Muffin and Pedal

Several months ago the city of Vancouver demolished my beloved outdoor pool on 15th Avenue, only 2 blocks from my house! It was a delightful place just a short walk away and great in the summer heat waves when the beach feels too far. Fond memories of lining up with the the groms and grasshoppers to hit the diving board into water that can only be described as ‘kiddy soup’. Shortly after it was knocked down a notice of development appeared with a proposal for a park space that included a potential ‘skate area’. Well, several months later and several rumors ago I can confirm the ‘skate area’ is true.

View from the South East Corner:

View from the North West Corner:

View From the South West corner

This tranny that stretches a good 12 feet or more is no more than 2 or so feet high making it the 3rd biggest quarterpipe-ish transition here….              …that’s 3rd outta 3 mind you:

The biggest Quarterpipe, 3 or 4 feet high, booyah!

This actually looks like a bit of fun, nice to look at anyway.

For you lot with pegs, nibbing galore!

All things aside it’s close by and small enough that it might be alright to play on when it’s wet outside and should be a bit of fun all the same.

One thing though!:

As indicated by the colourful daffodil shower head in the background there is a children’s playground on the backside of the North West part of the park. Hmmm, can you say “Personal Injury Lawsuit”?

If you look at the spatial arrangement of this play area you can see the nearest ‘skate area’ obstacle is less than 20 feet away from the play park. You show me the toddler who can differentiate between a playground and a skate obstacle. Honestly what goes through the brains of city councils! This is ridiculous! Almost as ridiculous as the scenario that plays out when your average, tired, middle class, working parent turns up to distract their 2 and a half kids for 5 mins so they can enjoy their Americano and read the ‘I saw you’ section of the Georgia Strait while there child plays ‘supervised’ at the park.

Let me break it down:

Parent is distracted for 5mins. Playground and skate area are 20 feet apart. Average toddler churns out 20 feet in less than 30 seconds. 30 seconds into 5 minutes equals around 10 opportunities for toddler to adorn a spoke necklace or skate bearing grill. When this happens, and believe me it has and will, said parent turns righteous and nasty. It’s a well known fact that every parent thinks their child is the most precious thing on earth and although it might be true for my mother it ensues a potentially nasty confrontation between parent and skatepark user that has been known to come to fists blows. There is one solution to all this, don’t build playgrounds beside skateparks, put them on polar ends from each other if space allows. Playgrounds are often full of spinning bouncing colourful things where people are having fun, so too are skateparks so it is easy to see how a small child would not be able to differentiate between the two and end up strolling unknowingly into a potentially dangerous situation. (One would hope however, that a parent/guardian would be able to distinguish the difference and identify the potential dangers and act accordingly however, too often this is  not the case). So ultimately the ‘old outta sight, outta mind’ is the best course of action in eliminating the problem. Building skateparks away from play parks equals no temptations in line of sight and ultimately no temptation to play in potentially dangerous and hazardous areas.

That’s my rant for the day, thanks for reading if you made it this far