Tag: Transportation

On Todd Stone’s letter to the Mayors (part 1)

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Less than 24 hours after I wrote this piece on the ongoing fiasco that is the Transportation Referendum*, the Minister of Transportation threw a great big wrench into the already significantly muddled works. Unfortunately, instead of providing helpful guidance during a time of confusion, he brought down a little monetary blackmail, told the Mayors to do his work and make a choice, then took away most of the choices the Mayors may have had.

This was not a good day for the Mayors, the Minister, or the region.

It was a 4-page letter, so I cannot address it all here, and much of it was a repeat of talking points with which the Mayors should already be very depressingly familiar (“ensure traffic congestion is reduced to improve everyone’s commute”… ugh). That said, there was enough new stuff offered that is worth discussing in detail.

The letter starts with the idea of delaying the referendum:

“Some members of the Mayor’s Council have stated…that not enough time remains before November to adequately deliver a referendum…”

This is an interesting piece of rhetoric. That “some of the members” have suggested this is to downplay the entire Mayors Council spoke nearly unanimously on this topic, and their opinion was supported by TransLink management, the business community, organized labour, the media from left and right, and every transportation and regional planning expert asked. The only people who thought this was a good idea were the Premier, Jordan Bateman, and Lois Jackson: A dangerous combination on the best of days.

It also seems to absolve the Minister of any responsibility for having done absolutely nothing to make the Referendum a possibility in November 2014. This referendum was announced by his Boss in a fit of pre-election scrambling, and the election that made the vapid promise “policy” occurred a full human gestation ago. What has the Ministry done in this time to set the parameters for the referendum? Where is the question? Where are the policy ideas? Where is the public discourse on the topic of transportation options? After squandering those 9 months doing nothing, the Minister is now tasking the Mayors’ Council with drawing up a Referendum that they don’t want within 4 months, off the sides of their desks while they already have full-time jobs running their damn cities.

To reinforce that this terrible idea scribbled on a bar napkin by his Boss a year ago is now their problem, he follows up with a little fiscal blackmail:

“If a vision is not ready by June 30, 2014, the next date the provincial government is willing to consider a referendum is in conjunction with the subsequent local government election. This later date would require the Mayor’s Council to use existing funding sources if it wishes to expand transit in the interim period. If the referendum is held… prior to June 30, 2015, the provincial government will compensate local governments for any related administration costs.”

Translated: If they don’t do within the next 4 months what he hasn’t accomplished in the last 9 months, they won’t see a lick of new money until 2017 or 2018, and they will have to not only run the referendum they don’t want, they will have to pay for running it!

“I believe the Mayors’ Council… is best placed to develop and articulate a clear regional transportation vision, ensuring it balances the region’s priorities. Is affordable and supports the movement of people and goods”

Really? Slowly, now: Then. Why. Have. A. Referendum?

So the Minister decides to pass all of the difficult policy development, forecasting, cost estimating, and priority setting to the Mayors. Once he has them lined up, the Minister decides to throw a curveball, followed by the knuckler:

“First, if new funding sources are identified and proposed, they must be generated within the region, and not subsidized by taxpayers in the rest of the province…”

So the rest of the province will not pay anything to support the movement of people or good in the Lower Mainland. Because we all know people in the rest of the province don’t use roads or transit in Vancouver, and no goods moving through this region support businesses or people in the rest of the province? Bullocks.

As an aside, see this graph that shows how BC Transit is funded. This is the agency that provides public transportation everywhere outside of the TransLink catchment, including transit servicing Todd Stone’s new office in Victoria and his home in Kamloops (not that he would ever use these, of course).

So the Lower Mainland is able to pay into general revenue that funds half of the BC Transit System, but none of the rest of the Province is expected to pay one red penny to support TransLink. Can we at least vote on that?

“[second], the provincial government will not permit new funding to be collected from the provincial transportation system situated in the region”

So that, in one short sentence, does it for any creative new ideas that have proven to work elsewhere and serve Transportation Demand Management purposes as well as revenue generation. No tolling of all the major crossings, for a dollar or ten, and absolutely no regional road pricing.

Note both of these decisions were made without the benefit of a Referendum and without consulting those local leaders he so trusted to create a clear vision.

To the Minister’s benefit, there is some potential good news in this letter around a return of some TransLink governance powers to the Mayors. It is too early to tell what the Minister really means by the changes he mentions obliquely – does this mean the Mayor’s rubber stamp will now just precede the non-elected Board’s approval instead of following it, or that they will actually have new  or restored power? Until some draft legislation is sketched up and the Mayors can get a grip on it, no-one can say except Todd Stone.

However, looking at the list of responsibilities the Minister is giving the Mayors (“approval of fare adjustments… oversight of customer satisfaction…sale of major assets…establishing remuneration of TransLink’s Executive”) it seems that the Mayors are being passed a satchel full of political hand grenades without knowing if any still have pins in them.

The question now is how do the Mayors react to this significant shuffling of the deck? I will talk about that in my next post….

*This entire mess is not helped by the uncertain language being used around this referendum on transportation funding for the region. The colloquial in the media has been to call it either a “Transit Referendum” or a “TransLink Referendum”. In fact, the Minister himself used the latter term in his Editorial last week, although all of his subsequent discussion was about “reducing congestion for commuters”. I have been chewing on this, and have decided “Transportation Referendum”” is the fairest term. It is being foisted upon TransLink and the region by the Minister of Transportation, and the decision we are making here is not merely the future of TransLink, it is the future of the region’s transportation infrastructure.

Time to move past the Referendum

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I haven’t written too much about the proposed TransLink Referendum. Yeah, I mentioned last year what a terrible idea it was, but it has come to the point where that is the consensus opinion outside of the Premier’s Office, so it seemed unnecessary a point to belabor.

Then, last week, the Minister of Transportation circulated an “Editorial” (raising the question of just what he is the editor of) outlining the need for a referendum. It seems a strange thing to do right now, as he has been saying essentially the same thing since he got the job (even if he and his boss have consistently disagreed about the form of the referendum she promised back when he was still in the private sector), and it seems meaningless to spend time convincing us that we need something that he is already committed to delivering, whether we like it or not.

What might have been more useful at this point in the discussion would be for the Minister to affirm that a successful referendum that sets a stable funding mechanism in place to build and operate a sustainable transportation system for the entire region is of utmost importance, and his #1 job this term, and he won’t let us down. That would be inspirational about now.

Instead he demonstrates what a few people have suggested: the Minister from Kamloops simply does not understand the transportation needs of the Lower Mainland.

Allow me to quote The Minister in full, with a few marginal notes:

The issue of transportation in Metro Vancouver is very topical, and that’s a good thing. Making sure that traffic congestion is reduced to improve your daily commute is important to our economy and maintaining this region’s great quality of life.

You have got to be kidding me. The Minister thinks “making sure traffic congestion is reduced” is the #1 transportation issue in the Lower Mainland? This, after they just spent $5 Billion building and expanding freeways and the widest bridge in the world, and have already decided the next $2 Billion will not be up for referendum, but will be blown on yet another oversized bridge? He still thinks the priority is yet more roads and bridges?

This opening paragraph, more than any below, demonstrates that Todd Stone has no idea what the hell is happening on Broadway, in Central Surrey, on the packed Canada Line, the increasingly unreliable Expo Line, on all those neighborhoods that are seeing their bus service cut, or on the traffic-clogged streets of New Westminster.

But to improve transportation in Metro Vancouver, big decisions lie ahead. Decisions that the people who live, pay taxes, and commute in the region need to be a part of.

I’m not one to get all grammar marm on his Honourable, but this paragraph starts with a conjunction, ends with a preposition, and contains two incomplete sentences (pretty much the perfect NWimby paragraph, come to think of it). Regardless, I wish the Minister had asked the people of the region to be part of the decision to replace the tunnel, or the decision to allow tankers to ply our northern coastal waters, or the decision to cut BC Ferry services, or…

Today, transportation improvements are supported through taxes and fees like property tax, gas tax, transit fares, and tolls for new crossings. And while there are many taxes, there is only one taxpayer—and that’s you.

Ugh. Note that the Minister is talking about transportation improvements (but not the ones he has already promised, like the tunnel) and not about maintaining the transit service we currently have. While he bickers and dithers about how to pay for any imagined transportation improvements, bus routes are being cut, major pieces of infrastructure are failing, and our communities are becoming less livable because there isn’t even enough money to maintain the overcrowded transit system that we have.

To support expanded transit and road networks for the region, many local government leaders have advocated for additional sources of funding to be created, on top of those taxes and fees you already pay.

Ok, see what he is doing here? The Minister does not want to raise your taxes! He wants to make things better for you, but he doesn’t expect you to pay for it. He wants it to be free. It’s those evil spendthrift local governments though: they are the ones who want you to pay for it!

Please, Mr. Minister, if we agree that improving transportation infrastructure is “important to our economy and maintaining this region’s great quality of life” as you suggest in paragraph 1, how will we fund the necessary “expanded transit and road networks” without increasing what people already pay? 

Further, if we agree it is important, can you assure us there won’t be a “none of the above” option on the referendum? Can you chat with your boss about that?

The provincial government does not disagree with this idea. But our position is clear. If the people of Metro Vancouver are being asked to pay new taxes or fees, on top of those that local governments and TransLink already collect, then taxpayers must have a say.

See, he did it again? No, not the starting a sentence with a conjunction (which he did do), but see how he pointed out the evil ones – it is local governments and TransLink that collect taxes and fees. It is almost as if the Province doesn’t collect any taxes or fees at all. How, exactly did we pay for those $5 Billion in freeways?

This is why the provincial government is committed to a public, region-wide referendum. It’s a commitment we made in the last election and that citizens supported. We will deliver on that promise.

Yeah, your referendum promise also said November 2014, and it looks like you might bend on that. It is clear that no-one outside of your caucus room supports the idea. One promise people did support was the money for hospital expansions in Dawson Creek, Penticton, Burnaby, and New Westminster. Your government has already admitted those were just empty promises made for votes, and you pretty much got away with it…

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Asking people to vote on a new transportation vision comes after governments and citizens work together to clearly determine and articulate what that vision actually is.

Please do. Because the only thing worse than this referendum idea is the stunning lack of leadership and vision from the Minister and the Premier on making this thing actually work.

If you’re following the news, you’ll have heard about passionate and important transportation projects that individual local governments are behind. The job ahead is to bring this into a common vision.

I’m not even sure what a passionate transportation project is, except maybe this? but you are starting to creep me out here, Todd. p.s.: The mayors are united in a common vision, just not the way you want them to be.

And, I would argue, success depends on a vision that is affordable for taxpayers, fair for all communities, and secures the movement of people and goods for generations to come.

(Again with the conjunctions). The worst part about this all, is that we have that vision. The region had a long term plan for a Livable Region supported by Transport 2040. It is the plan that TransLink has to keep cutting back on because of lack of funding, in part because they are stuck giving $30 Million a year to the operators of the Golden Ears Bridge because of a bad deal signed by the Minister of Transportation for a bridge that TransLink didn’t want, because of the $170 Million (so far) white elephant that are the FalconGates, and because of other short-sighted moves by the Provincial Government that would not allow that plan to be realized.

I will continue to work with the mayors to facilitate and help enable a process to bring focus to the regional transportation vision, so that the people can decide what’s best.

See, the Mayors are not interested, you screwed them enough times. You managed to do what no other Minister of the Provincial Government has done, and you have got all of the Mayors to be unanimous on a Transportation idea – the idea of killing the referendum.

If you and the Mayors did, miraculously, come up with the ultimate vision, the grand plan that will solve all, then why the hell delay and go to referendum? What happens if that great plan fails at referendum? What is the back-up plan, here. Sir?

If we work together for the benefit of the whole region, mindful of taxpayers big and small from Whalley to Whytecliff, Maple Ridge to Arbutus Drive, we will all succeed.

Arbutus Drive!? Is Whistler in the referendum zone now?

Look, Minister Stone, with all due respect and my sincere hopes that you succeed at setting a new, bold, plan in place for transportation in the region, I feel for you. I know you are new to the role, and your boss has given you an untenable task. Being a Minister means you are responsible for this file, it is time to step up and make the case. This letter didn’t do it. Read the writing on the Wall: everyone from Barbara Yaffe to Gordon Price to Vaughn Palmer is saying it is a bad idea. The Board of Trade and the major trade unions are agreed (!) that it is a bad idea. Every Mayor (except the one who just wants to destroy TransLink and replace it with a tunnel) and the management of TransLink are against it. The referendum is now only a distraction from the real conversation: how are we going to move the region forward?

Time to stop editorializing, Mr. Minister, and time to start leading.

Short Sea Shipping Dreams

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

I loved this opinion piece in the News Leader last week. I’m just sorry it took me a week to pen this retort.

If I can paraphrase the rhetorical question by Ms. Ouellet-Martin, it is “Can short sea shipping help us manage increased Port activity while protecting the livability of our Cities?”

The answer can be found in this report, which is more than a decade old now, with no sign that any action has come out of it. But first, a bit of background.

This study was commissioned back in the heady days of 2005, when there were still three port authorities in Greater Vancouver. The Vancouver Port Authority was responsible for the Ports around Burrard Inlet, the Fraser River Port Authority for those on the main part of the Fraser River and the North Fraser Port authority for the few remaining port activities along the north and middle arms.

All three Ports were running fine and were financially self-sufficient despite the downloading of many responsibilities (environmental protection of the shorelines, dredging costs) from the federal agencies that used to do them (DFO, Coast Guard, etc.) to the local authorities. Perhaps most importantly, they were run by local authorities who had experience with Port Operations (mostly people who had spent their carrers either operating the Port, or Captaining ships). It was during these times that Fraser Surrey Dock built a container facility, spending $190 Million to attract container ships that instead decided to go to Burrard Inlet after some Merger and Acquisition action hit their main customer. So in 2008, the Federal Government decided to amalgamate all three ports in to a single entity, allegedly to prevent this type of competition. They were so proud of the change that they announced it less than a week before Christmas 2007, and it came into effect two weeks later on January 1. Christmas news releases are a sure way to let you know even the government thinks what it is doing might be a bad idea.

With the amalgamation came another change. The Port People and Ships Captains were out. The Port Authority is now going to be run by business types. The CEO is not a former stevedore, he is a former jet turbine engineer who instead worked his way up the corporate ladder through Mergers and Acquisitions, for businesses that make chemicals and steel or developing real estate. The only thing he knows about Ports is he bought one once. Makes sense, though, as his job is not to facilitate the movement of goods on and off of ships, but to “leverage positions” and “deliver value” for his “capital-intensive, asset- and service-focused large corporate customers”.

His job is not to move goods. It is to use the movement of goods as the tool to create a high return on investment for his shareholder. But I digress…

The important point of the study is that it looked at the economics of moving containers through our region not by road, but on barges. They went so far as to do an economic analysis of 5 potential node sites where short-sea shipping infrastructure could suit the local goods movement market and the existing supply chains to the distant hinterlands that are the Port’s real customers. They evaluated the practicality, infrastructure requirements (with cost estimates), efficiency of goods movement, and even the air emissions related to the changeover.

The conclusions? Allow me to quote:

  • Intra-regional short-sea container shipping in Greater Vancouver offers promising, commercially viable, private sector opportunities in the short to medium-term for specific short-sea container terminal locations on the Fraser River.
  • Short-sea container shipping, for selected terminal locations and routes and with sufficient volume, offers price competitiveness with trucking and some competitive advantages (likely to expand dramatically over time) in the areas of delivery time and delivery time reliability. These advantages occur because of road network congestion as well as deep-sea terminal flow issues, gate congestion, reservation limitations and operating hour limitations. All of these factors impact on truck transfer delivery time and costs but do not affect a short-sea operation with on-dock marshalling areas.
  • Expected increases in environmental emissions from the intra-regional transfer of containers by truck will be moderated to the extent that short-sea operations absorb some of the future growth.
  • It will be critical for short-sea service investors and proponents to invest the capital and make the long-term commitment necessary to establish reliability and confidence in the market place. The Consulting Team is aware of a number of regional operators and external investors who are seriously interested in this opportunity.

There is more, but you get the drift. Short-sea shipping could work based on 2005 container movement levels and density, and the economics improved as container volumes increased along with road congestion. Note the growth in container demand up to 2013 has almost caught up to match the projections from this 2005 study despite the significant blip caused by the recession that started in 2008. The Port is clearly bully on containers, considering their development plans at Roberts Bank.

Now, about that road congestion. The report outlines the major road movement plans that were starting to come to light as part of the Gateway Strategy, all delivered, remember, “On Time and On Budget”:

  • Golden Ears Bridge (promised by 2008, opened in 2009)
  • North Fraser Perimeter Road (promised by 2011, now cancelled)
  • Twin Port Mann, 6-lane Highway 1 (promised by 2011, over-delivered in 2013)
  • South Fraser Perimeter Road (promised by 2011, delivered 2014)

The study proved that short-sea shipping was economically feasible, and would result in cleaner air and less congested roads, all we needed to do was invest in a little infrastructure on Port lands. So let’s look at the 5 highlighted sites from the study and see what type of infrastructure development is happening:

Coast 2000 (Richmond): Since 2005, the Port have bought adjacent farmland with an eye on future expansion, they have built no less than 23 new warehouse buildings for leasing to trucking and logistics companies, and not a single dock to the adjacent river has been built. The only dock facility on the entire 300 hectare site with 2.5km of deep river waterfront is one that has been there since before 2005, and is (rarely) used to move small break-bulk.

Fraser Surrey Docks (Surrey/Delta): Now deciding that importing dirty thermal coal from Wyoming that no port on the west coast of the USA will take is their only economic salvation.

Port Kells (Surrey/Langley): Has seen huge growth in the last decade – of truck-serviced warehouses. The entire area between the Trans Canada Highway and the River, from the Golden Ears Bridge to 190th, is over 630 hectares with more than 3 km of prime Fraser River waterfront, direct connections to two major freeways and a major rail line, and literally hundreds of warehouses, yet the only thing that moves on and off of boats is woodchips onto barges.

Tilbury (Delta): Tilbury is the long industrial strip along the north shore of Delta between the Alex Fraser Bridge and Deas Island. Used to be it was the industrial area you could never get to; now with the SFPR complete, it is becoming the industrial area you can’t get out of. The SFPR has facilitated expanded growth here, more warehouses and industrial land, but of course no new docks. The good news here is the location of SeaSpan – about the only place where a quasi-short-sea shipping mode happens in BC. They have a series of dedicated barges that move rail cars and truck trailer to Vancouver Island and back every day, as they have for the best part of a century.

Pitt Meadows Airport (Pitt Meadows): This area was ripe for development in 2005, but apparently the Port lost interest, and the municipality decided former farmland in the floodplain of the Fraser River was better utilized as residential development. There is essentially no industrial use of the waterfront in this area, despite proximity to the massive CP Intermodal Yard where every container that does not come or go by train must, alas, go on the back of a truck, because the river is way over there – across the street.

I could go on with other industrial waterfront areas that are not even evaluated in this report, the Mary Hill Bypass area of Port Coquitlam, Albion Flats, even the Mission waterfront. They have what you need – navigable river access, rail lines, and relatively direct freeway access far from commercial centres and their traffic hassles. Except for that last point, you could include Queensborough and Annacis Island. All they need (according to the report) is for the Port to invest in some waterfront infrastructure, or create economic incentives for private industry to do the same.

Instead, after amalgamation, this report was shelved, as the Port decided to go the other direction, to fit with the new business plan. They will continue to build warehouses that can quickly return lease money, and rely on infrastructure built by others (after all, you and I pay for those roads and bridges, the Port doesn’t even have to pay property tax). Instead of using their infrastructure investment money to improve the livability of our community and the efficiency of goods movement through the Port, they continue to buy up farmland (or create new land in the sea) so that they can lease that out to logistics and operations companies for a handsome profit. This is why I say the Port is no longer in the goods movement business, they are in the real estate development business.

Is it time for Short-sea shipping? Can it help with traffic congestion on our streets, and still provide efficient movement of goods? Can it reduce emissions, improve air quality, and improve the livability of our cities? The answers to all of those questions appear to be “yes”.

Is it in the business interest of the Port? That is the question we should be asking.

The $1 Toll – Updated!

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 8 Comments.

When the media start talking about bridges and roads and transit and referenda and all the stuff that is rolled into the Lower Mainland and BC’s plan to move people about, there is a common theme that arises. Go to any recent on-line story about these subjects, and someone will inevitably comment that the “solution” is to toll all of the bridges equally, the number usually proffered is $1 per bridge. This is suggested as being more “fair” than just putting these more expensive tolls ($3-$4) on the newer bridges.

That usually gets shouted down in the comments when someone else comes along and says any toll at all is a “cash grab” and there is no way a piece of infrastructure should be paid for by the people who use it, and the comment thread goes from there.

 Example, Example, Example.

 There is rarely any deeper analysis of that first idea. What happens if we toll all the major bridges at $1 a crossing? What problem does this “fair” solution solve?

First we need to define our terms. When people talk about tolling “all the bridges”, they surely don’t mean the bridge on Gaglardi Way that spans the Brunette River or the King Edward Overpass, but they likely would include the two North Shore crossings and the major crossings of the Fraser (Golden Ears, Port Mann, Pattullo, Alex Fraser, and Massey). Ambitious tollers might include the Pitt River and the Knight, and really, you couldn’t do the Knight without doing the Oak and Laing as well (lets assume the Queensborough is spared, as it is really an access to the Alex Fraser or one of the other crossings)

 Seeing as how the False Creek bridges (Cambie, Granville, and Burrard) belong to the City of Vancouver, and the Middle Arm bridges (Moray, No. 2 Road, Dinsmore, and Sea Island) to the City of Richmond, it is pretty unlikely they could be included in any regional tolling scheme.

This raises an interesting jurisdictional issue, especially around Richmond. Most of the bridges belong to the BC Ministry of Transportation, so tolling could be accomplished with a wave of a Minister’s hand, but three (Golden Ears, Pattullo, and Knight) belong to TransLink, and the Laing belongs to YVR, so some interesting revenue-sharing complications would ensue.

But let’s put those complications aside for a moment, and look purely at the revenue side. Traffic counts for most of those bridges are available from the MoTI website, and it took only a bit of digging to find the numbers for the rest. Let’s use 2012 traffic numbers, as they are the most recent available and complete. Here is the average daily vehicle count on the bridges:

 Bridge           Operator    Daily Vehicles
Golden Ears   TransLink     30,000
Port Mann     TI Group     110,047
Pattullo         TransLink     65,000
Alex Fraser    MoTI           105,108
Massey          MoTI             81,729
Lions Gate    MoTI             60,285
Ironworkers  MoTI           115,331
Pitt River      MoTI             80,000
Laing             YVR              70,000
Oak               MoTI             68,150
Knight           TransLink     90,000
                     Total:          875,650

 So if you slapped a $1 toll on all 8 “major” bridges (including the Pitt River), you are looking at $650,000 per day in revenue, 365 days a year. Add the jurisdictionally-problematic North Arm bridges between Richmond and Vancouver and that number boosts to $876,000. Annually, this works out to just under $240 Million and $320 Million per year.

Wow, that’s a lot of money. Except two of those bridges already collect tolls ranging from $2.50 to $9.00, depending on the vehicle type. Although neither bridge is yet reaching its “revenue goal”, the amount of toll revenue promised the contractor at Port Mann is about $184 Million, and for the Golden Ears, $38 Million. Assuming that TransLink and the Ministry could somehow break these long-term contracts, we would need to remove this $222 Million from our net increase in revenue, bringing it down to less than $100 Million. Let’s ignore, for the benefit of the argument, the cost of setting up and running all of these tolling locations.

To put that $100 Million into perspective, TransLink collects $450 Million in fare revenue every year from people riding public transit, which is about a third of its annual $1,400 Million operational budget. The tolling revenue at $1 per car only represents about 7% of the TransLink operational budget: hardly enough to fund even the most modest growth of the transit system.

 The fairness or palatability of $1 tolls on all bridges seems less relevant when you realize it will hardly make a dent in the money we need in this region to build a reliable transit system, never mind building more bridges and lanes of highways (upwards towards 3,700km of new roads!) that will be required to support the region’s growth if we don’t build a more robust transit system.

This is why municipalities with region-wide bridge-tolling policies, like San Francisco or New York, are charging $5- $15 to use the bridges. If we are going to talk about a “fair toll on all bridges”, it most certainly won’t be $1. The numbers don’t work.

Update:
Despite the positive response I got for doing a little bit of basic math with publicly-available data, I was not surprised to hear the “$1 Toll Everywhere” suggested again as the panacea to TransLink funding on the CBC “Early Edition” this morning. This was only shocking because it was being put out by Colin Hansen (the man who brought us the HST debacle, and should know a little about referenda), only to be immediately supported by Moe Sihota. Neither stopped to think if a “toll under a dollar” was going to actually generate any meaningful revenue.
Alas, that is the state of political journalism in 2014. A series of he-said she-said talking point arguments, no-one doing basic fact-checking.
Regional Transportation rabble-rouser Eric Doherty on another forum asked an important question in relation to the “$1 Toll Everywhere” Plan: What does it cost to set up a toll collection system? Installing toll collection infrastructure on 11 bridges, and the bureaucracy to run it, would surely cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and would cost tens of millions a year to operate. If it takes three years to pay off the toll collection system, and another 20% of our $1 Toll is lost to overhead- the net revenue numbers get even worse.



Speed Limit Review

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 5 Comments.

I wasn’t going to comment on this topic, but when someone makes a series of terrible arguments on the radio in the morning before I’ve had my coffee (one so bad that even Rick Cluff noticed its flaws – “Rick Cluff noticed” not being a phrase I ever thought I would type), I get all riled up, stew about it for several hours, and now I get to vent.

There are people in BC right now who think that speed limits need to be raised. The only shocking part of this is that they apparently have the ear of the Government, and in typical Premier McSparkles® campaign-when-asked-to-lead style, a public conversation is being stoked on the issue.

No, wait. That’s unfair. With the benefit of doubt, the Government is asking the public what they think about an idea instead of making a rash change, which is what they should be doing. This is actually useful public consultation, and they should be acknowledged for this. So let me tell them what I think.

I think the first question the Government, and everyone else, needs to ask is: What problem are we trying to solve?

Safety? “Speed doesn’t kill, sudden deceleration does”. That’s a funny joke, but sudden deceleration from higher speed kills much more effectively than sudden deceleration from low speeds. There is extensive research on this, but perhaps the best study is a comprehensive review by Stuster and Coffman (1998). They looked at numerous studies from various jurisdictions that looked at the effect of increased and decreased speed limits on crash statistics and crash severity. The vast majority of studies correlated increased speed limits with increased crashes, increased injuries, and increased deaths. Even the few studies that did not show an increase in accident rate showed no decrease. There were enough instances reviewed they were able to create a statistically significant rate of impact calculation: Rate of crashes causing injury increase 3% for every 1 km/h speed increase. Increase average speed limit by 10km/h, (say, 100km/h to 110km/h) you will have a 30% increase in people injured in crashes. The % increase in fatal crashes is even higher. He science is clear – increasing speed limits kills and injures people.

Cost? Are we somehow saving money by driving faster? Maybe there is a “productivity cost” argument to be made for people who commute to Merritt and can save 10% of their travel time, but I haven’t seen anyone trying to make a business case. Considering gas mileage and wear and tear on a car increases with speed (at first principles, the power required to move a car through the air increases with the cube of the speed – to go twice as fast, you need to apply 8 times the power), the costs and lost productivity attached to increased injury and death, and the cost related to required road upgrades to maintain “safety factors” (see below), I an skeptical that business case could ever be made.

Efficiency? We aren’t increasing road efficiency or “fixing” traffic congestion (one is unlikely to avail oneself of the maximum speed limit on a road suffering from any kind of congestion), nor are we increasing your gas mileage (see that stuff up there about needing 8 times the energy to go twice as fast), so increased speed limits aren’t an efficiency issue. Actually, the Province has committed to taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the Transportation sector – raising speed limits is counter to this stated policy goal.

Enforcement? It seems people are irritated getting speeding tickets. I’m also sure people are irritated getting drinking & driving suspensions, and I am positive that taking their exotic cars away irritated the hell out of these guys. However, when a law exists for a clear public protection reason, and there is good science behind that policy, I don’t see “irritation” as a good reason to get rid of the law.

This morning I heard arguments on the CBC Early Edition by Ian Tootill, the leader of a group with the appropriate misnomer “Sense BC”, who are leading the public relations charge here (the interview can be heard at this link, January 9th edition, starting at about 1:21:30). He threw a lot of ideas out there, but to answer the first question (what problem are we trying to solve?), he said something to the effect of (and I paraphrase): “We don’t want to make scofflaws out of the motorists out there who now speed because the roads are too good/safe for the related speed limit”.

This argument contains within it various wrong ideas.

1: Mr., Tootill will not declare what speed limit he would like to see (he mentioned 130km/h or more a year ago, but is now more coy about it), but suggests we should use an Institute of Traffic Engineers equation, which is to use the 85th percentile. That means measure the speed people are using, and set the speed limit such that 85% of the people are going at or slower than the limit. This, of course, makes 15% of people automatically “scofflaws”. This issue is also at odds with his statement of “if you set the speed limit correctly, you don’t get non-compliance”. Even ideally, you get 15% non-compliance.

2: This argument relies on an idea (one Mr. Tootill repeats in the interview) that drivers are the best judges of what a “safe speed” is. The problem here is obvious – people, almost all of them, routinely exaggerate their own driving skills. The vast majority think they are really good drivers. Evidence on the road proves otherwise. Do I want the Lamborghini kids from Richmond, the woman applying eye makeup at an intersection after making an illegal lane change, or the 40+% who admit to texting while driving determining what safe driving habits are for me, and for each other?

3: This problem is exacerbated by another wrong assumption. Mr Tootill seems to think that speed limits are unnecessary because if people drive faster, they will somehow drive better. This is what he means about “changing the culture” and forcing people to “drive with purpose”. Seeing as he is outspoken against increased enforcement, I’m not sure how he plans to “raise the bar of expectations” or force better “lane discipline”, and why those compare favourably to enforcing speed limits.

4: The biggest failure, however, is the argument that we build these big, wide, safe roads (the new Sea to Sky highway was used as an example) but we don’t increase the speed limits. This shows a complete misunderstanding on Mr. Tootill’s part about how road engineers build roads.

An Engineer’s first job is always to protect public safety. One way they do this is to introduce “safety factors” into things they design. You ask and engineer to build a bridge that can support a 10T truck, she will build one that can support a 12T or 15T truck in ideal conditions. This is because they know that there might be minute flaws in the steel, some bolts might be cross-threaded during construction, a ton of snow might fall on the bridge deck, or any of a myriad of small things under the category of Shit Happens might add up such that if you drive a 9.9T truck over a bridge actually built to support only 10T, it might crack.

Engineers know that people, information, and equipment may be fallible, and one way to address this is to build in this “safety factor” between ideal conditions (the ideal capacity of the bridge) and the real world (what you post as the capacity of the bridge). As an aside, the remarkable Richard Feynman’s contributions to the Rogers Commission Report on the Space Shuttle Challenger accident are a fascinating study in what happens when “safety factors” are misunderstood and misapplied).

So how do you apply such a “safety factor” to engineering a road with a 50km/h speed limit? You build the curvature, the lane width, and sightlines adequate for, say, 80km/h driving. Does that man everyone should drive 80km/h on it, because if “feels safe” at that speed?

I had a discussion related to this with a traffic consultant during the consultations for crosswalk improvements on East 8th Ave. When a few of us suggested better protection for pedestrians and even a pedestrian-operated crossing light, he countered that the traffic and speed on the road did not warrant this. I asked if he meant the posted speed, or the actual speed on East 8th. It must have occurred to him (I politely suggested) that people driving on a 12m-wide two-lane with few trees and 1.5km between traffic signals in the middle of an otherwise congested urban area might not travel strictly at the speed limit. In reality, the average speed on East 8th around Sherbrooke is closer to 70-80km/h. The “safety factor” is definitely misused to the hilt here.

So what happens if everyone starts driving within the “safety factor” designed into our roads? That “safety factor” goes away, like frozen O-rings on an SRB. The roads look like they are designed for faster speeds than posted specifically because they are not. They are made that way because shit happens, and when shit happens, safety requires wiggle room. This single reality of how roads are engineered makes the rest of Mr. Tootill’s argument bunk.

Mr. Tootill actually gives it away at the end of the interview (around 1:29:20) about where he mentions he recently went on a long road trip through the USA and brags about driving “considerably above the posted speed limits” most of the time and only getting caught once. It’s clear from this what Mr. Tootill’s interest is – driving really fast on public roads, and damn the consequences (as long as the consequence isn’t a traffic ticket)! Like the idiots racing exotic cars through the Massey Tunnel last year, or the street-racing moron who kills innocent pedestrians when he “finds the limit” of his car or his ability on top of a bus stop, Mr. Tootil is just a speed junkie who couldn’t care less about the risk he causes other people. Of course, unlike those examples, Mr. Tootill is a really good driver.

How about this proposal: We keep the speed limits where they are because of public safety, cost, and environmental benefits, and Mr. Tootill starts acting like and adult and gets his speed jollies at the track, not on our public roads.

BC Ferries- Part 2

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

I wrote this earlier piece about the announced “rationalization” of BC Ferries, but didn’t really address the direct measures that the Minister from Kamloops proposed to solve BC Ferries’ current funding woes. So what of the solutions offered? Aside from the service cuts, what of the rest of the initiatives announced?

I used to joke that Ferries could be free if there was a bar in the back with a half dozen blackjack tables. I cannot believe they took me seriously (or maybe my cynicism once again fell short?). Frankly, I couldn’t care less about the slot machine idea, And although I agree with this opinion 100%, I have come to expect and accept moral bankruptcy and from this government, so no surprises there. The government-run exploitation of the poor through gambling genie is out of the bottle, and I hope eventiually a rational government will come along and invest a meaningful chunk of the revenue into helping those affected by the addiction, but I won’t hold me breath.

In this case, though, I have my doubts that it will generate significant revenue (or if it does, what portion of that revenue BC Ferries will actually get to keep), and only hope they are located in such a way that I don’t have to sit near them or – dear god – hear them. Although this does open up some exciting possibilities for other transportation funding projects: Golden Ears Bridge revenues a little short? Throw a few slots on the deck! Casino cars on SkyTrain? Free spin with every tap of your Compass Card?

The ending of off-peak Senior’s free rides, replacing them with a half-price fare, seems petty and ill conceived. The current “free ride” offered Senior BC residents is limited to off-peak times (i.e. Monday- to -Thursdays, no holidays) and the discount only applies for their passenger fare: seniors still have to pay full pop for their cars. So a senior driving to Victoria pays $51.25 plus tax instead of $66.75 if they travel when demand is low. That fare will now go to $59.00. Not a big change, but if you have ever seen the line-up for the early bird special at the Pantry, you know pensioners love to get the discount.

Good thing Seniors aren’t riding these off-peak seats for cheap!

Cutting this “free-ride” does little for revenue, but disincentives travel in off-peak times for those with more adaptable schedules, which further exacerbates the sometimes-empty / sometimes-stuffed Ferry problem. Further, it perpetuates the undermining of the Ferries being a vital transportation link for BC residents – especially many of the seniors who live on Gulf Islands where there are very few services. There is no hospital on Saturna, no doctor, no pharmacy. Walking on a ferry and taking the bus to Sidney is the only affordable way for seniors to get access to these services. Charging seniors $12 return (if they don’t take a car) to walk to their nearest Pharmacy seems like a shitty policy to me, and not one offset by an appreciable increase in revenue.

Just poor planning. 

The lightly- floated idea of enhanced passenger-only service sounds great to me. I rarely take a car on the Ferry, but am commonly lamenting how passengers are not treated as valued customers, but as the more inconvenient part of the car-moving business. However, before blowing the budget on special passenger-only boats, they could think about just providing some basic level of reasonable service to the pedestrians they already have.

For example, you cannot reserve a passenger ticket for the Gulf Islands. On busy long weekends, you can (and pretty much must) reserve a spot for your car, but if you want to walk on, you need to show up, line up, and take your chances. Yes, those boats do regularly sell out. Taking a stuffed-to-the-rafters 620 bus from Richmond, lining up for 40 minutes to buy a ticket (as they cannot sell them until they know how many reserved drivers show up to take their spots, nor how many passengers are in those reserved cars), then being told they sold out and you have to come back tomorrow, then being told you cannot reserve for tomorrow, but will have to roll the dice again, then waiting 30 minutes for the next 620 to show up… well, it is enough to make you want to just get it over with and lease a Hyundai.

Actual lineup for the 620. How would you like to wait in this line,
then be told at your destination you can’t have a ticket? 

But if I already lease the aforementioned Hyundai (because I am tired of rolling the dice with the the bus), I can still walk on (if there is room) and might park at the terminal, but long-term parking at Tsawwassen is now $16 per day. Paying $50 to park on a long weekend, combined with the (car-only) reservation being the only certain way on the boat, the incentives for driving right onto the boat add up pretty quick.

They don’t need special Ferries to attract more walk-on customers; they need to adjust the systems they have in place that make walking on unreliable and inconvenient. Don’t even get me started about the lack of coordination between the TransLink schedule and the Ferries Schedule at Tsawwassen.

And while I am harping on about customer service, in what other business is it OK for staff to start vacuuming around the feet of paying customers who are trying to relax? Do hotels or restaurants do this? Airlines? Movie theatres? Anyone?

Has anyone seen this anywhere BUT on a BC Ferry?

However, there are more fundamental questions that these proposals raise: where did they come from? The person whose job it is to run the Ferries “like a business” (as business groups lament it should be done) clearly did not make any of these decisions, from which routes to cut to bringing on the slots. Instead, these decisions were foisted upon him by a Minister of Transportation who makes unilateral changes to the way the corporation runs, yet refuses to take responsibility for the efficiency (or lack of) of the corporation.

It is clear from this interview of the CEO of BC Ferries that these decisions were not made by him or his Board. Much like with BC Hydro, ICBC, and TransLink, this government is making management decisions for these quasi-independent agencies, then blaming the agencies when these seemingly random, poorly thought-out, and unaccountable decisions don’t work out.

The BC Liberals are like the schoolyard bully who grabs your wrist and repeatedly smacks you with your own hand, all the time asking “why are you hitting yourself?”

Larco, Rails, and the Waterfront Vision.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 3 Comments.
I am cognizant that things are preliminary and there are many details yet to work out, but my initial reaction to this is very positive.
The Larco Property has been, for a few years, the missing front tooth in the smile of New Westminster’s waterfront. For those not paying attention, this is the lot between the Fraser River Discover Centre (FRDC) and the New Westminster Pier Park – the big pay parking lot at the end of Begbie Street. The development of Larco has been an on-again-off-again affair, but the last time we saw approved plans for the site, it was, to borrow a phrase commonly used in ironic understatement by my old sedimentology Prof: “sub-optimal”.
The plan was for 5 tall, thick towers on a pedestal of parking, rather the same as Plaza88 but 66% larger. It was out of scale with the surroundings, and threatened to create a permanent barrier separating Downtown from the waterfront, and burying Front Street for all time. As a trade-off, the plan was to bury a few hundred metres of a new freeway – the now-defunct North Fraser Perimeter Road (NFPR) – under the pedestal. Little regard was given to how this “traffic solution” would impact areas east or west of the Larco Property, but I don’t want to drift off on that story here…
With the establishment of the Pier Park, the cancelling of the NFPR, and new ideas around accommodating parking in Downtown in a post-Parkade era, the plans for Larco no longer really fit the bill, so the City asked Larco (who, in the City’s defense, had not acted for a decade on the previous plans) to go back to the drawing board and try to re-imagine the site through the lens of these new factors. It is what Larco brought back that has me (tacitly, with all the regular devil-in-the-details caveats) feeling pretty positive about the prospects for that site.

Sketch drawing, click to make bigger, or go the City site to look at the entire report.
The number and mass of the towers have been reduced. The new plans call for narrower towers with greater spacing, which should help preserve the view corridors down the important streets, and allow some sunlight to hit Columbia and Front streets. With some clever design, these towers might fit very nicely without feeling like a wall separating us from the river. The towers will vary in height (which further reduces the wall effect), but the tallest will be at least as high as the tallest at Plaza88). I’m not generally in favour of super-tall buildings on the waterfront, but if done well, not completely out of scale with the surrounding buildings, and lined up so not to block established view corridors, 3 towers will not overwhelm. Note that Larco is reducing the overall number of residences from over 1000 to around 800, which is something significant for a developer to give up, but will definitely allow the buildings to fit the site better.
The second big plus is that the development will allow expansion of the Pier Park to the west, and will feature a significant amount of public greenspace filling the gap between the FRDC and the Pier Park. This will no doubt come with access improvements to the east side of the park, but just by connecting the River Market/Quay to the Park more cohesively, the whole will exceed the sum of the parts. With longer-term plans to connect the Quay to Queensborough with a pedestrian bridge, and to connect the east end of the Park to Sapperton with a Greenway, we can now envision a future where New Westminster’s waterfront becomes a one of the greatest community amenities in the Lower Mainland- we will truly “Own the River” as the best place to spend some time on the banks of the muddy old Fraser.
The third (and perhaps most surprising) positive coming out of this plan is the disappearance of the parking structure. I don’t mean there will be no parking, I mean that Larco wants to build the “human space” at the same level as the bottom of the Pier Park, and stick the cars down under the pier. New construction techniques and tanking technology definitely allows this to be done safely, and with the entire breadth of the lot used for parking (and driveways and walkways above) there is enough room to build parking to the tower residents, and to have an extra public parking area to accommodate the FRDC, River Market and visitors to the Pier Park. The plan will not have several levels of above-ground parkade creating a garage tunnel effect we see on some other streets (I’m looking at you, Carnarvon!)
All of this had rightfully raised the same question among several people: what about the rails? Don’t we need to build overpasses? Won’t the whistles and bells and idling trains just cause more conflict? How will all these people rely on Begbie Street crossing?
These are serious concerns: both the need for level crossings vs. overpasses, and the issue of adjusting rail operations to deal with whistle cessation and reduced community impacts. Apparently, the City is working on them, and this is an area where serious work needs yet to be done. However, I will argue that complete separation may not be the best solution. (Unless the separation involves moving the rails, but I’m going to assume the Federal Government is not interested in spending any money moving goods by anything but truck, and this idea will never fly).
I don’t want multiple overpasses with elevated concrete flying over our streets. They are ugly, they are expensive to build and maintain, they act as obstacles to pedestrians, and (especially) people with disabilities. They loom over the human spaces below, create traffic barriers at times of emergency, and serve to actually separate us from the places they are meant to connect. Instead, we need to take a more rational approach to level crossings in New Westminster.
And we don’t need to re-invent the wheel here. We are not the only City in the world with industrial rail lines along a re-imagined post-industrial waterfront. We don’t even need to tax our imagination too hard to see  how it would work, we can just look around the world (thanks to Google Street View):
White Rock:

The Old Port area of Montreal: 

New Orleans:  

Or even dusty ol’ Peoria, Illinois:

 I’m just saying, if it plays in Peoria, you can’t tell me we cannot do it in New Westminster. We (and by “we”, I mean the railways and the governments that regulate them) just need to grow up.

Like or hate what you see? Go the the City’s Open house on Wednesday and give them a piece of your mind! 



BC Ferries review – Part 1

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

I know it isn’t really a New Westminster story, but there has been some local twitter buzz about the recently-announced changes in Ferry service, and I ride ferries a fair amount, so I have opinions… and that’s what you come here for, no?

First off, I do regularly ride the Southern Gulf Islands routes, as the NWimby-in-Law lives on the Jewel in the Strait that is Saturna Island. Saturna is the south-eastern most Gulf Island, and has a permanent population of about 350 people, although the population can swell to over 1,000 on a sunny summer long weekend. I note there is virtually no camping or hotels on Saturna; that summer swell is people fortunate enough to have “vacation property” or to have relatives or close friends on the island. The fixed population is just big enough to support a store and a pub, as long as the owners of both are more interested in serving the community than in making significant profits. It is a friendly, small community, and Beautiful.

It is also a community that will probably ostracize the hell out of me after reading the rest of this post.

Saturna is, based on all accounts from BC Ferries, one of those “Problem Runs”. To get there from Tsawwassen you take the SGI milk run to Mayne Island (“Route 9”), then switch to a Ferry bound to Swartz Bay that needs to do a little 20-km-return side trip to Saturna (“Route 9a”). The trip to Swartz Bay (“Route 5”) is a little more convenient, but still relies on the 20-km-out-and-back side route from Mayne or Pender (“Route 5a”). Saturna, even in the winter, sees no less than 25 sailings a week: 4 ferries depart from Saturna every weekday, three every weekend day. The boat is usually the Mayne Queen (70 cars and 400 passenger capacity), sometimes the slightly larger Queen of Cumberland (127 cars, 462 passengers).

It should be no surprise that these ferries are rarely full, or even close to full, in off-peak times (although they do get to overcapacity on those aforementioned sunny long weekends). During the recent route evaluations, the “Utilization Rate”* of the SGI runs are pretty low – 36% for the connection to Swartz Bay, and 43% for the link to Tsawwassen. A closer look at how the ferries are used show what that some rides are virtually empty – the first run to the Gulf Islands in the morning, and the last one back to the real world the evening, which average around 10% utilization. A simple solution, of course, would be to eliminate these two sparsely-used runs. Operational costs cut by 20% overnight! Right?

“For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, clear, and wrong”-H.L.Mencken

Click to zoom in. Or go to the original source.

See, the problem is the boat needs to return to Tsawwassen or Swartz Bay at the end of the day. They cannot be over-nighted at Saturna because the ferry crews don’t live on Saturna. Also, there are no re-fuelling facilities on Saturna, or all those little mechanical, restocking, overnight maintenance things that keep the ferries running.Economies of scale keep all of those things at Tsawwassen and Swartz Bay. This creates an interesting phenomenon. If you look (for example) at the Wednesday morning Route 5 sailing to the Gulf Islands, the utilization is an abhorrent 9.2% (yes, that is 6-9 cars, on average!), but the return trip on Wednesday Morning is 91.5% utilized. That second almost-full-on-average trip cannot happen unless that first virtually-empty trip happens. The same thing happens with the last run back to Swartz at the end of the day. It is virtually empty, but facilitates an almost-full last run to the Islands.

So complexities exist, and maybe that is why it appears the Southern Gulf Islands have escaped this round of cuts to service, and not because of the Premier’s property on Galiano Island.

The local twitter-chat I got involved in last week was about another aspect of this report. Whenever anyone starts talking about BC Ferries and funding, a few futurist-engineers-in-waiting start talking about just building a bridge and getting the whole damn thing taken care of. Once and for all, build a bridge, charge a $20 toll, and problem solved. There are only two problems with this idea: a $20 toll won’t nearly cover it, and the technology required for such a bridge does not exist on planet Earth.

The BC Ministry of Transportation has a good summary of previous studies into the crossing, but if I can summarize the problems, it would fill a paragraph. The distance is too long. The shortest practical bridge would be something like 25 km long. This would not be the longest bridge in the world, but it would be more than twice the length of the Confederation bridge, and it would definitively be the longest bridge over very deep water. How deep? That is problem 2: the Strait of Georgia is more than 350 m deep, which is higher than the highest bridge piers ever constructed (and they are over land, with the deck only 2/3 of the way up!). The seabed at that depth isn’t even something you can build piers on, as there is another 400m or more of loose muddy sediments, in an earthquake zone. The depth of loose sediments (combined with the length) also makes a tunnel impossible. The best that could be hoped for is some sort of floating-foundation suspension bridge – one that would allow large ships to pass, could manage 5 meter waves, a 3 knot tidal current and 100km/h winds. No such technology exists, but it was estimated (in 1980s dollars, mind you) that such a technology could be developed and built for $8 Billion to $12 Billion, over something like 15 years. Financing it would require $200-$800 tolls, one way.

Oh, and this proposed bridge would essentially replace the two BC Ferries coastal routes that are making money, leaving most of the money-losing ones still running. So the Fixed Link is definitively not our short-term solution to Ferries costs.

That said, it might be a more rational approach to take a close look at some of the smaller islands and explore the business case for connecting them by smaller bridges to reduce the need for inter-island ferry services. I could get drummed off Saturna and banned from Mayne for suggesting this, but the aforementioned 20-km return side run by ferry could be alleviated by building about 5 km of connecting roads on relatively flat (and pristine) land and two small bridges to connect Saturna to Mayne Island. This would disrupt several people’s property (not the least the private owner of Samuel Island), and I need to emphasise that this would require a solid business case, not some random blogger’s speculation, but there may be opportunities like this to be found across the system.

I will go on in a later post about some of the actual proposals put on the table this week by the Minister of Kamloops, but for now, I have to call the NWimby-in-law and warn her about the torches and pitchforks headed her way.

*As an aside, I question whether “Utilization Rate” a good measure for the effectiveness of a transportation system. I wonder what the “Utilization Rate” of the Pattullo Bridge is, or the Massey Tunnel. What % of the time are they 100% full? An hour or two a day? But I digress.

Can we start the AirCare discussion now?

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 3 Comments.

I’m amazed it has taken until now, but it appears that people other than me and free-enterprise spokes-creep Harvey Enchin are starting to notice that the current government of BC wants to kill Air Care, for no good reason.

If you haven’t been paying attention (and why would you, as there has been virtually no public discussion on this topic?), the region’s only transportation air quality program is under the knife because the Premier has decided it doesn’t work anymore. She has no actual evidence that it doesn’t work. In reality, every time there has been an external audit or analysis of the program it has returned evidence that the program is effective (and will be for at least another decade), cost efficient, provides significant economic benefits for small business, and has spin-off benefits for automotive safety and health care savings.

The only argument against AirCare seems to be that it is kind of inconvenient. Apparently, requiring less than 50% of BC’s car owners to go to a testing centre once every two years, spend 15 minutes and pay $45 to demonstrate that their >10-year-old car still has functioning emission controls is a great big hassle, and for that reason our PR-savvy Premier wants to ax the most cost-effective air quality protection measure in the Province.

So at the risk of repeating myself, here are the reasons we should all be against the shuttering of air care:

Local governments: Metro Vancouver has already passed two resolutions asking that the Province not end the program. This makes simple sense: AirCare demonstrably reduces air pollution in the region, and makes our cities cleaner, healthier, more beautiful, and more liveable, while costing local governments nothing. The same goes for the Fraser Valley Regional District, who have been only tacitly in favour of AirCare, despite the disproportionate impact that vehicle emissions have on their communities. Hopefully, our local governments themselves will also join in and request that the Provincial government re-assess this move.

Unions: Some argue this is about 110 union jobs, and that is why this story is currently in the news, but that is a small part of the story. The AirCare program is run by a private contractor, with only a few government employees. There is an administration level, but the majority of the $19 Million program cost does not go to union wages.

Small Business: Auto Repair division: According to independent economic analysis of the program, there is an annual $35 Million economic spin-off effect to the automobile repair industry from AirCare. These are not predominantly Big Union jobs, but mom-and-pop operations across the City, along with a few of the bigger players like Canadian Tire. Simply put, end AirCare, and these people lose income.

Small Business: New Car Dealer division: Because Air Care has resulted in a measurable updating of the domestic car fleet (and this has been measured against other jurisdictions with similar socio-economic settings but without such a program). In other words, people have bought more cars, and according to external audit, this has resulted in an annual $19 Million in benefit to the New Car Dealers of BC. Where are they on this topic?

The Ministry of Health: The measured effects of AirCare on the health of British Columbians – both in reducing air pollutants and in providing for a newer, safer fleet of cars – could add up to $77 Million in health care savings province wide.

Everyone who doesn’t drive, or drives a car newer than 2008: Because the program is 100% self-financing, you get all the air quality, health, and livability benefits of the program without it costing you a dime. Although administered by TransLink, the program neither draws money from the TransLink Budget or provides revenue to it. It is, despite the protestations tax-opinionater-for-hire Jordan Bateman, no tax money is used to run AirCare, this is not a Government cash cow.

Government has been creating some bafflegab about replacing AirCare with a system to get smoky big trucks off the road. We in New Westminster know as well as anyone about the impacts of diesel truck exhaust, and reducing it is a noble goal, but the introduction of such a program does not preclude the existence of AirCare. Instead, Air Care, in it’s proven efficiency, cost effectiveness, and self-funding model, may be the best template upon which to build a heavy truck program. To suggest both cannot run in parallel is to suggest we have a provincial government that cannot walk and chew gum at the same time.

I expect more from a government.

Take Back our Port this Sunday

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Long time readers (Hi Mom!) know I have been occasionally critical of Port Metro Vancouver. It is funny, because I work with people from the Port on occasion, and have healthy, respectful relationship with many Port staff. The first property upon which I ever led an environmental investigation during my consulting days was a Port property. They were great to work for because of their professionalism, straight-forward communications, and high competence of their technical staff.

So why the current hate on? Why am I taking part in, and encouraging you to participate in, a Rally on Sunday in New Westminster, with the Theme “Take Back Our Port”?



You can read about it in the Newspaper, or show up to get details, but this is about accountability.

Port Metro Vancouver is, to quote their website,

“a non-shareholder, financially self-sufficient corporation, established by the Government of Canada in January 2008, pursuant to the Canada Marine Act, and accountable to the federal Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities”.

They are crown corporation who answer only to Lisa Raitt (who, like any other Conservative MP, answers only to the Prime Minister’s Office). There is no local representation of the Port, except a Board of Important Business People. They do a significant amount of public outreach, but there is no accountability to local residents in how they fulfill their mission, which is, again to quote the Website:

To lead the growth of Canada’s Pacific Gateway in a manner that enhances the well-being of Canadians

What is “Canada’s Pacific Gateway” exactly? Something to do with the Province, apparently, if you follow that link. But make no mistake, the Port doesn’t answer to the Premier, even if she leases her office space from them.

Regardless of catch phrases, the depth of the influence this unaccountable organization has on your community should concern you. A few of the hot-button issues that we talk a lot about in New Westminster point right back at the port: :

Coal: People in New West are very aware of the current proposal to introduce bulk coal exports to Surrey Fraser Docks, right across the Fraser from the Quayside. Most of you probably don’t know about the other two coal terminals in Vancouver are seeing expansion (Westshore Terminals expanded by 40% in 2012, Neptune Terminals in 2015 by 50%). With each expansion increases the number of open coal-carrying rail cars running through our neighbourhoods, increased air pollution, and increased climate impacts as we move the dirtiest fuel ever known to man. Although this expansion improves the financial bottom line of the Port, they are the agency charged with providing an “Independent” Environmental Assessment for the projects. They also make it clear that greenhouse gas impacts of their operations are not part of the assessment. GHGs are not their problem. That is the problem of the Federal Government, they say.

Trains: Train operations are dictated by Port needs. Trains are good, they are the most efficient way to move goods across land by far. If we are going to migrate our economy to a more sustainable path, trains will be a fundamental part of that economy. However, inflexibility in their operations, often dictated by Port needs, means that mitigating community impacts is difficult, and will always come in second place to logistical needs to keep things moving, as quickly as possible.

Further, impacts on the community are exacerbated by a failure to invest on rail infrastructure. The New Westminster Rail Bridge is more than 100 years old, and represents the largest goods-movement bottleneck in the region. This bridge, much like the Port, belongs to the Federal government, but there is simply no interest in replacing it. Therefore, more goods have to be moved by truck to bypass this bottleneck. Until this bottleneck is addressed, the re-alignment of the rails that run through New West cannot take place, and so we are all in a waiting pattern, hoping the rail/road conflicts will get better. Old rail infrastructure is also, like anything else, less safe infrastructure.

Trucks: Everyone in New Westminster knows we are being buried in truck traffic. The Port knows, but it frankly does not care. With the rail bottleneck, and complete disinterest from the Port in investing in short-sea shipping, containers are coming off ships at Burrard Inlet or Delta, then going on trucks, through our neighbourhoods and past our schools, to get to places like Port Kells or Port Coquitlam, to be put on trains, it’s clear moving stuff by truck is not an unfortunate consequence in our communities, it is the business plan.

This is further evidence when one looks at more recently-developed port lands, like Port-owned lands lining the north side of Queensborough and currently being filled with truck-only warehouses. Or look at the south side of Richmond, where the Port owns more than 750 Acres of waterfront land full of truck-only warehouses? These properties have something in common: no goods move on or off ships at these prime waterfront locations. Which brings us to:

Land Use: There has been an ongoing issue about the port encroaching on agricultural land, the threatening the ALR. We don’t have farmland in New Westminster, but regional food security should still concern everyone who hopes to eat for the next few decades. However, the Port is in a unique situation, where they can buy up large pieces of ALR land, which is relatively inexpensive at between $50,000 and $200,000 per acre (See Pages 28 and 29 of this report, I don’t make numbers up ) because of ALC restrictions on its use. Then, as a Federal Agency, they can, with a wave of the hand, remove the land from the ALR, and develop it for Industrial purposes. With undeveloped industrial land in the lower mainland selling for between $1,000,000 and $2,000,000 per acre, this seems like a pretty good business plan. Port puts up truck warehouses, asks the City to provide roads to service the trucks, and their financial self-sufficiency is all but assured. Good work if you can get it.

There is a strange meme being created by the current Port CEO– that an “Industrial Land Reserve” is needed to protect Port-related development. This is idiotic when viewed in the light of the equation above. Any land can be made industrial- you just need to pay the rates for that land that the market for industrial land requires. Further, once land become industrial, it can be re-purposed for other uses (see False Creek). The ALR land exists, because that is the one use that cannot be compatible with other uses- once a farm is lost to industrial development ,that land will never again be productive for traditional farming.

The current Port activity in Queensborough is a perfect model of this. High-value industrial lands were bought by the Port on the north side of Queensborough, east of the QB Bridge. Warehouses are being built to move things on and off of trucks. There is no plan whatsoever to use the waterfront location to move things on and off of boats; pier infrastructure is not even being built. The Port now owns the waterfront, and have paved it for the storage of trucks and trailers (with complete disregard to Riparian Areas protection standards or laws, which do not apply to them, because they are a Federal Agency, and with the closure of FREMP, the protection of the Fraser River riparian areas and waterfront habitat is now overseen by – you guessed it – the Port). The City’s and neighbourhood’s dreams of waterfront trails on Queensborough cannot be fulfilled because the Port will not allow a right-of-way through this same waterfront. Meanwhile, the trucks servicing these warehouses are backing up on Duncan Street and Derwent Way, creating havoc at the Howes Street intersection, and the Port is not responsible for any of the cost of improving this infrastructure. Meanwhile, the City has no say in any of this. Which brings us to…

Transportation. “Canada’s Pacific Gateway”, as mentioned above, is code for building roads and bridges. Under the guise of “goods movement”, the Port has been the main champion for spending taxpayer’s money on freeways and bridges that are out of scale for the region’s declining car use, unsustainable in their financing, and in complete contradiction to every regional transportation and land use plan created in Metro Vancouver over the last two decades. While everyone sat around for 20 years wondering where the money for Evergreen was going to come from, and while the Province floats a referendum to avoid having to make a decision about supplying enough funding the TransLink to keep the buses running, the Province has rushed ahead with $5 Billion on road expansion – from the Golden Ears Bridge (which is further crippling TransLink with debt) with the Pitt River Bridge (which is accelerating the removal of land from the ALR because of the traffic problems it has created), with the SFPR (which is a Port subsidy that destroys farm land and neighbourhoods), with the Widest Bridge in the World(tm) (which is also failing to meet its traffic targets and is looking like a long-term taxpayer pain), and now with the Tunnel Replacement to Nowhere. The Port has its fingers in every one of these decisions. They switch from consulting with the community to lobbying the Province in a flash, and then they are the agency that helps provide the Environmental Assessments for the projects. And greenhouse gasses? Someone else’s problem.

All of these issues are central to the livability of our City – of New Westminster, yet at every point, the Port’s only responsibility is to keep the money moving.

So come out to the family-friendly rally Sunday, and see how numerous people and groups feel about being kept out of the decision on how our community will develop, and how the livability of our region will be protected.