Green Cone Math

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 7 Comments.
I’m not sure why I am being drawn into this…but an anonymous commenter has challenged the sustainability of the Green Cone, because it is made of plastic. It is a silly non-sequitur, and a bit of a strawman,, and it seems to be coming from a drive-by troll, but our purpose is to educate…

According to Metro Vancouver’s waste surveys, 40% of household waste (by mass) is compostable organics. That means, of the average Metro Vancouver household’s 834kg of annual garbage, about 334kg is organic material that will compost. Notably, some organics, like fabrics and leather, do not readily compost, so they are not included in this 40%, nor are things like paper that do compost, but are classified under “recyclables”.


Read that again. The “average” Metro Vancouver household puts a third of tonne of compostables to the curb every year.

The vast majority of the rest of what goes to the curb is recyclable through the blue-box program or through the City’s recycling centre. Therefore, through recycling and composting, we can significantly reduce the amount of trash that goes to landfill or WTE. Every kilogram of trash we divert from the garbage truck, we save tax dollars used to pay tipping fees to dispose of the trash, we save the expense of moving garbage about, we reduce the need to burn diesel, we reduce the negative environmental impacts of trash incinerators and landfill leachate, we save landfill space. So can we agree that indiscriminately throwing trash to the curb is not a sustainable activity?

However, not all compostable organics are suited for the back-yard garden composter. Things like meat, bones, milk products, and fat get really stinky as they rot, and attract rats and other pests. They also encourage the production of methane, or sulphur compounds that we generally want to avoid both for the ecosystem of the compost, and for greenhouse gas reasons. Weeds like chickweed or creeping buttercup, when placed in your garden compost, will spread to new areas of your garden when you apply the compost. Therefore, the traditional backyard compost (where most of my kitchen scraps go) is unsuited for these wastes.

We have three options to manage this stuff not suited for the traditional garden compost:

Option 1: We put it in our new Clean Green Organics bin, provided by the City. The City then takes this material and ships it to a commercial composting company. There the material is shredded and composted in a high-oxygen environment, to reduce the production of methane and sulphur gasses, and is made back into commercial-grade compost, used mostly in parks and other City gardens. The reason the City does this is simple: they pay about half the tipping fees for this material than they do for “regular” garbage going to the landfill or incinerator. Therefore, your garbage utility tax goes down.

Option 2: We throw it in the trash with everything else. It then either ends up in the landfill or at the trash incinerator. At the landfill, it starts to rot very quickly, so we bury it fast to keep the smell and all down. Once buried, the bacteria that do the rotting deplete the mass of oxygen very quickly, and anaerobic processes take over. This causes acidification of the fluids, and makes the residual metals and manufactured hydrocarbons in the waste much more bioavailable (“toxic”), and much more mobile. We call that stuff “leachate”. We need to spend a bunch of money and resources trapping and treating the leachate so it doesn’t kill fish, birds, people, etc. If it goes to the incinerator, it introduces a bunch of water, sulphur, and trace metals to the fuel cycle, leading to less efficient combustion, and more technical difficulty preventing the production of things like dioxins and furans. These things can be managed, but only with the expenditure of money and resources. Therefore, either way, your garbage utility tax goes up.

3: we do what Conservatives always suggest: we take personal responsibility for our own situation, and instead of relying on the “nanny state” or the “suffering taxpayer”, we simply install a Green Cone in our back yard and throw the small proportion of organics that would foul our composter into there instead. We remove the personal need for Clean Green Organic waste collection, we reduce the collective need for expensive incinerators or landfill technology, we save the poor, beleaguered taxpayer money.

All for the price of about 10kg of plastic. Oh, and the Green Cone is made of 100% recycled plastics, and is 100% recyclable with today’s plastic recycling technology. “Anonymous” suggested it would be destroyed by the sun within 8.3 years, but it is guaranteed for 10 years, and there are many of them out there in the world that have been functional for more than 20 years.

Again, I like the math of the Green Cone. It looks good on paper. However, part of the purpose of my having one is to evaluate how useful and practical it really is. I will report back.

Green cone update.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 3 Comments.

We have had the Green Cone in the ground for a little less than a month now. Still waiting.

For the first week or two, we threw all of our kitchen scraps into the Cone: vegetables meat, bones, and a bit of garden weeding. Mostly, I wanted to build a little “reservoir” of waste for the bacteria, nematodes, worms, or whatever to start eating. I sprinkled some starter on every once in a while. It didn’t take long until the “basket” was more than half full, so we cut back to only non-compostables (meat, cheese, etc.), and started throwing the veggie waste back into our garden compost. From this point forward, the plan is to only use the Cone for stuff we don’t want in our composter (stinky stuff like meat, and weeds we collect from the garden that we don’t want in our new soil)

Apparently heat is our friend, and that is why the recommend placing for the cone is in a sunny spot. Unfortunately, we were loading the cone during a week of near-record cold. Temps dipped to the negative double digits, and there was snow on the ground. These seem like less-than-ideal conditions for digestion of the waste, so we may have to wait a bit before we see the volume of material go down. But something is happening, as there is some warmth when you open the Cone to fill it, and snow did not accumulate on the Cone even after a week of really cold temperatures. There is also visible condensation on the Cone on moist mornings. There is no smell next to the closed Cone, and only a hint of garbage smell when you stick your head into the gaping maw of the open Cone.

This morning, we had the first evidence that our regularly scheduled evening visitors have noticed the Cone. A few of the rocks I placed around the cone have been displaced, and something (either our local resident raccoon clan or our local resident skunk) did a little exploratory dig along the side of the cone. The plastic wall and the lip at the bottom of the Cone quickly frustrated them. If I know anything about skunks and raccoons, they will dig a couple of times, and if not rewarded with food, they will file the Cone, stinky or otherwise, under “not a food source”, and stop noticing it. The cobble-sized rocks I put around it will probably help, as they really increase the digging effort. Hopefully they will be bored of the cone by the time the spring plants come up.

Hopefully it will warm up by then as well, and we will start to see some hot digestion action.

Why Can’t we be Freinds?

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The Business community and the Environmental community are often painted as enemies, battling for the hearts and minds of Canadians. This is based on, and perpetuates, the myth that our society must choose between giving a rats ass about our environment, and putting food on the table.

This is obviously a false dichotomy.

The Board of Change is an example that flies in the face of that old conventional model of environment vs. business. In New Westminster, the Downtown Business Improvement Area has reached out to the NWEP, hoping to work together on some local environmental initiatives. Businesses in Sapperton recently took part in a Zero Waste Challenge, recognizing that being “greener” about how they manage their waste saves them disposal costs, and helps with the bottom line.

But shades of grey don’t work for some people. Some just like to live with the myth that we have to choose between a greener world and having jobs. Unfortunately, it is these narrow-minded, frightened types who dominate our national “economics” discourse. The Dismal Science is too often represented by people like the Vancouver Sun’s Harvey Enchin.

Have a look at two recent opinions he published, Both in the same month, both with the same theme: Business (as usual) good, environment bad.

First, his review of a report that clearly lays out the benefits of the AirCare Program results in his dismissal of the entire report, and of the hugely successful program, because AirCare is, apparently, a hassle.

Clearly he had this thesis goingi n, because he had to pick and choose from the report pretty carefully to argue his point.

Harvey notes that “Lower Mainland air quality is excellent, no thanks to the program, but to a growing proportion of cleaner vehicles on the roads”, but in reality, 20% of the reduction in airborne hydrocarbons (HC) and Nitrogen Oxides (NOx) is directly attributable to the AirCare Program, and the program has reduced the emission of benzene and other toxic mono-and poly-cyclic hydrocarbons by more than 40%. He also fails to recognize that the AirCare program is partially responsible for the accelerated introduction of a newer vehicle fleet in the province.

He is quick to point out the $45 Million dollar cost is born by drivers (well, who else should bear it, Mr. Conservative, the taxpayer? Carbon Tax? The automobile industry?), then links this idea to the 114 BCGEU jobs at Air Care. But in reality, the main beneficiaries are not the BCGEU members, it is the independent small businessmen running (for the most part, non-union) AirCare repair shops, as the $45 million figure includes the $35 Million in repair costs motorist pay to comply with the program. What is doesn’t include is the increased new car sales this program generates: more benefits to the independent businessman, and the Auto Industry in general.

Harvey also writes the howler: “An additional claim that the lifetime cancer risk would be reduced by 1.57 per cent through 2020 if AirCare were to continue is little more than a rounding error”. I don’t expect an Economist to know much about Human Health Risk Assessment. Far from being “rounding error”, a 1.57% increase in the chance of getting cancer is equal to the risk attached to getting more than 150 chest x-rays. A 1.57% increase in the chance of getting cancer means that 70,000 more people in BC getting cancer by 2020. Rounding error indeed.

He complains about the cost per tonne of removing these emissions by AirCare. He (mistakenly?) confuses the cost/tonne estimate of removing toxic contaminants through the AirCare program ($5000) with the cost/tonne of removing CO2. The report clearly spells out how the cost / tonne of removed toxins is significantly lower than other programs condidered (e.g. Bus upgrades, Park and Ride lots, cleaner locomotives) and has the extra benefit of not costing the taxpayer anything (as most of the programs would) or inconveniencing industry (who will therefore be able to afford to buy Harvey more lunches).

He (confusedly?) compares this cost to some random number for carbon-capture-and-storage, which he puts at $45-$65 per tonne. A number he must have pulled out of his …uh…tailpipe, as the Alberta Government has already invested $2Billion in CCS and have yet to store a single molecule. (There were some US estimates that there would need to be a carbon market at about $60/tonne to make CCS economically feasible). Of course, none of this would have anything to do with reducing CO2 emissions from the tailpipes of cars… It is a red herring he is throwing in there to make this look like a considered “economics” argument. Lazy, and silly.

The Air Care program costs taxpayers nothing. It adds 0.3% to the overall Provincial Auto Sales industry annual revenue, in other words, compared to what we spend in cars already, it is “rounding error”. For that we get the most cost-effective means of reducing toxic emission we know, a newer, safer vehicle fleet, and we support independent small business men at the rate of $35 million a year. The, a’hem, economics look good on this one to me.

But Harvey thinks it is a hassle. Tough luck, avoid the hassle and ride a bike.

In the same month, he pumps out this bizarre, one-sided account of the benefits of the Tar Sands, not even acknowledging that there may be any negatives related to such a good story.

His completely myopic analysis of the Tar Sands is simply an embarrassment. A long list of the amount of money being invested (no mention of the massive taxpayer subsidies), Royalties paid (no mention that they are amongst the lowest in the world), jobs created in Fort McMurray (no mention of the lack of social development to coincide with the growth), international investment (no mention of how this hurts our international reputation), summed up with a long-term rosy forecast (no mention of the environmental legacy). He even got a partisan dig in on Obama, completely out of context. Why was Al Gore spared? .

The whole thing got me thinking. Why limit ourselves to dirty oil? Just for kicks, I had a little fun with Harvey’s Tar Sands column and the “find and replace” function in my word processor. Here is Harvey Enchin’s take on the drug trade, translated from his November 24 editorial in The Vancouver Sun. Imagine a world where this was the normal discourse…

World drugs consumption of cocaine, opium, pot, meth, and ecstasy fell by 1.1 per cent last year, the first decline since 1982. But the DEA might want to postpone their celebration. The decline was the result of recession, not conservation, mainly affecting North America and Europe. Drugs use soared in developing nations; indeed, it doubled in China, with cocaine retaining its position as the No. 1 drugs source.

Once the economic recovery gains momentum, drugs-consumption growth should resume its vigorous ascent.

This is good news for Colombia, and particularly for Medellin and Cali, which are blessed with bountiful reserves of cocaine and opium. Of course, the main repository of wealth is Medellin’s coca fields, which have drawn global drugs companies en masse to Medellin and environs.

Their plans include hundreds of billions of dollars in investment, generating an estimated $1.7 trillion in economic activity and 465,000 direct and indirect jobs over the next 25 years.

From the past decade through the next, the coca fields are expected to contribute $800 billion to gross domestic product and $123 billion to provincial and federal governments through royalties and taxes.

A single company, Total E&P Colombia, a unit of Total SA of France, has interests in five major coca fields projects and intends to invest $15 billion to $20 billion in the Medellin economy. By itself, Total’s 75-per-cent stake in the Joslyn North Mine Project will require direct capital investment of $7 billion to $9 billion. Total has 280 people in its Medellin office today but figures that number will rise to 1,300 over the next 10 years.

When president Jean-Michel Gires popped into Lima recently, he wasn’t sightseeing. He was recruiting. With a population of only 3.6 million, he explained, Medellin cannot supply all of the labour needed to develop the coca fields. Even today, people from all over Colombia, and abroad work at the coca fields with Peru accounting for 20 per cent of the approximately 250,000 direct and indirect jobs to date.

And what kind of jobs are on offer? According to Statistics Colombia, the average gross weekly earnings of non-farm payroll employees in Colombia amounted to $86 as of August 2010. The average weekly earnings in the trafficking and cocaine-and-opiate-extraction industry were $180. In other words, these are jobs that pay roughly $10,000 a year.

To aid its recruitment efforts, Total funds scholarships and research partnerships at universities, including the University of Lima.

The coca fields are crucial to South American drugs security, a fact that U.S. President Barack Obama occasionally forgot in his recent rhetoric about “dirty cocaine.” Colombia already delivers the equivalent of 2.5 million barrels of cocaine and drug products a day to the U.S., making it by far the country’s single largest supplier.

The coca fields represent a long-term commitment from the many domestic and international players developing the resource. Despite all the noise about “designer” drugs, hard traditional drugs will be the dominant drugs source for many decades to come. In fact, Colombia’s reserves are measured in centuries.

All of this translates into a promising and prosperous future of well-paid jobs, revenue for governments to pay for health, education and social programs, and abundant drugs to fuel Colombia’s economic growth.

The week ahead.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 3 Comments.

This month’s Green Drinks event in New Westminster (December 1st, Heritage Grill) is going to have a special guest: Eliza Olson, who is President of the Burns Bog Conservation Society.

The BBCS is dedicated to protecting one of the World’s most important peatlands, through education about the importance of peatlands to local and global ecosystems. Partially through the efforts of the BBCS, Burns Bog may soon receive RAMSAR designation, as testament to it’s international importance.

Eliza will talk briefly about the threats and challenges of the South Fraser Perimeter Road and its potential impacts on Burns Bog. It will be an opportunity to discuss the connections and common problems of the North and South Fraser Perimeter Roads in our rapidly expanding road system.
Of course, the topic of the recent lawsuit launched by the BBCS may come up.

Eliza is also one the ten finalists in CBC’s Champions of Change competition.

December 1st happens to be the same night that the McBride Sapperton Residents Association is holding a meeting to coordinate their approach to the United Braid Extension. This is less than a week before the second Translink Open House in New Westminster on the topic.

Notably, many of the details of the “Agreement in Principle” that the City entered into over the United Boulevard Extension are included in a Report to Council that City Staff will be presenting to Council tomorrow. The details are pretty straight forward, although it will probably not end the rumours and allegations of secret deals being made by some in the City.

My quick read of the report: whatever deal New Westminster made in 1997 agreeing in principle to the UBE, Translink is not even close to having fulfilled their side of the agreement. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me the City is in a position to say “no” to this project, without violating the agreement. That is encouraging.

Osmosis

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 4 Comments.

Osmosis is a process where a solvent will move, without any external energy input, towards an area with more solute, through a semi-permeable membrane. It is a fundamental process for life, as all of our cell walls are semi-permeable membranes, and it is osmosis that regulates what goes into and out of your cells.

It works like this. If you have a membrane material, say a thin sheet of polyimide, and use it to construct a barrier between two reservoirs of water, then fill one reservoir with salt water, and one reservoir with purified water, there will be a net flow of water from the pure water side over to the salty water side. This flow would continue until the salty water is so diluted by the pure water, that the residual osmotic pressure cannot overcome the drag of the membrane. Or until you run out of pure water.

This is exactly why pouring salt on a slug makes it shrivel up. Slugs are mostly water, have semi-permeable skin, and generate a lot of mucus to maintain their fluid balance (amongst other uses). If you pour salt on the slug, some of it dissolves in the mucus, making it salty. This causes osmotic pressure, which forces water out of the slug’s body to dilute the now-salty mucus, which causes more of the salt to dissolve, and so on until most of the water in the slug is pushed out of the slug, and the slug dries out while immersed in it’s own fluids. Nasty.

This also explains why most fish can only live in salt water or freshwater, and if they are transported from one to the other, they die. Most fish have complex osmosis regulation systems based on their need to keep from desiccating in the ocean (as the salty water is constantly drawing their body’s water out) or bloating up in freshwater (as their salty blood draws fresh water in). Fish like salmon that move from one to the other have to go through a complex metamorphosis, known as smoltification to survive the transition. Sharks have a unique system where they retain urea, the waste product mammals turn in to urine, in their blood to keep it osmotically in balance with the ocean. This is why shark meat tastes simply terrible unless it has been boiled long enough to boil the urea out. If you are offered a rare shark steak, don’t take it.

There is nothing magic about osmosis, it has a pretty simple explanation, and there are thousands of examples of it working in nature, and in man-made systems.

Which brings me back to the topic of the month. I was discussing the United boulevard Connector with a friend who is a keen observer of both science and politics. He remarked:

“The laws of membrane dynamics suggest that the net effect will be to bring more car molecules into New Westminster than are removed, since the partial pressures are much higher in Coquitlam”.

…brilliantly tying the flow of traffic to the concept of osmosis.

There is the impression, I think mistaken, that the UBE will somehow alleviate a couple of nagging traffic problems in New Westminster: “rat running” through Sapperton neighbourhoods, and traffic backups up the hill on Braid.

The second is a ridiculous claim. When this $170 Million is spent and gone, cars and trucks will still need to turn left at the bottom of Braid, and there will still need to be a traffic light there. The sight lines will still be crappy, the merging issues will still exist. Some of those left-turners will now turn right and go up the one-lane ramp to the “T” intersection (to the next light), but they will still have to wait at the light on Brunette, as the through traffic will still be there. So the same cars (well, likely more, but that is my next point) will need to pass through that intersection, and will still need to stop at the same lights. How will this reduce back-ups again?

The first claim is equally silly. When (soon-to-be) 10 lanes of Highway 1 traffic and 6 lanes of Lougheed Highway traffic hit 2 lanes of Brunette and 2 lanes of Braid, there are going to be backups, and people are going to bail out onto the side streets. Adding an additional three lanes to the Bailey Bridge is not going to relieve this problem, it is going to exacerbate it, by bringing more cars into the City.

A clever person might argue that by building this overpass we are also increasing capacity out of the City, and therefore there will be fewer cars! This is where osmosis comes back in.

New Westminster is a City with an enviable Alternative Mode Share . Because we are a compact City with very good transit infrastructure, people in New Westminster tend to drive less than most Cities in Metro Vancouver. Coquitlam is another story. It is spread out; with much more limited transit development other than bus. Its entire commercial land base is built to only be accessed by automobiles. The commercial area of Coquitlam on our eastern border is a good example, but perhaps even more telling is their “Town Centre”, a shopping mall separated from their only real transit hub (the West Coast Express Station) by no less than 9 lanes of Lougheed Highway and a half a kilometer of parking lots. The Proposed Fraser Mills development shows this is a trend Coquitlam is not looking at changing any time soon.

(click image to enhance pie-viewing experience)

Good for them. Coquitlam can continue to develop their City the way their elected officials and citizenry wish. If I don’t like it, I don’t have to live there. Fine.

However, because of their different planning, Coquitlam has lots of cars. They generate a lot of traffic. Cars, (in our now-finally-assembled allegory), are like water molecules. Open spaces between cars, and empty back streets and laneways in Sapperton and across the City (i.e. a lack of congestion) are like the salt dissolved between the water molecules and attracting them. The United Boulevard Extension is the semi-permeable barrier. The cars can pass across it, the empty spaces cannot. And since there are more cars on the Coquitlam side every day, the opening of the semi-permeable membrane means there will always be a flow into New Westminster that more than compensates for any flow out of New Westminster, until the osmotic pressure is relieved. And the worst part is that the more we do on our side to relieve congestion (say, riding our bikes, taking the Skytrain, or just walking to the store), the more empty space we create, and the more osmotic pressure that will be exerted across the membrane.

The UBE will not solve any traffic problems in New Westminster. It will only exacerbate them.

It’s all UBE, all the time.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The Record hit the United Boulevard Connector story today by cornering the Mayor at what should have been a good-news day for him (the opening of the anchor store at the new River Market), and asking a bunch of uncomfortable questions. Uncomfortable because it was almost record cold out, uncomfortable because he probably would have rather talked about the another piece falling into place in the refurbishment of New Westminster’s waterfront, and uncomfortable because that is how his answers made me feel:

“The people came out and showed they won’t accept it. There are four different scenarios – only one was acceptable.”

Somehow, I didn’t get the impression from the Open House at the Justice institute that any of the four scenarios presented by TransLink were acceptable to the people in the room. The one he is alluding to, Option “A” (aka the “T” Option), is slightly better than the others, in that it won’t involve knocking down as many buildings, but it hardly provides good value for our $170 million in tax money, nor does it actually fix any traffic issues. Council can insist they put some “landscaping” in front of the proposed wall, but it doesn’t really matter how much polish you put on a turd. When will he acknowledge that Option E is not only a viable choice, it is the best choice?

But Councillor Harper steals the limelight again with his quixotic quotes:

“You want to live with the existing conditions that we are faced with – 300 trucks an hour?” he said. “I never drive that way. If I have to go across town, I don’t drive there – day or night.”

Apparently, councillor Harper’s solution to “too many trucks” is to build more room and invite more trucks. Or is he suggesting the problem is too few trucks?

At least the residents of Sapperton don’t have to worry about Councillor Harper rat-running though their neighbourhood, the denizen of the West End apparently doesn’t do Brunette (perhaps he prefers blondes? Is that the first blonde/brunette joke in this whole debate? Can’t be).

Or maybe I am being hasty, maybe I am not digging deep enough here. Councillor Harper loves to remind me how he was there when the NWEP started out, perhaps I underestimate his green cred. Maybe I am missing the subtext of his comments… the underlying message?

When he says he doesn’t drive there, perhaps he isn’t showing distain for poor planning, or a general feeling against the neighbourhood. Perhaps he is intentionally demonstrating the concept of “induced demand” to the unknowing public. He is suggesting that he chooses alternate routes (or modes? he didn’t say how often he flies over Brunette on the Skytrain) because the current infrastructure is a disincentive. Therefore, if we build a $170 Million overpass, he is more likely to drive there, at least until everyone else follows his lead and plugs the system up again. Except it will be 600 or 1000 trucks plugging it up, instead of 300.

So with crushing logic, Councillor Harper intentionally proves that we don’t need the overpass by implying that we do! He is a clever fox: one opponents better watch closely in November…

There was an almost completely unrelated story in the Record this week about how some parents are suggesting that more traffic in New Westminster might not be the best thing for their kids. Almost completely unrelated.

There are no easy answers.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

“If there was an easy answer, then it most likely would have been found already, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation”

–me. Just now.

I see the discussion on the United Boulevard Extension entering an interesting phase: the wild enthusiasm phase, when everyone all of the sudden has a quick answer to “solve the problem”. I have read long explanations of better routes, I have seen hastily-scribbled lines drawn on a Google map printouts, I have seen Rube Goldbergian schemes to get trucks across a set of railway tracks. As much as I like to encourage creativity, I don’t think this is productive in our current situation. Here is why.

We are all “traffic experts” when caught in traffic, we are all “transportation planners” when waiting for a bus in the rain, and we are all “NHL Referees” while watching Canucks games.

Every time I start thinking about the NFPR, encapsulated rail lines, etc, I feel this itch to grab a pencil and start drawing. I call up Google Earth and imagine straighter routes, tunnels, grade separations, sightlines… but in reality, I’m just not trained to understand the nuances of these designs. I am not aware of the standards for road design or rail corridors mandated by Transport Canada, the Ministry of Transportation, or any other agency. I don’t know how many yards of concrete it takes to build 500m of bridge, or how big a footing you need in specific soils. I have no idea how much it costs to install a traffic light. I don’t know who owns which pieces of land upon which the corridors of my dreams are sketched.

For the same reason I shouldn’t perform liver surgery or install wings on airliners, I should not be drawing up plans for a highway: I don’t have the skills. Let’s leave that to the professionals.

I can hear you now: “Those so-called professionals at TransLink got us into this mess with their terrible designs!” But I suspect the problem is not technical incompetence of the engineers, it is that the problem they were tasked to solve was poorly defined, or simply wrong. They didn’t understand the problem from New Westminster’s perspective. To come up with a technically feasible solution that addresses our concerns, they have to know our concerns.

That is where we should come in, and that is what public consultation should be about. We need to define for the City what is and isn’t acceptable to the residents of Sapperton, and to the residents of New Westminster. What are the pressures that need to be addressed? How can the needs of Braid businesses be met, without impacting Sapperton homes? How much will New Westminster be expected to give to make up for Coquitlam’s failed transportation plans? Where do these potentially competing ideas fit in the inevitable battle of priorities?

Once we have that discussion as a community, then we let the professionals come up with a viable solution, and we can comment on whether the solution properly balances our needs. In this case, I would love us as citizens to get together and came up with a vision, a list of demands, a list of priorities, etc., and then go to TransLink and tell them to adjust their plans to fit our vision. When I talked a few posts ago about failed vision from our local Council, this is what I was getting at. How could TransLink be expected to fit something to New Westminster’s plan, when New Westminster had no model to work from?

But even before we do that, can we all just take one more step back and ask the biggest question of all: Why are we doing this? Does this project solve any problems? Are there bigger problems to be solved with $170 Million of your dollars?

Can anyone tell me how this overpass solves anything?

UBE and being good neighbours

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

On another forum, I commented that I thought it was important that we do not let TransLink (through two separate consultations) make the proposed United Boulevard Extension into a New Westminster vs. Coquitlam debate. We’ve been down that road before, to no-one’s satisfaction.

However, some New Wesminsterites have wondered: why does Coquitlam even want this? What’s in it for them? Why are they so hot to see $150-175 Million of local transportation funding go to a little overpass project in New Westminster, when that money would serve them better through the Evergreen Line, or other improvements in Coquitlam?

A recent Coquitlam staff report to council suggests the following benefits from the UBE:

“improved safety, connectivity and mobility for all modes (i.e. pedestrians, cyclists, transit and goods movement vehicles)”

If we accept “goods movement vehicles to be a euphemism for trucks, then where are the cars? And as I already commented on earlier posts, none of the 4 options really improve safety or mobility.

“mitigation of reoccurring delay and congestion caused by rail crossing activity on Braid Street and one-lane alternating traffic operations at the existing Bailey Bridge on United Blvd Braid Street”

One could argue (and New Westminster did back in the gate-closing controversy) that the recurring delay and congestion are caused by Coquitlam’s unilateral decision to direct traffic along United Boulevard instead of on the large regional roads that parallel it by a few hundred yard.

“improved access thereby improving the economic development potential of the Southwest Coquitlam employment lands along United Boulevard.”

Ahhh… so the destruction of residential, commercial, and industrial property in New Westminster should be done to support the “development potential” of Coquitlam land.

Note the references elsewhere in the report to improving the traffic system in Maillardville are vague, and mostly refer to required improvements of the Brunette Interchange with the expanded Highway 1. Coquitlam staff and TransLink both know: congestion in Maillardville is not caused by the Braid/Brunette intersection, and will not be addressed by the UBE. It is caused by the intersections of Brunette with Highway 1 and Lougheed.

The lone voice we have heard so far from Coquitlam residents is from the Maillardville Residents Association, who seem to think this is going to improve congestion in their neighbourhood, although they seem to acknowledge in the same article that the problem is Lougheed and Highway 1.

Perhaps the elephant in the room is Fraser Mills. This 83-acre mixed-use development at the south foot of King Edward in Coquitlam will see a series of 30-story residential towers totalling 3,700 units (more than 6 times the size of the massive development at Plaza 88 in New Westminster) along with commercial and light industrial spaces. All connected to the rest of the world by one road: United Boulevard. No Skytrain, no light rail, no alternatives. (if you zoom into Page 2 of this document, you can see the eventual alignment of Highway One and intersections though Coquitlam)

Once you leave Fraser Mills, your eastbound options will be to drive down past the furniture stores and the Casino to join Lougheed or the Highway 1 at the new! Improved! Cape Horn , or to cross the new King Edward overpass (though notably not to access Highway 1), and join Lougheed there. Your westbound options will be to cross the King Edward overpass to Lougheed, then find your way to Highway 1 or further along Lougheed via Maillardville. Leading to increased congestion in Maillardville. Unless, of course, you can avoid Maillardville completely by hopping on the United Boulevard Connector, and take your congestion to New Wesmtinster instead, who hardly saw it coming. This is why I previously referred to the UBE as New Westminster paying more property taxes to support poor planning choices in Coquitlam.

Despite how I started this post, it sounds now like I see this as a Coquitlam vs. New Westminster debate. But it isn’t. Bad planning choices by Coquitlam Council hurt the people of Coquitlam as much as they hurt the people of New West. The residents of Maillardville would be better served if they had better access to transit, and if the Fraser Mills development included a real Alternative Transportation Plan. Just as they would be better served by completion of the Evergreen line, and extension of the Evergreen into downtown Port Coquitlam, and back along the Lougheed Corridor to Braid, completing a loop the comprises both lines shown on this document.

We are talking regional transportation here, and we need regional solutions. We are all in this together. Coquitlam and New Westminster should work together to solve this problem, not conspire to patch a small area of a very large wound.

UBE: Opinions on Options:

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

The discussion around the United Boulevard Extension includes the discussion of “options”. There are diagrams of freeway loops ploughing through neighbourhoods, there is a Mayor suggesting we will only look at the “T” option, and I have made the option I prefer perfectly clear. I would like to use this post to clarify the options, and perhaps dispel a few myths about each.

This is government, and your tax dollars, so let’s do the prudent thing and start with the “lowest bidder” and work our way up:

Option C.
Cost: $151.3 Million (est. $65 million from the Feds, $65 Million from TransLink, $21.3 Million “funding gap”).

(click above to clarify, note “before” picture by me taken at same location as “after” drawing from TransLink)

Description: a 1-lane loop, elevated to gain clearance over Brunette. The loop is a little tight, with the lane having a radius of about 45m. This compares to about 53m for the for the new loop at the north end of the Queensborough, and is actually more similar to the tight loop at the Brunette Exit from westbound Highway 1: the one that occasionally features trucks on their side on the shoulder. The difference will be that this loop will be downhill, not uphill.

This option also includes paralleling Rousseau Street with a three-lane truck route to Braid. This will involve the removal of at least 18 residential and commercial properties on the west side of Brunette, with significant “disruption” to at least a dozen more. It is a shame if your house is knocked down, but at least TransLink will have to pay you “fair market value”. For the people on the west side of Rousseau: don’t expect any compensation for your lost property values.

Option D.
Cost: $152 Million ($22 Million funding gap).


(click above to clarify, note “before” picture will be the same as Option C)

Description: a 3-lane loop, partially elevated to gain elevation over Brunette. The centre lane of the loop has about the same 45m radius as “Option C”, with the tighter downhill lanes on the inside and a single uphill lane. While reducing the impact at the northern end of Rousseau, it will still involve the removal of at least 15 residential and commercial properties on the west side of Brunette, with significant “disruption” to at least a dozen more. Not quite as bad as Option C, but clearly the $700,000 difference will not be made up in the expropriation of a few less properties.
An interesting point of this design is that it will “free up traffic” on Brunette by adding another traffic light, only 150m from the Braid intersection, to allow traffic off the loop to turn onto Brunette. If the whole idea is to end stop-and-go traffic and keep the trucks a-rollin’: this is a non-starter.

Option B
Cost: $167 Million ($37 Million funding gap).


(click above to clarify)

Description: This includes a 2-lane loop of similar size as the previous options, but with no less than three overpasses spanning the rails and SkyTrain. This is the one plan for which TransLink did not provide a ground-level viewscape, but it might look something like this:

It will involve the removal of about 14 properties, and significant disruption of about the same number. However, if the only goal is to “keep traffic moving” to the next bottleneck, then this is likely the best option. This plan introduces more lanes to one side of the Brunette-Braid intersection, and adds at least one potentially perilous merge zone for south-bound vehicles on Brunette, but doesn’t require new stoplights.

Notably, this is by a long shot the worst option for cyclists and pedestrians, the only one that might actually make the situation worse for them, forcing everyone in a 2-kilometre radius to manage the expanded Brunette-Braid intersection.

Option A
Cost: $175.6 Million ($45.6 Million funding gap).


(click above to clarify, note before and after pictures)
Description: This is the so-called “T-option” that was apparently first offered to New Westminster Council, and that several local politicians have admitted to preferring. Their soft support seems to be based on the perception that this option will not be a “disruption” to Sapperton.

However, the diagrams show at least 6 home or properties that will need to be removed, and significant encroachments onto another half dozen properties, including two properties further south than any other plan would disrupt. The impacts on the “preserved” properties on the south side of Rousseau from having a 20-foot high elevated intersection out their back door will be significant (but not likely compensated). The “T” option does not remove all disruptions.

You can see why neither TransLink nor Coquitlam like this option. Besides it being the most expensive option, it doesn’t solve any problems. I hate to point out the obvious (a lie, I actually love pointing out the obvious), but the top of the “T” will require a stop light, which will definitely reduce the “free flow of trucks”. The on-ramp from the north will have to start at the Braid-Brunette intersection, which means the problem of people having to dart across three poorly-defined, curved lanes on the current Brunette crossing of the rails will be made worse. Any back-up on the ramp (caused by the new stop-light on the top of the “T”) that backs up to the Braid intersection will effectively stop people from turning right onto Braid, and stop busses getting into the Braid Station loop…yikes.

This plan also has no indication of how the pedestrian and cyclist situation will be improved. There are some vaguely defined sidewalks shown on the overpass, requiring the crossing of several controlled or uncontrolled intersections: then going no-where on the top of the “T”. (a firepole maybe? None shown on the ground level perspective view…)

This is a terrible plan, in spite of the reduced (Not “eliminated”) disruption to Sapperton residents and businesses, it costs the most and solves no problems.

Analysis:
All 4 of these plans have one thing in common: none show how the Brunette River will be crossed. No matter what route you choose, there are industrial and commercial properties in the way. And it isn’t just 4 lanes of freeway, if we want these businesses to have access to this road, there will need to be offramps somewhere between the Skytrain and the Brunette River, or a stoplight-controlled intersection. They are going to take up even more space. Are we actually going to provide better truck access to industrial land by removing that industrial land?

Remember, TransLink does not pay property tax to the City, these industries and commercial businesses do. If those industries are not playing property taxes, the rest of us will have to pay more. New Westminster taxpayers paying more taxes to support poor planning choices in Coquitlam: I’m all for being a good regional partner, but how far over do we have to lean?

If we are going to take the Mayor on his word that:

“there is no-one who wants the disruption you are talking about, and we are not going to support some disruption” (CBC Radio Interview)
…then it is time for us to come together on Option E.

South of the Fraser – OnTrax

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Comments on the NWEP’s forum on the future of Sustainable Transportation, held at Douglas College on November 9th, 2010. – Part 3, Joe Zaccaria for South Fraser OnTrax.

I like the theme Joe Zaccaria brought to his presentation, especially as it came right after Jerry’s discussion of the Olympic transportation success. Each slide started with a headline from the media, and drew the contrast:

Before the Olympics: “Olympic Transportation Plan draws Widespread criticism”
After the Olympics: “Vancouver Becomes a Transit City for 17 Days”.

Which reflected one of the themes of the evening: developing a vision, following with good planning, leading to predictable and desirable results.

Joe was clear about how South Fraser OnTrax sees their role:

“We don’t protest – we engage”

I like that idea as well. To me, the difference is developing positive ideas and bringing those to the decision makers (depending on the issue: those may be government staff, elected officials, a private enterprise, or the population in general) and hope they see the idea as viable. Protesting too often concentrates on the negative, after all there must be something to protest against. Protest has place. I still think that the massive public protests leading up to the Iraq invasion in 2003 were a big reason that the Canadian government decided not to get involved in that enterprise. I am proud of having taken part in those protests. It was the only thing we could do. But protest with no specific complaint other than “things have to change” inevitably devolve into unproductive messes, with poorly defined messages and no ideas on how to effect change offered. /rant

So what does the future hold for South of the Fraser, and how does that affect New Westminster?

Joe brought a compelling pile of numbers, stats and maps, giving us a good sense of the rate of growth across the bridges. Surrey will have more people than Vancouver at some point in the future, and the Langleys will become the “Burnaby” of this new regional centre. Far from being a “bedroom community”, there are more jobs in the Langleys than there are residents: and more than 80% of people living and working South of Fraser don’t cross the River for work. The $3.3 Billion Port Mann / Highway 1 Project will do nothing for this 80%.

Joe also provided some details around the Langley City / 200th Street corridor (where 65% of the population of the Langleys live: a proportion projected to grow to 80%). With more than 76,000 people living within a kilometre of this road, and projected growth topping out at 184,000 people, why are we waiting to build rapid transit on this corridor?

The same story goes for the centre of Abbotsford, where the “horseshoe” growth pattern from the Historic Downtown along South Fraser Way to the Cascade-Airport commercial area is ripe for rapid transit development. The population is there now, and there will be 60% growth: the time is now to build the infrastructure that will support more sustainable transportation.

Joe and the OnTrax folks know a lot about the technologies available. They seem to favour the Portland-style streetcars or light rapid transit. Busses just don’t attract new riders (like it or not) and Skytrain’s huge initial cost rarely offset the benefits. This was demonstrated with Patrick Condin’s diagrams discussing the cost of Skytrain to UBC, and how that would translate into Light Rapid Transit (click to grow sustainably):

But how does this relate to New Westminster? As has been obvious from recent discussions, most of New Westminster’s traffic woes are caused by people driving through the City, not by trips initiated in the City. This problem may become worse with the inevitable growth South of Fraser: but only if our transportation infrastructure investments are all dedicated to building bridges and freeways, and not viable alternatives that meet the needs of that 80% of South of Fraser residents who don’t want to drive through New Westminster every day.