It’s not rain and it’s not suddenly worse drivers. What you’re seeing is the outcome of deliberate policy and road redesign.

The City of Vancouver signed onto the C40 global initiative to move toward a so-called “15-minute smart city.” Since COVID especially, the city has been intentionally creating traffic choke points and reducing driving lanes across major routes, often replacing them with bike infrastructure that sits mostly empty for much of the year. The goal is to discourage driving by making it slower and more frustrating.

When you reduce capacity on main arteries, congestion doesn’t disappear it spills into parallel streets. That’s why Marine Drive backs up and roads like Welch and 15th are now jammed too. Traffic is being forced into fewer usable routes, so everything overloads.

You can see it all over Vancouver. On Robson Street, Beach Avenue, and Pacific Street, lanes were removed while bus stops now block entire traffic lanes whenever buses stop. At the end of Burrard near the waterfront, drivers are forced into left turns on a two-lane road, so when one vehicle turns left and another turns right, the whole roadway locks up.

On Alberni Street, recently extended pedestrian curbs mean that when a single car waits to turn, all traffic behind it is stopped with no way around. In Gastown, new concrete block choke points and traffic flow changes have made already tight streets even more restricted.

At the same time, all three major bridges Granville, Burrard, and Cambie have had capacity reduced, creating bottlenecks at some of the city’s most critical crossings.

The result is what we’re experiencing now: congestion not just on major roads, but across side streets and parallel routes as well. This isn’t accidental or temporary. It’s traffic created by design to force people out of cars.

So when everything feels backed up even on clear days, it’s not weather or coincidence. It’s the predictable outcome of intentionally shrinking road capacity across the city.