The holiday season is the busiest time of year for both small and large businesses, many of which depend upon the profits generated between Thanksgiving and Christmas to sustain them through the year.
This holiday season, however, some downtown Vancouver business owners are worried that customers won’t visit, due to ongoing construction from C-TRAN’s Fourth Plain Transit Improvement Project. One area seeing the largest construction impact is along Broadway Street between 15th and 16th streets.
Reshell Douglas is the owner of Not Too Shabby Boutique, a small business that has operated at 15th and Broadway for 15 years. Early last week, as a result of the CTRAN project, street access to Broadway was closed. Sidewalk access and pedestrian access to her business has also been limited, and customer parking has been diverted to side streets.
Douglas said she didn’t know about the restricted car and pedestrian access until December 3, and that her business is “endangered due to the careless planning and lack of consideration by CTRAN.”
“I consider this a crisis situation and I don’t feel like I’m exaggerating when I say that,” said Douglas. “There is definitely a percentage of my clients and my sales that will be lost because it’s just not easy for incidental drive-bys and a lot of my elderly clients want to park right in front of my store. They don’t want to try parking far away and walking down.”
In a letter to customers, Douglas wrote that she asked C-TRAN to delay the construction until after the Christmas season.
“We shared that their plans to begin on December 7 is detrimental not only to our customers but to small business as sales during this time of year have a huge impact [on] their course for [the] following year,” Douglas wrote. “C-TRAN told us it is out of their control.”
Lo-Lo on Broadway, a gift shop located a few doors down from Not Too Shabby, has also seen the C-TRAN construction take a toll on sales. The shop specializes in skin care products and has been located in downtown Vancouver since August.
“This [construction] is devastating – not only for me as a retailer, but for customers,” said owner Kismet Andrews. “Once it started, the foot traffic went from maybe 15 people a day to one or two. This was thoughtless and not in the holiday spirit.
“The bottom line,” she added, “is had I known when they were going to start this, which they did not tell us, what I would have bought for my store and the quantity in which I would have, would have been very different. It would have also allowed me to contact customers about what was going on. I couldn’t do that on the fly. My signage would have been very different as well.”
Fourth Plain is C-TRAN’s busiest transit corridor, and the improvement project, which began in September, will use larger buses and level boarding stations to increase service and reduce travel time. The new transit system, which C-TRAN is calling “the Vine,” will connect downtown Vancouver with the Westfield Vancouver Mall, Clark College, the Veterans Administration Vancouver Campus and the Marshall Luepke Community Center. Battle Ground-based Tapani Inc. is constructing the new stations along the route.
Christine Selk, C-TRAN’s public information officer, said construction will take longer than a year, “making it unavoidable to skip a holiday season.” She said that C-TRAN is aware that businesses may be affected by the construction and the sidewalk “is completely intact and accessible,” parking is still available on side streets, and that “Business Open” signs have been placed near stores throughout Broadway.
“C-TRAN is in touch with businesses regularly to navigate challenges as they occur, and to help solve problems to the degree that we can,” Selk said in a written statement. “C-TRAN is working diligently with our contractor to complete the work as soon as possible and maintain access to all affected businesses.”
Both Douglas and Andrews expressed frustration over the fact that C-TRAN was not able or willing to postpone or delay construction in front of their stores until after the Christmas holiday.
“We did our best to say, ‘please don’t do this until after Christmas, just give us two weeks.’ They decided to do it anyway,” said Andrews. “They’ve been out for maybe two-and-a half to three days since the streets have been torn up and we were told they are taking the week between Christmas and New Years off. It’s just so thoughtless to do that to a business owner and customers at Christmas.”
Douglas is now urging her customers to endure any hassle created by the construction and to continue supporting small businesses. To that end, she said the local community has stepped up to help make this unfortunate situation a little more tolerable.
“I’ve had a lot of support from Vancouver’s Downtown Association and many of the business owners have gone out of their way to say, ‘I’m coming here to make you feel loved.’ It has been nice,” said Douglas. “At the end of the day it is a horrible situation and I feel bad for anyone else who is going to go through the process, but I’m just going to make the best out of it.”
For what it’s worth, Douglas said still believes in C-TRAN’s Fourth Plain Transit Improvement Project, despite her problem with the ongoing construction in front of her store.
“The [bus] platforms themselves are beautiful,” she said. “It’s really going to update the look of downtown and help with security. I’m all for that. It’s just bad timing.”
Managing editor Nicholas Shanmac also contributed to this story.
