Killer Bikes Lanes

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 3 Comments.

Related to bike routes, and completely separate to yesterday’s post…

Being a loud-mouth and a “crackpot environmentalist”, I often get called out on various issues in social setting where people already know my position. I guess I am a fun guy to get a rise out of. Last night at the Curling Rink one of my buddies remarked to me:

“I think your bike lane on Dunsmuir got somebody killed today”.

He then regaled me with the story of a cyclist, an ambulance, and a scene that looked like a commercial vehicle turned right across the bike lane and struck a cyclist. I have no idea if any of the info he gave me was accurate, but I have no reason to doubt him. I can only comment on the allegation he made: a cyclist on the Dunsmuir Bike Lane was killed by right-turning truck.

First off, it isn’t “my” bike lane, and before you say it, it isn’t even Gregor Robertson’s bike lane. The dedicated bike lane on Dunsmuir (and the one on Hornby) are part of Vancouver’s Transportation Plan, which was written in 1997, under NPA Mayor Phillip Owen, and fully supported by COPE Mayor Larry Campbell, NPA Mayor Sam Sullivan, and Vision Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson. Four mayors, four administrations. They are a piece of a puzzle that has been assembling for 15 years.

Second, a bike lane can’t kill anyone. The story he told me was a commercial vehicle turning right where it shouldn’t have hitting a cyclist. It was the bike lane’s fault because cars used to be able to turn right there, and cyclists in the bike lane are hard to see for truck drivers turning right.

I cannot say this clear enough: in this alleged scenario, the truck driver killed the cyclist. He broke the law by turning right when the motor vehicle code said he could not. This is no different than someone going 100km/h through a school zone and plowing down a kid on a crosswalk. It doesn’t matter that the school zone was on what used to be an open road, or that the kid should have been looking for speeding cars prior to crossing the cross walk. No rational person would wave it off by saying “well, you know those kids are always crossing streets, usually not at crosswalks, the kid had it coming”.

And no-one would say to me “I think cross walk in that School Zone got some kid killed today”.

It is a manifestation of the post from yesterday: blaming the victim (or the victim’s advocates) instead of recognizing the real problem

Bikes in Richmond

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

This article pisses me off, as someone who cummutes regularly, by bike, to Richmond.

First, it has the regurgitated-press-release style of lazy journalism, but I can let that pass. It is the overall message that is sent that causes me tremors. That message, on the front page, is that cycling in Richmond is unsafe, and that it is the cyclists fault.

Let’s start off with the Stats:

“Between 2005 and 2009, there were 291 crashes involving cyclists in Richmond…including two fatalities.”

So a hair under 300 cyclist-related crashes in 5 years reported to ICBC. We can presume that if ICBC was involved, there were not people falling off bikes or hitting trees, these were impacts between bicycles and automobiles. But where is the context? Is 300 bad?

According to ICBC stats, there are, on average, 900 auto accidents per year in Richmond, resulting in an average of 10 deaths, which extrapolates to 4500 accidents and 50 deaths over 5 years.

“Mode share” for cycling in Richmond is around 3%.. That means for every 100 trips taken, about four were by bicycle. The mode share for cars was about 65% (with the rest being walking and transit), so to compare apples with apples, we need to lose the 32% others and say 3 in 68 trips (4.4%) were by bike, and 65 in 68 (95.5%) were by car. Then we can do the same with the accident statistics, and see how much more dangerous cycling is that driving:

                  As mode share      Accidents        Deaths
Drivers          95.6%                      94%             96%
Cyclists           4.4%                      6%                4%

Considering that drivers are surrounded by 3000lbs of steel and plastic, with seatbelts and airbags, and cyclists usually wear some combination of lycra and styrofoam, I think the numbers don’t really make cyclists a public health hazard.

Another way to look at the above numbers:
                                      total      cyclists were killed      people in cars were killed
Accidents with cyclists   6%                 0.6%                                    0*
Accidents w/o  cyclists  94%                0%                                     1.1%

So you are more likely to die if you are in a car crash, than if you are in a bicycle crash. If you are in a car, you have a miniscule chance of being hit by a bike relative to being hit by another car, and as far as I can read in the stats, not a single driver or passenger was killed in a collision with a cyclist (I cannot confirm this, hence the *). So if you are hit by anything in an accident, you are better off if you are hit by a bike than a car, and you are actually better off being on a bike when you are hit than being in car.

But the biggest stat here is that 6% of crashes involved bikes, but 100%, involve a car. I will come back to this.

First, let’s look at the “most dangerous intersections” outlined in the article: the Bike map for Richmond might be useful.

#1: No 2 Road and Westminster Highway (9 crashes).

Here is a location where a designated bike route along a major arterial (the No 2 Road Bridge and Russ Baker Way) abruptly comes to a stop at the crossing of two major arterial routes. Full 1.5m bike lanes evaporate into nothing except two 6-lane arterial roads with no shoulders that lead to residential areas. The southbound bike lane squeezes out into a right-turn only lane, with no shoulder to the right…not even a curb cut to give you the illegal but safer sidewalk bailout… I’m surprised there aren’t rotating knives.

#2: Gilbert and Granville (8 crashes).

Here we have Granville, which is a dedicated bike route with full bike lanes on both sides, crossing Gilbert, which to the north is a dedicated bike route in name only (it has kind of wide shoulders, but no pavement lines or markings), and no shoulders at all to the south. Of course, the “bike lanes” on Granville both become “right turn” lanes at the intersection, confusing both cyclists and drivers, and the shoulder on Gilbert is wide enough that it acts as a defacto right-turn lane, even though it is not marked as such. The fact the corner is on one of the City’s destination public facilities (Minoru complex houses playing fields, pools, arenas, libraries, etc.) and Granville is the major east-west bike routh through town, it is no surprise this disaster of an intersection is up in the stats.

#3 (tie): Blundell and Garden City Roads.

This surprises me a bit, only because it is one of the few I don’t frequent. Garden City is a dedicated bike lane in name only (slightly wider shoulders, no pavement markings) and Blundell is an east-west racetrack with no shoulders. Also, the corner visibility is a little sketchy due to retail signage, and there is a lot of relatively dense residential area around, but there is little here to make this intersection worse than 90% of the others in the City.

#3 (tie): Granville Avenue and Minoru Boulevard;

Take everything I said about Granville and Gilbert, adjust by the fact Minoru is not a dedicated bike route, and you have Granville and Minoru. Proximity to the Minoru complex brings the bikes along the main east-west bike route, the bike lanes become right-turn only lanes, Minoru is narrow with basically no shoulder. Bada-bing Ba da boom.

#3 (tie): Garden City Road and Westminster Highway.

Garden City north and south have great, well-marked bike routes (although they have been seemingly under constant construction for the last two years, making me wonder if the stats are biased by that), and represent the best north-south route through central Richmond (much better than the disaster that is No 3 Road). Of course, the nice southbound bike lane becomes a right-turn only lane, while the north-bound one sort of hops across the extended right-turn only lane, leaving the right-turning cyclist in a nasty spot with especially poor visibility around the Gas Station on the southeast corner. Westminster Highway also has excellent wide bike lanes to the east…but absolutely nothing the west. There isn’t even a shoulder wide enough to ride on safely for an experienced cyclist. Car speeds are high here (they seem to take “highway” as a suggested speed).

I humbly suggest there are many ways to alleviate the risk to cyclists here and city-wide. A few engineering improvements on these roads, better education of cyclists and drivers, perhaps signage improvements., but what does the article suggest after rhetorically asking “…what’s a cyclist to do to avoid being victimized?”

They advise that cyclist dress brightly so drivers can see them, look both ways before crossing streets, and wear helmets. Or to translate: if you girls don’t want to get harassed so much, maybe you shoudn’t wear them short skirts!

Every single one of these accidents involved a car. Every one of those cars had a driver. Yes, some proportion of the accidents was no doubt caused by a lack of cyclist caution, or even by cyclists violating the Motor Vehicle Code (which, I remind you, was written for motor vehicles, and does not reflect the reality of cyclists in our modern cities). However, some of the accidents were most assuredly caused by drivers not paying attention, or violating the motor vehicle code. If I want to wear camouflage on a bike, that is my right, and if a driver hits me while I am wearing that camouflage and within my rights on the road, the “I didn’t see him, he should wear something brighter” is not a freaking excuse. We don’t make you paint a car neon orange, do we?

The sad reality is that most cyclists do dress brightly, most do ride with caution and plan ahead, most do wear helmets, all because they are acutely aware that they can get hit by a car, and that would be a bad thing. This article does nothing to alert the majority of readers (who are drivers, not cyclists) that perhaps they should also exercise caution In their 3000lb vehicles so they don’t accidentally kill or injure a cyclist. Instead, it suggests bikes are dangerous (not true) and that all accidents involving bikes are caused by cyclists (not true).

That would involve thinking beyond the ICBC press release though.

Windows, part 2

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 7 Comments.

Once we had settled on replacing windows, the journey really began. The house is ca.1940, and all of the main floor windows are wood frame, single-hung, single-pane. All of the counterweight strings are broken, so we had been using strategically shaped blocks of wood to prop them open. Before we arrived on the scene, renovations were done in the house in two stages, with wood-frame single-hung double pane wood windows being used in the converted attic, and double-pane sliding vinyl windows being used in the basement.

Front Picture window, with original leading.

?????

Original single-hung single-pane wood windows.

??

??????????????

??
The ones downstairs should have given us some cautionary idea of what we are getting into. At least one of them was an “off the shelf” vinyl window from a hardware store, and did not fit the hole in the side of the house ideally. It has been installed with the flashing on the outside of the house with the caulking puffing out between the flashing and the nailed-together wood spacers. It might have looked real sharp when it was done, but it looked pretty terrible a decade later. The other windows were not much better: one installed with the drain holes facing in (and blocked), none of the slid very well in their casings, or opened very wide, and the proportion of window-to sash was depressingly smaller, making basement suite darker than it needed to be.
Terrible, terrible basement vinyl window install.

??

The attic windows were probably OK, we might have gotten along with a bit of maintenance, but at this point we were 17 windows in, another two more wouldn’t increase the marginal cost that much, and for the sake of consistency, we decided to replace them all.?????

Double-pane wood replacements, used in 1980’s (?) attic renovation

?

“We decided” will be used throughout this monologue, but that really belies the amount of discussion, argument, hair-pulling, and cajoling it takes for us to make these decisions. The Better Half had her priority list, essentially around making sure that the windows added to the value of the house, by complimenting the 1940 wood flooring and the unique Amish-Bauhaus-English-antiques furnishings style she somehow pulls off quite successfully. I was mostly concerned that the windows be the most efficient we can afford. She worried about frame proportions, leading, opening styles, and colours; I worried about what Low-E glass types are most appropriate for our climate and whether Argon was really superior to regular air. We did agree that installation was as important as windows, and that we were going to buy from someone who we trusted to do the installation jog right.

The first question that needs to be answered is what type of frame material to use. The basic options are aluminum, vinyl, wood, fibreglass, or some sort of hybrid. The list of advantages and disadvantages is huge.

Aluminum was off the table pretty early. They have certain structural and maintenance advantages and provide the biggest window-to-sash ratio, which is why they are so popular with high-rises, rental and commercial properties. However, they are remarkably inefficient. Aluminum frames work like the aluminum fins on your old Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engine: they are excellent heat exchangers, sucking heat out of your house and warming the air outside. They are moderate in cost (falling between the cheapest vinyl windows and the most expensive wood frames), but did not match the style of the house, and were inefficient: so the decision was easy.

Aluminum windows, lots of glass, but no efficiency.

Vinyl is probably the most popular material for replacement windows, and the Yellow Pages (remember them?) are full of companies that will plop a vinyl insert into your existing window frames, with creative names from AAA Windows to ZYZ Windows. Vinyl has several advantages: it can be made thermally quite efficient by building frames with lots of void spaces, they can be made in various colours and can be painted, and they can be very inexpensive. Some of the problems are the generally low window-to-sash ratio, which seems to get worse with increased efficiency (as those insulating void spaces have to come from somewhere), and a general “plastic” look, which only gets worse with attempts to hide it (ornate finishes, printed or wood veneers, etc.). There is also a large apparent variation in quality of construction, and the amount of concern the companies put into the install in the house.

Vinyl windows, efficiency comes at the expense of window area.

Wood windows have significant advantages. They generally look good, and since that is what the house already has, they are the quickest match to the style of the house. They are also the most thermally-efficient frame material. They fit somewhere between Aluminum and Vinyl in the window-to-sash ratio. The disadvantages are cost (more than Aluminum or the most expensive Vinyl), and maintenance issues. Wood is wood, and needs to be protected from the elements, and that means some level of ongoing maintenance would be required. Some of this can be offset but using a clad-wood window, where the wood frame has a thin aluminum cladding on the outside. This is by far the most expensive option.

Aluminum-clad wood windows, the best of
both worlds, the highest of all costs.

Fiberglass windows can be made almost as thermally efficient as wood, and very strong in a structural sense. They can be powder-coated which makes them durable and low maintenance. Unfortunately, fibreglass options are limited (they seem to be more popular in places with continental climates the suffer temperature extremes), and are expensive. They also come in limited styles and sizes, as the manufacturing process is not as flexible as vinyl or wood. Aesthetically, they resemble Vinyl more than they probably should.

The efficiency issues were a little easier. The advantages of triple glazing (increased thermal efficiency and noise abatement) did not make sense in our coastal climate, or in our relatively quiet Brow-of-the-Hill neighbourhood. Low-E glass (where a coating is applied to one of the frames which limits the transmission of infrared (keeping heat in during the winter and out during the summer) is great, but needs to be balanced around reflectivity and brightness issues. Everything I read says Argon helps, even if I remain somewhat sceptical about the science of those claims (with my basic chemistry-physics education, which is usually deeply flawed) .

Then there is Energy-Star rating. Energy-Star windows are certified to meet some level of efficiency. Since we had an “energy audit” in the dying days of the LiveSmart BC program, we would receive $70 per window if we bought Energy Star rated windows, a not-unsubstantial $1,300 total for our house.

Replacement window insert, in this case
Vinyl going into an existing wood frame.

The decisions were difficult. No matter which way we go, this was going to be the most expensive purchase we have made in our lives (outside of the mortgage!), easily as much as a new car (it is worth noting we drive a Honda Civic we bought used for less than I paid for my last bicycle.) And the “getting informed” part of the process exposed us to too much contradictory data, too many contradictory claims, too much advice from people who would have us spend a fortune for each incremental increase in efficiency, and from people who advise us to buy the cheapest we can because “they are all the same…how long are you going to own that house anyway?” (we can debate at length the sustainability ideas of that train of thought). And we experienced lots of sssssales men (and women), with different styles, different approaches, although the results always seemed the same, that was to make us less certain of the purchase, not more certain.

For people like us who find no joy in shopping at the best of times, it was not fun.

TttF, and the Transport debate

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I really dig Tenth to the Fraser. Jen, Briana, Will and Jocelyn the gang over there do an incredible job in keeping the conversation going in New Westminster, whether they are talking politics, business, environment, or community events. The great part is that they avoid being one-dimensional like some lesser local blogs, and instead have a diversity of topics, and a diversity of speakers. I am excited about their new series covering aspects of the upcoming Civic Election. They fill a big gap in New Westminster public discourse, and they should be read every day by everyone who lives in the Royal City (does that make me an “elitist”?).

I’m mostly gushing right now in order to call attention to Matt Laird’s recent two-part series on the UBE and the future of the North Fraser Perimeter Road. Matt, ever the muck-raker and pot-stirrer, raises some of the uncomfortable questions about the dream of a “seamless 4-lane truck route” through New Westminster. The problems with this dream can be broken down onto 5 points:

1) There is no room on Front Street for 4 lanes of truck traffic, without moving rails (the railway won’t agree to reduce shunting noise or modify level crossings, they won’t agree to pedestrian overpasses to the new Park, you think they are going to agree to give up real estate!?!), or chopping off the front of a couple of buildings (InterUrban, the new Sally Ann, and the Keg/Train Station for starters). The Parkade would also have to go, but I think few will shed a tear for it (although the Downtown businesses will expect the City to replace the lost 700 parking spots)

2) The idea of “stacking” the four lanes is monumentally expensive, complex from an engineering standpoint, and may create issues around the transportation of dangerous goods (which makes it’s utility as a “truck route” limited). Working the stacked road around the rail overpasses at the east end of Front Street would be a challenge, as would designing some sort of interchange at the west end that would bring trucks safely back to grade, work as an intersection for Columbia Street traffic, and not be a blight to the Plaza 88 development, all in a very small footprint.

3) It only serves to move more trucks to Stewardson Way, where they will line up with the cars to get through the Queensborough Bridge spaghetti-bowl. Anyone who drives that intersection west regularly knows the right lane is commonly backed up to 4th, the left lane is full of cars looking for advantageous gaps in the right lane to squeeze in (gaps usually found between big trucks that cannot be as aggressive as cars at blocking queue-jumpers). For the New Westminster residents in Queensborough, their only access to the rest of the City is already backed up with traffic 12 hours of the day with all of the vehicles heading east… and to this mess we want to add more trucks?.

4) Take everything I said about Queensborough, and insert “Columbia and Brunette”.

5) It won’t solve a congestion problem. After the last Translink open house, there was some informal discussion around the NFPR, and I asked one of our City Councilors (I won’t name him here, but his last name rhymes with “Foster Can”) how long it would take for a 4-lane truck route to become just as congested as the current two-lane road, 5 years? Ten? And he admitted, “less than that!” So we want to spend 10 years and more than billion dollars designing and building a road we know will be just as congested as it is now in less than 10 years? That is madness.

It is going to be up to us to make the case to TransLink that this is a colossal waste of money. Your money and my money. When it comes down to it, New West as a municipality may be limited in their ability to stop a regional project if there is strong political pressure to build it (See Delta’s position on the South Fraser Perimeter Road as an example). Up to this point, New West Council has done a good job protecting New Westminster from the unnecessary intrusion of the UBE, but the future of the NFPR will need to be a campaign directed at TransLink and the Province.

The first step in that campaign would be for a strong voice from City Hall to counter the frankly ridiculous comments of the Mayor of Coquitlam.

Jonathan Cote at the NWEP Transportation Forum

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. – the much-belated Part 4. There has been so much going on in Transportation locally, and the UBE issue pushed itself to the front page so effectively, that I almost forgot to finish up the series on the NWEP forum held in November. That would be a shame, because the final speaker was New Westminster City Councillor Jonathan Cote, and we were lucky to have a sitting council member share some ideas about how he sees the future of transportation in New Westminster, and throughout the region.

First off, it was refreshing to have a politician sit in front of a crowd and put ideas out there, especially ideas about sustainable transportation and the things that Cities (including ours) do wrong. But Cote always struck me as one of those rare types in politics who actually thinks about these issues, who cares about communities (especially his own), and who knows who Jane Jacobs was, and what she meant. He is also young enough that he still has a thirst for learning. He was generous with his time, and with his ideas. I tried to catch the essence of what he said below, but I am working from two-month-old notes now, so any gross errors or inexactitudes below are more likely mine than his!

His talk began by putting “sustainable transportation” into context. There are lots of feel-good reasons to build sustainable transportation infrastructure and to increase sustainable mode share (safer more livable cities, lower development costs, healthier populations), but the harsh realities of Anthropogenic Climate Change and Peak Oil mean the heady decades of our parents may soon be over, and we may be forced by economics to make better choices.

Cote then discussed the “Chicken and Egg conundrum” around urban planning and transportation planning, although I think the analogy fails on two fronts: clearly the egg came first (after all, the genetic changes that result in diversity happen during the reproduction phase and very early development, not by gradual change within an individual of a species, but hey, this is about transportation, not evolutionary biology); and second, it isn’t really a conundrum as the there is a simple answer: both must happen in concert. We built automobile-serviced suburbs because people had automobiles, people had automobiles because they lived in (or wanted to live in) those suburbs. The two are so entwined that the entire model must be redrawn together. His points about street design and density (then, now and future) were well made however, and were (in my opinion) similar to the Patrick Condon mode of thinking. Read his stuff, there is much there to think about, and even things to disagree with.

There were two solid “factoids” I took out of Cote’s talk, and they stuck with me so well I have repeated them and used them in discussions about sustainable cities in various contexts.

The first is the “5 – 7 – 10” rule, and once I looked this up, I realized it was a Patrick Condon concept.

5 minutes is approximately how far the average person will walk to get to a place, or a transit stop. Any more than 5 minutes, and walking is no longer the likely choice the person will make. The Dutch Rail bicycle program takes advantage of this by setting loose thousands of bicycles into the unsuspecting public. If people will ride a bike 5 minutes to get to the train station, that triples the distance people can travel in 5 minutes, increasing passenger share, and ultimately paying off for Dutch Rail. This basically speaks the transit density we must build to make transit the truly viable option: everyone must be 5 minutes from a stop.

7 minutes is the maximum time between buses or trains that makes the system reliable and efficient without the need for schedules. If the maximum wait is 7 minutes, people will tend to just go to the stop and catch the next bus. If it is 10 minutes, and you need to make a connection to a bus with 15-minute frequency, all of the sudden you need to consult a schedule and plan your trip. I thought about this recently trying to take the Canada Line from Brighouse Station to the Airport at 7:00 on a Friday, when the train frequency was 12 minutes to each of the “Richmond spurs”. Which meant a 10-minute wait at Brighouse, a 5 minute ride to Bridgeport, a 12-minute wait at Bridgeport then a 8 minute ride to the airport: It took me more than a half hour to get from Richmond to the Airport… frustrating.

Finally, 10 units per acre is the density required to support transit service at the frequency required to be efficient: density is the key. But in reality, 10 units an acre is not that dense. An acre is 43,560 square feet, so 10 city lots at 50 feet by 90 feet will suffice. It isn’t Queens Park Mansions for all, but a 1500 square-foot footprint will fit nicely on a lot that size, and with good design, a comfortable 2500-square foot home can be built. At the other end of the scale, a single 20-story high-rise can be built on less than an acre and have 120 units in it. The density can be built, and for New Westminster it is already here.

The second point that stuck in my craw was an old CATO Institute economic study Cote showed that purported it would be cheaper for the governments of the United States to buy a new car for every citizen that it was costing to provide public transportation. Wethinks the old-school Reaganites at the Cato meant this to demonstrate the public transit is a waste of money and people should just find their own damn way to work. Cote turned it around and described it is a condemnation of the state of Urban Planning in the United States. If the most efficient way of moving people around is the least efficient form of transportation ever invented, then clearly something is wrong with your cities.

So what is wrong with our Cities? Where is my 7-minute service? The answer came back to the “Funding Gap”. How do we raise money for public transportation? We have federal and provincial governments claiming poverty (while subsidising the auto industry, and building 10-lane freeways, respectively). We have municipal governments absorbing more and more infrastructure and other costs that used to belong to higher levels, while extremely limited by the Local Government Act in how they can raise funds. The only source Munis have is property taxes, and there are numerous reasons why that is not the appropriate way to fund regional transit systems. Road taxes, gas taxes, vehicle levies, and these types of creative funding measures would require the Provincial government to institute them, and that isn’t something any government thinking about re-election is willing to do.

Translink has a dream of an integrated, effective, region-wide transit system. Many critics of it say it isn’t enough, that the infrastructure planned for 2040 will be inadequate for 2025. The harsh reality is that even that “too little too late” plan will never see the light of day unless the Province frees up the Municipalities and Metro Vancouver to find the creative measures it needs to properly fund the system the region needs.

Green Cone Update.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

When I last talked about the Green Cone, it was rapidly filling up with food waste, and the temperature was dropping, neither of these good for promoting the initial growth of the friendly dudes that break the waste down.

With my month away, obviously the input stopped completely. However, with the month away, I have no idea what the weather was like while I was gone. Oh, maybe I do.

Seems to me the most relevant stat maintained by Environment Canada would be the “Heat Degree Days”. This is completely non-empirical, but when the HDD gets up into the high teens or 20s (like the cold snap in November), then it seems it will be a little cold for the green cone to digest efficiently. Conversely, when the HDD is down in the single digits, we are getting into a realm where bugs can proliferate and the blue fuzz starts to grow in the cone.

Looking in the last few days, there is definitely a good blue fuzz going on which means the breakdown is happening. When open, there isn’t much sign of the nasty smell we had happening in the fall when the food waste was overwhelming the cone’s breakdown speed. Looks like the Cone is finally working as hoped.

From this point forward, the only things going in the Cone are non-vegetable matter, bread scraps, or either of the above so tainted by meat, fat or milk that I can’t stick them in the compost.   

Also, after the initial exploratory digs, it appears whatever wanted to dig around the cone has lost interest. The raccoon/skunk/neighbour’s cat test has been passed. Or the offending digger has gone south for the winter. So let’s call it a provisional pass until Spring has sprung.

As for the compost, my worms have survived the deep freeze. I was doing some aerating on the compost pile, and found massive clumps of red wrigglers in spots. So many that I was able to share some with another NWEP TrashTalker whose compost didn’t do so well over the holidays.  

Windows, Part 1

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Like a shrinking proportion of New Westminsterites, I live in a single-family detached home. A two-professional-income family and a history of fiscal prudence meant that a couple of years ago we were able to sell our “hardwood floors, stainless steel appliances, granite countertops” condo on Royal Ave and buy a house. There were several motivations for the purchase: the Condo didn’t really compliment my obsessive cycling habit; I really wanted a garden and the Community Gardens Project in New Westminster was still only a glimmer in David Maidman’s eye; the condo market in New West looked pretty saturated to me, and more “peaky” than the housing market; and we had committed to New Westminster as the best place in Metro Vancouver to live.

At the time, I described the purchase as “kind of small, kind of old, in a slightly sketchy area, but we can almost afford it”. In the end, it is more size than we need (the guest suite renos are ongoing), we lucked into the house being really solid for it’s age, the brow-of-the-hill neighbourhood turned out to be anything but sketchy and my neighbours are great, and we can still almost afford it. A few minor renos have really made it “our home”.

The house was built in 1940, and although solidly built and well cared for, it is still a 70 year old house. We had an energy audit performed, and they confirmed many things we already knew. The physical plant was in good shape, the furnace and water heater were relatively new, but could be replaced with more efficient ones. There are a few insulation and draft-sealing things we can do. But mostly: the 70-year-old single pane windows are sucking us dry. We decided efficient windows were the first priority, when we had the money and time to do real improvements.

Thus began a long, dark journey into the aftermarket window market. We had a dozen window sales people come through the house. We visited showrooms and workshops, spent our evenings walking the streets of Queens Park staring at (not into) strangers’ windows. The longer this process went on, the more frustrating it got, as we discovered some depressing realities: any windows we could reasonably afford were ugly, and most after-market windows are cheaply built.

I am currently sitting in my dining room, a year or so after we started this course, looking at the new windows we are in the process of having installed: double-pane, Low-E, Argon-filled, wood framed. Significantly not CSA-approved.

More about the journey from energy audit to new windows will be included will be coming as part of an ongoing series here

Recycling and the Multi-family dwelling.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

People who keep up with the solid waste issue know that Greater Vancouver has a “diversion rate” that is the envy of most major cities in North America. The proportion of refuse that Vancouverites recycle, compost, or otherwise keep pout of the landfill is currently over 55% (my weight). Metro Vancouver’s (unfortunately misnomer-ed) Zero Waste Challenge goal is to bring this number up to 70% by 2015.

There are several challenges to this goal, but one in particular is significant in New Westminster, that is multi-family housing, as New Westminster has one of the highest proportions of people living in multi-family dwellings of any jurisdiction in BC.

Although the uptake on organic waste collection has helped boost already-impressive diversion rates for single-family homes in New Westminster, multi-family lags way behind. Regionally, the diversion rate in multi-family housing is a dismal 16% compared to more than 50% regionally for single-family dwellings.

My personal experience from when we lived in a condo on Royal Ave was frustrating. And I emphasize this was a well cared-for, clean, newer building with a proactive strata council and an on-site caretaker. It was a nice building, a great place to live, but the recycling system was a mess. There was some success with the cardboard bin in the basement, but the blue bin system was a joke. Any attempt to provide a separate receptacle for newspaper, missed paper, and containers was basically ignored. There were pizza boxes and other food-contaminated waste getting into the bins (which quickly lead to a smelly mess), people putting the wrong things in the wrong bins, and some completely random stupidity (I once had to pull a complete upright vacuum cleaner out of the mixed plastics bin).

To introduce organics collection to a broken system like this is to invite disaster.

Metro Vancouver and the City have recognized that Multi-family is a tough nut to crack, but they are really starting to put some effort into it, because the benefits to the overall diversion goals are there to be had.

The New Westminster Environmental Partners have a “TrashTalkers” group that meet regularly (like tonight at 7:00 at the Waves Coffee house at Columbia and Begbie) to work on solid waste issues. They have identified multi-family as an area they are going to put a lot of energy towards this year. Working with the Glenbrooke North ZWC folks, the City, and Metro Vancouver, we are hoping to help launch some pilots in New Westminster to see if we can find some strategies to make multi-family recycling easier and more effective.

At the same time, New Westminster’s indefatigable Environmental Coordinator Jennifer Luckianchuk is launching a program to bring these ideas to the larger community (instead of just ruminating amongst us “greenies”). Right now they are trying to collect baseline data, and it would be great if everyone who cares about recycling and lives in a multi-family unit (townhouse, rental, condo, co-op, whatever!) go there and do the on-line survey, give your City a little help.

Of course, we can talk about doing this out of the goodness of your heart, for the good of the planet, etc. etc., but really, it is about saving you money. Garbage to the landfill and the incinerator costs the taxpayer more money than diverted waste to recycling or composting. With tippage fees likely to double in the next ten years, and the efficiency of the recycling stream, and growing markets for both recycled materials and compost products, wste diversion seems like an economic no-brainer.

If you are really keen, Metro Vancouver will be holding a Zero Waste Conference in March, where people interested in strategies to reduce their own impact, or in working with larger organization to reduce all of our impact, can share ideas, learn, and engage.

No wasted time when you are talking trash.

Water Bottles and Schools

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 3 Comments.

This is good news for a couple of reasons.

First off, the idea is right. Selling bottled water in schools is a stupid idea. Here in Metro Vancouver, we spend MetroVancouver’s drinking water quality is exceptional, with standards amongst the highest in the world, there is not reason for anyone to spend money on bottles of water, creating plastic waste, along with other impacts.

Bottled water is sometimes seen as convenient, but in Metro Vancouver we pay $0.0008 for a litre of the highest quality tap water in the world, compared to $2 or more for a litre of bottled water. That is a 2500x mark up. That is a spectacularly stupid consumer choice. Imagine if your ATM charged a 2500x mark up for the “convenience”, or if a cell phone call cost 2500x that of a pay phone. Like the new BC hydro ads: the amazing thing about wasting money on bottled water is that it is considered normal to do it.

Why? Clever marketing, and creating a culture where people are raised to think it is a reasonable, even the “safer” choice, to pay Pepsi or Coke a 2500x mark up for water. And Schools are a part of that plan. There is a reason most marketing of products are pointed at high-school aged people, it isn’t because they have money to spend, it is because that is where life-long habits are formed, from smoking to selecting toothpaste brands, to selecting religions. If they get you at 16, they likely have you for life. Worse, Schools are a “captive audience”, and the big soda marketers sign sweetheart deals to make sure only their brands are available in a particular school. In the case of NWSS, about $20,000 a year goes to the school athletic programs because of these deals.

But that $20K is not a “donation”, it is a bribe. An investment by a multi-national to bombard a captive audience and build brand loyalty. It is a bribe we should say no to. As obesity becomes a public health threat bigger than smoking, maybe we should take $20K from Rothmans to put cigarette machines in the school instead… the harm would probably be less. Bottled water is only part of the issue here, we should be banning the sale of pop and all snack foods in schools. If kids want to bring snacks to school, let them, but let us not use our schools for captive marketing exercises.

Too bad this debate got so mired in pro- vs. anti-labour rhetoric and politicking. Because it deflected from the real issue: what the hell are we thinking bilking kids for bottled water, and selling them malted battery acid cola in schools?

The second good news part of this story is the active group of High School students willing to take the lead on an initiative like this. The Environment is one area where the youth are teaching the parents, we are raising a generation of students who actually give a shit about the state of their home and their planet. With apologies to Gord Downie, every generation is smarter than it’s parents.

I’m back.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

Rested, refreshed, with eyes opened and lessons learned. An educational vacation, as they all should be.

Seems there was a lot going on when I was away. The City somehow found a way to both say “no” and “maybe” on the UBE (no surprise there). My buddy John Baird decided to finally release the independent report on Oil Sands impacts, and he did it a few days before Christmas to make sure it got the maximum possible exposure. The Tea Party finally got violent. And the Canucks didn’t lose a single regulation game.

I will resume almost-daily blogging in the next few days, but in the short term, here is the short interview I did with the News Leader before I left, as part of their Year in Review – Looking Forward series, called “2011 Hopes and Plans”, along with some expanded comments in italics that didn’t fit the word-count requirements of printed-on-dead-trees format.

Q: Were there any surprises for you in New Westminster environmental issues during 2010?
The immediate success of the Clean Green organic waste collection. The system was rolled out with surprisingly few problems, and the early returns show a huge reduction in “trash” the city has to ship to the landfill or the Burnaby incinerator. This is better for the environment, and will save taxpayers money in the long run. City council and staff deserve kudos for making this work.
The surprise is the immediacy of the success, not the success itself. There was a concurrent news story about the measure of the success: the huge decrease in garbage going to the curb, and the huge increase in green waste going to the compost facility. Kristian Davis from the City deserves the bulk of the credit for this success, it was a complicated program to administer and the roll out went amazingly smooth. The fact he became a new dad in the middle of the roll-out no doubt made for some stressful days.

Q: What do you think is the most pressing local environmental issue now?
Transportation. The United Boulevard Extension is on the front page now, but the NFPR and Pattullo Bridge replacement are elephants in the room. It is imperative that the city stop taking a wait-and-see approach and come out with a strong vision, backed by policy, that makes clear what the city will and will not accept for transportation routes through our neighbourhoods. Nothing will have more impact on the liveability of our city in the decades to come.
The UBE issue is the beginning of this debate, not the end. The City is phasing up for an update of the Master Transportation Plan; the Pattullo is apparently on hold, but with Falcon running for Premier, it will no doubt be coming back at a politically advantageous time; the Evergreen Line is still delayed; the train bridge over the Fraser needs replacement; no-one knows how they will fit 3 rails, 4 lanes of “truckroute” and a Pier Park between the River and the buildings on Front Street; and I don’t see any leadership from our local on this file.

Q: What are your plans to help address this, or other, issues in the new year?
The NWEP have an active transportation group, and brought together regional experts on the topic for a forum in November. It is important that the eventual shift to alternative modes of transportation is not forgotten in the current debate about congestion and goods movement in our city. Our role is to engage stakeholders, politicians, and the public, and keep this open conversation going. I hope we can make this “Topic #1” in the upcoming civic elections in November 2011.
We also have people on the Traffic Advisory, Pedestrian and Bicycle Advisory, and Environmental Advisory Committees. We are coordinating an approach to the Master Transportation Plan, and hope it will include real alternatives to building more road capacity. Not by protesting or writing inflammatory rhetoric, but by engaging the decision makers and providing them the information they need to make more sustainable choices, and stand behind those choices.

Q: What would be the best thing that could happen in your sector in 2011?
Our federal and provincial leaders taking real action to address climate change. We have a provincial government that is aware of the issue, but decides to spend billions on freeways anyway. The federal government has a head-in-the-(tar)sand attitude about the whole thing. It is becoming an embarrassment.
It just gets worse. Baird’s performance in Cancun was ugly. I had people in other countries actually ask me what the hell is wrong with Canada on this topic.


Q: The worst thing?
The province approving Metro Vancouver’s plan to expand trash incineration, in the face of massive public opposition. Burning garbage is not a sustainable way to make electricity, or a sustainable way to manage solid waste. With local backers pushing to locate the incinerator in New Westminster, this debate is going to come back to our front yard this year.
It verges upon rumour-mongering at this point, but the suspicions about our Mayor’s desire for locating an incinerator on the Canfor lands won’t go away. With Barry Penner off the file, the Minister of Environment has no reason to not approve incinerators, and after that it will be up to Metro Vancouver to decide the location. Sapperton Residents may find the UBE debate was just training for the real political fight they have ahead.

Q: What are your hopes for the community in the new year that have the best chances of actually happening?
Increased awareness. Sapperton residents are engaged in the UBE debate, a group in Glenbrook North completed a groundbreaking Zero Waste Challenge, Green Drinks are a happening event, community gardens are cropping up: we are at a tipping point where people are realising living “greener” actually means living better. We are starting to see “environmentalism” as improving our quality of life, not threatening it.
The good news is that our Cities are becoming “greener” every year, because that is what the voters want. People like clean air, clean water, green space, less traffic, lower taxes, all the things sustainability initiatives can bring (example: green bins). The NWEP keeps hearing from different people from different walks of life who want to make a difference. I am actually really positive about the years ahead.

Q: Give us your wildest and craziest prediction?
Besides a Canucks-Canadiens final?
Note that I wrote this back in the end of November, when the Canucks were in 4th in the West and the Habs were in 5th overall. I picked the Habs because I’d love to see an all-Canadian final as much as Gary Bettman would hate it, and neither Ottawa nor Toronto are going to make the Playoffs. It helps that my Dad is a Habs fan, and watching each other’s teams lose brings us together as a family.
Now, I’m not one to plan parade routes prematurely, but I will be in the bottom of the Grand Canyon in the first week of June, so if the Canucks are playing Hockey in June… I might miss it!