Im being tracked by the City of Vancouver.
I knew it! You might be, too.
If youve driven over the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts, the city may or may not have recorded your licence plate number to learn where you live. Huh?
Yep, thats what I thought, too.
But before you think Im going all conspiracy theory and paranoid about the citys covert actions to track my movements, Ill let the citys own transportation director explain.
His name is Jerry Dobrovolny. He was in council chambers Tuesday and talking about what would happen to all those vehicles that cross the viaducts, if council so chooses to knock the suckers down.
This is a question Dobrovolny gets all the time. The short answer, he said, is all those vehicles anywhere from 35,000 to 45,000 per day, depending on when the city counts them is theyll just continue along a new roadway.
Besides, he said, the citys research has shown a trend of fewer vehicles coming into downtown. But theyre still coming. So where the heck are they coming from?
Weve done a licence plate trace of the vehicles that are on the viaducts we looked to see where they were coming from, Dobrovolny told council.
See, I wasnt making this up.
Turns out, the majority of motorists using the viaducts originate from the southeast quadrant of Vancouver and from Burnaby, Coquitlam and outlying suburbs.
But Dobrovolny pointed out those volumes should decrease once the Evergreen Line from Coquitlam to the Commercial Drive transit hub is open in the summer of 2016.
There is a tremendous potential for trips to shift on to transit, he added.
As for what the Commercial Drive hub will do about all those Coquitlam and Burnaby transit riders descending on the already chaotic station, the citys answer is a $2.8 billion subway out to the University of B.C.
Good luck with that.
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