awful "vision" are reacting to the "winner take all" stance that the task force brought forward. They -- and the business interests behind the plan -- are the ones who aren't thinking in differentiated terms, they're the ones who can't conceive of mixed uses, they're the ones who are creating the conditions for "extreme polarities," as you put it. After all, they're the idiots who suggest that we should excise the Coho from the harbour -- a NIMBY reaction, "nix the hotel," is primarily provoked as a response to the proposal to nix the Coho.

(FWIW, where I would fault the anti-hotel-development sector is in what I suspect will be lack of vigorous criticism of this idiotic plaza. They'll find that just peachy keen, even though it's probably the nastiest piece in the whole "vision." Baro comments on that with great acidity -- and lucidity.)

If a knee-jerk NIMBY reaction to getting rid of the Coho is, "run the (hotel) developers out of town," what else could one expect? It's not as if this "vision" proposed by the task force is in any way inclusive or democratic, is it? It proposes turning over a prime piece of public land -- land owned by the Province, and therefore by us -- to a very, very limited range of interests. Why wouldn't an editorial writer remark, "Victoria needs a new hotel and more tourist gimmicks on its waterfront about as much as Clark County needs another strip mall"? For one thing, if the shoe fits..., as they say. We really don't need more "tourist gimmicks" and other devices that separate tourists and locals, and I have yet to see how or why another hotel will contribute to integrating local & tourist interests. Show me how the new hotel will do that, and we'll talk turkey.

It's all fine & dandy to remark that it's possible to accomodate a diverse range of usages, but don't forget that there are powerful business interests who'll play hardball to try to ensure that that'll never happen. When developers are already in attendance at the "unveiling" of the task force's "vision" to jockey for position so that they can formulate/shape or possibly position their proposals -- before there has even been any public discussion of whether the "vision" makes any kind of long-term sense at all -- you really have to wonder about the topography (of the playing field, that is...).
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