Thursday, the City held a public open house to garner feedback on the new Multi-Use Civic Facility, planned for the 700 block of Columbia Ave.

It was remarkably well attended, and there were lots of staff about to answer questions, but I liked that they were there to ask questions as well. I was approached more than a half dozen times with staff members asking what I think, or if I had input: you get the sense they really wanted to hear from us (note to TransLink: hire New Westminster Planning to facilitate your next open house, I’m sure their rates are reasonable). It was also a great idea to hold the open house at the Westminster Club, on the 7th floor overlooking the site where the MUCF will be built.

The project is somewhere beyond the visioning stage, but the design is clearly not quite done. The model was balsa wood, and was good for getting a sense of the mass and layout of the building, but not an idea of the real appearance. There were several design-type drawings, but no complete picture of what the building will look like (more on this below). However, I walked out of there impressed with the concept, and excited about what it means to downtown New Westminster.

There is much to like. With the completion of the commercial part of the Plaza 88 development, there are going to be big changes in this neighbourhood. Movie theatres and restaurants right on the Skytrain station are a potential game-changer. This will be the most accessible movie theatre for the Lougheed Mall, and SFU crowds, and will even be easier to get to than Guildford for a lot of people in the new Surrey Centre. The food, drink, and entertainment options on the street immediately adjacent that development are going to have a huge impact on the success of the Columbia Street renewal, drawing in pedestrians and shoppers. This building will be the keystone.

The restaurant space on the corner of 8th and Columbia is a smart move. No names of potential tenants are being mentioned (for obvious reasons), but a popular mid-scale local chain (think Earls, Cactus Club, etc.) would be an obvious fit. It is clear they want the restaurant to have street appeal: open window space and a large patio to bring the restaurant out onto the street. My only complaint is the plans have the deck on the 8th street side, where we really need it on Columbia if we want to connect to the rest of the businesses in the area, from Waves to the Heritage and all the way up to Brooklyn. Restaurants are about the only business (other than wedding shops apparently) that benefits from having more competition in he neighbourhood. The deck/patio will also lead to more engagement of Hyack Square, and we will have to wait to see what happens with the third corner at Columbia and 8th. I can’t help but feel the Sally Ann is going to increasingly be out of place on this new “entertainment core”.

Click to zoom in

The planned theatre space in the MUCF also looks great, a mid-sized and very convertible space. Small concert and performance space is lacking in the City, as our existing theatres downtown seem to be limited to single-use only (tickle and giggle, respectively). At 1/3 of the seating capacity, this will not threaten the (New! Improved! Eventually!) Massey Theatre, but the potential for smaller arts productions, for local music, and for screening space for indy films and docs is pretty exciting.

Bringing the City Archives, the City Museum, the Police Museum and the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame together under one roof will also bee a boon. With the Fraser River Discovery Centre just across the tracks, we will have a one-stop-shopping “museum core”, with a gift shop and food options attached. Finally, when friends and relatives are visiting for a day, we can give them a spot to go to entertain themselves for several hours, without having to send them to Vancouver.

The transportation planning around the facility has not been finalized, but I can already see a few concerns. The re-vamping of 8th Street between Carnarvon and Columbia will have to be approached with caution. Presumably, there will be no bus stops on 8th once the loop at Plaza 88 is completed, but the previous crossing issue at 8th at the SkyTrain exit will remain. People will still want to cross mid-block from the station to the new MUCF. It is too bad an elevated walkway from the Skytrain to the east side of 8th is not included in the plans.

Worse, when one leaves the Skytrain Station and the Plaza 88 commercial/entertainment centre, you will be greeted with a view of the garage ramp on 8th. Why stick a garage entrance right in the middle of your façade? We want this area to be as pedestrian-friendly as possible, and a garage entrance crossing the sidewalk does not do this. This area needs a re-think, and I suspect the answer will be to stick the cars (and garage entrance) around back on Begbie.

The plans show the use of Begbie as the Greenway connector between Columbia and Carnarvon, which is a sub-optimal solution. The slope on 8th between Carnarvon and Columbia is less then 8%, which is a much more bike-friendly grade than the slope on Begbie (higher than 10%). The Central Valley Greenway should connect to Hyack Square and the New Westminster Skytrain directly, along Columbia to 8th. For these reasons, 8th should remain the connection between Columbia and Carnarvon for bikes, with cars accessing the underground parking along the much-less-trafficked Begbie side.

The idea of closing Alexander Street and using it only for loading is great, but let’s be sensitive to what it means to the people in the low-costs housing around there, who will now be shadowed by a new tower, will be facing a loading dock for their front yard, and will have reduced access to Columbia Street. Some creative urban design might be needed here to head off a potential crime problem.

Again, this is early design phase, so these potential issues can be addressed simply, but they have to start thinking about them soon before too much detailed design is completed.

Which brings me back to design. The preliminary drawings are definitely “place making”. They have that big “I’m Here” look to them. However, much of the chatter around the room was about “where is the heritage?” Simply put, this building needs to fit the surroundings. I love the Chicago-school Westminster Building and Trapp Block. I am not a big fan of the “modern-glass-tower humping a heritage façade” technique used at the InterUrban, but recognized that the requirements of the modern Condo market (balconies, floor-to-ceiling windows, etc) made this the best we could hope for. I will be interested to see how the Art-Deco Façade at Plaza 88 is preserved, and how it fits those hideous-looking pseudo-Soviet towers. Mostly, I love Art Deco (cognizant that it can go really bad really quickly), and would love to see that part of New Westminster’s heritage be accentuated, but that is very much a personal matter of taste.

Since there is going to be an office tower on top of this building, there is a lot more flexibility in design than there would be for a condo complex. As this is going to be the keystone building for the continued revitalisation of Columbia Street, it is imperative that the visual impact of this building represent New Westminster, both its iconic heritage, and where we want the City to be. It should be an interesting challenge for a talented Architect. The pictures I have seen so far, and the comments I heard around the room, suggest they are not there yet.

Oh, and I seriously hope “MUCF” is a working title, and we will find a better name for the building, but that is a minor detail, which we can debate in 2014.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments on the NWEP’s forum on the future of Sustainable Transportation, held at Douglas College on November 9th, 2010. – the much-belated Part 4. There has been so much going on in Transportation locally, and the UBE issue pushed itself to the front page so effectively, that I almost forgot to finish up the series on the NWEP forum held in November. That would be a shame, because the final speaker was New Westminster City Councillor Jonathan Cote, and we were lucky to have a sitting council member share some ideas about how he sees the future of transportation in New Westminster, and throughout the region.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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