Tag: New Westminster

Election stuff!

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Again, I am mostly avoiding talking about the ongoing election on this site, partly because my time is limited due to (totally partisan) election work I have been doing, and partly because I want to keep this page less about fighting (depressingly partisan) fights and more about building local community. I am reserving most of my regular political (unabashedly partisan) rants for my Facebook Page, so if you care about my (hilariously partisan) opinions on “the horserace”, you can go over there. I do, however, opine here occasionally on the election as a process, and what it means for the state of our democracy.

Two quick points on that:

The politics of fear and division are rising in Canada in a way I have never seen in my (admittedly-short 40-year) awareness of politics. I draw a distinction between “Vote for us because our opposition’s policies/ideas are scary” and “Vote for us, because we are the only ones who will protect you from some dark-skinned boogeyman who is hiding in the shadow but wants to murder your family”. These are two very different uses of the term “fear”. The former is drawing a distinction between people running for office, and is the root of the reason we have elections. The second is fear-mongering, and a dangerous erosion of civil society.

When we draw these types of distinctions between groups of people, it seeds a garden of hate towards all identifiable groups, and supports a volatile coalition of ignorance, xenophobia, religious intolerance and outright racism. Done well, it allows the target voter to pick their own boogeyman to fill the gap (remember how Sikh and Hindu people were attacked in the United States in the immediate aftermath of 9/11?) and can target specific voter groups. This stuff is the specialty of Harper’s new adviser, Lynton Crosby, and I am chagrined that it is working.

My second point is that you, before you vote, should take a bit of time meet those vying to be your representative. You should ask them questions, and you should hear answers. You should make the connection so that after the election you can contact them with your concerns or ideas and start with “we met at…”. A few of you have reached the level of local fame that they can just put a few silly questions on a blog and expect answers. Others can attend one of several All-Candidates events, where you might be lucky enough to get a question in, and may or may not get the answer you were looking for.

This is why for the last few years, through Local, Provincial, and Federal Elections (excepting the last one, where I was an actual candidate!), I have worked with the NWEP, NEXT New West and Tenth to the Fraser to put on a different type of All Candidates Event. We have had a comedy night, a Jane’s Walk, a Cocktail Party, all with the desire to break the partisan and confrontational mould of the typical debate, and bring the candidates together in a social setting so that voters could get to know them better. We are doing it again this year, and we are doing it on a boat, so the candidates cannot escape your questions!

Next Tuesday, we will set sail at 6:30pm and do a 90-minute cruise of the Fraser on the MV Native. Cocktails and canapé will be available. We will be strictly limiting the speechmaking to only a few minutes, and will instead rely on the candidates and participants to mix and mingle for the rest of the cruise and schmooze the fickle voter (you!). We emphasize that this is not a confrontational environment, and heckling or badgering will not be tolerated. The Captain has the authority to throw jerks in the brig for the duration of the tour, so no candidate should fear appearing here. Unless they are jerks, I guess.

We need to pay for the boat and snacks, so the tickets are $15*, and tickets are limited by lifeboat capacity, so you need to go on-line to buy them. This will be a unique (and very #NewWest) event, you should join us, so you can also say “I knew them back when…” Tickets here.

*Hey, we want to be as inclusive as possible, because money should not be a barrier to participation in democracy-building events. So an anonymous donor has agreed to contribute a few dollars to buy tickets for some people who feel $15 is a barrier to their participation. Please drop me an e-mail at info@patrickjohnstone.ca if you know someone who might want to take advantage of this offer.

Consultation

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The Sapperton Green project is big, and it will redefine the shape of New Westminster, especially as it is slated to occur on the heels of the expansion of Royal Columbia Hospital and development of the associated Economic Health Care Cluster.

It also is a long-term project. Even at the most ambitious pace, I cannot imagine Sapperton Green building out within 20 years. It is simply too large and too complicated, and the organization developing this new community are not build-it-and-run types, but long term players in developing and managing large real estate investments. One indication of the slow approach being taken here is the pace so far. The project has already seen 5 public open houses, the striking of a community stakeholder group with representatives from the community, and numerous “checking in” reports to Council over more than 5 years of initial planning before a Public Hearing was even scheduled. The developer is taking the slow approach here, and this appears to suit New Westminster Council just fine.

That is why I find this story a little frustrating, as it unfairly presents a confrontational motif to what I expect to be a respectful dialogue between municipalities. The concerns raised by Coquitlam city staff in their report and by their Council at the meeting are excellent, and are remarkably similar to the conversations that have taken place between New West Council and staff, and to the comments I heard from the public at the Open Houses I attended. My feeling (and I cannot speak for all of Council on this) is that Sapperton Green can only be developed in concert with a re-imagining of how the Brunette and Highway 1 interchange operates. Those discussions will (because of jurisdictional requirements, and because it only makes sense) include Coquitlam, the Ministry of Transportation (as owner of the interchange) and TransLink (as administrator of the Major Road Network). As I understand, those conversations have already begun at a staff-to-staff level, where the real expertise resides.

One comment made at Coquitlam Council to which I do take exception is the suggestion that this plan represents New Westminster not working in the best interest of the region. This City, along with Coquitlam, is a signatory to the Regional Growth Strategy and the regional transportation plan known as Transport 2040. We have agreed to take on a fair chunk of the projected population growth in the region, up to 30,000 more people by mid-century. Both of these documents emphasize building dense, compact, multi-use (work, live, and play) development projects adjacent to major transit hubs as the best way to address that growth. They both see development along the SkyTrain corridors as the highest priority to accommodate regional growth, as that is the best way to reduce the impacts and costs of that growth when it comes to transportation, utility infrastructure, and protecting greenspaces across the region. New West has, through the ongoing consultation, made it clear that Sapperton Green must be a mixed-use development, with real job-generation lands (not just a scatter of retail-in-the-pedestal) included with the residential development. I would be hard pressed to find a proposed development in the region that better reflects the long-term regional growth vision than what is proposed for the Braid Skytrain station.

That said, this project is still at a very preliminary stage, and Council has not yet officially provided any approval to the project. The open houses so far are a precursor to an Official Community Plan amendment that would permit the rezoning of the site to a Comprehensive Development District. Only the broadest of zoning principles are being established at this point, and even if this OCP amendment is approved by Council after the Public Hearing, there is a long way to go and a lot of design and amenity discussions to be had before the first concrete gets poured on this site. There will be Public Hearings, there will be more Open Houses, and indeed there will be further consultation with key stakeholders like Coquitlam. The recent report to Council lays out the comprehensive consultation plan, and the City of Coquitlam is #1 on the list of communities we need to be having discussions with. In fact, the report that Coquitlam Council was addressing at the September 8th meeting was sent by New Westminster as part of that longer-term consultation plan.

If I was to put the most optimistic light on this situation, I would think the ongoing consultation is a unique opportunity for the neighbouring Councils to get together and talk about how we can better manage boundary issues like this. There may be areas we fundamentally disagree, but we already share many services and would both benefit from better integration. There is no reason that the inevitable re-alignment of the Brunette overpass and interchange can’t be a project that suits both of our needs (indeed, we may need to work together to assure that is the case, as the Ministry of Transportation may have other needs in mind). Ultimately we both win if we can work together to address knotty issues, as we can both make better decisions for the people who elected us. I’m not sure offsetting Reports to Council and edited comments printed in the media are the most productive way for us to do this.

Maybe we should use Twitter. (Just kidding!)

Council Report – August 31, 2015

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Welcome back. We took Council on the Road for the last meeting of August, meeting at the Anvil Centre in beautiful, historic Downtown New Westminster – Western Canada’s Original Downtowntm.

For the first meeting after a month-long break, it wasn’t as packed an agenda as one might expect, although there were a significant number of proclamations and presentations that are worth your time to watch on video.

We also had a bit of commentary about the windstorm from the Chief of Police and the Director of Parks. The short version is that our Fire and Electrical Utility folks did an exemplary job, got almost everybody’s lights back on within 24 hours, and managed a huge call volume through activation of the new Emergency Operations Centre at Firehall #1 to take a bit of the load off of the swamped central E-Comm system. This was a relatively small emergency, but was a good test of our response capabilities, and will be a learning experience going forward.

It should also be a learning experience for people like me, who were found wandering the streets of Uptown on Saturday Night trying to find a meal and a place to plug my mobile phone in (both successfully located). I will try to pop out another blog post this week about Emergency Preparedness, and what we should learn from this event.

As usual (but for the last time ever?) the meat of the meeting involved covering Recommendations from the Committee of the Whole.

FCM encouragement for Federal Leaders Debate

I don’t know if you noticed, but there is a federal election happening, and Federation of Canadian Municipalities is attempting to the get the leaders of the major parties together to hold a debate on the topic of “municipal issues”. As a Council, we support this initiative, as there are numerous Federal issues (the Long Form Census and reinvestment of the Federal Gas Tax pop immediately to mind) that have a direct impact on Municipal governments, including New Westminster.

Land Use and Planning Committee

This is part of our new Council format, where the Council will no longer be meeting as Committee of the Whole. In part to reduce the workload on the newly expanded evening meetings, and also with the intent to serve the public better in providing more timely responses to “development” questions, we are setting up a Land Use and Planning Committee. This will comprise two Councillors and the Mayor, supported by a few relevant staff members, with the plan to meet earlier in the development process and provide more detailed reviews of potential projects and potential pitfalls. The LUPC will serve as advisory to the whole of Council, and will hold their meetings in public.

I’m excited to be serving on this committee for an inaugural two-year term, and am interested to see how we can make the development process smoother for developers, and more open and transparent for residents.

Development Variance Permit – 302 Fifth Ave

This is a simple request to replace a garage with one that is quite a bit taller than is allowed in the zoning. The City limits garage or outbuilding heights in part to reduce the unregulated conversion to living space, and also to reduce the visual impact on adjacent properties. In this case, the proponent was requesting a taller height so the garage matches better the unique roofline of the house, was building the garage with a truss design that prevented the upper part of the garage from ever being converted to living space, and the two closest neighbours provided letters indicating they were not opposed to the larger size.

With that information in hand, Council agreed to consider the requested Development Variance at the September 28 meeting. If you have an opinion, you should let us know before then!

Development Variance Permit – 1258 Ewen Ave

This is a request to build a new house in Queensborough 10 inches higher than permitted, which would make it the same size as the adjacent houses. Council agreed to consider the requested Development Variance at the September 28 meeting. If you have an opinion, you should let us know before then!

Housekeeping Amendment Bylaw

This is to make several housekeeping changes to the existing zoning Bylaw. The changes are:
• Changing the wording of the bylaw so the reference to the professional organization that oversees massage providers matches the language of the actual professional organization;
• An adjustment of the density formula for RM-6 and C-4 districts to make the formula actually work properly and as intended for smaller sites;
• Clarifying some language in at-grade commercial requirements in the C4 district;
• An amendment to allow animal care operations in CD-19, to bring it in line with other commercial districts of the type; and
• An amendment of the language for how corner cuts are defined for properties with front lawns.

Exciting stuff, I know, and these changes will go to Public Hearing on September 28, 2015. C’mon out and tell us what you think!

Development Permit 26 E Royal

This is the final development site at Victoria Hill, which will provide some long-awaited commercial property in the centre of the neighbourhood as part of two 4-story residential buildings. The unit mix here is very family-friendly, with almost every unit being 2- or 3-bedroom, and many of them ground-oriented with access to a large public courtyard and parks.

Council voted unanimously to consider issuance of the Development Permit.

404 Ash Street Development Permit and Housing Agreement

This is the plan to replace the building lost to fire at 4th Ave and Ash in February, 2014. The rental building had 29 units, and will be replaced with a slightly larger building featuring 38 units, and will be a secured rental building.

In Committee of the Whole, I asked that we have staff report back to us prior to the DP being issued about the potential to save the row of about 18 trees that line the north side of the property.

These tall, mature evergreens trees were impacted by the fire, but survived and appear now to be healthy – they even came through last weeks’ windstorm without a scratch.
They are essentially limb-free for the bottom 25 feet, but have healthy crowns that rise to probably 50 feet. Besides all of the community amenities trees provide in regards to the sustainability of our community, this particular line of trees provide an incredible weather buffer to the apartment building to the north – shading the three-story walkup from the worst of the summer heat, and reducing wind and noise.

The trees are planted just within the property line of 404 Ash, and are prospering despite only taking up about 3 feet of soil between the driveway to the north and the excavated underground basement foundations of the building that was burned. It would be a shame if we lost these trees now. It would be a loss to the Brow of the Hill community that lacks tree coverage, to the neighbours to the north, and ultimately to the residents of this new rental building (as was pointed out recently in a news story).

The trees look healthy to me, but I am not an arbourist. Therefore, I asked that Staff provide us a bit of guidance about the viability of these trees, and to opine on whether they could be saved. If the new building’ footprint is going on top of the foundation footprint of the old building, then the trees should not be effected, and just might need a bit of protection during construction. If the planned foundation of the new building is closer to the north property line than the existing building, then I would even be happy to see the entire building shifted 3 feet south to allow these trees to remain for the entire neighbourhood.

I don’t want to hold up this development, I just want to assure that every possible step was taken to protect these trees, so they are not lost out of general neglect of their benefits.

?

Council will be reviewing this Development Permit at the September 14 meeting.

Queensborough Special Study Area – Consultation and preliminary zoning

Council was asked to approve an ongoing consultation plan on the comprehensive redevelopment of a large area of Queensborough. The plan outlines the stakeholders that must be consulted under the Local Government Act (like Metro Vancouver), and those that probably should be consulted (Port Metro Vancouver), along with the next stages of public consultation, especially with property owners within the Special Study Area.

This is a large redevelopment, which will bring a commercial hub to the east part of Queensborough adjacent to Port Royal, along with residential development of family-friendly ground oriented housing. I attended a Publci Open House at the Queensborough community Centre back in June, and the reception we generally very positive about this development. There were a few traffic-impact details to work out at that time, but the most frequent comment I heard was “how soon can we get those stores?” There is a real desire to get a bit of local retail around Port Royal, and I hope it can be built early in this development plan, if the plan is approved.

There are more details to be worked out yet, but Council is happy at this point with moving the project ahead to the next steps.

800 12th Street, Text Amendment to Zoning Bylaw

A business wants to move their operation to New Westminster at 12th St. and 8th Ave, but the strict wording of our Zoning Bylaw does not allow part of their business plan. They currently offer a variety of pet services, but boarding for cats is one of them, and that does not fit the zoning of the property. There are several steps to make the required change to the Bylaw, including informing neighbours, committee review, and Public Hearing. Council is happy to allow the process to proceed as required by the Bylaw and the Local Government Act.

Street and Traffic Bylaw changes
We moved 3 readings of the changes to our Street and Traffic Bylaw back on July 13th, but before it is adopted, the Bylaw needs to pass Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure muster – one of those gentle reminders that Local Governments and Municipal streets exist at the pleasure of the Provincial Government. The MoTI review found our definition of “street” was not strictly appropriate, and needed a bit of modification. No problem there, but to make the change we need to rescind our original Third Reading and replace it with a Third Reading of the text of the Bylaw that reflects the new definition.

Yes, this all makes perfect sense, although it is a pretty good argument for why Government can’t just “run more like a business”. Checks and balances, my friends. Checks and balances.

2014 Annual Water Quality Report

There has been a lot of talk this year about water quantity, but not as much about water quality. The water that comes out of your tap is remarkably clean, and we take extraordinary measures to assure it is some of the cleanest, safest water in the world. Our Water crews in the City and our supplier the Greater Vancouver Water District do excellent work, and it is something we should trumpet more. If nothing else, we should use it to point out the silliness of paying for bottled water.

This annual report is the public disclosure of how, where and when the 966 water samples for 2014 were collected, and the detailed results of their analytical testing. Data geeks might want to have fun there, but for everyone else- the water is safe, and we are going above and beyond the requirements to assure it stays that way.

Sewer separation budget re-allocation

If you noticed all the digging activity along Queens Street near Tipperary Park of late, that is part of the ongoing “sewer separation” program, where the City’s archaic combined-flow sewers are being replaced with separate sanitary and storm systems. A legacy of being a very old city, and a lack of infrastructure investment in previous decades, much of New Westminster’s sewers still combine storm flows with sanitary flows, which means our sanitary system carries more water than it needs to, treatment costs are high, and occasional very large storm events can result in sanitary sewer spills. Replacing these systems City-wide is a decades-long process that will cost the City hundreds of millions of dollars – we do what we can when we can.

In this report, Engineering is asking Council to approve a plan to accelerate separation in an area of Sapperton where there are current plans to pave and install gutter/drain systems. It makes sense to do the separation at the same time – you only have to tear the road up once, and you are not hooking your new surface works to obsolete infrastructure. So Council approved the plan to move some money over to facilitate this and save us money in the long run.

Update 2016 Budget Survey

The City commissions a survey every year as part of our outreach efforts during the budgeting process. The questions are very opinion-poll-like (“What do you like more or less about the City? Where do you think we should put more/less emphasis?”), but the study has been asking similar questions for several years, so longitudal trends can be tracked. This report was just a final “OK” on the survey questions from Council before the poll is commissioned.

Sole Source Multi-year Maintenance Agreement

The City has enterprise software it purchases from a large company. That software is proprietary, and requires regular maintenance. We need to pay the supplier for that maintenance, as no-one else can do it. Our purchasing Policy requires that only Council can authorize sole-source procurement for the necessary ~$150,000 per year spent on this software system. We did so.

Front Street Public Art Installation

Back in July, Council decided it didn’t like the Public Art proposal for the Front Street Parkade that we chosen by an independent jury of professionals working under the guidance of the Public Art Advisory Committee. So the project was punted back to Staff and Committee to come up with a better proposal.

This is a topic where I respectfully disagree with some of my Council colleagues, in that I think that judging the aesthetics or artistic merit of Public Art is not the role of politicians (as wise and intelligent as we may be). I won’t go into this at length here (another blog post, another time – a short version can be heard in my comments at Committee of the Whole). Regardless, I agree with the idea that we need to get the PAAC involved and get a project approved for this site.

Capital Budget amendment

The NW Police Department needs to renovate its space to reflect the results of their successful recruiting of female members. The Old Boys Club needs a few more lockers for the New Girls. This approval by Council is a preliminary step towards the NWPD including the improvements in their Capital Plan, and securing cost estimates. Council will once again be able to opine on the project once some more detailed costs and timing are worked out.

Rental Displacement Policy

This is a topic I brought before Committee of the Whole for consideration. I wanted to hear how the City’s existing rental protection policies and practices, and those of the provincial Residential Tenancy Act are working to protect individuals who are living in the City’s rental properties. I also want the report to identify potential policy gaps, and how we could do better.

There have been a couple of events recently that have raised the profile of people displaced from affordable rental accommodation. During the Urban Academy debate in the spring, there was a situation created where residents of a Manitoba Street residential building were evicted in preparation for a development that was (in the end) not supported by Council. During those discussions, it was clear that the proponent felt they took measures well above and beyond to help the displaced residents, however it was also clear that some of the families that were displaced suffered tremendously, and felt that their rights were not respected by the proponent or by the process. I also had a conversation a few weeks ago with a neighbour who knew of two other men who were being displaced right now by a new small residential development in the West End.

There is increasing media attention in some of our neighbouring communities around “renovictions” and loss of affordable and rental housing that results from rapid development (especially around SkyTrain stations) and our rapidly increasing cost of housing.

There are already some policies in place in New Westminster to prevent the loss of rental properties and to reduce the impact on affordability that comes with redevelopment, but I think it is timely for us to review the policies and have a closer look at provincial and municipal standards compared to the expectations we have as a City about how rental property and affordable housing will be protected as our building stock is updated.

After all of that Committee of the Whole action, we had a few Bylaws to read:

Zoning Amendment No. 7779, 2015
Housekeeping changes to the Zoning Bylaw mentioned above, Received First and Second reading.
Housing Agreement Bylaw No. 7775, 2015
The agreement that assures this development will be secured for rental, also mentioned above, received First, Second and Third Reading.
Street and Traffic Bylaw No. 7664, 2015
The changes made by the Ministry (mentioned above) required rescinding of Third Reading and a new Third Reading.

And that was an evening’s work.

Stroads

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

Can we avoid a stroad problem in New West?

The word “stroad” is a slightly tongue-in-cheek portmanteau combining “street” with “road”, and it is becoming such common parlance in city planning that even small towns in Pennsylvania are talking about how to deal with them. The term came from people who understand the difference between how a “street” operates, and how a “road” operates. The former is a place where people do things, like socialize and perform commerce; the latter is a conduit for travel to get somewhere else. The term “stroad” pinpoints the problem created when you try to combine those two mutually exclusive uses into the same space.

I would argue that New Westminster has very effectively dealt with one stroad in its midst when the Council of the day put Columbia Street on a road diet. I remember the boo-birds talking about the disaster that would befall the City, and many of them still pop up to complain about pedestrian bumps or crosswalks or any other thing the City does to make the pedestrian space safer. Columbia is not back to being the Miracle Mile of the 1940s, and it never will be. However there is no doubt it is a better place for walking, for shopping, for living and for driving, than it was in the 1990s.

stroad5

Stroads are rarely created intentionally, they evolve into existence, with a bunch of small (and at the time, seemingly rational) decisions. Most commonly, a city finds one of its shopping streets is increasingly used by through-commuters. In hopes of eking some value out of this apparent windfall, automobile-oriented development happens along the route, displacing the existing landuse with the intent to capture the fleeting attention of through-commuters. This (often strip-mall commercial) development also attracts local drivers who used to shop on the street, and now blend with the through-commuters. Congestion is exacerbated, and the engineering solution is to increase capacity. You widen the road, removing on-street parking if necessary, which requires you to build parking lots, further separating the road from the businesses, and creates in-out driveways or more light-controlled intersections, which slows the through-drivers. To fix this, you put in a left-turn lane or two so the through-traffic doesn’t get stuck, then a right-turn lane to get them even further unstuck. Which kind of works for a while (see Byrne Road and Marine, or Kingsway at Metrotown), as long as you have a bottomless asphalt budget.

stroad3

All of the sudden, you have a road in the middle of your City right in the middle of the street in the middle of your City. Anyone who wants to try to put value into the street by using their local commercial businesses discover the shops are behind expansive parking lots that are hard to get into or out of, and walking across the street means braving 40 metres of asphalt where the people trying to turn right through the crosswalk are separated from the people trying to pull a left turn across traffic by the people in between speeding along to be the first to get to the next red light, frustrated by all the traffic. So, complicated light timing, “pedestrian islands”, or expensive overpasses are required to make the space marginally safe for people who failed to bring along 3,000lbs of metal when they went to buy a loaf of bread. And we have built a stroad.

stroad4

Stroads are expensive to build and maintain. They move traffic poorly, yet provide the appearance of moving it well, which paradoxically increases induced demand while not actually increasing capacity. They are dangerous for all users, but especially for cyclists and pedestrians, who end up avoiding their chosen mode because the stroads are so uninviting. Worst of all, they strip away the value of expensive and precious urban land space, and contribute less to the local economy than an active street. They represent a planning failure, an engineering failure, and a leadership failure that must be avoided in modern urban areas.

So when you hear about plans for East Columbia Street, 12th Street, Ewen Avenue, 6th Street or 20th Street, or any of the busy streets in New Westminster, think to yourself: do we want this to be a street, or a road? Without first making that distinction, we will inevitably hedge towards a stroad, and end up with neither.

Opening Streets

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Much like this earlier post, I want to address a common use of language that has been bugging me of late: that around “closing” streets to hold events. It is a convenient term we use in a City to organize traffic management, emergency planning and engineering needs, but it is wrong. It implies that our streets are only there to serve people driving along them, or for temporary storage of your vehicle while you are off doing other things. There is so much more we can do with our streets when we stop worrying about “closing” them, and start creating better ways to “open” them.

Last weekend, I was at the New West Pride Street Party on Columbia Street, where two lanes of road was indeed closed for 10 hours so that people could walk, sit, talk, drink, dance, shop, share, eat, sing, and celebrate. I defy anyone to look at this picture of Columbia Street (which I borrowed from Bif Naked, because her view was better than mine!) and tell me that street is closed:

A photo posted by Bif Naked (@missbifnaked) on

This weekend, we are doing it again, with 70 food trucks and (if last year’s event is any evidence) tens of more thousands of people will be enjoying themselves on Columbia Street. These are not just New Westminster people, but folks from around the region coming to New Westminster to add to the vitality of our downtown, support local businesses and entrepreneurs from around the region, and hopefully discover that Downtown New Westminster is a great place to spend some time, not just a place to drive through.

closed

I also noted a news story this week about the Royal City Farmers Market plans to move uptown for their winter market season. The story mentions “Belmont Street will be closed to traffic from 11 am to 3 pm”. This statement is only true if you define “traffic” as cars. I am willing to bet that there will be more people using Belmont Street for those 4 hours every second Saturday than on any other day – it is just that the “traffic” will be on foot. By being on foot, they are more likely to stop, to shop, to talk to their neighbours and enjoy a laugh. People can, just with their presence, bring several hundred square metres of dead asphalt to life by making it a place of human interaction and commerce, not  just a place for cars to drive and park.

Language matters, so let’s stop talking about a day where tens of thousands of people flood onto our streets as a “Road Closure”; let’s start calling it a “Street Opening”.

Art in my absence

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I’m going out of town this weekend!

Yes, I am actually leaving New Westminster for a weekend. I’m visiting my favourite Mom-in-Law on Saturna Island and giving a talk at the Gulf Island National Park Reserve sunset stories series on one of my favourite topics.

That means I am going to miss one of New Westminster’s best annual events – so I am making up for it by encouraging you to attend in my place and give the organizers my regrets.

The New Westminster Cultural Crawl is happening Saturday and Sunday, has been powered by the indomitable Trudy at the Van Dop Gallery for 12 years now. The Crawl is an opportunity for you to have a New West weekend staycation, and interact with literally dozens of artists across several venues. It is self-guided, no stress, and many events are interactive, so like the best of Staycations: all fun, no pressure. It doesn’t matter what neighbourhood you are in, and there is enough variety to keep everyone entertained.

Yes, there are a lot of galleries, including the incredible Van Dop, the Arts Council one in Queens Park, where the current showing explores local LGBTQ artists (fitting for the start of next week’s New West Pride week), and the amazingly popular 6th Street Pop-up space brought to you by everyone’s favourite brick & mortar shop. There are also various other ways to interact with art and artists. I may be biased, but I share Gord Hobbis’ opinion that the craftsmanship in old bicycles is a beautiful expression of art. There will be a family-friendly outdoor movie at Port Royal Park, an interactive celebration of Irving House’s 150th birthday, and the entire City will be, apparently, awash in “Capital” Teas.

The entire program is available here, so stay near home, enjoy some creative local artists, have a cuppa tea, and be inspired by your neighbours.

As a bonus, if the artists inspire you and/or your kids, take that inspiration out on a concrete wall! Another amazing young community leader has coordinated a fun opportunity to help beautify a bit of Downtown. You and yours can take a paint brush and add to a mural to a currently-uninspiring concrete wall. This is a neighbourhood-driven neighbourhood improvement project that will leave a fun legacy, who couldn’t support this?

Or you can came to Saturna Island and snooze through some boring former academic droning on about geology.

shovelin

PS: I’ll be back for the Rainbow Flag Raising at City hall on Monday, and hope to attend several of the New West Pride events, but maybe I’ll go on about that more next post…
PPS: Except to say if you like Whitecaps soccer, and who doesn’t, you can get discount tickets and a pre-game party in New West by going to the Pride Kick-off this Satruday! Enter here, and use the promo code PRIDENEWWEST.
FPS: And you should probably also pick up some tickets (while they are still available) for the 80’s and 90’s Dance Party at Match Pub next Friday. They are ridiculously cheap, and the Starlight Casino is a huge supporter of New West Pride. More on this next week, but I didn’t want to wait until tickets are sold out!

Ask Pat: NEVs and LSVs?

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

It’s been a while since I did one of these, and there are a few in the queue…

Vickie asks—

Hi Pat, I’ve been looking into NEVs lately to see if they could be a viable alternative to public transit for commuting to Vancouver. I’ve always been a huge fan and advocate of EVs but since I can’t afford a Tesla I’ve been forced to look at other options. I know that New West has a bylaw that allows for them but I’m not sure if it includes streets that have a 50km speed limit. Do you know if it does? What are your thoughts on NEVs and LSVs in general?

Frankly, I know nothing about them! For the benefit of others, NEVs are “Neighborhood Electric Vehicles”, which are essentially electric golf-cart like vehicles designed for general use, and are one category of “Low Speed Vehicles” that bridge the gap between mobility-assist scooters and automobiles. In New Westminster (and in the Motor Vehicle Act ) they are referred to as Neighbourhood Zero Emissions Vehicles (NZEVs).

Indeed, section 702 of our Street Traffic Bylaw makes them legal to operate in the City on any road where the speed limit is 50km/h or less. Perhaps strangely, they are limited to operating at no more than 40km/h by the same bylaw. The NZEV must also be labelled in compliance with the federal Motor Vehicle Safety Act.

The Provincial Motor Vehicle Act gives municipalities the power to permit their use, so don’t ask me if you can drive them over to Burnaby, Coquitlam, or Surrey). They also need to be registered and insured by ICBC, just like any other car.

My thoughts on electric cars in general are fairly ambivalent. They address one of the issues related to automobile reliance (that of converting fossil fuels to airborne carcinogens and greenhouse gasses), but do not assist with all of the other negatives. Electric cars will do nothing to solve our regional congestion problem, or the ongoing road socialism that is putting so much strain in municipal coffers. They similarly do nothing to address the fundamental disconnect between building a sustainable, compact, transit-oriented and highly livable region, but are instead just another tool to facilitate sprawling growth into our ALR and surrounding greenfields.

We are fortunate in BC in that almost all of our electricity comes from sustainable sources, so electric cars do help reduce our greenhouse gas footprint, however we cannot separate the idea that moving 1000kg of metal and plastic around with you everywhere you go is simply inefficient. In places where less than 99% of the electricity is sustainably derived, the implications of a wholesale shift to electrics is daunting. Look at this diagram from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory:

LLNL
Yes, it is US data, but the narrative is applicable to most of Canada. If you take the 24.8 Quads of energy that is derived from petroleum and goes towards transportation, and shift it up to “electricity generation”, and suggest that we have pretty much tapped as much as we can from hydroelectric power, you will see we are going to need to build a lot of solar fields and windmills to power our transportation needs.

The way I see it, electric cars are a useful stopgap technology that can be useful in addressing some parts of our current climate crisis, but they are far from the panacea for sustainable transportation and communities.

However, my Mom-in-law lives on Saturna Island, where gas is expensive, electricity is cheap, and you never have to drive more than 20 km, but almost always need a truck. If someone built a plug-in hybrid small truck (think a Prius plug-in or Chevy Volt drivetrain under a small 4×4 pick-up), I would convince her to buy one tomorrow.

Pride

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

When the City decided to support our growing Pride Celebration week this year by painting a crosswalk with the rainbow symbol of Pride, the reaction was immediately positive. Aside from mentions in the local and alternative media, and a huge splash on social media, there was no big press rush or ribbon-cutting unveiling. It was a small but meaningful gesture, and we are far from the first community to do it.

@MsNWimby and I decided to take walk by after dinner yesterday so she could see it for the first time, and I was at first buoyed, then dismayed, to see a small crowd gathered taking pictures. Yes, somebody had splashed some household paint on the crosswalk, and all of the sudden, the regional media was interested.

I think it says something about where we are in Canada in 2015 that a City displaying an important symbol of inclusion, diversity, and acceptance is smaller news than someone defacing that symbol. Some might use this to critique modern media’s tendency to tell us what is bad in the world instead of what is good. I prefer to look at it from a more positive side.

The symbol of the Rainbow Flag was once a revolutionary one, born of the historic struggles for acceptance of homosexuality. The rainbow as a symbol of diversity and inclusion grew out of San Francisco as that City became the bulwark of “Gay rights” in the post-Hippie era. As is typical with symbols that challenge orthodoxy, many tried to ban it or belittle it. Fortunately, through the struggle of new generations of activists and community leaders, our society evolved, and the meaning of the flag has evolved with it. It is not just about “Gay rights”, or even homosexuality anymore; it is about recognizing that people are different. Colour, size, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, kinks – nobody is “normal”, because in a society of individuals there is no “normal”. Even I, as a hopelessly Wonderbread white, straight, monogamous, middle-aged, cis,  professional male, exist within a spectrum. The rainbow flag reminds me that the privileges once bestowed only upon those within my narrow band of the rainbow must now be enjoyed by all, or we don’t live in a just world. Unfortunately, we do not yet live in that just world.

The good news yesterday was that several people were around the crosswalk when the elderly vandal started slopping paint on it. They were quick to contact the NWPD, who were quick to react, and the gentleman was quite literally caught white-handed. A couple of quick phone calls, and City engineering staff were able to get a clean-up crew out there before the paint had fully dried, minimizing the damage. I’m really proud of our Police and Engineering staff for their quick response, such that by the time the first TV camera arrived on scene, the mess was already disappearing.

I was also happy to see that when the vandalism lit up the social media, the reaction was again almost universally supportive of the rainbow sidewalk. Many people were disappointed that the vandalism had occurred, and some even expressed anger about it. My first Tweet was this:

Capture

In hindsight, that probably sounded angrier than I was, as mostly I felt disappointment. It was later I learned the vandal was an aged man whose faculties may not have been completely intact. There is no doubt the act was deliberate, and the man should have to pay restitution to the taxpayers who paid for the policing and clean-up, but I mostly felt sorry for the man who felt so desperate to remain in his own, narrow band of the Rainbow.

With the benefit of 24 hours, and thinking about the elderly gentleman who performed this flaccid protest, I’m reminded of the words of a great leader:

“Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.”

Perhaps, as some have suggested, we shouldn’t be angry at the gentleman who saw this as his only way to express himself. Instead, we can be hopeful that he will see that he is only fighting against a more just world. We can also be optimistic about a future where we don’t need this symbol anymore. We aren’t there yet, but we have come far enough that an act against the symbol is bigger news that the displaying of the symbol itself. We are moving in the right direction, and if we handle this right as a community, the step backward represented by this gentleman’s rash act can be far offset by the steps forward taken by the conversation his act precipitated. As was posted on Facebook last night by another New West resident: “We all need to paint more rainbows in the world.”

I hope you all come out and enjoy New West Pride August 8-15th. It is going to be a great series of events, culminating in the Pride Street Party on Saturday the 15th. Get your picture taken with the crosswalk, and use it to start your own conversation.

Loitering

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 7 Comments.

I hate that word. Second only to my hatred for the term “jaywalking”. Both terms imply that there is a better use for a public space that you being on it, even if you are not actually stopping those better uses from being exercised. They are (semi-) legal ways of saying “go away kid, ya bother me”.

But I don’t want to defend loitering (a very, very good essay on that topic, with that very title, was already written by Emily Badger), I want to talk about a specific place in New Westminster, where we have completely lost the plot on loitering.

The New Westminster SkyTrain station is the defacto heart of our City. Speak all you want about Queens Park, the Quayside Boardwalk or the Coffee Crossing in Uptown, I will argue that our central downtown transit hub is the centre of our new City. This is where compact, mixed-use, transit-oriented new urban development is centred. When Hyack Square was built to better connect it to the River Market, when hundreds of residential suites and thousands of square feet of retail were developed right on top of it, when the Anvil was conceived as a new community gathering space, it was all about the SkyTrain and New Westminster Station. It is the centre point in the “big vision” for New Westminster, and it is the new “front door” to our Downtown and waterfront, a mix of our Grand Central Station and our Times Square.

As such, New Westminster station needs to be a space where people are comfortable hanging out, walking through, meeting friends, having chats. A place people want to be in, without a particular purpose, which is pretty much the definition of loitering.

It has always been a little tough to love New Westminster Station. It is far better now than the empty parking lot ringed with marginal businesses it was in the late 80s when I first moved to New Westminster, but for the best part of the last decade, it has been a station under construction. Plaza88 / The Shops at New Westminster Station has taken a bit of time to find its character, but is now mostly leased up with an interesting mix of businesses, and is attracting customers. The Kyoto Block (the empty lot between the shops and the Anvil Centre) is still an empty lot and a signficiant missing connection, but despite some dreams I may have had, I’m afraid they will never be realized now that it has been sold. With the Anvil construction just wrapped up and now a year-long construction project on the SkyTrain station, followed by potential expansion of the McInnes Overpass to occur with the River Sky development, and building of the 4th Plaza88 tower, there is more construction to come.

Meanwhile, the plaza opening up to Carnarvon between the front of a Tim Horton’s and the back of a Spaghetti Factory presents you the best-used “grant entrance” to New Westminster. With all due respect to the fine people in the Pawn Brokering industry – is this really the best we can do?

entrance

However, it isn’t the walls around the space that we interact with as much as the space itself, and I have had two very different e-mail exchanges of late with New Westminster residents I respect about the “problem” with that plaza space. The interesting part is that they were two very different conversations. One complained about the loiterers and “gauntlet of smoke and dirty looks” they have to endure when walking through the station, the other spoke of all the unfriendly spikes and security presence that is making a presumptively public place less friendly for people to linger.

sidewalk

(it just occurred to me that I should get these two people together for a coffee at the Tim Hortons there and let them come to a solution instead of writing this blog…)

I am very much on the side of the second person: public spaces with people in them are safer, more friendly, better for business, and more fun. It is clear the space in that plaza was initially intended to be lingered in – the architect built bench-height structures around the periphery and decks in front of the restaurants, there was even initially some funky plastic chaise-lounges and benches on the site when the shops opened.

Now, the benches are gone. Metal fences have been installed to prevent sitting on one set of benches, glass wall installed ot prevent sitting on another. And in case you didn’t get the message, the ineffective No Smoking signs have been supplemented with No Loitering signs.

spikes
This concrete bench is no longer a place to sit.
glassstep
Similar to this space, which was once somewhere you could sit.
noloiter
And the sign is there in case you don’t get the message from the spikey metal.

Get away from me, kid, ya bother me.

I remember a talk I heard last year by Susan Briggs, a prof at Douglas College, who discussed the loss of the public realm. We have replaced the town square with the shopping mall, the playground for the McDonalds Playspace, the urban space for the corporate place. Cash-strapped governments are only too happy to have private industry provide the plazas, the parks, the gathering spaces that governments cannot afford to buy, develop, or maintain. This space off Carnarvon is a prime example. It is the only access from the public street to public transit, yet the space is private, and beholden to the rules of the owner. In this case, the owner doesn’t want smoking teenagers and other ne’er-do-wells hanging about.

transit

Actually, I as I went down to the area yesterday to take a few photos for this blog, I was approached by one of thee young toughs. He was not very polite in asking who I thought I was taking pictures and suggesting I might prefer a punch in the face. He was clearly posturing more than threatening, but the demonstration was pretty clear that this space is not a friendly one for many people.

20150724_184234

I’m the first to admit I don’t know what to do about this. I want the entrance to New Westminster to be a welcoming space. But I have two suggestions, one in the control of the City, one not, and both successful in other cities.

The first is soft community policing. I don’t want to be in a place where we send cops down there to bust skulls or push “the wrong people” (whoever decides what that means) out of public space in New Westminster. However, the presence of community policing officers downtown could make it a better place for everyone. Police on foot, talking to people, saying hello and just being present and visible without being threatening, can make a big difference to how people experience the space. But the balance is hard to find, and this approach needs to be very cautious around that balance.

The second (and more promising) approach is to activate the space. The best way to make loitering (the pejorative term) into lingering is to give people a reason to linger, making the space “sticky”. This can include introducing some interactive public art, blending the restaurant seating space with the pedestrian space like you would recognize in the Spanish or French streetscape, or adding buskers or events into the space. The go-to reference for this type of urban space activation is Jan Gehl, and his writings about the “human spaces” between buildings.

Nuggets of these ideas can be seen in the slightly half-hearted attempt of placing the chaise-lounges in the square when it originally opened. A surviving example is the kids’ play area under the SkyTrain in the middle of the plaza level of the Shops, which (despite the shadowy look and roaring trains) has managed to remain an inviting space.

playplace

Unfortunately, the exact opposite of these ideas can be seen in front of the Safeway, where a “stickiness” opportunity is lost, and what could have been an active part of the public plaza became the best-defended coffee patio in history. What is the point of this glass wall? To keep people out, or in?

the cage

I’m not sure I know what type of “placemaking” can make this place more welcoming as an entrance to the City, but whatever it is, we will need to work with the owners of The Shops at New Westminster Station to make it work, because if it helps the City, it will help them as well. They need loitering for their businesses to be successful, and we want to be a City where people want to loiter.

Divestment

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

I have been putting up boring council reports for so long, that I figure it is time to get back to a good old-fashioned NWimby-style rant here. It is about global warming, which I believe am convinced by the overwhelming scientific evidence is currently happening at a rate unprecedented in the last 2 million years, due directly to the accelerated introduction of fossil carbon into the atmosphere by human activities. If you are still in denial about this, you are either deluded or not paying attention, so before commenting here, please check your irrefutable factoid against this before trying to make your case.

That caveat on the old debate aside, we are not past the real debate about what to do about it. There is an argument that we should do nothing, but that is the deeply sociopathic side of the spectrum when we start to look at the seriously bad implications for the next generation of humans if we take that path (where do you plan to put 150 million Bangladeshis, not to mention 10 million Floridians?)

I also think there is a personal responsibility part – we (especially those of us in the rich industrialized world) need to take individual actions to address this real problem. We need to burn less fuel; we need support more sustainable farming practices; we need to stop buying so much disposable junk. But these individual actions will be meaningless without a coordinated government action, and societal shift to support those individual actions.

The Montreal Protocol was a good example of how this problem should have been addressed. Less than 15 years after the concept of ozone depletion by long-lived chlorofluorocarbons was proposed (and only a few years after that theoretical effect was demonstrated with a high level of certainty to be actually happening) the world’s governments took action, much to the protestations of DuPont and manufacturers of aerosol cans, and it worked. We have turned the corner on ozone depletion, DuPont still exists, as do aerosol cans. Industry adapted, society shifted, but it took government action.

However, those mid-80’s were simpler times. We had those socialist hippies Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan running the free world like a commune, and Russia were our best friends yet. So world governments getting together to legislate an industry-constraining action to prevent life-altering damage to the earth’s atmosphere was a doable thing. Thirty years later, almost all of which have seen the world’s science community increasingly pleading for the world’s governments to do something about a slowly-emerging disaster, the progress on greenhouse gasses has been dismal. If we cannot count on the governments of the largest economies to fix the problem, we need to shift the economy.

A couple of years ago, the NWEP held a showing of the Bill McKibbon short film ”Do The Math” that made the case for fossil fuel divestment. If interested, I wrote a long piece about it at the time. The short version: investing in stranded hydrocarbon assets is a bad idea for long-term financial reasons, and for ethical reasons.

So back to the question of what we can do. As a municipal government we can shift to greener fleets and more efficient buildings, we can encourage energy efficiency in the community and in our corporate functions. We can encourage a form of development that results in lower GHG production: transit instead of freeways and compact, pedestrian-friendly mixed-use city centres instead of sprawling suburban expanses. We can even ineffectually express concerns about pipelines being built to facilitate the export of bitumen, and try to resist the expansion of thermal coal exports through our ports. But these will not be enough if we are continuing to fight the tide of an economy that does not serve our future.

The City can, however, divest from the companies that are pushing that unsustainable future. We can make the choice to not invest our money in the stranded assets that will, if dug out of the ground and burned, diminish the ability of the next generation to prosper. It isn’t just something we can do, it is something we should do.

So I moved the following at the June 22 Council Meeting:

WHEREAS: The City of New Westminster’s financial assets are invested with the Municipal Finance Authority, which includes pooled funds and direct investment in hydrocarbon extraction and pipeline operation companies;

WHEREAS: The City of New Westminster recognizes the global concern and risks of Anthropogenic Climate Change and has taken efforts to reduce the greenhouse gas impacts of its internal operations and in the community in general, and

WHEREAS: Investments in fossil fuel extraction carry numerous risks, including economic risk to market value of fossil fuel companies based on stranded assets through increased worldwide transition to renewable energy sources, including Canada’s own commitment to moving towards reduced GHG emissions and the G7 commitment to a carbon-free economy by the end of the Century;

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED: That New Westminster support ongoing efforts by communities and public institutions across Canada and North America to divest public investments from fossil-fuel related assets by calling upon the MFA to develop a plan to divest from these assets.

We are also not alone.

On Thursday, the City Council in Victoria will debating a motion to divest their assets from fossil fuels, and I suspect it is going to be successful.

As is typical these days, Canada is lagging behind the United States on this important environmental and social justice issue, as San Francisco, Seattle, Eugene, Boulder, an many other US Cities Seattle have already committed to fossil-fuel divestment.

Divestment does not have to be a sudden move to be effective. Although it represents less than 5% of our GDP, the oil and gas industry is still important to some regions of Canada, and we are going to be using hydrocarbons for the foreseeable future. However, if we agree that we need to continue to improve the quality of life of people on earth, we need to start the transition away from burning of coal, petroleum, and gas for our energy needs right away. We also need to give the industry, and the customers, a chance to adapt to the new reality, while easing the market forces into the right direction. A broadly-supported divestment strategy that rolls out over five or ten years will change the economics of the industry, and allows investment in alternatives, instead of continuing to invest in squeezing the last bit of prosperity out of last Century’s energy sources.