IDEA Series - Bury Fortune Drive
The IDEA series is just that, some crazy ideas, some pragmatic ones, that seek to enrich and strengthen our City.
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Bury Fortune Drive you say?! But Why?!
As is well documented in public discourse and in zoning requirements, the North Shore of Kamloops is all on a flood plain. The flat, sandy soil on the North Shore makes construction much easier than most of Kamloops, and the connected street network give the North Shore the unique opportunity to be successful in Alternative Transportation solutions like walking and biking. The extra couple months of snow-free weather help too in this respect. How are these related?
Many years ago I heard about an idea to create a Canal on the North Shore, primarily as a tourism/park feature. While I would actually think this is still a great idea, the property pre-emption and scale of the project would seem to make it a pretty unlikely plan without massive political will and public support. That said, daylighting and giving similar treatment to an existing water way (looking at you Peterson Creek) may be much more likely to succeed and have a more realistic scope.
In the meantime, I listened to a CBC Ideas episode about European Infrastructure looking to mitigate the effects of flooding in Climate Change times, something incredibly topical in BC today. In the general words of the shows guests - in nature, rivers and streams have wetlands, subsidiary streams, lakes and other features which allow Rivers to rise, and shrink and manage the water in its different flows. We can see this exhibited for example at Cooney Bay near Tranquille Creek. The area floods every spring and recedes into the summer.
It is only human development which is truly at risk here. Our standard mitigation techniques such as dikes and pumps can be effective at keeping our buildings safe from water damage, but they have some secondary adverse effects, which include narrowing the channel in which the river flows, increasing the rate at which the water runs, changing erosion patterns on the bed of the river. In addition, Cities like London which have been building dikes and tidal management infrastructure for more than 2000 recorded years, have a bit of a head start in imagining how bad a flood may be, and how high the dikes would need to be. Needless to say, it is likely that our estimates of the 200 year flood plain may be inadequate.
So what to do? Well in the CBC Ideas episode, many places are now being "designed to be flooded" as was the Net-Zero Four Plex built on Schubert Drive in 2018. It is common in the Netherlands as well for the ground floors of buildings and certain streets to be designed to flood in extreme situations, allowing the river to spill its banks as it naturally would, should the human development not be there. The CBC episode framed this as "going with the flow".
This can be applied to large park spaces like Park Aranzadi in Pamplona, Spain shown below - which is designed to flood and allow the river to spill its banks when required, but be occupied by productive human use throughout.
Other places like Seaside, Florida have used the elevations and designs of their streets, combined with sub-grade park areas to both enhance public spaces as well as create storm-water reservoirs in emergency storm situations (as we could in places like Riverside Park, McDonald Park, John Tod, and others). The green in the center of town shown here has the avenues designed to sheet flow excess water down into the green space, which is sunk below grade to hold the water. More in this video at 2:45.
But places like Kuala Lampur in Malaysia have been even more ambitious! In the countries capital the new SMART Tunnel (Storm Water Management and Road Tunnel) is designed to function as a subterranean freeway for most the year, but in Monsoon can be quickly able to become a massive overflow for River Water.
So herein lies my primary purpose in the suggestion to bury Fortune Drive. Using much cheaper methods than tunnel boring machines, simply cut and cover the traffic lanes, putting them ~12' below grade, turning Fortune into a large cistern that can accommodate river overflows in a 200 year flood.
And paying for it may not be that hard. Federal and Provincial grants for Flood infrastructure currently abound considering last autumns (and this springs in Northern, BC) flooding damages. A proactive approach like this would likely qualify for significant assistance from higher levels of government.
Putting Fortune Drive would have other positive effects. From a traffic point of view, most traffic coming over the Overlander Bridge has destinations beyond the intersection of Tranquille, 8th and Fortune. This intersection has the Cities highest Crash rate from 2017-2021 with 251 crashes in the five year period. That is nearly once a week!
The significant variability of destinations here, means that most drivers are not going straight through at this intersection. Long waits at the lights for left turns and pedestrians mean that this is the worst intersections in the City, and likely is going to continue to get worse as more and more people move to Kamloops. That is also directly in conflict with the Cities vision for the Area as the "North Shore Town Center" filled with pedestrian oriented plazas, apartments and retail. Immediately adjacent to a polluted, loud major arterial is not most peoples idea of a nice place to by a flat and get a coffee.
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2021 North Shore Vision
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A roundabout here could help with traffic flow particularly due to the significant number of conflicting left turns, but Canadians are generally adverse to their large implementation and I could see the politics of this being a non-starter. But if a buried Fortune Drive extended under the intersection, up 8th and down Tranquille to Brock, a vast majority of the traffic would be free and unimpeded to continue right past. How many of those 251 crashes might be avoided when considering our Cities Vision Zero commitments should we move the vast majority of the traffic away from the turning conflicts at this intersection.
So in returning to the Cities vision of the North Shore Town Centre, and the rest of the North Shore.
I lived on Schubert Drive for a number of years. The Rivers Trail along it is a premier and well used piece of active transportation and park space in our City. However living on Schubert you feel completely cut off from the rest of the North Shore as the high speed, unsignalized Fortune Drive essentially cuts you off from the schools, parks, shops, restaurants and other amenities of the North Shore. Adding traffic lights to Fortune might help in a most minor of ways to make crossing Fortune easier for folks, but it would also serve to turn Fortune into a bumper-to-bumper mess for drivers.
Burying Fortune would allow the North Shore to be re-stitched back together. The road left on top for local access could look alot like Abbott Street in Kelowna, a slower speed car street that also hosts park spaces and a large multi-use path. This would be a key connection for Alternative Transportation Goals giving cyclists a far more direct connection to Downtown from the North Shore than currently exists meandering through MacDonald Park - especially considering City Plans dating from 2004 clearly identify a goal of the North Shore Town Centre having a density and mix of uses comparable to downtown, which on its own will generate significant new traffic.
This approach too has been extremely successful in thousands of Cities, from Barcelona's Super Block Projects, to small-city Netherlands "Disentangle" projects, Vancouver's Georgia Viaduct Project, Seattle's dismantling of the waterfront freeway, and Dusseldorf's Waterfront Park overhaul. Cities big and small all over our continent and the world have has success with these sorts of projects.
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| Kelowna's Abbott Street |
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| Bird Rock, San Diego |
A final note on funding. Currently many homes along Fortune are some of the saddest single family homes in town. You might say they are not in good-fortune. Of course that would be the case: living only a few feet from one of the Cities busiest roads is not a preferential situation for many.
If redevelopment in this area occurred at roughly the same density already occurring on Tranquille, the parcels along Fortunes roughly 1.7km of currently under developed area would generate roughly $15 million in Development Cost Charges, and increase the return on Property Taxes collected by an estimated extra $6 million per year in property taxes. In addition, with the tradeoff of a more quiet street level and redevelopment of the lots there is room for more than 3000 homes here without a single building over 6 stories. 3000 homes on the highest quality alternative transportation corridor in the City, immediately adjacent to high quality amenities.
Talk about bang for your buck!
So in summary, burying Fortune Drive could have the following positive effects:
- Create a vital piece of flood infrastructure in the Cities most densely populated area
- Have the opportunity to achieve most of its funding through provincial and federal grant stream related to flood mitigation
- Mitigate Traffic Conflicts and Crashes at the Cities most dangerous intersection
- Leverage the Vision of the North Shore Town Centre in City planes dating since 2004
- Create high quality Alternative Transportation and Park infrastructure at street level working with Climate Action Goals, Urban Forest Goals
- Stitch the Schubert Neighbourhood back into the greater North Shore
- Create space for over 3000 new homes in the middle of a Housing Affordability Crises
- Generate $15m+ in DCCS for the City and an additional $6m+ in new property taxes per year ongoing.
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