Re: “New park poses parking problems for pool users,” Letters, Oct. 9.
To the editor:
I agree with Gwen Giesbrecht’s concern over decreased accessibility to New Brighton Pool. With the park board’s predilection for closing outdoor swimming pools (Vancouver is now reduced to three outdoor swimming pools compared to Toronto’s 58 and Winnipeg’s 10), declining usage due to inaccessibility could give them cause to reduce our inventory of outdoor pools even further to the two on the western waterfront — Second Beach and Kitsilano pools.
Outdoor swimming is a unique summertime activity that needs to be preserved and enhanced in Vancouver. It’s time for the park board and the City of Vancouver to start investing in these old-fashioned favourites that benefit the entire population’s health and well-being.
Margery Duda,
Vancouver Society for Promotion of Outdoor Pools
To the editor:
Gwen Giesbrecht’s letter reminded me of my letter to Vision park board commissioner Constance Barnes when this project was put forward. All that Giesbrecht wrote of, I wrote to Barnes. A waste of time, I knew.
Vision Vancouver is so anti-car that totally inconveniencing users matters not at all to them. And it may be a strategic move: make the pool inaccessible to most of the users and the numbers will fall, and then the pool can be shut down and the area resurrected as a garden for flowers and kale, perhaps. But Vancouver has to become the greenest city in the world, eh — not the second greenest, the greenest.
Mike Tropp,
Vancouver
