Author: Patrick Johnstone

On Pipelines, Parks, and Rhetoric

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I could start this post apologizing for not writing more recently, but things are pretty crazy busy and… well.. most of my recent posts have been of the “haven’t written much lately” genre, so just read one of those if you come here for lame excuses.

I did stay up last night to see Stephen Harper talk to Peter Mansbridge. The take-away quote for me came when the Prime Minister suggested :

“But just because certain people in the United States would like to see Canada be one giant national park for the northern half of North America, I don’t think that’s part of what our review process is all about.”

First off, for those interested in the he art of rhetoric, this is a textbook example of a “Strawman Fallacy”. This is when you re-phrase your opponent’s argument using a deliberately extreme caricature of it. You then argue not against your opponent’s actual position, but against the extreme caricature of your own creation. The name comes from the idea of building up an effigy of your opponent, but make it of straw so that it is easy for you to defeat.

Like most logically fallacies, it is pulled out when you cannot refute your opponents’ actual position. Really, the only way it works is if his opponent falls for it, and tries to defend the Strawman position without realizing that it is an exaggerated version of their position.

So, just to prove it is a crappy Strawman, I’m going to do exactly that.

The Northern Gateway Pipeline has benefits to BC, no doubt. According to the Astroturf organization the Northern Gateway Alliance , these benefits can be counted as 3000 short-term jobs, 500 long-term jobs, and $1.2Billion in tax revenue over 30 years (that is $40Million a year). That is pretty impressive.

However, compare that to the benefits Alberta receives from its National Parks. According to the Albera government, just Alberta’s Rocky Mountain National parks provide almost 20,000 fulltime jobs (40x that of the Northern Gateway), $1.14 Billion in annual revenue, and $398 Million in government revenue every year (more than 10x the Northern Gateway).

I’m with Steve! It’s a no-brainer. Lets us stop the Northern Gateway Pipeline and open the Northern Gateway National Park. Have you seen that part of the Province? it is spectacular! One Peter Jackson movie, and we’re in gravy!

Even if it only sees 10% of the visitors of Banff, we will still be way ahead economically, and we don’t have to worry about the long-term environmental impacts, the oil tankers, the GHG emissions, or anything. Best thing is that this is sustainable in the long run, and it wouldn’t require us slowing down on Bituminous Sands extraction at all, as there are already plenty of places to ship the stuff. Or maybe we can start refining it domestically and see some value added, but I am digressing here…

OF course, I am being facetious (a little bit), but really, this just puts the lie to the biggest logical fallacy that is made by Stephen Harper here, and by his entire “you are with us, or you are radicals” crowd: the false dichotomy they create between environmental protection and economic development. I’m not just saying that both can exist simultaneously, I’m saying that they had better exist simultaneously.

Otherwise, what future do we have?

With Enbridge, or Against Us?

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 7 Comments.

The Environmental Assessment for the Northern Gateway pipeline project has started its public consultation stage. As is typical, the Harper Government has used this potentially-divisive event not to demonstrate leadership, but instead to draw sharp the divisions, and to demonstrate it doesn’t respect due process or the laws of the nation.

It started a few days ago when Steve declared that he was going to make sure radical groups with foreign funding don’t “hijack” the process. Now Steve may have his faults, but using language loosely is not one of them. Every message sent out by the PMO is carefully crafted to frame the discussion. Therefore, his choice to use the language of the War on Terror (“radical”,”foreign”,”hijack”) is designed to intentionally draw anyone who values environmental sustainability over the profits of Multi-national Oil Companies as non-Canadian, and not to be trusted. You are with Enbridge or you are against us.

Then he sent one of his less familiar minions, Joe Oliver, to sign a highly inappropriate and inflammatory “open letter”. The inflammatory part is obvious (read “radical ideological agenda”,”foreign special interest groups”, “radical groups”), but the inappropriate part comes from what he does for a living. As the Minister of Natural Resources and a member of the Conservative Cabinet, he is one of the people who will need to review and eventually approve or reject, this project: a job best done, in my humble opinion, after the data-gathering and the public hearings, and after the Joint Review Panel makes a recommendation. Actually it’s not just my opinion, it is the Law.

Given the nature of the open letter, how could anyone conclude the Joint Review Panel is anything but a sham process, when it is clear that the Federal Government as already made up its mind. You are with them, or you are against Enbridge.

Once again, Elizabeth May is the only one in Parliament standing up and speaking truth to power.

I keep on jumping on and off the Elizabeth May bandwagon, but with this open letter and her frighteningly frank comments coming out of Durban, I can see myself enjoying my current bandwagon seat for quite some time. I know many members of our Loyal Opposition feel the same way on this topic as May, but the realities of a large party system probably limit their ability to speak as clearly and truthfully as She does in response to John Oliver. Why, oh suffering Canadian Media, do we give Kevin O’Leary more air time than Elizabeth May? looking for inspiration in the vacuum left by Jack Layton? Read her blog. I digress…

Since he raised the spectre of “foreign special interest groups”, I might just agree with the concern expressed by Minister Oliver, except that all of those pejorative terms are so poorly defined. What is a “special interest group?”

Looking at the Joint Review Panel documents, one can actually see who is planning to hijack this process.

“Interveners” are interested stakeholders who are able to present written or oral evidence to the Panel, and to ask questions of other Interveners when they are presenting evidence. In essence, if you want to “hijack” the process, being an Intervener is the way to do it.

The Joint Review Panel lists 216 registered Interveners. Of those, 91 are private citizens, almost all from the northwest of British Columbia, or those most directly affected by both the positive and negative impacts of the proposed pipeline. There is really no way to know which of those are “for” and which are “against”, or which are just kind of curious. I suspect this group also includes small business owners who may have a vested interest one way or the other, or even journalists, bloggers, and local politico types who just want to take part in the conversation.

The Interveners list includes one labour union that has already expressed opposition to he project, and two academic institutes associated with Universities, who may be presenting evidence, or may just be interested in collecting data for research purposes.

Twelve of the Interveners are governments: BC, Saskatchewan, and a whole bunch of Municipalities. Except that, as Elizabeth May was quick to point out, the First Nations are also effectively governments, and there are no less than 48 First Nations groups listed as Interveners. I wonder if Minister Oliver suspects these as the source of “Foreign interference”?

If not, that leaves us with two more groups: Non-Profits (34) and Corporations and businesses (28). The first group is pretty diverse, including everyone from the T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation and the Douglas Channel Watch (whom I think we can safely say are opposed to the project) to oil-industry funded lobby groups like the Oil Sands Developers Group Association, the In Site Oil Sands Alliance, and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, whom we can be equally assured are in favour of the project. I will leave it to you to determine which Non-Profits are more likely to be well funded from abroad, and which are more likely to have the local community’s interests in mind.

Which leaves us with 28 Corporations and businesses. I am not going to presume that all of them are in favour of the pipeline, but seeing as they fall into two main categories: Oil Companies, and companies that contract to Oil Companies, I think the vast majority see oil pipelines as a good thing. Since Minister Oliver seemed specifically incensed by the untoward influence of foreign money, I am going to pass on calling out any Canadian companies (hey, they are Canadian, and Corporations are People too… give ‘em the voice!), and instead call attention to a few of the standouts:

ExxonMobil (Irving, Texas, annual revenue $383 Billion), and their subsidiary Imperial Oil, are listed as two separate Interveners.
BritishPetroleum (London, UK, annual revenue $309 Billion);
Total E&P (Courbevois, France, annual revenue $203 Billion);
ConocoPhillips (Houston, Texas, annual revenue $198 Billion);
Sinopec (China, annual revenue $197 Billion) as “SinoCanada Petroleum”;
Koch Industries (Wichita, Kansas, annual revenue $100 Billion) as “Flint Hills Resources”;
Inpex (Tokyo, Japan, annual revenue $16 Billion);
Daewoo International (Seoul, South Korea, annual revenue $13 Billion);
Kinder Morgan (Houston, Texas, annual revenues $12 Billion)
Japex (Tokyo, Japan, annual revenue $2.6 Billion) as “Japan Canada Oil Sands”;

So Severn Cullis-Suzuki and the Fort St. James Sustainability Group are going up against an organized group of foreign-owned companies with $1.4 Trillion (with a ”T”) in combined revenue, and our Prime Minister is more concerned about where the Environmental Groups money is coming from? Surely, this is parody.

As an aside, this morning on the radio business news, I hear Chris Carter stating that the high gasoline prices we are seeing now are only partially caused by high crude prices. The biggest reason for high and fluctuating prices is a chronic lack of refining capacity in North America leading to difficult-to-manage inventories.

This is something to talk about. Why are we spending billions setting up systems to export raw crude, when we could use the money to build the needed refining capacity? This would provide way more jobs, would increase the “value added” we receive from the Bituminous Sands, and could potentially lead to more stable fuel prices for Canadian businesses.

The question is, of course, rhetorical. Lower and more stable fuel prices, producing jobs in a relatively expensive labour market, increasing domestic value form Canada’s natural resources: none of these serve the purposes of the real decision makers in Ottawa, the Multi-national Oil Companies with offices in Calgary.

Saving Parkades – the original

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Editors note: I first posted this on December 18, 2011. but somehow (likely my ham-fisted Blogsy iPad Interface doofusness) it got lost. I posted a follow-up on the 26th of December, but with the context removed, the second post makes less sense, so here is the original post, repeated in exactitude (even though I have learned more about this subject since December 18th, I will post this as the original for posterity, then write something in the next few days to update the update of my update. Get it?  

There was apparently a Rally Thursday night to “Save the Parkade”. It was not well advertised outside of the Downtown Merchants, and I only heard of it through the blog of Adam Goss (oh, by the way, Adam Goss has a new blog – worth reading!) I am on the record about my feelings around the Parkade and the future of Front Street, so I won’t bore you here. But I was intrigued by the flyer information provided via Adam’s Blog. To a point:

“Downtown Merchants and Landlords have not seen any line of reasoning from city hall showing that removal of the Parkade or reduction in parking will improve business.”

Interesting, but I haven’t heard the City suggest it will improve business. They have said that the Parkade is underutilized, falling apart, and that repairing it will be expensive. There are however many of us who suggest that Downtown would benefit from being connected to the waterfront and from having a vibrant Front Street for commercial businesses, and removing the Parkade may facilitate those things.

“Merchants and landlords will lose over $6,000,000 in rents and personal income during the West Parkade demolition and Front Street realignment process.”

I am intrigued about where this number came from, and how it compares the “rents and personal income” that will come from having storefronts on Front Street.

“Removing 283 parking spaces and replacing them with only 36 much despised back in angle meter parking spaces will not be adequate for area prosperity.”

I guess I would return the question with asking how many empty parking spots are required in order to provide adequate prosperity? The studies on the Parkade have shown peak usage of less than 38% of the 741 spots: meaning that even after the above-mentioned changes are made, there will still be 200+ empty spots in the remaining half of the Parkade.

“Other than the East Parkade, there are no monthly or multiple hour parking spaces available for our workforce. Not everyone takes the train to work.”

As noted, there are still going to be 200+ unused spots in the East Parkade, and you can park all day for $5 at Douglas College (you don’t need to be a student), and you can park at the Quay. As to the ending non sequitor argument about trains, just how many cars is each employee planning to bring to work? And what incentives are you giving your employees to not drive to work, saving precious parking for your customers?

“The city has not implemented any long term plan to create decentralized parking spaces. In fact, most new developments have relaxed parking requirements.”

I agree with this statement. The City needs to develop a realistic plan for decentralized parking in Downtown New West before they remove the East Parkade. Clearly, the West Parkade is not needed (see empty space numbers above), but I think that knocking it down without a plan in place is bad planning. Removing it without a plan is silly, but so is dumping money into maintaining a bad piece of infrastructure that is not being used and is causing other negative effects. Will the merchants accept a plan that suggests that parking is currently adequate without the Parkade, if that is what the study finds?

“The parkade is a $20,000,000 revenue generating, downtown revitalizing, asset to save, not to destroy. Smart money would invest in its rehabilitation and enhancement.”

Where is this revenue number coming from? Surely the Downtown Parking Commission is not getting $20 Million from selling fewer than 200 parking spots a day. Clearly, the smart money is not in rehabilitation, but in planned removal.

“The parkade and Front Street are in need of a long term vision including noise abatement, safety, maintenance, beautification and enhancement.”

Agreed. A long-term vision for Front Street is needed. Part of that long-term vision will be evaluating whether last century’s parking solution makes sense over the next 20 to 50 years. Safety, maintenance, beautification and enhancement of Front Street will all be facilitated with the removal of the Parkade.

“The parkade was created by the merchants, paid by merchants and its fate and management should be controlled by merchants.”

Interesting argument. My understanding of the history of the Parkade is that it was built at the end of 1950s to coincide with the decline of Columbia Street as a destination when auto-oriented shopping centres began popping up in Coquitlam and Burnaby and other areas, and the Woodwards opened in Uptown. At the time, parking seemed to be the Bright Idea about how to develop a shopping area. Even in the 1960s, this didn’t work for Downtown, so more of a bad cure was applied, and the Parkade was expanded, and Columbia Street continued to decline. It wasn’t until SkyTrain arrived in the late 1980s that Columbia began to turn around, and the despised back in angle parking introduction of the Road Diet in the last few years has also made the street a better place to visit, walk, and shop. All along, the Parkade was underutilized, and never provided the boost to business for which it was designed.

I stand to be corrected, but I thought the Parkade was built by the City, not the merchants, although it was the merchants who lobbied the City to build it in the 50s, and lobbied to have it expanded in the 60s. It was the merchants who more recently recognized the Parkade was underutilized, and lobbied the City to advertise the Parkade as a park-and-ride destination, ironically complaining that we need more parking at the same time as trying to find ways to fill empty parking spots. Merchants are important, and addressing their needs is a fundamental duty of City Hall. However, the Downtown Merchants have no more or less right to decide the fate of a public resource than Residents or other community stakeholders do. So I hope what comes out of the Rally is a public conversation about the fate of the Parkade, not a confrontational keepit vs. killit debate that lacks rational analysis of the needs of all stakeholders.

I also think that there are other things the Downtown Merchants could direct their energy towards. While researching for this post, I ran across this interesting Masters Thesis on the topic of Columbia Street and potential for urban renewal. It is a good read, and since it is a few years old. It is good to see some of the recommendations coming out of it (changes to Hyack Square, the establishment of a Community Centre downtown) are already arriving.

Starting 2012 Off-line

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 3 Comments.
As has become custom, I have been using the year-end holiday season to recharge my batteries, chill out, relax, etc. This means a lot of reading, a lot of new learning, and very little writing. Along with the increasingly-frustrating ravings of Dr. Moore, I have been reading Master Transportation Plans, found a couple of interesting new on-line sources of better science around environmental issues, and have even been reading a bit of fiction: a rare luxury for me. So I have not been writing much.

However, once again, the News Leader asked me to contribute to the year-ending Looking Back / Looking Forward feature, on the topic of local environmental issues. I can’t help but feel 2011 was a good year locally for the environment, just as giant steps backwards were taken nationally and internationally. 

I’m not one prone to New Years Resolutions – my life is full enough of half-realized aspirations – but I do have some plans for 2012. Obviously, the Master Transportation Plan and Pattullo Bridge public consultations will be meaningful and interesting. There are a couple of big captial projects at the Royal City Curling Club that have been on the back burner too long, and I will relish being the “Past President” of the NWEP, seeing what exciting new directions the group takes under the refreshed Board and crazy-smart and outspoken new President. I also need to take a little more analytical approach to my gardening, the shotgun approach is getting frustrating. Oh, and finish the basement renos, and ride my bike more, and replace the back fence, and spend more time on Saturna, and stop using the car to commute so often, and get a day of curling practice in every week to work on my draw weight,  and… what was I saying about half-realized aspirations?

Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout Review – Part 5. On the topic of B.S.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.
As previously noted, Dr. Patrick “Sensible Environmentalist” Moore is a big fan of the Alberta Bituminous Sands. I call them that, because as Dr. Moore points out in his book, “Tar Sands” is a misnomer, as they don’t actually contain “tar” in the technical sense of the word. If we follow his footnote reference (I kid you not, Wikipedia is the actual reference he uses), we discover that they don’t contain oil either, in the technical sense of the word, so “Oil Sands” is an equal misnomer. Therefore I will call them what they are: Bituminous Sands, or B.S. for short. 
You see, “tar” is a highly viscous liquid hydrocarbon mixture originally extracted from coal, but more typically now extracted from petroleum. “Oil” is a less viscous liquid hydrocarbon mixture originally extracted from whales, and now more commonly extracted from petroleum. Since we are in a definition mood, bitumen is a naturally-occurring amalgam of numerous polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, with high sulfur content and relatively high concentrations of various metals (such as chromium, lead, nickel, mercury) and some non-metals (such as arsenic and selenium), in reduced (and therefore more bioavailable and toxic) states due to the anoxic conditions in the bitumen, but maybe that is too much detail. Dr. Moore’s fandom of B.S. is no secret, but in his book, he really lays out his best argument for B.S. development. Even in a book full of muddled thinking and logical fallacies, this argument may stand above all for it’s sheer absurdity:

“To put things in perspective, consider when a gas station spills oil or gasoline from a leaky underground tank. The site is declared “toxic real estate ” and must be cleaned up, often at the cost of millions of dollars. The oil sands [sic] in Albetra are a massive area of toxic soils, and the companies that operate in the oil sands [sic] are removing oil [sic] from the soil, on a very grand scale, making a profit selling the oil [sic] as a transportation fuel” Page 256

Now, I am no expert. I only took post-graduate courses in sedimentology from SFU and Petroleum Geology from the University of Illinois, and spend a few years working in the remediation of hydrocarbon-impacted soils and groundwater throughout BC, so by all means defer to Dr. Moore’s Ph.D in Ecology when it comes to these matters, but I contend B.S. extraction has almost exactly nothing to do with the remediation of fuels and oils spilled from underground fuel tanks.

The reason we clean up after fuel tanks spill or leak into the ground is because automobile fuels (gasoline and diesel) contain a variety of monocyclic and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, along with a variety of halogenated hydrocarbon compounds. Many of these compounds are soluable in water (meaning they enter groundwater and flow towards drinking water sources or fisheries habitat) and/or volatile (meaning they evaporate at common surface temperatures, and can therefore move through the soil into basements, buildings, or confined spaces). These are generally bad things, because many of these substances are either carcinogenic or toxic to people, plants, or animals. They also cause reactions in soil and groundwater than can result in the reduction of metals found in the soil, ruining groundwater quality, or potentially increasing the toxicity of the metals in groundwater. Add to this waste oils and antifreeze, octane boosters, anti-microbial preservatives, fuel system solvents that “keep your engine running clean!”, and your average gas station has a lot of nasty things that can accumulate in the soil and groundwater. 
It is important to note that the gasoline (and, to a lesser extent, diesel) you put in your car is not a natural substance that is extracted from B.S. like one might extract moonshine from a pile of sopping grain mash. Instead, the B.S. is subject to chemical washes, solvents, thermal and/or catalytic cracking and distillation. Various substances are then added to stabilize the resultant fuel, to stop it from freezing, pre-ignition, gelling, separating, or rotting when exposed to oxygen and/or water. Very few of these things would you want collecting as vapor in you basement, or entering your drinking water supply, or corroding the water or gas pipes in your front yard. Therefore, it is often a good idea to “clean up” after a leaky gasoline tank. More than a good idea, if you are in an urban area and/or the leak migrates to your neighbours property, it is the Law.
Even then, Dr. Moore might be interested to learn that, increasingly, the most logical and efficient way to deal with gas station contaminated sites is not to physically clean them up, but to use a “risk-based” approach. Here, all or some of the actual contamination is left in the ground, because the Investigator has determined that the contamination is stable, and there is no practical pathway to human or ecological harm. If (for example) the hydrocarbons are 15 metres down below relatively impermeable soils, are slow moving, and are 2 km from the nearest surface water or drinking water source, then they may not constitute a risk to anyone or anything if left in the ground to naturally decompose. Sometimes systems are installed to pump air down to the contaminants, to hasten that natural decomposition, and in pretty much every case, the person responsible for the contamination has to monitor it to make sure this “no risk” condition doesn’t change. The point is that it is safer to just leave that stuff down there than to dig it up, truck it around, and find a facility to either treat or dispose of it. 
Which brings us to B.S. extraction.
Contrary to popular belief, most of the B.S. is not sitting there on the ground waiting to be scooped up. If it was, then it is unlikely that there would be much to extract, as natural processes such as rainwater dilution and organic and non-organic decomposition would have caused it all to go away over the millions of years since the bitumen migrated into the Mesozoic and Cenozoic sediments in which it is trapped from the Paleozoic rocks which are it’s original source. The reason it is preserved in that younger “host rock” is that there is an overlying “cap” of impermeable sediments covering it. Except for a few small, local “seeps” where the bitumen actually comes to the surface, you either have to dig for it, or process it in the ground with heat or steam, and pump it to the surface. 
Since this impermeable surface cap is generally more than 50m thick, and since there is, therefore, no reasonable pathway to human health impacts or ecological health impacts if the B.S. we’re left where it was, most competent Contaminated Sites Professionals, when presented with an Athabaskan Bituminous Sands type scenario, would recommend leaving the contaminated soils in place, a limited annual monitoring program, and perhaps minor risk-mitigation measures such as burying the “seeps” under impermeable caps, or trap-and-treat at the seeps, and restricting the extraction of impacted groundwater as a drinking water source. It would be the most responsible, cost-effective, and lowest-impact approach.
Compare this to what is happening today at the B.S. This safely-tucked-away bitumen is being either scooped up (after removing and setting aside the protective overlying cap) and then treated with solvents and/or having hot water run through it, and is being sifted and sorted in extremely energy-intensive ways. The sand is then returned to the hole, but it is not “clean”. At a contaminated site, the sand used to fill an excavation must be tested to not itself contain contamination. As the extraction methods used at the B.S. are far from perfect, there is no way the sand byproduct would meet Contmainated Sites Regulations standards. 
The other wastes – mostly water, fine sediments, and residual solvents – are dumped into vast open-air settling ponds, where volatiles evaporate off, heavy metals collect on the sediments, and leakage into the surrounding ecosystem is a certainty. There is currently no long-range plan to manage these ponds.
Alternately, “in-situ” methods are used when the B.S. is too deep to economically dig out – if the protective impermeable cap keeping the B.S. from harming people and the environment is too thick to feasibly strip off. In this case, solvents, steam, hot water or even hot oil are pumped down to liquefy and volatalize the B.S., then pressure used to pump them through the ground to extraction wells. The same settling ponds for waste water and sediments are used, but this adds the bonus of mucking up the groundwater systems for large areas around the extraction zones. 
You can argue B.S. extraction is better or worse than conventional oil extraction, or risky deep sea drilling, but you cannot truthfully argue that it is the same thing as cleaning up a contaminated gas station site. 
I wish this terrible argument was anomaly in this book, but it isn’t. Dr. Moore’s Confession is so chock-full of bad thinking, logical fallacy, post-hoc rationalization, and straight-up bullshit, that it is hard to read without verbally responding to it while reading. My better half has asked me to stop reading it in her presence as my guffaws and invocations disturb our quiet time together. The best feature I have found about this book so far I that it is soft-covered and printed on pulpy paper, so it causes very little damage to anything more valuable than it when tossed in rage across the room.

Saving Parkades – the sequal

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 3 Comments.

It is worse than I thought. This story expands on the Downtown Business Improvement Associations rally to save the Parkade that I blogged about last week. 

It is not just that the BIA wants to save the Parkade, some of them also want the bike lanes and back-in angle parking gone from Columbia, all in the effort to – you guessed it – get traffic moving. 
I have already talked about the Parkade, and don’t want to be more repetitive on the topic. However, Dr. Shannon from the BIA does make a few interesting points. 

First, he has repeated the claim that the Parkade was built by the Merchants, and I honestly have not been able to find any records of this on-line. Can anyone provide a reference for me on this? I’m not disputing it, but am just curious about the history.

Second, his acknowledgement of, and immediate dismissal of, the “eyesore” status of the Parkade is interesting. “Who sees it?”, he asks rhetorically. I tell you who sees it: every person who visits Downtown New Westminster. Every person who goes to the new Pier Park. Everyone who goes the the Discovery Centre or the River Market. Everyone who drives across the Pattullo Bridge or rides the Skytrain over from Surrey. How many of those people, you think, see that and think to themselves ” Hmmm… That looks like a nice place to go shopping”? 

Again, I agree with Dr. Shannon that the Parkade should not be removed without a plan to accommodate the Downtown Merchants’ realistic parking needs, but with the end goal of removing the Parkade to improve our waterfront and all of Downtown. Maybe instead of seeking legal opinions, the Merchants should spend their money on doing a practical parking needs assessment, and coming up with ideas on how to manage their parking needs (or even, gasp, look at ideas to promote Downtown New Westminster to the thousands of people who pass through each day on Skytrain, or to the hundreds of thousands that are only a short Skytrain ride away?) 

The BIA approach to Columbia Street really has me scratching my head. I cannot believe that the members want Columbia changed back to how it was 10 years ago, just as Downtown is seeing the benefits of the road diet. Is the organizational memory so short that they don’t remember a congested 4-lane Columbia as even less pleasant than a congested 2-lane Columbia? Do they really want to step back to the 1980s? 

As is said before, I just don’t get the thinking. The Parkade was a failed attempt to keep a 1950s business model (mom driving the family car down Main Street to stop at the green grocer and the butcher while dad was at work) alive, as shopping centers and malls in the suburbs took over. This model is not coming back. Malls with ample free parking exist. Big Box Retail with ample free parking exists – even here in New Westminster, as evidenced by our City Councilors lining up to cut the ribbon on the new Lowes. 

So who are these customers the BIA are trying to attract? What do they have that the Mall and the Big Box doesn’t have? What will bring people down to New Westminster’s Downtown in the 21st Century? Surely, it isn’t the Parkade.

Hare Krishmas!

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.
There will be a serious reduction in blogging for the next week or two. It’s the holidays, days are short, and you really should be talking to your family, friends, and neighbors, not checking on on a grumpy blogger. I should be talking to mine, instead of being a grumpy blogger.
If you really can’t get enough of reading my diatribes, be sure to check out the Year End edition of the News Leader, where I will be answering a few questions about the year in review and the year to come, along with some other New West rabble. 
In the mean time, I will be reading transportation plans, checking out my copy of Dr. Patrick Moore’s Ph.D. thesis, sipping scotch, and generally enjoying life. 
And, early in the New Year, I will resume starting sentences – or whole paragraphs – with conjunctions, and will pull out a whole new quiver of prepositions to end sentences with. 
Oh, and I think I am going to finally change the name of this Blog – the  “Green” thing is so 2010. 
Finally, can I show off my present?
Happy 2012 everyone.

Master Transportation Plan – the starting point

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

In preparation for New Wesminster’s Master Transportation Plan public consultations, I have been reading The transportation planning documents of other Cities. Yes, I really am that kind of a geek. 

I have been looking at various types of plans. As many local municipalities are in the same jurisdictional regime, they provide the best comparisons for what we might want to see in New West. Naturally, some cities like Surrey, Langley Township, Richmond and Coquitlam have greater growth opportunities for their road networks, as they have green space to be plowed over (if desired), and oodles of 60’s strip malls that can be repurposed (with bulldozers) into more comprehensively-planned neighbourhoods. 
New Westminster does not have that luxury. 
Being the oldest City in BC means that we are built-out, and barely a sidewalk can be widened without impacting someone’s property or eroding already-precious green space. Vancouver (although obviously larger, and not completely bereft of 60’s strip malls) and the City of North Vancouver are better models for New Westminster – they are basically built-out and they have to accommodate a lot of through-traffic on major routes. I would throw the City of Langley into that mix, but that City is such a mess planning-wise, that their example should only be a cautionary one. I have also been looking farther afield, at model cities like Portland and New York, where visionary transportation planning has remarkably increased livability in the last decades. There is even some interesting stuff going on in Toronto, despite Rob Ford’s ongoing rally against rationality. 
 However, I thought I would look at New Westminster’s own existing Transportation Plan, developed in 1998. This plan was to set the course for transportation planning for 15 years – up to 2013 – and beyond. It struck me, sitting on the Canada Line on my way to work, reading a .pdf of the plan on my iPad, listening to the Decemberists on my mp3 player, how far away 2013 must have sounded to the people putting this plan together in 1998. I’m surprised there aren’t more mentions of Jet Packs or hoverboards.
Instead, the plan is pretty rational, and brings out many good ideas. What is notable is how the problems in 1998 are basically the same as the problems in 2012: how to accommodate so much through traffic; how to deal with all the trucks; how to encourage mode shift; how to leverage the advantages of the SkyTrain stations; and (especially) how to pay for it all. Some good solutions were found, some of the improvements we have seen in New Westminster in the last decade are a result of this plan. Some other aspects remain a work in progress. div>The Executive Summary of the report (linked to above) is worth commenting upon.
On the third page, the livability objectives are outlined. All sound good, but one really stands out to me. 

“Work toward the principle of no new added road capacity for vehicles passing through the City”

This really speaks to the UBE discussion. Clearly, the UBE was all about increased capacity for vehicles passing through the City. Come to think of it, this principle also places the discussion about the Pattullo Bridge replacement into context. Any plan to replace the Pattullo with a 6-lane structure will clearly violate this principle. It is also interesting that this principle stands in contrast with other ideas in the plan, such as the part under “goods movement” where one of the Key Actions is to:

“Encourage early implementation of the Stormont-McBride connector and the Tree Island bridge”

There is also a good guiding principle, also on page 3, on Cost management that sates:

“Increase user’ share of transportation costs, and decrease Taxpayers’ share of costs”

Which to me sounds like a pretty strong statement towards road pricing, and the tolling of the Pattullo Bridge replacement. In fact, on page 11, under Affordable Transportation Services, there is a long argument for moving towards ore of a user-pay principle for roads, including road pricing and tolling. 

Perhaps most interesting is the timeline for the plan, laid out on page 12. There we can see that many of the plans leading to 2013 were realized, with a few notable exceptions. It seems the entire discussion of High Occupancy Vehicle measures has disappeared.
Also, there are several areas in this plan where measurables are mentioned, and we seem to be in only thinking about measuring them as we go into the 2012 plan. From 56% of all traffic being through-traffic, to 50% of trucks being trough-traffic, to plans to collect bicycle travel data: it seems updating this information has lagged somewhat. 
There is also mention of Parking Management Programs, Access Management principles for commercial corridors, and Trip Reduction Programs, which seem to have not found the light of day. 
Still, if the City were to fully implement every good idea of the 1998 plan, we would be 90% of the way towards a great plan for 2012. Of course, in the era of Peak Oil, Climate Change, and twisted TransLink governance, we need to make some firm decisions about what we need for our City for the next 15 years. I just don’t think Jet Packs or hoverboards are going to solve our issues. 

Hitch

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.
He was a great intellect, a great writer, and a great drinker. The world is a lesser place now that Hitch is gone. With he an Hunter Thompson gone, are there any journalists left?
I cannot say I agreed with every opinion he held, but I don’t think I ever found flaw in his arguments. He was like Rex Murphy, but smart.  
My favorite Hitch quote was his reaction to a Fundamentalist Christian who, lacking sophisticated physiological knowledge, suggested that his esophageal cancer was some sort of directed punishment from God for using his throat to blaspheme:

“My so-far uncancerous throat . . . is not at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed.”

Amen, Mr. Hitchens.

Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout Part 4: Moore and Nukes

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I opened up my analogue version of the Walrus and on page 28, there is “Patrick Moore, Ph.D, Environmentalist and Greenpeace Co-Founder” staring back at me from a glossy full-page ad extolling the environmental responsibility of the Alberta tar sands. His most recent shill for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers got me thinking it has been a while since I picked up his book. My seemingly endless review continues.

After much of the history and basic philosophy is dispatched, Moore’s book becomes a rather disjointed discussion of various environmental topics, and his “sensible environmentalist” approach to these issues.

His discussion of Energy starts with a rather nonsensical statement:

Motion requires energy, so without energy, time would stand still. (pg. 204)

Which reminds me of the Calvin & Hobbes comic where Calvin thought time had stopped, but it turned out his watch battery had died, but I digress.

His rather lengthy dismissal of most sustainable energy sources can be summarized into a few points: they are untested, unreliable and would require huge government subsidies to compete with what we have.

In many ways these very expensive technologies [wind and solar energy] are destroying wealth as they drain public and private investment away from more affordable and reliable energy-generating systems. (pg. 221)

I’m not sure how putting money into sustainable infrastructure constitutes “destroying wealth”, in fact I’m not even sure what “destroying wealth” means. He mixes this with even sillier arguments: solar panels are made of aluminum, and that takes energy to produce! How sustainable is that?

This is mostly preamble to his long argument about the wonders of Nuclear Power. Before I get too deep into it, I need to point out that I am not a reflexively “anti-nuclear” environmentalist. I think nuclear energy probably has a role in responsible energy policy, if it can be done safely with appropriate accounting for its waste streams. Those are, admittedly, very big “if”s.

I remember my first experiences writing reports and proposals in my life as a Consultant working for a major engineering firm. After interpreting some data, I wrote something along the lines of “the source of pollutant X cannot be determined”. My boss chuckled when reviewing it, and said “in Engineering, we never tell the client something cannot be done. It can always be done. We just need to outline for them the costs related to doing it, and they can decide if it should be done.” I asked what we do if the request really is impossible, and he remarked something along the lines of “impossible just means the technology isn’t there yet. So we budget the cost of developing the required technology”. I came to learn this is how engineers think. Bless them, the sorry bastards they are.

But along those lines, I do believe nuclear energy can be made safe (it is already way safer than getting energy from oil or coal), it is a question of costs and developing the appropriate technology. At this point, we have to decide whether that is a good investment in our money, or if the alternatives make more sense for our investment dollars.

However, this is where Dr. Moore’s argument falls apart. There hasn’t been a new nuclear plant built in the United States in decades, but it isn’t due to no-nukes fear mongering or radiation risks or a lack of political desire as Dr. Moore suggests, but due to something much more banal: economics.

Simply put, Nuclear Plants are too expensive to buildand too expensive to maintain. Currently, there is no business model to produce nuclear power capacity. Without significant government subsidies, like the ones Moore decries for truly sustainable energy alternatives like wind, geothermal and solar, there would be no nuclear industry at all. The people holding nuclear plants back are not environmentalists, they are accountants.

You wouldn’t know this from reading Moore’s book. On page 217, he decries Germany for subsidizing solar energy production to the order of $3 Billion, then, 33 pages later and seemingly unaware of the irony, Moore is extolling President Obama for providing more than $50 Billion in subsidies to Nuclear power industries. I guess you can’t “destroy wealth” by nuking it.

This pales in comparison to his silly arguments around radiation risk. I have written extensively on the poor understanding in the popular media of radiation risk, mostly around the unfounded local concern about impacts of Fukushima. Moore did not have the benefit of writing after Fukushima, but his argument around radiation risk is so Homer Simpsonian in it’s idiocy (and remember, I basically agree with him on Nuclear energy), all I can do is quote it verbatim from page 240:

…fire can be used to Burn down a City and kill Thousands of people. Should we ban fire for cooking and heating? Car bombs are made with fertilizer, diesel oil, and a car. Should we ban those three rather useful things? Guns can be used for hunting and for defending one’s country or for committing genocide?

Unfortunately, his argument for salmon farming is no more nuanced.