Cole's Notes - The Sunday Journalist

From the Calgary Herald Suffering tunnel vision? Look, up in the air! It's a bird, it's a plane -- no, it's a bunch of bicyclists pedalling madly over people's heads. Instead of building castles in the air, architect Christ Hardwicke wants to put tunnels there. Hardwicke's brainchild, Velo-City , involves a maze of glass tunnels suspended over downtown streets, through which cyclists could zip to work without running interference with pesky cars, buses, pedestrians and LRTs. Sounds like an eyesore to us, but then what do we know? Velo-City placed third recently in a winter-city design competition sponsored by Toronto's DesignExchange Gallery. It's hard to imagine why any city would want to uglify itself with tunnels strung everywhere above the streets, sort of like the old pneumatic tube system used for sending documents between offices, but not to worry. The cost would probably be so prohibitive that it's unlikely any city council would ever do mo...