TOO FAR?

Like so many places, until recently there were trolleys and trains zooming people all over Victoria and beyond. From 1888 to 1923, a foot and rail bridge crossed the waterway at Johnson Street, connecting downtown with Esquimalt. In 1924, that bridge was replaced by another that, for some reason, also accommodated automobiles. In 1979, after extensive repairs on the severely corroded bridge, the Johnson Street Bridge was painted light blue and became universally known as “The Blue Bridge.”

When I first moved to Victoria there was still a train you could take from downtown, across the bridge and through Esquimalt to where everyone now lives in Langford, and up-island to Duncan and Nanaimo, as well as points north and west. Both the train and the bridge were iconic. Both are gone. *Tear* The old bridge, who survived 85 years, was replaced with a fancy new one — a much more streamlined single-leaf bascule bridge.

Though the city wanted to refurbish the blue beauty to give her another 40 years of life at a cost of $30 million, they were convinced to go with a brand new bridge at a cost of just $10 million more. When it came time to build, the price tag jumped to $63 million then soon nearly $80 million and before long it was around $90 million. When the project was completed in 2018, two-years late, it was $65 million over budget. If you’ve lived in the world, all of that looks pretty typical. But I bring it up because: this masterful bridge replacement boondoggle earned the Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s “Most Wasteful Project of the Year” award; then in 2020 there was supposed to be an audit to explain to the public where all their money went but, you see, there was a pandemic so, you know, obviously accountants couldn’t look at spreadsheets; and then as the pandemic was winding down the province just decided to kill off the office of the Auditor General for Local Government who was supposed to do the investigating (because oversight was deemed to be “unpopular”), which, apparently, just made the whole matter disappear…

Oh and I also spell all this out here because if you go to the Wikipedia page for “Johnson Street Bridge” you’ll find none of the above. What you will find is a note offering a perfectly fictional pricing for the build, insisting “actual costs of $96.08 million had been incurred, to an approved budget of $105.06 million.” As Mark Normand says: Comedy!

If all that wasn’t enough, the new bridge and the surrounding infrastructure is pure chaos. Even Google Street View can’t make sense of the situation almost a decade on. So, the main bridge deck has three lanes for automobile traffic, two going west out of the city and one coming east into the city. Great. In addition, there are two single-lane bike lanes making up the very outside lanes of the main bridge deck, one going and another coming. All of that is paired with two separate pedestrian paths outside of the main bridge deck. Of course they're connected to the main deck and raise with the rest of the bridge. One of those microdecks, on the south side, is quite narrow and really only good for pedestrians. The one on the north side is pretty wide and, like the main deck, accommodates bikes; only, it does so totally pointlessly and stupidly. This bike lane requires cyclists to mount the sidewalk in a perfectly weird manner, usually right where a bunch of tourists are standing. When you get up there you find strollers and kids and dogs and rollerbladers and electric unicycles zooming in and out and all over the place or otherwise stopping and standing right in the middle of everything. Oh and, if you make it to the other side, you will discover that the pathway after the bridge was designed with a mysterious dip and incline for, seemingly, no reason at all, and that the bike lane terminates soon after the bridge by merging into the roadway bike lane that you should have been on the whole time. And if you take the path to the south, in the most obvious direction, toward the harbour where everyone is naturally drawn and the bike path is so sensibly in Vancouver, on the seawall, the path transforms into a no-bike, pedestrian-only walkway. So, all that makes sense. And, well, I’m not even going to mention whatever pure insanity is happening on the city-side of the bridge with the convergence of all this automobile, bike, and foot traffic. It’s chaos. Total chaos. How I would love to talk to an engineer and city planner about this bridge. Oh man.

Still, if you’re lucky, the bridge will get out of the way of a boat, bending toward the sky Inception-like, as you’re passing by. Even better is walking up on the north side, right up to the hinge, and watching the mechanism do its work during the lift. Sure, the no-longer-blue bridge is no Golden Gate or Danyang–Kunshan but, if you ask me, it’s better.

My dream job would be sitting in the little booth operating the Johnson Street bridge. I’d have a pet raccoon or maybe a starling. Either way it would be named Brusselsprout Lunchbox Paddywagon III. If a starling, she would only communicate in R2D2 tones. If a raccoon, we would have matching lunch boxes (carrying a similar sashimi bento box). Obviously.