That Olympic Spirit

We drove down today from the Sunshine Coast (north of Vancouver) to Point Roberts (south of Vancouver) but failed to catch the Olympic spirit.  There are, of course, no signs of snow; what there are are drifts of daffodils here and there blooming profusely.  The crocuses are practically on their way out.  Everything is weeks ahead of time, except for the winter which we seem to have missed.

The trucks are still bringing snow into Cypress Bowl (which is the venue in the mountains just north of Vancouver and much lower in elevation than the Whistler venues), and have now been joined by snow-delivering helicopters, not to mention lots of dry ice.  The dry ice, according to the news, is buried under the moguls...suggesting that it might turn out looking like a misty day in May.  The organizers are saying, 'No Problemo!  We are right on top of all this.'  But 75% of Vancouverites think the whole thing will be a financial loss to, largely, Vancouverites, I suppose.

Up on the Coast, the torch bearers came through and took the ferry over to West Vancouver.  It was a special ferry; not the one we usually get to take the peasants back and forth from the Coast to West Van.  It was one of the newest, biggest, fanciest ferries that normally ply the Vancouver/Vancouver Island route.  It sailed a practice route to make sure it could get into our dock, and then it sailed a special sailing in order to bring the torchbearers and several hundred of B.C. elites who are somehow connected with the Olympics from point A to Point B, even though most of them had to be carted to Point A from Point X before the ride began.  The talk is that each of these sailings cost about $75K.  If they'd all gone on a regular ferry, they could have done it for about $8/person.  But, then, there's the security concerns, and the additional concern that the folks couldn't manage a 45-minute ferry ride without having a salmon/halibut/prawn and truffles treat table.

I think in Greece, way back when, the athletes just came and competed and everybody had a pleasant few days.  But nowadays, everything has to be 'world class,' for some reason, and a lot of everybodies need to be made to feel a great deal more important than they actually are (which is to say 'not very important'), everybody needs to grab a piece of some strange pie that has nothing to do with them except that it's all over the 'news' paper, and the burning questions are whether the event is making money for somebody and, if so, for whom.  The public we saw today, however, seemed to be taking this all outside their stride.  Very few cars were sporting Canadian flags...just enough so you realized that the vast majority were not.  There were no delays at the Lions Gate Bridge.  Traffic was minimal.  We sped through Vancouver, bereft of Olympic spirit, I'm afraid, but happy to be south of the border.  (In the photo above there is a flag flying over the house, but it is barely visible.)

Who's Doing This?

This past Monday evening, the Massey Tunnel (the tunnel that goes under the Fraser River on the main north-south highway into Vancouver) was closed for several hours after a 1981 Volkswagon pickup with a single driver had an accident while driving through the tunnel around 8:50 p.m.  The pickup then caught fire.  Unfortunately, the driver was killed.  Closing that tunnel in both directions, even for a short period of time (the accident was in the northbound section, but there was smoke in the southbound section) must have caused a colossal traffic mess, even that late in the evening.

The next morning, we were driving east on Highway 17, barely 6K from the Massey Tunnel, when we saw traffic backed up forever in the westbound lanes, near Ladner Trunk Road.  Just past the intersection, a trailer truck had turned right over on its side.  No curves in the road there, no wind happening; the driver seemed to have made the turn (if he was turning) before the truck turned on its side because it was stretched right straight out on the shoulder.  Many, many police cars around, lights flashing.  Many, many cars not getting to the Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal.

This, my experience of the beginning of the Olympic phenomenon here in Vancouver.  Today, the newsmedia report that they are trucking snow in from the interior to Cypress Bowl because it's 45-50 degrees F. all this week, all last week, all next week from all appearances.  My neighbors up here in the Sunshine Coast are not speaking kindly about the Olympics and the Premier who thought having it in Vancouver was such a great idea.

But here's the bright side.  If the Massey Tunnel closure had occurred in the U.S. on the first day of the Olympic schedule (that's when the various road closures began), somebody somewhere would have asked, suggested, insisted that the driver of that 1981 truck was probably a terrorist.  That the overturning of that tractor-trailer truck, barely 3 miles away the very next morning, was the work of a terrorist.  That the absence of snow and the high temperatures were part of some terrorist conspiracy.  And the official response, at the very least, would have been to let only one car at a time drive through the Massey Tunnel for as long as the Olympics lasted.

In B.C., there has been no indication that anyone thinks it was the work of a terrorist.  Although some people have wondered how you get a 1981 Volkswagen pickup to drive at all.

The Olympic Deficit

While the U.S. is celebrating all that is Obama, up here in Canada, they’ve got Olympics blues (or maybe ‘reds’ if you think of the debit side of the balance sheet). Back in 2003, when Vancouver was wooing the Olympic Committee for the right to host the 2010 Winter Olympics, there was a significant groundswell of public unhappiness. It got to be so pervasive that they actually had an election as to whether Vancouver should go ahead with what was endlessly advertised as less a sporting event than a cornucopia of benefits to the economy and a vastly improved quality of life! A rail line to the airport! A new highway to Whistler! Some really big sports arenas here and there that would be unlikely to be necessary as sports arenas after the fact! A rebuilt ferry terminal access! The public was sufficiently persuaded however: 64% of them voted in favor of the Olympics bid, which subsequently won the hearts of the Olympic Committee, and whose reality is now barely a year away.

In the interim, the snow levels have been a little dicey and one certainly wondered what they do with a Winter Olympics without snow. But…ah, well, we are all in a different space now. There may or may not be snow next year, but the bigger issue is whether there will be anywhere to put the athletes when they get here and who is going to pay for all the cost overruns.

The major crisis at the moment is that a big U.S. hedge fund--you know this sentence isn't going to end well--was financing the building of the Olympic Village and the hedge fund’s plan was to make a profit by selling the village as pricey condos afterwards. Alas, hedge funds have been having hard times and this particular fund recently pulled out of the financing, about half way through, citing cost overruns as well as hard times more generally. The city needs about a half a billion dollars (Canadian) to finish the project but the city charter requires a vote of the citizenry to take on that kind of debt. And then of course the city will need to pay back that loan along with associated interest costs.

In some way, the B.C. legislature just evaporated the charter requirement and now Vancouver is going out to borrow the money at what I doubt are going to be low interest rates. Subsequently, I guess, lucky Vancouver will be in the business of trying to sell those condos spring, summer, fall, winter, and perhaps spring again.. I suppose there could be worse market timing for that kind of real estate venture but probably not in my lifetime.

I was living in L.A. when the city had the summer Olympics. Although L.A. actually did manage to make money on it, there was precious little reason to believe that overall it improved our quality of life. And I doubt if it’s going to do anything good for Vancouver’s, either. One of my neighbors at the Point has been talking of making a killing on the Olympics by renting out his house (one bedroom, one bathroom). I doubt if that’s going to happen, but maybe we could offer all of the Point for an Olympic Village next year and, in exchange, Vancouver could underwrite a Point Roberts vacation for all of us somewhere sunny next January and February. Maybe December, too, so they'd have adequate time to get things ready for the athletes. Travel is such a nice way to get to know strangers, especially when they're your neighbors!

Which Way Up?

B.C. Transit or B.C. Roads or whoever in the B.C. government is responsible for signage on the highways simply never fails to disappoint. The agency seems to have a relatively random policy for highway exits: sometimes the sign is before the exit, sometimes right after, so it is never quite clear where or when you should exit if you don’t already know how it works. Because the Olympics is coming to Vancouver in January of 2010, barely a year from now, there are lots of new roads with new signs, particularly in the area to the north and west that leads to Whistler where much of the snow-based competition will occur. Also in that area is the Horseshoe Bay Ferry Terminal, which is the place to go if you want to go to the Sunshine Coast and Roberts Creek. And indeed that is where we were heading today.

About a mile from the terminal, there was a standard rectangular metal road sign indicating that there was a new routing for the ferry terminal. Okay, that’s good. And then there was a sign that said something like ‘ferry terminal and village to the right,’ which is also good, and we went right. And then, not so good: there was one of those signs that change, using light bulbs or LED’s or something. It showed the words, ‘Ferry Terminal,’ followed by a new sign that showed a right-pointing arrow. Okay, but that was immediately followed by a new sign that said ‘Village,’ followed by a new sign that features a left-pointing arrow sign. So, logically, you get: Ferry, go right; Village, go left. But it says that logically only if you come in at the right moment. It can equally well say, ‘left-arrow, ferry terminal; right arrow, village.’ Four instructions, but since they are not numbered on the sign, they can be read as 1,2,3,4, or 4,1,2,3, or 2,3,4,1, or 3,4,1,2. You have two choices to go right to the ferry terminal and two to go left. Go, sign designers! So many more opportunities before January 2010.