When we set out this summer to find out what was the worst intersection in Metro Vancouver, it was both out of genuine curiosity and to prove a point—that terrifyingly bad infrastructure is all around us, no matter what corner of the region we live in.
After six rounds of voting, we still do not know why engineers and politicians keep designing unsafe roads, time and again, but we do know what 14,000 of you think is the worst intersection in all of Metro Vancouver.
It’s Main St & Kingsway & East 7th Ave in Mount Pleasant.
The Grand Loser: Main & 7th & Kingsway
It’s not hard to see why people dislike Main St & Kingsway & 7th Ave so much: it’s truly a terrible intersection for all road users.
Drivers can expect to be caught up in 128 crashes a year—more than one every three days!—that block the intersection and back traffic up for blocks on end. In fact, it’s the single worst intersection in the entire city in terms of crash volume.
Thousands of transit riders on the 3, 8 and 19 each day get stuck in gridlock as their buses crawl their way downtown. While there are bus lanes on Main St, they have weird hours most of the way that don’t help bus riders outside of a two-hour window. Thankfully, the city is finally proposing to make them all day, and our friends in Movement have a letter-writing tool to tell Council to act now.
Pedestrians trying to get across to reach the Mount Pleasant community and library, grab a bite at Budgie’s Burritos or go thrifting for vintage finds have to cram into a single crosswalk that crosses 12 lanes of traffic—because there’s no other safe crossing for two blocks to either the north or south.
Cyclists simply have no means to cross, with the city deciding to place a concrete barrier in the middle of Main St and deviating the 7th Ave (Off-Broadway) bike route all the way north to 5th Avenue. As any regular user of this route will tell you, the detour is not only highly circuitous and time-consuming, but it’s also marked by non-existent wayfinding in places.
It’s all the more jarring that the main intersection in the heart of a thriving commercial strip is designed not to be a great destination for people, but to funnel traffic in and out of downtown. While the clock tower in the middle of the intersection welcomes you to Mount Pleasant, the built infrastructure around it is anything but welcoming.
With Broadway closing at Main in January for subway construction, we think this intersection is only going to get worse. With Broadway blocked off for months, we expect to see 7th Avenue absorb most of Broadway’s traffic, raising alarm bells for pedestrians walking in the area and cyclists using the dangerously uncontrolled crossing of the Ontario Bikeway.
We hope that the City and Province are taking measures to mitigate these dangers, and will hold them to account if they don’t.
About the Bracket
Earlier this year, we asked our followers on Bluesky and Instagram to nominate their least favourite intersections and selected 32 of the scariest, nastiest, most confusing ones throughout the region for a community vote.
Across six rounds, we thinned out the nominees to crown a regional champion from each of our four sub-regions: East Van, the West Side, North of Fraser and South of Fraser.
In the penultimate round, you sent Vancouver’s triangular terror to face Richmond’s Sea Island spaghetti in the grand finale—a matchup won by the former, 64% to 36%.
Now What?
People often ask us why we picked these 32 intersections, and the truth is that there are a lot more terrible intersections than there were spots in our bracket—short of doing 40 rounds of voting. But we can demand better from all terrible intersections: let’s take action to demand better road safety from our elected officials, everywhere in Metro Vancouver.
With your help, Vision Zero Vancouver will continue to advocate to decision-makers to put people’s safety first when designing roadways, so that we can all walk, roll, drive or transit to our destinations in safety.
Vision Zero Vancouver 