An Olympic-sized Accomplishment for Vancouver

The city of Vancouver, the host of the 2010 Winter Olympics, should be highly praised for their successful efforts in being innovative yet environmentally friendly and sustainable. 

Let’s take transportation for example.  A lot of thought has definitely gone into it; the Skytrain lines were extended to ensure that it would reach more places as well as the locations for the Olympic venues for the tourists so that they would not need to use a car as often therefore reducing the emission and pollution for Vancouver, saving money for tourists, and makes more places accessible for those who are residents of BC even in the future: a perfect win-win-win situation (win for translink(more $); win for the tourists (cheaper transportation); and win for the locals(less traffic on the streets) ).  What else could be a better strategy?

The Olympic Village is also quite a sleek design.  Its design goal is not so much to create a building with a beautiful exterior and unrealistic pricing, but a building that may very well prove to be the role model for the buildings of the future.  With the living space in Vancouver becoming more and more limited and the cost of land soaring while pollution becomes an increasing problem, the environmentally friendly buildings, complete with a green roof and solar panels along with many other energy-saving and eco-friendly functions and tagged with an economical cost, is a realistic and sustainable solution.          

Even for the venues, many are quite huge feats of accomplishment.  The Richmond Olympic Oval for example, has a roof made with pine beetle-bitten wood that had been discarded.  Imagine how many young trees could have been killed to build a structure spanning 100m x 200m.  Now, that’s how many trees were saved.   

Fine, there were definitely hardships along the way such as how they used an amount of money that exceeded their initial expectations and fine, they had hiccups here and there with protests.  However if you put all this aside and take a look at the big picture, with all the money and effort put into making this event possible not only benefiting the two weeks of Olympics, but also the future of the city and better the innovation for the world, I think the troubles are well worth the long-term result. 

It truly has met the criteria of sustainability, innovation, and being environmentally friendly with flying colors.  There are still some improvements that could be made, but it’s a great start.  It may be the end of the 2010 Winter Olympics, but a great start for innovation.  Good for you, Vancouver & VANOC.