Tag: Politics

On Bridges and Consultations

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

There’s been a lot of talk about a new bridge in New West. Some love the idea, some hate it. Paradoxically, those who will use it the most (those right next to it) hate it the most: at least those on the north side of the crossing. Those on the south side seem to insist a better connection is needed.

The initial designs were met with much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. The consultation was a sham! The options were not viable!! The neighbourhood will not stand for it!!! Pleads of urgency and need were tempered by vaguely Nimby-esque calls for caution and/or outlandish alternatives. Loggerheads were met. Funding sources were debated, petitions were signed, Council was implored.

So the responsible agency hit Ctrl-Alt-Del; sent the engineers back to the drawing board to re-evaluate and return with better options. Third parties were brought in to consult. Previously-discarded options were reconsidered. Numbers were crunched, common ground was sought, new sketches were proffered. More than a year later, the conversation is re-booting, and it is time for you to provide your input. Yet again.

I am talking, of course, about the proposed Quayside to Queensborough pedestrian crossing (what else?).

The people of New Westminster are being asked to comment right now on the two options that have been pencil-sketched for us. We have on-line info, there has been a travelling “whattya think of the bridge now” road show at most recent community events, Ted Eddy has expressed his opinion(s), and all that is left is for you to spend 5 minutes filling out the quickie questionnaire. You have until October 16, 2013.

Allow me to opine.

The current proposals address one of the biggest challenges for the project as originally conceived: the Navigable Waters Act requirement that there be 22 metres of air above the River to allow medium-sized ships to pass into and out of the North Arm of the Fraser River. Less than 22m, then the bridge has to be openable, like the current swinging train bridge in the location.

The engineers have come back with two options to avoid the 22-m high bridge that made for an opposing edifice and a challenging ramp for the less-able-bodied. “Option A” is a bridge that coalesces with the swing span of the existing train bridge, and opens and closes with the rail bridge. “Option B” is a bascule design, which is a drawbridge common to medieval castles and the Chicago River. This would be build adjacent to, and separate from, the train bridge. Each have advantages and disadvantages.

Note there is a language issue here. When talking about a draw or swing bridge, relativity rules the use of the terms “open” and “closed”. Since I (and presumably you) see this as primarily a piece of pedestrian infrastructure, “open” would mean you can walk across it, and “closed” means you cannot. This differs from the mechanical and nautical view of an “open” drawbridge being one where boats can pass. So just to make things clear: when I say open, I mean closed to boats; and when I say closed, I mean open to boats. Clear?

The primary advantage of Option A is cost. The study suggests the entire bridge can be built for $5 Million, which is less than the remaining DAC funds that have been allocated for the project. The bridge will also be slightly lower with shallower ramps and less visual impact for residents.

OPTION A: You can click the image to zoom in.

There are however, significant negatives related to this option, mostly related to being literally mated to the existing rail bridge. The owner of the bridge (Southern Railway / SRY Rail Link) has indicated that pedestrians will not be permitted to use the bridge while a train is present (currently, about 8 trains cross the bridge every day) which could cause significant delays for people hoping to cross the bridge.

OPTION A: You can click the image to zoom in.

The existing train bridge is 100 years old, and there are some questions about the longevity and engineering reliability of that crossing. Attaching a multi-million dollar piece of City infrastructure to a privately-owned piece of infrastructure approaching the end of its service life may not be the most prudent choice, and may represent “penny wise, pound foolish” planning. What happens to that investment if the rail owner decides to replace their aging bridge in 10 years? What if a moderate seismic event or barge collision closes the rail crossing for an indefinite period? What are the odds SRY’s business plans will change at some time in the 75-year lifespan of a pedestrian crossing? Arguably, these issues may be managed through a deftly-negotiated agreement between the SRY and the City, but some risks will still be there for future administrations to deal with.

Option B will be higher than the existing rail bridge. With 9.6 metres clearance above high water mark, it will not be so big that the on-ramps will be daunting, but high enough that many of the boats that pass the rail bridge will not require the pedestrian bridge to be opened (um… closed). Current estimates have the Option B bridge being open for boats less than half as often as Option A. It will also not be tied physically to SRY’s bridge, so changes in rail operations or replacement of the century-old wooden structure will not adversely impact the accessibility of the pedestrian crossing. This is all good.

OPTION B: click to make bigger.

The downside, of course, is the increased cost. At an estimated $9.6 Million, there will need to be a second funding source aside from the remaining DAC funds. The City will have to shake out the couch cushions or borrow to fill the funding gap and get the job done.

OPTION B: click to make bigger.

When discussing the Q2Q pedestrian crossing, people talk about it in different terms. Some think of it as a nice amenity, a connection between neighbourhoods, an extension of the park system or a tourist draw. I think of it as all of these things, but primarily as a vital piece of transportation infrastructure. With this in mind I quote myself:

Ultimately, I only hope the crossing will be reliable – one you can count on being there when you need it, and not unexpectedly opened [sic] for a hour at random times – because I see this bridge primarily as a transportation link… then it will be the link we have been missing up to now.

So I vote for Option B.

As for the money, let’s go back in time a bit. The DAC funding was part of a negotiated package the City worked out with the Province over permitting for the Casino. The original allocation of $60 Million looked like this:

$5 M for park improvements across Queensborough;
$35 M for a Multi-use Civic facility in downtown;
$6 M for a new and improved Queensborough Community Centre;
$4 M to improve the docks at the Quay;
$10 M for a Quay-to-Queensborough pedestrian crossing.

The two Queensborough community projects have been delivered: Parks in 2011, the Community Centre in 2013. Last year, the City decided, and received permission to, “reallocate” $8 Million from the last two projects to the MUCF, which became the Anvil Centre. They more recently announced the dock program is not likely to happen any time soon. That leaves $6 Million for the Q2Q Bridge.

Back when the original Q2Q Bridge plan estimates came in around $20 Million, the difference between $10 Million and $6 Million in available DAC funding seemed a little academic- they were still going to have to pop for a significant amount of money to fill the gap. So transferring some of that money with uncertainty attached to the much more certain (as there was a hole in the ground having cement poured into it) seemed like a good idea at the time.

Now that the revised, reasonable, and more acceptable to the community “Option B” estimate is $9.8 Million, the City has a bit of a problem. What to do when the better option is within your original committed budget, but you have now re-allocated such that there is only enough left to pay for the lesser option?

The Bridge to Nowhere.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I have already opined about the potential to replace the Massey Tunnel back when the rushed “consultations” were launched in the Spring. People with better minds than mine have already challenged the base assumptions built into the apparent need for a replacement using the Ministry of Transportation’s own numbers.

This week’s announcement that this low-priority election bauble was pushing on, full steam ahead, despite the objection of pretty much every Mayor in the region* except for the one who doesn’t want to pay for it, is still a little confounding. Our all-but silent rookie Minister of Transportation continues to dither about Transit funding models and a still-born referendum, everyone from Teachers to Nurses to Social Workers are being told there is no money in the kitty for any of their essential programs, but for some reason this multi-billion dollar boondoggle is a Provincial Priority. Depressing, but not shocking.

Since the announcement was amazingly bereft of details: size, scale, scope, costs, tolls are all things we can only speculate on. The only substantive thing we have to base our speculations upon is the fly-through animation of the proposed bridge, a fanciful piece of salesmanship no doubt created in a wet dream by the very engineering firms and Project Managers that are now engaged by the Ministry of Transportation to sell this product to a reluctant taxpayer consult on the project design and implementation on behalf of the Government, so they can eventually get paid by the same Government to build it. You know who you are.

First off, note the lane count. 10. Well, 12 if you include the “safety lanes” that appear to be full-lane width on this rendering. Plus a bike/pedestrian path. As drawn, this bridge will be wider than the Port Mann, the alleged widest bridge in the world.

Yes, two of those lanes will be “HOV” lanes. Note the HOV lane is dominated by cars and commercial vehicles, which makes them very different than the HOV lanes we know and love.

Note no substantial changes to the design of the Steveston Highway intersection as far as lanes in and lanes out, (although it looks like the overpass will be blown out to 4 lanes, which will not do much for Stevenson and No 5 Road).  Note especially how the free-flowing traffic from the new bridge disappears as it exits to the 2-lane Steveston Highway, as if by magic. The magic of road builder renderings. That traffic is distinctly “somebody else’s problem”. Or the next problem they will get paid to solve.

Nor do will see substantive changes to the Highway 99 / Highway 17A intersection. Except, of course, the current 6-lane Highways that extend through farmland away from the Bridge north and south are shown to be 10 lanes wide as far as the eye can see. Pity the Oak Street Bridge, I-5 Seattle, here we come.

Note the pedestrians on the bridge. There are a dozen pedestrians and three cyclists shown. Cyclists I’ll give you, but the bridge is 3 km long, with the north end ramp more than a kilometre from the nearest doorway of any kind, and the south end something like 5 km from any likely destination, be it residential, commercial or recreational. Where the hell are these walkers going?

Perhaps they got tired of waiting for the transit that never showed up, as the established bus stops on the Richmond side of the bridge have been removed, and the HOV lane moved to the middle of the freeway, so Transit connections have clearly not been thought out here. Probably TransLink’s problem to solve.

At least I give the rendering props for truthfully representing the types of vehicles that use the Massey tunnel route. In the animation, 83% of the vehicles shown are private cars, 14% are commercial trucks, and 3% are buses. Admittedly, they are “tour” bus types but let’s assume the animator meant for these to be ultra-luxury Transit buses that will come with expanded Transit funding to go with the new road (yes, that was sarcasm).

These stats are close to the actual current count of traffic going through the tunnel: 87% cars (including HOV, which means at least one passenger), 12% trucks, 1% transit.

Source: Massey Tunnel Replacement Consultations.

Actually, the 2% increase in trucks is almost exactly the increased number that will result from the most ambitious Port expansion plans at Terminal 2. Keep that 2% number in mind when you are told “Goods Movement” is a primary reason for spending a couple of billion of your dollars to replace the tunnel.

In contrast, the displayed tripling in transit service is clearly fanciful, as TransLink has no money to maintain the routes they currently run. This is important, because if transit use (which at 1% of vehicles, already represents 26% of the people travelling through the tube) tripled, then the numbers of cars going through the tunnel would be reduced by half. Which would end our congestion problem for a much lower cost than a $X Billion bridge.

Alas, I heard Moe Sihota speaking for the NDP on the Rick Cluff Radio Confrontation Hour (follow link to about 1:50:00) this morning, also agreeing that the tunnel needed to be replaced with a big shiny bridge, using the same incorrect data and false assumptions as Premier McSparkles(Tm). Of course, he disagreed with Colin Hansen on some arcane aspect of the funding or the opportunism of the announcement, but he was all for pissing away you tax dollars entrenching another generation of motordom.

This leaves the 100,000 daily transit users on the under-serviced Broadway Corridor and the tens of thousands in Surrey loading on stuffed and increasingly unreliable SkyTrains every morning wondering who represents them.

*note, just before writing this, I heard an unintentionally hilarious interview with Mayor Diane Watts of Surrey, where (the always-excellent) Stephen Quinn has her so confused by her own talking points, that she appears to be all for the Bridge, although it is a low priority compared to pretty much any other transportation project; for tolling the bridge, though against tolls, except for them if they are low, except not unless everyone pays; and against a Transit Referendum, except for it when important for deciding transportation alternatives, except when it isn’t. It is well worth the listen.
  

“Getting to Yes”

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Further to poorly-framed arguments supporting specific hydrocarbon-transportation projects, there was this recent opinion piece written by John Winter, who is the President and CEO of the British Columbia Chamber of Commerce. It was, frankly, disappointing. Not because I disagree with Mr. Winter, but because it was so poorly argued.

The opinion was in response to this previous piece in the same Important CanWest Newspaper of Record. In the first piece, economist Robyn Allen pointed out that the economic arguments being made by Enbridge on the Northern Gateway Pipeline proposal were “just not true”. Ms. Allen, in a tightly-argued 600 words, explained the factual misrepresentations in Enbridge’s claims, from the perspective of an economist, using Enbridge’s own numbers. No-where does she suggest the Northern Gateway, or any other project, should be stopped. Instead, she simply criticizes, point-by-point and from a position of considerable knowledge, the mis-characterization of the economic impact of the project as presented in the proposal. She then suggests:

“In the interests of transparency and accountability, British Columbians deserve better than what Enbridge seems capable of delivering.”

Mr Winter’s response to this argument does not engage in the same detailed analysis of the data presented by Enbridge, nor does he directly address any of Ms. Allen’s actual points. Instead he engages in over-the-top and largely fact-free rhetoric. He further characterizes her argument as an “intellectual exercise” to undermine the project:

“It’s disturbing to see how much British Columbian ingenuity is being channelled into our province’s alarming — and growing — ‘culture of no.’ And for what gain?”

I don’t know where I got this idea, but I suspect the gain Ms. Allen was aiming for is that the conversation be “in the interests of transparency and accountability”.

You see, Ms. Allen is a scientist who studied, spent a career working in, and teaches economics. It is her job to scrutinize economic augments and determine if they are fact-based or not. If Mr. Winters disagreed with her factual information, he might have made a counter-point. Instead he engages in a bunch of irrelevant hyperbole:

“In virtually every corner of the province, we’re seeing the same thing: Smart, highly environmentally responsible projects that can employ our children and keep our towns alive are being battered, paralyzed and stomped out.”

I’m not sure what dusty corners of the Province Mr. Winters is spending his time, but the vast majority of large industrial projects in BC are being stomped upon only by rubber stamps. If one looks at the BC Environmental Assessment Office records, one can look at the history of project proposals in BC since the Act came into force in 1995.

Completed:       128
Refused:           3
Pre-application:  69
Exempt:           22
Terminated:        6
Under Review:     10
Withdrawn:        21
Total:           259

So of 259 projects, exactly 3 have been refused permits. That is just over 1%. In contrast, 150 were either issued certificates or were found to be exempt from the process. That is 58%. If you re-calculate those numbers without including 79 that have not yet reached the decision stage, 83% of projects have achieved approvals. Where is the alleged battery occurring here?

As an aside,the Federal EA process numbers are very similar. Well, they were, until the Federal Government in one stroke of a pen in 2012 changed the Federal EA Act, such that thousands of Federal Environmental Assessments will simply not happen now. Where before there was scrutiny, proponents can now fill their boots.

But back to the Project in question: the Northern Gateway Pipeline. Mr Winters continues:

“So there’s a lot at stake here. And frankly, what’s yet to be decided has nothing to do with project economics (which, Ms. Allan, are frankly settled), but rather how we balance economic value against other B.C. priorities, as the Joint Review Panel is assessing.”

This is actually where Mr. Winters is wrongest. Ms. Allen has aptly demonstrated that the project economics are far from settled, and there still exists debate. At the very least, some clarification is required from the project proponent.

It is interesting that many of the environmental protection measures that come out of this type of Environmental Assessment are codified in the review documents as conditions of approval. For example, if the exclusive use of double-hulled tankers was promised by Enbridge, then using single-hulled tankers would be a breach of the Approval, and the certificate can be removed, shutting down the project. However, none of the “economic” commitments have the same status. Enbridge could promise to employ every adult person north of 50 degrees, then only employ three people once the assessment is done, and there would be no recourse for the Province or communities to whom the promises were made. I’m not saying they would do that, but that makes it important that any assessment of the anticipated economic impacts be as accurate, fact-based and defensible as possible- we only get one crack at that part of the project review.

“And with this project, as with any that proposes such substantial benefits for B.C., we hope that British Columbians will take a close look at what’s to gain here. We certainly don’t ask that environmental or community concerns be sidelined. But we’d ask that jobs and economic value not be sidelined as well.”

Ms. Allen is not sidelining economic values, she is assuring they are properly assessed so that we can, as British Columbians, take the close look at what’s to gain for which Mr. Winters is asking. Surely, the CEO and President of the BC Chamber of Commerce wants the public to be provided with factual information, both when they question the economic gains, and when they question the environmental impacts. That is why we have Environmental Assessments, and that is why responsible businesses engage in them.

Alas.

The entire argument presented by Mr. Winters is framed around “Getting to Yes”, which has become one of those abstract rhetorical phrases that everyone thinks they understand, but in reality it means different things to different people, and is actually completely meaningless. Mr. Winters suggests we need to “Get to Yes” on these projects. But who is it, exactly, that needs to “Get to Yes”?

Does the Provincial Government need to “Get to Yes” by bypassing (or tossing out a la Stephen Harper) their own environmental assessment laws, ignoring the environmental protections afforded by Provincial Law, Federal Law, and our constitutional responsibility to First Nations?

Does the Media need to “Get to Yes” by continuing to publish fact-free editorials that would have us believe that 3 certificate refusals out of 256 applications is some sort of war on resource development?

Does the public need to “Get to Yes” by agreeing to whatever Enbridge says, and refusing to listen to people who point out factual errors in what they promise?

No. It is Enbridge who needs to “Get to Yes”. They will get there by providing realistic data about what they have to offer BC, and what the risks to BC (economic and environmental) are. Then they need to convince us that those risks are managed and mitigated to the point that the economic development they are offering us is sufficient payment.

It is possible that Enbridge will not, with this project, ever “Get to Yes”. But that would not be from a failure of British Columbians to dream, it would be from a failure of Enbridge to convince us they are good for our future.

Parking variances for new developments, and other Green things

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Remember that whole Downtown Parking Strategy and the concomitant “Tear Down the Parkade” movement? What ever happened with that?

There are two recent news stories that are directly relevant to this study, both about newly-proposed developments in the Downtown.

The first development plan is for a location in deep need of redevelopment: the mid-block area on the north side of Carnarvon across from Plaza88. The so-called Carnarvon Gardens (ugh…) development is creating a bit of a disagreement on Council because of various challenges in providing parking space and the impact on the neighbourhood form.

At least part of the reason for debate here is the location across the street from Plaza88, whose own parking situation is an ongoing cause of chagrin. As I have said many times before, Plaza88 is a great idea as far as Urban Planning, but suffers from some poor execution as far as Urban Design. One of those issues is the wall of parking lots that provide the facade of the building. The multiple stories of above-ground parking exacerbate the canyon effect on Carnarvon, at least partly because it is not “human space”, but machine space. If that facade was windows and balconies with evidence of human life, the effect would be much more gentle. If it was set back from the street by a few metres, it would be even better.

The proposal for Carnarvon Gardens, right across the street, is to have a similar 5 stories of above-ground parking, but to hide most of them behind a wall of office/commercial space, much like the bottom two floors at Plaza88. The top floor would not be so obscured, nor would the Victoria Street facade or the little side-lane that connects Victoria and provides access to adjacent buildings (9th Street?).

The development looks great- (you can see it in these Meeting minutes, starting down on page 88) – 23K sq.ft of office space, 10K sq.ft. of retail, and 198 residential units. But even back in July, Council asked questions about the plan for parking. Originally, 308 parking spaces on 7 floors (2 underground and 5 above ground, at least on the Carnarvon side) was proposed, although the current Bylaw requires 353 spots. After sending the July plan back for more consideration, the proponent came back with a similar proposal (two underground parking floors, five above ground) but have now reduced the number of parking spots, based on two studies.

The Downtown Parking Plan study suggested 278 parking spots were required here, where the Proponent’s own study indicated 260 were required to service the building’s needs. The Proponent, however, is willing to build 294 spots- as they figure that is the magic number that balances the cost of building parking with the “marketing goals” for the condos. They also balked at the idea of moving the exposed 5th floor parking down underground where it will be out of site, presumably because of increased costs.

During discussion at Committee, Councillor McEvoy raised an excellent point, in that there will be a time (perhaps now?) that we stop thinking about the street presence on only one side of a building. This development “backs” on Victoria Street, but other businesses and potential future developments front on Victoria. So why is a parking lot facade that is not acceptable on Carnarvon acceptable on Victoria? If we want the best revenue-generating and job-creating parts of our renewed Downtown to expand, then we cannot afford to create more “dead space” roads. More imagination is needed here.

The second development plan is much more preliminary, according to this story, but has many parallels other then being three blocks to the east. This building will have 7,500 sq.ft. of commercial and 282 residential units, planned for rental as opposed to market condos. Here, the Bylaw parking requirement is 410 spots, the Downtown Parking Study suggests 218 are needed, but the Proponent is proposing 169.

So two concurrent (or close enough) developments one block uphill from Columbia Street, and both want to save money by not building parking. A bit of quick math gives us:

Bylaw Requirement: 763 total spaces.
Parking Study demand: 496 total spaces.
Proposed to be built: 463 total spaces.

So depending on how you count it, there are between 33 and 300 parking spots being left on the table. These are spots the Developer is required to install according to existing City policies, but is asking for an exemption because they won’t make any money from them.

Now compare those numbers to the “peak use rate” of the Front Street Parkade according to this report to council. 38% of 800 parking spots is 304. Now you (hopefully) see where I am going.

This is, ultimately, the solution to the Front Street Parkade problem – distributed parking in new developments. I’m not saying both of these buildings need to build parking to 100% of their (now dated) Bylaw requirements, but there needs to be a discussion about how new developments provide public parking at rates similar to the Parkade. 30 to 50 lots in each new building, the construction paid for by the Developer and the rental income going back to the Developer (unless, of course, they choose to sell the parking lot rental business off) to offset the cost.

Instead of pulling into a decrepit waterfront white elephant, one can find public parking in any of a half dozen buildings within a block or two of your destination. And we get a major part of our waterfront back.

This is not as easy as it might seem, though. We need to convince the Developers that it is worth their time and money. We also need to worry about the urban form issues that Councillor McEvoy raised, and that threaten to make Carnarvon and other streets into car park canyons. However the first step is to stop handing out variances for every new building so Developers can save the hundreds of thousands of dollars it takes to provide market parking. Instead, we need to create the market incentives to make it worth the Developer’s time to install public parking as part of every new large development.

As for the Parkade, it is not giving up without a fight. It has apparently been exposed to Gamma Rays, and vents its occasional rage through Twitter:

So there’s that.

The ALR development cycle

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

This is a story with more layers than an onion, and is so absurd that it should be in the Onion.

The City of Pitt Meadows, against the protestations of its citizens, wants to fix a traffic problem by building a big-box retail strip mall on 80 acres of ALR-protected farmland.

Read that again. That is the case Pitt Meadows successfully made to the Agricultural Land Commission.

Boggles. The. Mind.

The longer version of the story is thus:

You see, Old Dewdney Trunk Road  (ODT Road) is a rural two-lane that runs through farmland in Pitt Meadows north of Lougheed Highway. Mostly protected from development by the Agricultural Land Reserve, the ODT Road area is mostly larger farms, and protected from the strip mall and low-density housing explosion that has grown around Lougheed Highway – stretching almost undisturbed from Coquitlam Centre to Haney. Problem is, being the “back route” around the inevitable Lougheed Highway congestion, ODT Road is suffering from more traffic than the old rural two-lane is designed for.

This problem was apparent in the 1990s, but Pitt Meadows was not all that concerned, because the Pitt River Bridge was being expanded, and more lanes of Lougheed were being built. As a bonus, the Golden Ears Bridge was coming to take some of the traffic load off of Pitt Meadows, and a brand new semi-express way was being blasted through farmlands to the east, providing easy access to the Golden Ears Bridge for all those single-family homes that have been built out around Abernethy Way, which was all, notably, farmland less than 30 years ago. Pitt Meadows was not worried, because with all these new roads being built, traffic congestion on Lougheed would soon be a thing of the past- and ODT Road could go back to serving local farmers.

Except, of course, the roads did not take the traffic away, the roads brought more traffic. With easy highway access came more single-family homes that can not be served adequately by transit when TransLink is cutting services, and came more strip-mall retail shops to serve the needs of the growing car-dependent community. Few real family-supporting jobs are created in these strip malls, so people cannot actually work near their single-family home, and commuter traffic inevitably got worse, not better, with the new roads. That is what we call Induced Demand.

So the City of Pitt Meadows, shocked (shocked!) that these new roads have not fixed their traffic problem, has found a solution: one more road. This is where we get the proposed “North Lougheed Connector”. Problem is, after the Ministry of Transportation blew their budget on the Pitt River Bridge and Lougheed Highway improvements to fix the traffic problem in Pitt Meadows, and TransLink is bleeding through the ears in part because of a shitty Golden Ears Bridge toll deal that was supposed to fix the traffic problem in Pitt Meadows, neither have the money to build this one last road that will finally fix the traffic problem in Pitt Meadows. Even with all the single-family home building and strip malls, Pitt Meadows doesn’t have the money to fix the traffic problem in Pitt Meadows.

Along come Smart Centres, strip-mall builders of some fame. They have the money to fix the traffic problem in Pitt Meadows. They are more than happy to build a short stretch of highway through land they don’t own (because like the Golden Ears Way, and a fair chunk of the South Fraser Perimeter Road, the North Lougheed Connector will be built on protected ALR land, no need to exclude from the ALR for roadbuilding, alas). Only catch is that the new road has to include off-ramps to their parking lots for their new strip mall. The parking lots and strip mall they want to build happen to be on land they bought at ALR rates, and that they will lease out at Commercial rates now that they can get more than 80 acres of that that cheap land out of the ALR just for building a road through more ALR. Good business if you can get it.

The 80 Acres in question is between the golf course and Harris Road. Click to enlarge.

It is the circle of progress: build low-density housing on ALR land, build freeways and bridges to access them (if someone suggests alternatives like density, transit, or bike lanes, cry “tax grab!”), when traffic gets too busy, build more roads, take more land out of the ALR and build houses on that land to fund it, lather, rinse, repeat.

So why do I, a local blogger in New Westminster care about Pitt Meadows strip malls? Because this is, boiled down to its essence, New Westminster’s traffic problem. When TransLink or the Ministry of Asphalt talk about the North Fraser Perimeter Road– turning local New Westminster streets into highways for through-traffic, it is this strip mall in Pitt Meadows that will be at the east end of that highway. Traffic problems being generated by bad planning in the Pitt Meadows (Surrey, Langley, etc.) today will be used as an excuse to destroy the livability of New Westminster.

The ALR does more than protect agricultural land, it protects the livability of our region. Don’t let Bill Bennett destroy it.

On Festivals, recent and future.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

I just had one of the busiest and most interesting, weekends in recent memory. Many conversations had, many things learned, many ideas shared. A large amount of it I just can’t get into right now, but suffice to say there are very good things brewing (in the metaphorical sense) right now, and I feel pretty positive about the year ahead.

Amongst the craziness of the weekend was a few hours spent in the beer gardens at the Columbia StrEAT Food truck festival thingy. This was shocking, and yet refreshingly not. For those out of town or otherwise unaware, tens of thousands of people showed up on Columbia Street Saturday afternoon/evening to sample the wide variety of food truck offerings that have descended on the Lower Mainland (and the rest of North America) in the last few years.

How successful was the event? So many showed up, that the food lines were often an hour long, and many of the trucks sold completely out of product before the end of the event. I sat in the beer garden waiting for lines to shrink, then went to get a grilled goodie at 7:00ish. I asked the operator how it was going, and she said she apologized for the limited offerings she had left.

I said “That’s good, isn’t it?”

“Well,” she replied, looking exasperated, “We have another event tomorrow, and we have no more product. It’s not like we can pick these things [her delicious homemade sausages] up at Costco.”

The only complaints I heard from the crowd was that the lineups were too long. A complaint not unlike the old saw “No-one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded”.

This got many of the noble beer-garden patrons with whom I was sharing stories contemplating what this event might mean for future “Car-free days” on Columbia Street, and what relation this has to the other big festival-related story in New Westminster right now.

On the first topic, I think we have learned that if we choose to build it, they will come. The ongoing massive success of the Show & Shine has some wondering if more “Car-free days” could work on Columbia, around different themes. Some other street festivals are really hopping in New West (I think especially of the newer “UpTown Live”), while there is no doubt some other events are getting a little stale (examples redacted – but you know who they are). I think this event shows there is an appetite, as long as there is some variety of themes, they offer something new or interesting, and they are well marketed.

The question remaining would be how would more events on Columbia serve the merchants along Columbia, seeing the effort that the Downtown BIA put into organizing them? It appeared everyone from the Heritage Grill to Starschmucks had huge days, and even further-afield businesses like SpudShack and Re-up BBQ commented on how they saw a big sales on Saturday (no doubt benefiting from those 1-hour lineups on the street). The spin-offs from having all of these people downtown should be obvious to the merchants who support the BIA.

I’m not sure the wedding shops benefited as much, but I digress.

So I look forward to what Kendra and the rest of the folks at the Downtown BIA do with this new knowledge and the vigour it promises. I could think of a few different types of events that would similarly bring hungry, thirsty, happy people to Columbia Street on a sunny weekend. Nothing against the Show & Shine, but it should be the beginning of something, not the only thing!

As for the other festival-related story about these parts, I just don’t know what to say. I have had casual conversations this weekend with a half-dozen different people who are, or should be, “in the know” about what is happening at Hyack, and from those 6 people I got at least 7 different stories, most of them contradicting each other.

I think speculation from those of us who are not “in the know” probably doesn’t serve any purpose, but I am concerned when some of the same people who usually call for openness and transparency for all things at the City are now the ones counselling that everyone should just be quiet and let this pass. Hyack spends a lot of taxpayers’ dollars, and are responsible for much of the public face of the City. This type of mysterious back-room battle erupting into public hissy fits does nothing to improve confidence in their ability to continue doing the good work they do.

For my part, I’m glad the City has Hyack, and that so many volunteers are willing to work so hard to make it successful. They are not without fault, however, and some of the allegedly-sacred traditions around Hyack may need to be updated to appeal to a growing 21st century urban centre full of young families, hipster doofuses, and the transit-oriented consumers from surrounding communities who are only a few minutes away from one of our five SkyTrain Stations.

I get the sense that was the direction the no-former Executive Director (whom I have never met, by the way) was leaning, and it seemed like there was some success towards that direction. Then today I read a letter by Bart Slotman, who is not one of the people I have chatted with about this, but for whom I have a tremendous amount of respect, and it sort of confirms my worst suspicions. Something is amiss here, and needs to be fixed.

My (in this case, actually humble) opinion is that Hyack does a great job getting folks in New Westminster to look inward and enjoy our wonderful City, but needs more successful events like Uptown Live and the Columbia StrEAT Festival to bring others into New West, to show our neighbors who we are and why they should come back. We have something to show off here, so let’s quit arguing about it, and do it!

On TransLink and the referendum

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

I really wanted to write an in-depth piece on the TransLink Funding Referendum; a withering piece using phrases like “abhorrent abdication of accountability” and “irresponsible idiocy that threatens the livability of the region”, but I realized there has already been a ton of good stuff written on this issue.

So before wading through MY diatribe below, why not see what noted Bridge-and-Freeway advocates like Mayor Diane Watts and Mayor Richard Stewart have to say on the subject. Or you can follow the writings of the leading thinkers on regional development, like Gordon Price, or Stephen Rees. Or how about the dirty hippies at Business in Vancouver? It seems no-one outside of the Premier’s office (and it’s PR wing at the Vancouver Sun) think this is a good idea. Even the new Minister of Transportation seems to skirt around the issue.

The Referendum is a bad idea, and perhaps the best way to explain how bad and idea is to take a (supposedly) thought-out and argued case FOR the referendum, and disassemble it. Please forgive me if I stray towards a Strawman fallacy here, but I am not making up a preposterously weak pro-referendum case here, I am just relating one that appeared in one of the PostMedia Papers of Note. If you hear a better argument for the referendum than the one I critique below, please send it to me, so I can tear that one apart as well.

I present to you, Province “Metro View” columnist Jon Ferry:

I’m no huge fan of referendums to resolve major public-policy issues, any more than I’m of penalty shootouts to decide hockey or soccer games.

Why are you not a fan of referenda? Perhaps you can expand this, because the 490 words following your initial expression of dislike seems to argue that referenda are a good idea, even for complex issues. If you hate them, why are you advocating for one? This sentence makes the rest of the discussion sound like one of those rants your drunk uncle goes off on that starts with “I don’t want to be racist, but…”

But they have their place, especially when an issue gets so tied up in political knots that a direct appeal to the people in a simple, take-it-or-leave-it vote is the only way to disentangle it.

But this cannot possibly be a simple take-it-or-leave it vote, can it? If that is what you are proposing, a question that says: “Do we want to raise your taxes through ‘X’ to pay for a subway to UBC and buses to White Rock and fancy offices for TransLink bureaucrats who couldn’t plan their way out of a wet paper bag? Or not? ” then we all know it doesn’t matter what the ‘X’ is: it will fail. We all know this is how any request for more tax money from any source will be framed by the Vancouver Province and Sun other car-dependant media. I hardly exaggerate, as you can see that narrative is already being drawn.

Then we will all be here in the same place 16 months from now, wondering why Skytrain keeps breaking down and why busses are passing people by on the curb, with no plan to deal with it and no new revenue source. If anyone can imagine a simple yes-no referendum question to which the majority of voters will say “Yes” and which will also lead to TransLink being funded adequately to meet the Transport 2040 goals, then I have not yet heard it expressed. The referendum will not untangle any political knots, it will only tighten the string for another two years and drag TransLink failures into the Municipal election cycle, pitching “Pro-Tax Mayors” against “Anti-Tax Mayors”.

That’s why I think the Christy Clark government must not bow to the wishes of the Metro Vancouver mayors and must refuse to renege on its election pledge to hold a referendum on possible “sources of new funding” for TransLink.

Right. Why should the Premier show any leadership at all, or even work together with the Mayors in an honest discussion of the issue without the side-show of a doomed referendum? The TransLink Board is her baby – it came with the job – so unless she is willing to turn TransLink back over to the Mayors to run, she should start thinking about how she is going to pay for it, and take the plunge. It is the willingness of Victoria to make random and ill-advised decisions regarding TransLink (FalconGates, the terrible Golden Ears Bridge deal, endlessly delaying Evergreen) that has put TransLink in its current financial bind. Now the Premier wants to continue to run TransLink from Victoria, but get the Mayors to pay for it so she doesn’t have to raise any taxes. The Mayors are right to tell her to get bent.

I believe that the mayors are being downright patronizing when they say the topic is too complicated for voters in their area to decide upon.

Look- referenda have their place, but this is not it.

I think referenda should be reserved for significant changes to government structure (e.g. changing the Constitution) or questions where our “social norms” are being evaluated (e.g. the legalization of marijuana). Where they should never be used is when the question is one of the rights of a minority (e.g. same-sex marriage equality or  the stunningly inept BC Aboriginal Treaty Referendum of 2002).

I would include tax policy as a third subject that should never go to referendum. (see discussion of HST referendum below). Ultimately, revenue generation and spending is what we hire a Government to do, it is the core of the budget every year, and in a place like BC where the government rarely sits in a legislature, it is almost the only thing a government does. There is a referendum on their tax policy, and it is held every 4 years. It is bad governance to parse out one small part of tax policy and put it up for referendum, because you cannot forecast spending or growth, you cannot even frame a balanced budget, unless the results of the referendum are pre-determined. Which, in this case, it will be, So why go through the exercise?

They’re also being alarmist in claiming a defeat by taxpayers of new “sustainable funding” — meaning new taxes — would doom metro to a stagnant transit system.

Alarmist? How is pointing out the obvious negative consequences of delaying, yet again for another year or two, investment in public Transportation being “alarmist”?  If you do not think the current funding crisis is hurting the current system, you have not tried to catch a 99 B-line or been on a westbound SkyTrain at 8:00am or had to make last-minute changes to your plans because “switching problems” scuttled the morning Skytrain Commute for the third time in a week.

A “stagnant Transit system” is, at this point, not “alarmist”, but an optimistic dream. In the last year, TransLink has not only been unable to move ahead on expansion plans (other than the Evergreen Line, which is finally seeing construction after more than 20 years in delays, mostly due to money committed years ago), they have actually cut bus routes to growing communities. Queensborough, Coquitlam, Maple Ridge- these areas are seeing bus service reduced, even as their population and density increases. The system is shrinking, squeezed of dollars at the same time that Billions are spent on new freeways and bridges. As service becomes less reliable, people will stop relying on it, and will instead avail themselves of all those new roads and bridges, increasing congestion, increasing GHG impacts, increasing roadbuilding costs and maintenance, making our communities noisier, less safe, more crowded, and more polluted. This will cut TransLink off from what has become its most stable form of income- fares. Indeed, with no more money inputs, the system will not stay stagnant- it will fail.

Now, I disagreed with scrapping the HST. But I think Victoria was right to put it to a referendum in 2011, if only to clear the air.

OK, let’s nip this comparison in the bud. Victoria was forced to put the HST to a referendum, they didn’t decide to – they had no choice! This was an example of a bad policy choice being made by the populace in a referendum, simply because the word “tax” was attached the wrong side of the story. This actually makes the case for the “patronizing” position of the Mayors.

What should have happened with the HST is the Government of Gordon Campbell should have been honest with the populace, introduced and explained the HST to the public, and sold them on the merits of the tax over the old system. They should have done this a year before the provincial election when they started negotiations with the Feds, not just introduce it with little warning a month after an election. The referendum campaign and overturning of the HST was a reaction to a dishonest and cowardly government, not a bad tax. Any policy discussion where Bill Vander Zalm is seen as the voice of reason is a clear sign governance has gone off the rails. The conversation during the referendum was distorted into an anti-Gordon Campbell plebiscite and the result was a bad decision made for the wrong reasons.

And I think a fairly worded referendum on raising, or not raising, new tax money for metro area transit would do the same.

Really. You honestly think if during a Municipal election, the government asks the Taxpayers of the region if they want to pay more taxes to build a subway for UBC students and bike racks for buses (because, mark my words, that is the level of discourse we will end up having around this referendum) that there is any chance of more than 35% of them voting yes? What planet are you sending your dispatch from? Please, Mr. Ferry, or anyone, show me a question that will result in a properly funded regional transportation system. I dare you.

The Mayors Council on Regional Transportation voted June 19 to formally oppose such a referendum, planned for the fall of next year, saying “making complex policy by referendums is contrary to principles of good governance.”

Of course, no-one ever accused Christy Clark of good governance. She can sure campaign, but so far her governance skills are as suspect as her driving. This is why, when she is stuck in a corner here and needs to display some governance skills, she is choosing instead to make a “campaign” of it. She will turn the entire conversation about the future of the region into one of those he-says/she-says confrontational radio call-in shows that were her specialty. The conversation will not invest deeply in fact, established principles of regional or transportation planning, systems science, or any of the complex ideas that make up a complex infrastructure strategy. It will be quips and “ya know’s” and pandering to the voter about what is “important to families” and gotcha moments. There is no risk of good governance arising from this.

What pompous nonsense. The public makes great decisions on complex issues at the ballot box, even if the politicians they elect aren’t always the brightest of the bunch.

(I’ll leave aside the fact you just said you disagree with the results of the last referendum) Following your reasoning, what decision should NOT be made by Referendum? I never got to vote on the $5 Billion spent on Gateway freeway projects (the SFPR, Port Mann2, Highway 1 expansion, etc). I never got to vote on a $500 Million roof for a football stadium. I never got to vote on the Billions spent on the Olympics. I am not being offered a vote on the replacement for the Pattullo Bridge, or the Massey Tunnel, or on the Kinder Morgan Pipeline expansion. I cannot even vote on the betting of our entire province’s economy on building a half-dozen LNG plants. If the single largest industrial investment ever in the Province, one that will radically restructure the BC economy while contributing multiples of our current GHG output to the atmosphere isn’t worthy of referendum, if no other transportation infrastructure investment in the history of the Province has ever needed a referendum, If BC Ferries rate increases, BC Hydro Rates, Carbon Tax increases, run-of-the-river hydro expansion, the sale of our Provincial assets, if none of these can be trusted to referenda, why this one little local transportation authority held to a different standard?

No, the big problem with the provision of public transportation in our region of 24 local authorities is that those supposed to be piloting it get so paralyzed by indecision they don’t seem to know whether they’re coming or going.

So fallacious an argument that it isn’t even wrong. TransLink knows exactly where it needs to go. Transport 2040, knows the funding it needs, knows what is available to it and what isn’t. The Mayors are also on side, as is the regional government. The direction forward is clear. Planning- knowing whether they are coming or going- is not TransLink’s problem. Political interference that drops in just long enough to muck up the the business plan, then steps back to avoid accountability is the Problem. The only people who paralysed with indecision on TransLink have been completely ineffectual Ministers of Transportation Blair Lekstrom and Mary Polak. Kevin Falcon, when he was in the role, made bad decisions that are still costing us, but at least he made decisions.

Part of the reason for this is the awkward/awful governance structure of TransLink. There’s also confusion about whether TransLink is a bus firm, rail company or simply another Vision-style bicycle-promotion scheme. Or is it an agency genuinely serving the travelling public?

I cannot believe one the major newspapers in Vancouver could have a “Metro View” writer express such a stunning ignorance of the largest single issue in the region today. No wonder Postmedia’s ship is sinking. TransLink is a regional transportation authority, responsible for a “bus firm”, three distinct “rail companies”, a transit ferry, three bridges and the entire Major road Network (>1,000km of roads used by cars every day!), and, yes, indeed, last year they spent 0.2% of their budget on bicycle infrastructure to further the Great Socialist Cycling Agenda. In every aspect of the above, they are serving the travelling public (even those who dare travel on bicycles!). They move hundreds of thousands of people every day – it is virtually impossible to move in the City without interacting with one of thier assets, and are one of the most cost-efficient transportation authorities in North America. If Mr. Ferry is confused about TransLink’s role, he should start reading, or get a new job far, far away from the “Metro View” file. Maybe you can parlay your talents into full time Climate-Change denial, as you only seem to dabble in it these days, and that stuff can really pay off.

B.C.’s new transportation minister, Todd Stone, confirms there’ll be a referendum on possible new TransLink funding sources, but the wording of the question to be asked voters still has to be decided. He says discussing this with the metro mayors is one of his top priorities. How TransLink is governed will also be addressed.

Wait- maybe there is some promise here. Why not have a referendum just on the governance? Because we all agree – the taxpayer, the Mayors, and now even the Minister of Transportation, that this is the problem with TransLink. Simple question: Who should run TransLink, a Council of Mayors that the voters get to vote for, or an unaccountable board of Political appointees chosen by the Premier?

“We have committed to having the governance worked out and agreed upon in time for the spring sitting of the legislature in 2014,” Stone told me.

Worked out and Agreed upon might be two different things. It is clear the Mayors are not going along with this referendum plan, if if that is the case, will the Minister forge ahead without their consent? And just who is paying for the Referendum? Who is financing the “yes” and “no” campaigns? Will the referendum only be regional, or will people in Fort St. John get to decide if their Provincial Income Tax or Carbon Tax are used in Greater Vancouver to build bike paths to avail Hipsters of their Latte?

Vancouver city Coun. George Affleck says he doesn’t really like referendums, but the metro mayors should stop being in denial about the Clark government’s obvious commitment to one. Affleck, of the Non-Partisan Association, also believes there’s “an appetite in the region for people to start to pay a bit more for transit infrastructure.”

At the risk of repeating myself: Please, Mr. Affleck, show me a question that will result in a properly funded regional transportation system. I dare you. And if only the people in the region are voting, that pretty much takes the Provincial government off the hook, doesn’t it? If the Province is off the hook, can you ate least admit they should then disband the Victoria-appointed board and put TransLink back under regional control?

I’m not so sure about that. But I look forward to finding out about it in a referendum. So far, the alternatives haven’t exactly worked out.

OK- here it is. Mr. Ferry admits he thinks the referendum will fail. So the only alternative he thinks will work is the one that he knows won’t work. Great analysis there Mr. Ferry. That sound you hear is my slow, ironic clapping.

The numbers tell the story

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

Gordon Price has almost the opposite Blogging philosophy than me – he just puts direct, incisive, short messages out there, and provides enough links so you can put the pieces together yourself. I tend to draw things out laboriously and write with about 2,000 words what a brighter person could in 200.

Case in point- this post you are currently reading, which is a follow up to this post on Gordon’s blog “Price Tags”, where he provides two images, a quote from the source, a couple of links and says everything that has to be said in three short sentences. Contrast this with the long diatribe below.

Clearly, the Province Newspaper has the hate on for bicycles. I suspect it has less to do with bicycles and more to do with not particularly liking the current Mayor of Vancouver, whom they blame for the sudden appearance of bicycles and bike lanes in Vancouver. The fact that all these bicycles and bike lanes are appearing because of a Transportation Plan developed in the City of Vancouver in 1997, and moved forward by Mayors Philip Owen (NPA), Larry Campbell (COPE), Sam Sullivan (NPA) and Robertson (Vision), is missed in the current discussion, but I digress.

So I follow the links Gordon Price provided, did 5 minutes of Google research, and figured that the Province was indeed profoundly dishonest in their reporting on this issue. As is my wont, I went to twitter and called the Province on it. I might have used slightly stronger language than Mr. Price, but I clearly got a reaction, which led to this chain of communications:

Yeah, I’m a bit of a jerk, but I think they deserved it. Here’s why.

Start with the headline:

“Bike-lane ridership stalled on Burrard Bridge”

See, bike riding is increasing across the City, as is transit use and just plain old walking to work, while car use is the only mode of transportation in Vancouver that is on a steady decline. The Burrard Street Bridge bike lanes, as successful as they are, were the first time that the idea of dedicating a small percentage of the City’s asphalt to bikes hit the front page. It was, if you will, the first public battle in the imaginary “war on cars”. It also happens to be directly attached to the now-controversial Cornwall-York-Pt.Gray Road bike plan, which is the were the latest battle in the same imaginary war is being fought.

So what better story than a story about how no-one is biking over the Burrard Street Bridge anymore?

Too bad it isn’t true.

“Cherry Picking” is a common rhetorical technique where you take a big body of data, and selectively choose from that data the specific set that makes your point. The best example of this is with the current crop of Climate Change Deniers who say something like “It hasn’t gotten any hotter since 1998”– knowing full well that 1998 was the hottest year in history (well, not really, it is complicated), and ignoring the fact that every year after 1998 was warmer than almost every year before 1998. It is the easiest way to lie with statistics.

So look at the data set that the Province graphed for your benefit, and you see some months were ahead of others (likely related to week-long runs of bad weather that dissuade some riders, but maybe also related to road repairs, Canucks playoffs, whatever little bits of data go into the bigger noise:

It is hard to take from that that data set that cycling is declining, or “stalling”. In this very first level analysis, from two specific time points, on one of the routes measured, there was a 1% reduction in counted cyclists on one route. The model for Cherry Picking data.

Being the detail-oriented guy I am, I went to the City of Vancouver website and tried to find the data source. The only thing I found was this site, which does actually report cycling traffic counts for the last few years on specific routes. I brought the .pdf  file into Excel and created a chart as close as I could make to the Province one. This proved rather challenging, as their y-axis didn’t make sense- (75,000, 10,000, 20,000 !?!)- and clearly made the raw numbers of cyclists look smaller than they were. Anyway, I used the real numbers, and it looked like this:

Which was subtly different from the numbers reported by the Province. Compare September, October, pretty much any month- the numbers they used are clearly not those from the City’s website.

So then I went to Twitter to ask Province what their data source was, and got no reply after 48 hours. What did happen was the Province, a few hours later, changed the chart that had in the online version of the story:

It looked a little more like mine in a few months (January and February), although some months still had bad data (see September). At least they had their y-axis figured out. Progress for the old media.

So let’s ignore their charts, perhaps a mistake was made by an unpaid intern – really, with the Province laying off all of their paid staff, these kinds of things will happen. Let’s look at the actual data.

If you look at the last 12 months for which data are available, there are 7 months when more cyclists used the Burrard than in the same month in the previous year. There were 5 months when there were fewer cyclists. In longer-tern trends, you can pull other things out: January, February and March 2010 were anomalously high – which is clearly an effect of the Olympic traffic disruptions, and not something you can hang a trend on. The June 2011 anomaly can likely be similarly linked to the Canucks Stanley Cup run. My point only that the data is noisy, making Cherry Picking a simple technique.

Looking at the raw data, it is clear that there have been something like 1 million bike trips cross the Burrard Bridge within any 12-month period in the last 4 years. Which makes one wonder how the Province ever found a situation where they could take a picture of the bridge and only have one cyclist in frame.

To quote the article:

“Despite years of Mayor Gregor Robertson and his Vision Vancouver councillors peddling the merits of pedalling, ridership on the controversial Burrard Bridge separated bike lanes has declined in the past year. Total bike trips compiled by the city for the 12 months ending April 2013 — the most recent statistics available — show that ridership is down by 16,000 compared to the previous 12-month period from May 2011 to April 2012.”

The data tells us May 2012-April 2013 saw 1,028,000 crossings where May 2011 to April 2012 saw 1,044,000 crossings. So the 16,000 reduction is true. But is it relevant? I took the 12-month cumulative ridership ending in every month from July 2012 to June 2013, and here is the trend (the two time periods mentioned in the Province story are highlighted in red):

I’m no expert, but that doesn’t look like a meaningful decline. The number of cyclists crossing the Burrard is basically stable. Meanwhile, the use of bicycles on other routes in the City are increasing. How do I know that? The free toss-away paper I found on the SkyTrain offered a different version of the exact same story on the same day.

Of course, they were also lying, depending on how one reads the statistics.

Peak Oil coming home.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

By now, the front page of the newspaper has moved away from Lac-Mégantic to more recent tragedies and travesties, while the body count in Quebec is still incomplete and the memorials have just begun. Cities like New Westminster that are wrapped around rail yards are taking the opportunity to do a little inward reflection – are we under similar risk? What’s in those tankers over there? What can we do about it? Meanwhile, remaining discussions of the original incident are circling around whom to blame- and who should pay.

Everyone is trying to score “political points”, mostly by accusing others of trying to score “political points”. The media treated us to the strange spectacle of an unprepared Corporate Boss ham-fistedly talking to people who recently had their City and/or families destroyed- then the media somehow concentrated on his poor management of a PR opportunity and not on his poor management of a Train Company that just killed 50 people… alas.

Mistakes were made.

People (including me) who have found themselves questioning for several years what our country slowly evolving into a Petro-State really means find we have to censor ourselves at times like these. Yeah, it may be hard to directly link the Calgary Floods and the Toronto Storm and the fact most of the western United States is currently on fire directly to fossil fuel burning and profiteering, and if I were to suggest a link, I am the one trying to capture “political points” (whatever the hell those are) from others’ tragedies.

One thing is certain about Lac-Mégantic: this is what Peak Oil looks like. Much like the Deepwater Horizon disaster and our Federal Government’s decision to approve Shell’s new Bitumen Sand megaproject while acknowledging it will violate the Species at Risk Act, the Migratory Birds Convention, and there is no technology yet invented to mitigate the destruction it will do to the environment, the people at Lac-Mégantic died because the cheap and easy oil is gone and burned.

When pipeline proponents used this as an example of why pipelines were safer than trains for moving oil, they were missing the point here. The oil that destroyed Lac-Mégantic could not be moved by pipeline, because it came from parts of the Bakken Field where pipelines are not part of the mix. This is not a place where porous rock full of oil sits in the ground until an enterprising driller sticks a pipe in it and sees a black gold gusher. This wasn’t even a viable oil field 20 years ago, even though it has been considered a hydrocarbon source rock since the 1950s, when all the easy stuff was skimmed off the top. The currently-accessed Bakken oil is trapped in non-porous shale deposits, and cannot be removed from the ground without hydraulic fracturing. Essentially, the rock needs to be made porous enough for the oil to flow to the well through violence.

Problem is, the oil produced by a hydraulic fractured well is not plentiful. Each well head does not have decades-long lifespan, but will only produce economically for months. This is why the Bakken Field looks unlike any conventional oil field. New technology had to be invented that allowed wells to be jacked up and moved around quickly. This is the reason that 2,000 wells are being drilled per year and an equal number abandoned, not to expand the field, but just to maintain production levels. With the source of the oil moving around daily- it is neigh impossible to build an economic pipeline system that connects it all. By the time the pipe is laid, the well has run dry. So Bakken Oil is moved by truck and by train, re-purposing the rail sidings in small rural towns where there used to be silos to store grain and sugar beets.

As a bonus, because there is no viable way to sell the gas that vents from these spurt-production wells, it is vented or flared, making Bakken Field Oil almost as GHG-intensive as Canada’s Bitumen Sands.

This is just another face of “unconventional oil”- the place where a society economically addicted to oil will go when the easy oil runs out – this is what Peak Oil looks like. Hydraulic fracturing (despite what some might suggest) is not a new technology- it has been used for at least 60 years – you are only hearing about it now because it has suddenly become the only economically viable way to suck the last bits of oil and gas out of formations that do not give them up easily. It is economically viable now because oil is over $100 a barrel, and because Western Governments have decided to subsidise the practice, both directly with cash and tax incentives, and indirectly by removing the type of environmental protections that would make it more difficult or expensive to do.

This doesn’t stop when it gets out of the ground, either. Moving oil by trucks and trains is more expensive, in a number-of-pennies-to-move-a-barrel-of-oil-a-mile sense, but we are out of options for these marginal fields and the good fields are gone. It isn’t David Suzuki and Al Gore who are responsible for the number of railcar loads of heavy oil crossing our country going from 500 just 4 years ago to 140,000 today; this is a product of the continued exploitation of more marginal oil supplies as our addiction goes on.

Of course, when your transportation service is more expensive than the competition, there is large incentive to cut back, reduce cost, pinch pennies to remain competitive. When asked why there was only one Engineer on the fateful train carrying $6,000,000 worth of volatile substances, the President of the rail company made vague statements about how if your competition reduces costs by 1%, you need to keep up. In an industry that is steadily becoming more self-regulated as the government reduces costs by cutting back on inspections, safety is one of those places where a few pennies saved can pay off. It’s not like no-one was warning that the DOT-111 rail cars being pressed into service to move oil were ticking time bombs. This is not limited, of course, to trains. A similar situation is facing us with Trucking in BC, where regular inspections are replaced by self-regulation and “inspection blitzes” where the vast majority of trucks are operating in violation of the law– and more than 40% are deemed too dangerous to continue their trip! No doubt saving pennies along the way.

It is the race to the bottom, as the resource becomes more marginal, and the need remains insatiable, because we refuse to consider shifting gears until we are forced to. Like any other addiction, this leads to poor decision making, hasty rationalization, and irresponsible risk taking. This is the horse our nation is tying itself too – as we migrate into full Petro-State status, throwing all of our eggs into an increasingly threadbare basket.

As long as this happens, we will have a prosperous economy that keeps too many children in poverty, a thriving business climate while long-term youth unemployment reaches record highs, and we will promise low taxes to support these important businesses, even as the systems that support the citizens fall apart from lack of funding.

A week after the deadliest corporate crime in recent Canadian history, the bodies are not even identified yet, the grim count not yet complete, but it is business as usual in Stephen Harper’s Ottawa. He shuffled his cabinet to clear the air of an increasingly stale stench– changing a few of the pawns in the middle rows while the suits in the front row maintain their armour. The Minister of Transportation- the person who should be held to account for this massive failure on his watch – is quietly shuffled out of his post and moved to Industry – making it easy for he and his replacement to cowardly avoid ever having to answer any uncomfortable questions. None of these question are going to come from the Elected Representative of Lac-Mégantic, as their MP is Christian Pardis, who was himself busy being moved away from his Minister of Industry post and into International Development – where he can oversee the continued deconstruction of Canada’s aid systems for the Third World where the impacts of our continued exacerbation of Anthropogenic Global Warming for quick profit will be felt the most.

It’s the circle of political life, Petro-State style.

On Moles and Retorts

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 5 Comments.

The Blog is rarely much of a dialogue. It’s just a place where I shoot out ideas wrapped in questionable grammar. Occasionally, someone comments below, and I might comment back. Mostly however, this is just me spouting off, and never claimed to be anything else.

So some time last week, an extended comment appeared in my e-mail inbox in reference to a post I recently did on the proposed / alleged Q2Q Pedestrian Bridge. As that post obliquely (through an external link) referenced the person who wrote me, I suggested he add it as a “comment” on my blog. He was having technical issues with Blogger’s commenting form, so we agreed I could post it on his behalf. So here I include, in its entirety and exactly as send to me, the comments of one E.C. “Ted” Eddy:

Dear Mr. Nwimby,

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t respond to anything posted on media that isn’t fair and balanced or has a limited following. I decided to make an exception to your NWIMBY BLOG. Feel free to post my first whack-a-mole response to yours. 

The tenor of the piece seemed to attempt to paint the Quayside Community as being “NWIMBY” (NOT WELCOME IN MY BACK YARD) with respect to a pedestrian/bicycle crossing to Queensborough. Selective historic references were utilized to underpin that shaky premise. We proceed here to whack some other mythical moles that popped up on your blog. 

First Mole – The original Queensborough Ped/cycle crossing had been proposed to cross at Poplar Island in a Queensborough Community Plan of June 2008 – a laudable enterprise that would have opened up Poplar Island as a first Nations eco-tourist destination complete with the entire environmental cleanup paid for by the Federal Gov’t. This is a good idea if it took off from the west side of the Third Avenue Overpass and solicited funds from developers of land on either side of the river. No one at the Quay was against it that I can recall. Indeed, people on the Quay have never been against an interconnection with our Queensborough neighbors. 

Second Mole- Your “who could be against it?” hyperlink was an old newspaper article and the number of signatures on the petition has grown to more than 1,000. Recall that same year the city explicitly stated in a report to council they would provide community consultation . You were fair and balanced by repeating the problems of cost, visual pollution, extreme length and destruction of the Children’s Submarine park (which is busier than the Pier Park) but failed to mention the biggest concern that there was none of the promised Public Consultation, Environmental Impact studies, usability report, etc. Indeed when the Quayside Board pressed for these requirements we were rebuffed with the comment that such consultation would create “unnecessary expectations”, or in your parlance more “whining” in any attempts to provide senior’s access, save taxpayer dollars and the only children’s park. One would think that the SRY being chuffed about encroachment should have been uncovered prior to spending any Engineering Study dollars on the three failed overpriced, over engineered and overbearing earlier options -especially in light of the comments by the rail company they wanted completed assurances the rail bridge would be safe. A cost, by the way, that was not established in the original cow pie-in-the-sky bridge proposal. 

Third Mole – Your characterization that somehow we, or possibly just me, plays whack-a-mole with all city projects is reflective of your position as an “insider mole” that everything the City proposes is great “grandeur wise” and “cost-wise”. Some of us are more circumspect about creating legacies with taxpayer dollars with neither usage studies nor public consultation. I guess you missed NEWSLEADER JUNE 17th article wherein I was quoted as follows: 

“Quayside resident Ted Eddy, an outspoken critic of the earlier verions (sic) of the bridge, says these new designs address many of his concerns — particularly the $5-million option that would pair with the existing rail bidge (sic). This low-level option with the swing bridge looks like it could be a winner,” Eddy said. “I think I could sell this to my [Quayside Community] Board quite easily. We’ve never been opposed to some kind of connectivity.” 

Perhaps a correction to your blog is in order. 

Forth Mole – The Ferry Service alternative -“show me the business case”. I venture you have not seen any business case from the city on other ventures such as the office tower but I digress. Tom Littlewood’s presentation to the Quayside Community Board a week ago was compelling with no cost to the city. There is a dock already in Queensborough along with two wheelchair accessible/bike-friendly covered ferries in his possession, a suitable dock, purchased by his business partners, for use at the Quay and two years of discussions with the city, in particular the Mayor. All that’s needed is the city to utilize the Port Metro Vancouver offer of up to $100,000 to put a dock near the Fraser River Discovery Centre (whose DAC funds have also been redirected) or at the Inn at the Quay to complete the linkage. Tom’s willingness to proceed is business case enough for me and indeed he has put forth a plan that warrants consideration at little if no cost to the taxpayers of New Westminster. What is the problem with that I ask? We don’t need second guessing, hand wringing or “whining” from City Hall. He needs their cooperation and speedy approval after two years of inaction and their already touted “enthusiasm at all levels” – not a whack-a-mole parade of negatives and hurdles. Who knows, usage of the Ferry Service could provide a proxy for figuring out if a $3,000 per person swing bridge link could be justified. Recall here that car-dependant Queensborough residents have just lost a bus route that was costing about $3.80 per trip to run based on a business case done by TransLink. If the City is to spend more than the $6 million of DAC funding remaining after raiding the DAC funds, specified for other earmarked projects, for another showcase project in cost-overrun mode, then where is that business case?” 

All-in-all, I look forward to your portended BLOG on the Water Taxi Option and assume you might want do a little research by perusing the more recent media links that I have conveniently provided in the attached. You might even go to the horse’s mouth, Tom Littlewood (whom I have copied here) rather than continue to BLOG from viewing the past from the other end. 

Become a “Ferry godfather” rather than continue to put lipstick on the legacy projects of the “Spinderellas” at City hall. 

E.C.”Ted” Eddy

Thank you, Mr. Eddy, for taking the time to express yourself so eloquently. Allow me to retort.

The only reason I would suggest the Quayside Community Board was not enthusiastic about the bridge is that the only vocal opposition I have heard to the idea of the bridge came from a couple of well known and outspoken “leaders” of the QCB. I further suggested this may not be a universal opinion of Quayside residents – and purposely linked to the story where Mr. Eddy expressed tacit approval of the new plans to support that point. I even pointed out that many of those original concerns were very much valid, and should be addressed. I’m just not sure any of them are a game-ender. I also don’t think the Quayside residents speak as a single voice on this issue. I ride with a couple of Quayside folks on a regular basis, and they are anxiously looking forward to the bridge..

First Mole – Actually, the 2008 Queensborough Community Plan documents I could find (and they are all here, scroll to the bottom of the page) only reference the Poplar Island route for the bridge as a possible “backup” plan if the direct route is considered too difficult or impossible. Looking through those documents, it appears that option was not initially considered, but was added to the conversation through community consultation. I have already written a long post about why this is a terrible plan if one is hoping to build this as a useful piece of transportation infrastructure, so I won’t go deeper into that here.

Second Mole – The submarine park will not be destroyed. Council has said they will not destroy it, and as a worst-case scenario, they will move it. The rest of this “Mole” seems to be a criticism about the format of consultations and planning, and we can all have opinions on how those should work in an ideal world. I think Mr. Eddy and I have differing opinions here, and nothing wrong with that. Here is the process best I can figure from watching the media and Council reports:

1) The community has an idea for connectivity that was included in the Queensborough Community Plan in 2009 as a priority;
2) Council secured some funding through DAC with a fairly long planning window;
3) Staff hired some consulting engineers to do an initial assessment, and scope out potential opportunities, problems, and rough costs. Included in this would be general feasibility issues- including Senior government issues location and potential for conflict with the Train Bridge;
4) Recognizing that being close to the Rail Bridge is the best spot, talks with SRY begin to suss out concerns;
5) Take the assessment to Council to seek opinions (after all, they are the elected representatives of the public), and IF council thinks we are on the right track- take it to public consultation;
6) Report out on Pubic consultation, and either move ahead, fix the plan to address public concerns, or go back to Step 1.

It sounds to me like they got to Step 5 and there were enough concerns at Council or problems for staff to iron out (i.e. railway discussions) or enough public negative reaction that they stepped back and re-assessed by going back to Step 3 and re-jigging the plan.

The point is, the plan, such as it was, was clearly not ready for a detailed public consultation, and the new plan may also not quite be there yet (as it sounds like there are some issues to work out with the Port and SRY about how a lift or swing bridge might operate). There is no point going to the public asking them to approve an idea if the Port or another agency will not allow that idea to be built.

Of course, these tentative plans and technical reports are sent up to Council and read into the public record for a reason: so that people like me and Ted Eddy can talk about them and get the public thinking about the project. We also have a Council that allows open delegations- if anyone has a strong opinion about the bridge, or a great alternative model, they should go to Council and use their allotted 5 minutes to make their case to Council. Or write them a letter. Or Blog. This is what the public conversation looks like. I don’t want valuable staff time wasted holding evening “consultation” meetings for a half-baked plan that is not feasible, but this has hardly been a secretive process – both Mr. Eddy and I have seen the plans presented so far.

Third Mole: “Insider Mole” is an interesting accusation. I am afraid everything I know about this project comes from press accounts and reading the reports on the City’s website (and therefore, I am free to admit my knowledge of the project is incomplete), but I have worked for a consulting engineering firm and inside of a City Hall (not New West City Hall, mind you), so I can read between lines with more nuance than some. I am also out and about in the city a lot, so I have occasional conversations with Councillors or Staff, and am not afraid to ask them questions. Hey, I pay their wages, the poor people have to listen to me!

As for the inference that I am secretly working for the City (that’s what an “ insider mole” is, isn’t it?), I can only refer back to several posts on this same blog where I am highly critical of some of the moves this City has made (or refused to make). I call things as I see them, and that includes when I actually agree with the City as much as when i disagree with them.

PS: “Missed” the June 17th Newsleader Article?! I linked to it in the 10th paragraph of my post!

Forth (sic) Mole: I’m not one to challenge Tom Littlewood’s plans. I worked with Tom on the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee, and he is indeed a visionary who loves to spread the good word about bicycles and safe cycling infrastructure. However, I think a ferry service is a very different consideration than a bridge.

A fixed bridge provides a reliable, permanent link between the communities, something the City and the burgeoning neighbourhoods of Queensborough can plan around in the long-term (and something the DAC funds were earmarked for). A ferry service (for all its benefits) does not provide this security. It may work great in 2013, but any number of factors (rising fuel costs, change in safety regulations, change in business interest of the owner, unexpected mechanical issues with the floating stock) could make it disappear in a flash. That is not the kind of transportation infrastructure one can plan a community around.

The example of TransLink cutting bus service to Port Royal is a perfect one – a quick business decision made, a transportation link is lost, and the community has no say. This is the biggest reason why I am such a big fan of the fixed bridge, I like to think of the long game when we are talking about building this community.

I don’t want to say more about Tom’s plan until I get a chance to talk to him about it, so I’ll leave it at that. Then maybe I’ll write a blog post about it and other alternatives to the bridge, as previously suggested.

Anyway, thanks for the comments, Mr. Eddy, and feel free to comment below if I have missed any points, or am missing something. You can even do it anonymously, if that suits you…