Dead Parrot Sketch Part 2
In all my years advocating for better transit in the Vancouver metro region, I have never heard an excuse for not building with LRT, that is as silly as this. “An European style lawned tram rights-of-way will kill birds.” How low will the SkyTrain lobby stoop to?
Don’t believe me?
A story in the Tyee on-line newspaper has a HUB (cycle lobby) type decrying LRT and lawned R-o-W’s as bird killers.
http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2014/05/26/Greenest-City-Must-Dos/
A person using the moniker ‘positively4thstreet’ claims;
“I wouldn’t like to mix inviting greenspaces with transportation. It’s also wasteful…someone has to mow all that grass. The light rail itself is fine but not mixed with grass…that will attract grazing animals like geese. And we are on the Pacific Flyway so as well as our own we get hundreds of thousands of snow geese migrating and looking for rest stops and grazing places.”
In another post the same person replies to my comment;
You are hopeless. I AM TALKING ABOUT GRASS ATTRACTING GEESE AND THE CATASTROPHIC ACCIDENTS THAT CAN CAUSE. DID YOU HEAR OF FLIGHT 1549 IN NYC IN 2009???
TRUE..THEIR GOOSE MAY BE COOKED BUT SO MIGHT SOME HUMANS ON A TRAIN IF THEY GO THROUGH THAT WINDSHIELD LIKE THEY DO THROUGH PLANE WINDSHIELDS AND CAR WINDSHIELDS………………………………..”
I have yet to hear of a catastrophic accident between a tram and a bird and probably it has happened, but really to claim that a tram’s lawned R-o-W is a danger to birds is, I think, a wild goose chase.
Actually Zwei,
There was a bird that crashed through a tram window one day in a European City a few years ago. I was unaware if the line had a grass median. The incident was on page 2 of the newspaper in my mother’s bathroom. The article underneath it of the aliens that brought Elvis and JFK back to Earth was much more interesting though. Have any of these people heard of a horn before or a bell for that matter, an LRV has to have both by Law.
Actually, I am more worried about the increased chances of LRV on Worm collisions with a grass median. Just think of all those poor squashed worms, every time it rains! Oh the humanity!
Technically if you count worm homicide as real, I have to finally admit it after all these years, I was the Great Worm serial killer of Nortonville Dr. and Davisbrook Blvd. back in Scarborough in the mid 1970’s. As “The Stomper” people were afraid to go out without rubber boots in my neighborhood for many years.
I’m 57, born and raised in Vancouver. I”m looking forward to seeing my first flock of snow geese landing on West Broadway.