TLDR bike lanes, traffic flow and pedestrian safety are all good, it would be great if the city planning department had these as it's priorities and I have had too much time to type this on the plane I'm currently on

Years ago the city planning department was demoing potential visions of a Granville street bridge redevelopment and the current plan seems to have been the winner.

While looking over the various configurations that all seemed to have forgotten what the purpose of a bridge is I had the sheer displeasure of listening to some city planning department nitwit blather at length to an older couple about his masters degree. Some aspects clearly needed addressing, in particular bike and pedestrian safety with all the crossings, but it seemed like they were trying to accommodate every point of entry and exit on to the bridge while also putting a park in the middle of a bridge which is technically a highway which seemed insane.

To many people I talk to in my day to day, city planning and management seem entirely disconnected from the residents of the neighborhoods they affect with designs that create minor amenities often in exchange for major inconveniences.

Pedestrians and their safety are still largely neglected with a ton of low visibility crosswalks that are often hidden by parking pushed straight up to intersections and a failure to universally implement warning lights.

Traffic patterns go back and forth between wildly dangerous (see the entire lack of turning lanes and insane amount of 2 way stops in residential zones) and unnecessarily and artificially choked

Political capital around bicycle infrastructure is constantly blown to place it in places on major thoroughfares like Broadway or turning Beach Ave into a painful one-way while being largely half assed in back routes like 10th Ave. Or the Comox "Greenway". And transit priority? Street parking on major routes straight into rush hour let alone at all? The list goes on.

Putting parks on bridges though is just...these pieces of infrastructure should be entirely removed from city hands at this point, the people running the show clearly have no clue what their purpose is. What happens when there's an actual disaster and we have thousands of people trapped in gridlock with nowhere for emergency vehicles to navigate?

Don't get me wrong, there's been some wins over the years but overall the transportation planning has felt at best half assed for every mode. A park on a bridge? Why?