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Welcome to In The Village on False Creek, a unique project inspired by Live@YVR and 365 Days of Dining. I've moved my family into this community with my mission being to showcase the myriad of things that make it awesome by bringing you a weekly scoop! |
I couple of years ago I realized that I am "that guy". I am that guy who asks city workers, and generally people out in the streets doing their job exposed to the public, exactly what it is that they're doing. People in these types of occupations are nice to me for the most and they usually don't mind answering a few dumb questions. Here are a few stories that we've published due to this breed of curiosity that I harbour:
- Painting traffic lines HERE.
- Snowblowing bugs out of trees HERE.
- Bumps in the sidewalk repaired HERE.
- BC Hydro literally has the keys to the city HERE.
- Measuring the City's 138,000 street trees HERE.
When I spotted these two guys below installing the brand new (solar-powered!) public garbage compactor and recycling station now located outside of the new London Drugs in the Village there was absolutely no way they were going to get away without a few questions from me. I kept my distance for the first minute or so though, observing as they adjusted the placement of these two new additions. There are a bunch of these around the Village and now that London Drugs is open the need for more has apparently become evident.
As soon as they opened the solar-powered compactor and revealed its guts, that was the moment I zoomed in and initiated a conversation. This photo was taken seconds after they had peeled off the instructions that were taped inside and booted it up for the first time.
I already knew that these solar powered garbage compactors (manufactured by a company called Big Belly) save City workers from having to empty them as often as traditional garbage receptacles. These guys confirmed what I assumed, that the series of three blinking lights circled in this photo below mean (LEFT) "Hey, everything's cool", (MIDDLE) "Okay, I'm half full here" and (RIGHT) "Hey! Empty me!". But what I didn't know is that built into them is a monitoring system that has the capability of beaming those messages directly to City Hall. So instead of a concerned citizen calling 311 and complaining about how crappy their neighbourhood looks because the garbage is overflowing, these are built so that they can be monitored from afar, and when they're full someone will be sent out to empty them long before anyone has to get upset about unsightly trash. That system will likely require more than one hire and a larger city-wide system being put into place in time so, for now, workers monitor the status of them manually simply by looking at these lights.
More than one person who has visited me at my home in the Village has told me that walking around the neighbourhood feels "the future" due to the planning, how everything seems to be in its right place and how the spirit of sustainability and LEED is not only incorporated into the buildings in which we live, but into the community as a whole. This is just one example of those sensibilities in practice.
Learn more at TheVillageOnFalseCreek.com and stay tuned each week as I expose other unique qualities of our new community.
