Residents of Strathcona and other East Vancouver neighbourhoods were out in force Monday morning for a festive protest against plans to demolish the city’s Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts without proper traffic-calming measures on roads such as Prior Street.

More than 200 people gathered at the intersection of Prior and Hawks Avenue, accompanied by a live band, children, dogs, parents with strollers and other residents. Participants repeatedly used a pedestrian-operated traffic light to cross busy Prior Street.

Many carried signs with slogans such as “Why Would Any Chicken Cross This Road?” and “Prior Street is a Residential Street. We Live Here!”

“We’re doing an April Fool’s-themed protest to let the city know that we won’t be played for fools,” said Pete Fry, chair of the Strathcona Residents’ Association.

Fry said Strathcona residents are not against the removal of the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts, but city plans do not fully take into account what will happen to traffic east of Main Street.

In particular, he said, residents are looking for traffic-calming measures along Prior and Venables all the way east to Victoria Drive. They would include a speed reduction on Prior to 30 km/h, the street narrowed to two lanes of through traffic, and trucks moved to Malkin/National.

Last July, Mayor Gregor Robertson said the city would make “immediate traffic improvements to Prior Street, including reinstating parking and exploring speed bumps and other traffic-calming measures.”

In a meeting with residents in February, city staff showed a revised plan that did not have any traffic-calming measures for Prior, Fry said.

“We want to remind the mayor of the commitment he made in July of 2012 for immediate traffic-calming measures on Prior,” he said.

Graham Elvidge, who has lived on Prior for nine years, said the street was never meant to handle the volume or speed of traffic coming off the viaducts, built as part of an attempt to build a freeway through East Vancouver. Prior is not the proper width, nor does it have adequate setbacks for a major arterial, he said.

“Prior is a little community street that is being forced to do duty as an arterial,” he said. “It spent the first 75 years of its life as a little street — and spent the last 40 years having to deal with a really bad decision to build the viaducts.”

What has happened, he said, is that Prior now cuts through Strathcona and divides most of its residents from the neighbourhood’s major green space, Strathcona Park, and from the neighbourhood’s community gardens known as Cottonwood Gardens.

kevingriffin@vancouversun.com