sqwabb

This is about 7:30 a.m., pointing west, down a back alley I usually go through twice a day -- look how tidy it is!

All back alleys in Vancouver are this clean (unless they're not). This alley is in the process of being washed by the rain and having some of its dumpsters emptied -- you can just make out the caution lights on the back of a garbage truck on the west side of Alder Street at the far end of the lane where it doglegs north rather than continuing straight on to intersect with Granville Street.

On the left is a brightly-lit building's gated parking enclosure containing garbage and cardboard dumpsters as well as a set of blue city recycling bins, which are full, darn it! On the right you can see the brown dumpster tucked into its un-gated alcove. Right beside it (see below), is another alcove for the recycling bins. Both buildings have the same building manager.

Each of the accessible dumpsters, from the brown one down to the end of the alley -- seven in all -- is wide open -- again, look how tidy it is! Welcome to Fairview.

[caption id="attachment_8469" align="alignnone" width="497"] A perfectly pallet-able way to make a buck in the back alleys.
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These two lads from Geo Pallet are taking a drink break from trolling the back alleys of Fairview for returnables. But the returnables they're collecting are wooden shipping pallets rather than returnable beverage containers -- but the principal is the same.

Where bottles and cans can each be cashed in for between five- to twenty-cents, every pallet is worth two dollars said Joe, the fellow on the passenger side.

Joe told me the maximum load they could carry was 160 pallets -- $320. They had to already have at least 150 pallets, and honestly, I've seen flatbed trucks this size carry at least a third-again as many pallets, so I'd be surprised if they couldn't make room for 200-or-so.

Still, that's only $400 split two -- nearly three ways (there's the cost of the truck to account for). Like Joe said, they can make a buck but they've really got to hustle. Click the images to enlarge.

This Ken fellow should understand the word "free" could've been written larger, but everything after that was wasted effort. He may have imagined well-behaved neighbours when he penned the note, but it'll almost certainly be flea marketeers bombing through the lanes in pickup trucks who will scoop this stuff. Better perhaps to have left a list of what wasn't free. This last summer, I encountered one such fellow with a pickup in a Fairview lane, standing by his truck -- the truck box had high wooden side extensions, and was already loaded with scrap, and furniture, and stuff, from other lanes. He was gazing intently at an apartment building. I got off my bike, and went over beside him to see what he was looking at -- a neat stack of aluminum scaffolding against the lane-side of the building. He had the nerve to ask my opinion. Did I think they were putting it out? At that moment I believe he would have taken the scaffolding on my say-so. But I told him no. It was clearly on their property, as he already knew. I didn't think too badly of him -- he wasn't a thief, just hopeful. Click the image to enlarge it.

I appreciate stencil graffiti; you don't just dash it off, it's premeditated. There's a person, or persons, lately doing a bit of stencil graffiti in Fairview's alleys. The stencils are one colour. small -- three to five inches square, and they are positioned out of normal lines of sight. This stencil of U.S. President Barack Obama, is no more than five inches square, and so positioned on a wall that a dumpster will often be partly in front of it. Click the image to enlarge it.

I like how Fairview residents sometimes do the hard-sell on their unwanted stuff -- notes on blenders, lipstick on the screen of old TVs, big, and little signs propped, taped, or hung on the things they don't want, bur hope someone else will. They usually write pretty prosaic stuff like: "Free," "It Works!." "Take me home I'm yours." Sometime, like this dresser, the message is bright, and funny. Sometimes it's as cracked as what they're throwing out. Click the image to enlarge it.

[caption id="attachment_3132" align="alignnone" width="497"] Now what? Having "swallowed" the dumpster along with it's garbage, poor truck #222 appears to be suffering indigestion.[/caption]



This is a dumpster collection truck belonging to Northwest Wast Solutions Inc. The driver is definitely having a Bad Day at Work! These photos were taken early in the afternoon, in the lane on the South side of 10th Avenue, right at the intersection with Fir Street. Just a moment ago, this truck was holding a large dumpster (what Europeans call a skip, I think) on the two forks you can see sticking straight up in the air, atop the truck. Where is the dumpster? It's in the truck! I watched it happen, and still can't believe what I saw.

I was binning in the Fairview lanes when this truck pulled in to the alley between 11th, and 12th Avenue, ahead of me. We were both travelling West-bound. The driver seemed a bit slow about the actual dumpster pick-up, but moved ahead of me quickly. I caught up in the lane South of 10th. I heard the truck screech to a halt ahead of me, and when I got to where I took these photos, I kept a respectful distance -- especially after I saw the several feet-long skid marks left by the back tires when the truck "stopped" to collect the dumpster in question.

I watched the driver skewer the pockets on either side of the dumpster with the truck's two hydraulically-powered fork tines. He lifted the dumpster a bit and dramatically shot the truck forward , at least half a truck length. Stopped, and lifted the dumpster up over the big hole on the top of the truck -- gravity did the rest. Well, the drivers have a trick to help it along -- they quickly raise, and lower the forks a bit to shake the dumpster, and help dislodge compacted garbage. This driver was actually bouncing the dumpster up and down on the forks. Somehow, as the forks got to the horizontal position we can see in the photos, the dumpster bounced high enough to completely clear the fork tines and fell back down, exactly into the hole in the top of the truck. Who knew that could even happen?

A resident in a third floor apartment called to me, asking if I'd seen "that." I said yes, and pointed out the skid marks. The resident thought the driver was a menace, and said he was calling Northwest -- I gave him every encouragement. I felt bad for the drive, but, wow, I thought this could have gone dangerously wrong -- if the dumpster had bounced off the top of the truck, for instance. Wonder how much fun it is to get the dumpster out of the truck. Click on the images to enlarge them.

July 29th update: I emailed Northwest, but received no reply -- busy people. I have also since spoken to several drivers of dumpster collection trucks; all have admitted to doing it: They'd all dropped the dumpster container into the truck, or had it bounce off the truck -- "it happens all the time," more than one driver, or person connected with a garbage collection company, told me, and given the hundreds of dumpster pick-ups, day-in, day-out, I shouldn't doubt it. Driver's indicated it wasn't that big a deal; the dumpster was easily extracted, but it wrecked their schedule for the day's pick-ups.

The back alleys of Fairview can easily be as crowded as the side-streets, and, right along either side of South Granville, there are choke-points where the service truck and delivery vehicle traffic can get very thick -- tough on pedestrians, and vehicles trying to back out of the tight, little parking spots behind some of the businesses. Back alleys don't have traffic lights -- yet, so the ad hoc solution seems to be sticking up convex mirrors to remove the blind spots. These three mirrors are all in one spot, in the lane off the South-West corner of South Granville, at Broadway. Click the images to enlarge them.

I say a guy wrote it "chump," and a woman corrected the sentence -- it's nice to see that dumpsters have editors. Click on the image to enlarge.

Wooden utility poles stand mute throughout Vancouver's back alleys. But, take a close look, and you see they have stories to tell, in the form of words and codes burned in the wood, or stamped onto buttons, and rectangles of metal, nailed to the poles. Just like the ever-present graffiti, all of them have meaning if you know how to read them. I know something about two of them.

In most major cities, much of the transmission infrastructure -- electrical transformers, power lines, telephone lines, and fibre optic cables -- has been moved underground; Vancouver is said to be one of the few cities of its size to still suspend so much of it's transmission overhead -- apparently adding to our earthquake risks. Where image counts to a "world-class" city, on the main streets, the poles are painted steel, but in the lanes they are all wood. British Columbia is still a forestry powerhouse, and wood is probably still cheaper than steel.

[caption id="attachment_1747" align="alignnone" width="497"] This button (about life-size) means you can touch this pole without being electrocuted. And you can click it to enlarge the image.[/caption]

Almost every pole has a little "Pole-Tec" button nailed to it. These buttons only date back a year or two, when the City of Vancouver contracted Pole-Tec, a local company specializing in wooden utility pole inspections, to do just that, test the safety of virtually all the wooden poles. This followed the non-fatal electrocution of a homeless man, in 2010, sleeping near a metal light standard pole downtown. Independent tests in 2011 suggested a serious problem with poles and stray voltage ►

I watched as Pole-Tec workers methodically tested each pole in Fairview's alleys. They jacked up a lot of poles, into precarious-looking positions -- I don't know if this was to ground them or brace them. All that remains of that work is the little buttons saying the work was done and the poles are safe. The pole at right is one of the only ones I can find, with the extra "stuff" still attached to it.

Geotagging the old-school way

[caption id="attachment_1759" align="alignnone" width="497"] Someone nailed their old Chargex card to this pole. Click the image to enlarge.[/caption]

Most poles have one of three types of credit card-size tag nailed on them. One of them is just a number code, and the other two include inventory and geographical references. One works with physical maps, and the one pictured above has GPS coordinates in a special form (the first two groups). What's easier to read is that this pole dates to 1979, and belongs to BC Hydro. The details about these old-style geotags is here.

[caption id="attachment_1737" align="alignnone" width="497"] Beats me why, but here it is. Also, I believe "on line" is now commonly treated as one word. Click image to enlarge.[/caption]

This evening, I observed a commendable thing: Fairview residents patrolling back alleys as Kitsilano Fairview Community Policing volunteers. Three residents, to be precise. They were wearing outfits appearing to be made up of hand-me-down articles reminiscent of police, or traffic flagging gear. Better still, the three of them were as noisy as a murder of crows. They were mostly interested in each other, but they did notice me, naturally -- with my bike and trailer, I stick out in a lane, but so did they, and I made a bee-line for them.

They explained what they were, and then told me a shameless fib, to the effect that they patrolled the alleys all the time -- That may be what they're telling the Vancouver Police -- they were, as they told me, "the eyes and ears of the police" -- but I can not remember the last time I saw Community Police volunteers in the back alleys of Fairview. They wouldn't consent to be photographed -- privacy issues -- but they gave me a card; a model of late 1990s connectivity; street address, phone, fax, and an email (plus a mailing address), but no Web site. When I left them, they were busy analysing the different bits of gear each of them had.

It's good when residents take a pro-active interest in looking after their neighbourhood, even if, like the three I saw this evening, they treat it as a game. On top of the increased police patrols of the lanes, seeing it tells me Fairview residents may be feeling there's a bit too much disorder in their back alleys.

If you sit, patiently, and stare at this picture for two or three minutes. you will experience an authentic sqwabb moment™, feeling what it was like to be ME, earlier today, when this dumpster-collecting garbage truck just sat, chewing it's cud, or digesting trash -- I've no idea what it was doing besides standing in the way of commerce.