Construction on the $50-million Powell Street Overpass Project gets underway Monday June 24, requiring the closure of Powell Street between Clark Drive and Hawks Avenue for a year.
Only local traffic and businesses will have access.
The city is responsible for delivering the project, but it's only paying for a small portion of the cost.
Port Metro Vancouver is covering the bulk - $19.5 million. Transport Canada is kicking in $18.5 million, Canadian Pacific is contributing $4.5 million, while TransLink and the City of Vancouver are each paying $3.75 million.
"The project does two things," explained Jerry Dobrovolny, the city's director of transportation. "One, is it takes the road up and over the railway - it's called grade separation, by building the bridge. And the second thing it does is shifts Powell Street south so the alignment of the road is also changing to free up additional space on the Port land, which allows them to, in the future, put one full additional lane of rail track on the Port. It's significant because it goes for kilometres and that's the pinch point on that whole corridor on the Port land. So, it frees up a major pinch point to create more space and more rail capacity and it also eliminates the at-grade crossing for Powell Street with the rail tracks."
The overpass will feature four lanes for traffic and also separate cyclists and pedestrians from traffic.
Dobrovolny noted the city has held open houses about the project and has gone door-to-door to businesses to address concerns about the disruption construction will cause.
"We've made a number of changes working with businesses to provide access. In one case, a business had access from one of two streets. We were eliminating one of them and there was a light pole in the way for big trucks, so we moved a light pole, so that they could access from a different street," he said.
An advisory committee has been set up to allow business owners and other interested parties to deal with other concerns that might crop up over the next year.
"They've had one meeting now pre-implementation. They'll have another meeting post-implementation after a couple of weeks to talk about how it's going," Dobrovolny said. "So there's a continual discussion going on now around specific details of access."
Joji Kumagai, executive directive of the Strathcona BIA, said businesses, especially those just west of where the closure will take place and in the Franklin Street area, are worried about the impact of construction noise and dust, along with customer access and getting goods in and out.
"We have a few businesses - more retail-based business - that rely on traffic going in and out of downtown. So with that access being restricted, it obviously makes it more challenging to get people into their businesses," he said, adding, "There's going to be challenges in reconfiguring the commercial truck accessing area and getting out."
Some business owners, according to Kumagai, feel there should have been more consultation and communication. He said the city has done its best, and has tried to be available for information, but "to some degree it's out of the city's ability to really influence the project because it's something that's very much dictated by the federal government and the province in terms of trying to increase the capacity of the Port," he said. "The city, in terms of funding has contributed the least amount, so [the project is] really being dictated by higher levels of government."
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