Columnist Wants Honesty From Planners, Not A T-Shirt

Before drastically changing their plans for a rail line running through a Vancouver neighborhood, the city's planning department held a public meeting. However, the decision to change the rail line from an underground tunnel system to an above ground line was not mentioned at all. Columnist Trevor Boddy -- a resident in the neighborhood affected by the big changes in construction plans -- is not only upset about the noise and dust constantly engulfing his home, but that the city planners offered him and other residents pencils, t-shirts, and balloons to promote the plan instead of the truth about their decision.

" 'Good grief, even city planners are branding themselves!' I muttered to myself, while ingesting the foul swamp-water that passes for coffee served at public meetings. There were lots of free pencils that night, plus requests for vision statements, alternate development scenarios, and all the other consultative markers of city planning in action, Vancouver style."

"Nothing was urgent, nothing was specific, and the evening was a kind of warm bath in non-threatening generalities, a tepid pool filled with the healthy happy bromides that civic bureaucracies use to wash their urban policies."

"If the planners were up to snuff, they must surely have known this transit line construction scenario was possible, even likely, but then why was nothing said to us assembled citizens about so important an issue? If they did not know that this shift from invisible tunnel to long deep trench was looming, then what is the point of the kind of city planning they practice?"