A grassroots group is calling on the City of Vancouver to remove concrete barriers - and restore the roads.
According to CityHallWatch, the East Van Traffic Coalition wants unrestricted vehicle access brought back to two areas: between 1st Avenue and Hastings Street, and between Nanaimo and Boundary Road. Its Change.org petition had attracted more than 2,000 signatures, with residents demanding accountability.
Those demands are reasonable. Traffic calming promises safe travels - but often delivers complications. For example, a 2024 field study found that vehicles navigating through a section containing a small speed hump experienced an average 9.31-second delay of total drive time. A conventional speed bump, however, produced a 16.42-second delay, and a series of three consecutive bumps produced a 29.51-second delay. This led to extended commutes and increased frustration.
The environmental cost can also prove high. Research using GPS data and emissions modelling found that vehicles travelling over speed humps produced increases of up to 51% in hydrocarbons, 43% in carbon monoxide, 110% in NOx, and 52% in CO? emissions. Another traffic-calming simulation found NOx emissions varying from a 5% increase to as much as 160%, with speed bumps producing the largest increase of total concentrations.
That puts the East Van dispute into a larger context. The concerns documented by CityHallWatch—additional fuel expenses and traffic being pushed onto too-small alternative routes—are not simply questions of driver convenience. Repeated slowing, braking, and acceleration can carry measurable time and emissions costs. The question for Vancouver is whether those costs have been adequately considered.
The answer is no. They have not.
Sources
CityHallWatch — “Community backlash: East Van Traffic Coalition wants the City of Vancouver to ‘Remove the Concrete Barriers’” — August 12, 2026. CityHallWatch article
Civil Engineering Journal — “Assessing Multifaceted Effects of Speed Humps and Bumps: Travel Time, Safety, and Environmental Considerations” — 2024.
Ahn & Rakha — “Energy and Environmental Effects of Traffic Calming Measures” — Transportation Research Record.
New Zealand Transport Agency — “Traffic calming: effects on emissions and air quality” literature review — 2022.
