Month: November 2010

On Blobs and politics.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The news seems bad, a toxic blob is waiting under our new waterfront park, ready to strike down our children and any fish silly enough to brave the New Westminster waterfront. Proof again that our Mayor bought a bag if cursed seeds in a pre-election rush to appease the milling hoards…

Ugh.

Contaminated Sites happen to be an area where I have some technical knowledge. Note, my information here is limited to the reports that the City have made available, and the sporadic news reports, and I am not legally entitled to provide technical advice on this, but what the hell. Everyone else has a misinformed opinion. Here is mine.

The news report that this is a “high risk” site does not mean people or fish are currently or imminently threatened by it. This is simply a procedure that all Contaminated Sites undergoing Independent Remediation go through. The evaluation involves a whole bunch of criteria. If any one of them apply, the site is determined to be “high risk”. Here is the criteria table from the Ministry of Environment:

(click to zoom it)

The list is comprehensive, but based on the media reports, it seems the trigger here is chlorinated solvents, 8m below the surface. So the only risk criterion that applies is “mobile DNAPL”. With the Ministry saying it is not getting in to the River, it seems the only pathway to the actual environment is not open. So the risk is here may be “high”, but in a future-case sense.

Nothing says anyone or anything is going to die right now from this. The classification means that there is a significant amount of contamination, and that there is potential for this contamination to cause harm.

So if you own and are cleaning up a contaminated site, what does it mean to have your site designated “high risk”? It means that the Ministry has to be informed. That’s it.

Does it mean it will cost more to clean the site? Not necessarily.
Does it mean that we have to accelerate the clean-up process, or it will take longer to clean up? Not really.
Does it mean the site has to be physically remediated and cannot undergo risk assessment and management? Nope.
Does it mean the City Park is doomed? Not yet.
Does it even mean the site is making people sick or hurting fish? Not likely.

It is also silly of Voice to suggest somehow that High Risk determination is proof that the City did not do “due diligence” in 2008. The Site Risk Classification criteria did not exist until June 2010. The City did the environmental studies it felt it required, the City knew the site was contaminated, knew the scope of the contamination as well as they could with reasonable investigation efforts, and was working on the advice of a qualified Environmental Consultant. I don’t know what else they could have done.

Now onto the topic of the “Toxic Blob” itself. Notwithstanding all the above, the problem is not a minor one. DNAPL (Dense, Non-Aqueous Phase Liquids) are petroleum products that are denser than water. That means that instead of going down to the water table and spreading out on top of it (like so much olive oil on the balsamic vinegar of your dippy plate at Anducci’s), this stuff sinks through the water table until it hits some layer of soil it cannot penetrate. Sometimes that layer is really far down.

This sometimes makes it difficult to manage, and challenging to clean up, as you can’t just dig down to the water table and scoop it out, like you might with fuel oil. A more technical approach is required, but, and I can not emphasize this enough, typical for waterfront brownfields in BC. These kinds of challenges were faced by Vancouver in False Creek and the Olympic Lands, Victoria at Dockside Green, North Vancouver at the Pier… I don’t think the consultants or the City were surprised to run into them here.

From the press reports, this is “chlorinated solvents”. That likely includes tetrachloroethylene (“Perc”), trichloroethylene (“TCE”), or carbon tetrachloride (“Halon 104”). To most people in Contaminated Sites work, that suggests one thing: drycleaners. There are some significant wide-area sites in BC where drycleaners (before there were strict laws about this sort of thing) dumped solvents wherever they could, and caused large contamination plumes. However, these solvents were also used widely industrially and commercially, so it will be neigh impossible to point out a single cause for this plume. And it is unlikely chasing down the source will do anyone any good anyway, as they are unlikely to be forced to pay for the clean-up. The “train derailment” theory fails Occam’s razor, as more mundane excuses (historic washing of equipment with Perc, a drycleaner located uphill in the commercial part of town, etc.) are much more likely.

Long and short: stop worrying about Blobs.

Jerry Dobrovolny on The Olympic Transportation Plan

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Comments on the NWEP’s forum on the future of Sustainable Transportation, held at Douglas College on November 9th, 2010. – Part 2

In the second part of his presentation, Jerry talked on how this one-time event can be used as a model for what transportation will be like in Vancouver in 2050, if the transportation plans of the City are realized. Much of this talk is actually available on the City Vancouver Website, so I won’t go into details here.

Short version: mode shift was responsible for getting most people to most events. Unlike recent Olympics in North America (e.g. Salt Lake City and Atlanta), Vancouver did not send a message for its Citizens to avoid downtown at all costs. Quite the opposite, they set up free events and pavilions around Downtown to encourage people to attend. They just told people to not bother trying to drive in Vancouver.

The City planned for a slight increase in overall traffic for the two weeks, and to avoid traffic gridlock, they hoped for 75% “alternative modes” (transit, bike, walking, rolling office chairs, crowd-surfing, and being dragged down the street on downhill skis being pulled by your drunken buddies I saw all of these on Granville. It was a good party). In the end, they got almost 80%. Notably, their initial estimates of total trips was way too low as there was a 44% increase in trips, but due to the high diversion rate, traffic chaos did not ensue.

Transit chaos only occasionally ensued. But TransLink did a great job managing it, and Jerry was quick to point out how pivotal their role was in running a successful games. I remember spending a half an hour in line at Main Street Station to catch a train home after a Hockey Game. But the line was well managed, organized, and moved pretty swiftly given the circumstances. Only at Jerry’s talk did I realize the people who were out on the street in yellow jackets organizing these lines were TransLink staffers: the managers, planners, secretaries, lawyers, engineers, and custodians who usually occupy TransLink offices were out on the streets during the Olympics, helping make things run smoothly.

Then there was the Olympic Line Streetcar, which proved it worth, moving more than half a million riders during the Olympics and Paralympics. Oh, to have streetcars on our streets again…

There is an inherent problem in all science: either you control all your variables and have an unrealistic model, or you collect real data from the messy real world, and then try to figure out what the variables are after the fact. This is definitely an example of the second half of this problem. It could be argued that the Olympics are a really terrible model for everyday life in the City. Many of the “trips” during the Olympics were taken by tourists, who were unlikely to use a car (as the City’s rental pool was way over depleted). Most of the trips were not people going to work, school, and everyday chores, but were people going downtown to enjoy the festivities: it is safe to assume they would tolerate more inconvenience on the way to the Closing Ceremonies than they would on a daily basis commuting to work. Sobriety is also a confounding factor in every day life that was no significant on February 28, 2010.

So the transportation plan worked, it proved that good planning and an integrated infrastructure not based on single-occupant vehicles can efficiently move larger numbers of people through Vancouver without increasing road capacity. But realistically, this is not the future of Vancouver transportation:

Jerry Dobrovolny on The Olympic Transportation Plan

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

Comments on the NWEP’s forum on the future of Sustainable Transportation, held at Douglas College on November 9th, 2010. – Part 2

In the second part of his presentation, Jerry talked on how this one-time event can be used as a model for what transportation will be like in Vancouver in 2050, if the transportation plans of the City are realized. Much of this talk is actually available on the City Vancouver Website, so I won’t go into details here.

Short version: mode shift was responsible for getting most people to most events. Unlike recent Olympics in North America (e.g. Salt Lake City and Atlanta), Vancouver did not send a message for its Citizens to avoid downtown at all costs. Quite the opposite, they set up free events and pavilions around Downtown to encourage people to attend. They just told people to not bother trying to drive in Vancouver.

The City planned for a slight increase in overall traffic for the two weeks, and to avoid traffic gridlock, they hoped for 75% “alternative modes” (transit, bike, walking, rolling office chairs, crowd-surfing, and being dragged down the street on downhill skis being pulled by your drunken buddies I saw all of these on Granville. It was a good party). In the end, they got almost 80%. Notably, their initial estimates of total trips was way too low as there was a 44% increase in trips, but due to the high diversion rate, traffic chaos did not ensue.

Transit chaos only occasionally ensued. But TransLink did a great job managing it, and Jerry was quick to point out how pivotal their role was in running a successful games. I remember spending a half an hour in line at Main Street Station to catch a train home after a Hockey Game. But the line was well managed, organized, and moved pretty swiftly given the circumstances. Only at Jerry’s talk did I realize the people who were out on the street in yellow jackets organizing these lines were TransLink staffers: the managers, planners, secretaries, lawyers, engineers, and custodians who usually occupy TransLink offices were out on the streets during the Olympics, helping make things run smoothly.

Then there was the Olympic Line Streetcar, which proved it worth, moving more than half a million riders during the Olympics and Paralympics. Oh, to have streetcars on our streets again…

There is an inherent problem in all science: either you control all your variables and have an unrealistic model, or you collect real data from the messy real world, and then try to figure out what the variables are after the fact. This is definitely an example of the second half of this problem. It could be argued that the Olympics are a really terrible model for everyday life in the City. Many of the “trips” during the Olympics were taken by tourists, who were unlikely to use a car (as the City’s rental pool was way over depleted). Most of the trips were not people going to work, school, and everyday chores, but were people going downtown to enjoy the festivities: it is safe to assume they would tolerate more inconvenience on the way to the Closing Ceremonies than they would on a daily basis commuting to work. Sobriety is also a confounding factor in every day life that was no significant on February 28, 2010.

So the transportation plan worked, it proved that good planning and an integrated infrastructure not based on single-occupant vehicles can efficiently move larger numbers of people through Vancouver without increasing road capacity. But realistically, this is not the future of Vancouver transportation:

argumentum al Gorium

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

There is a meme from the old days of the Usenet that will be familiar to people who frequent blogs and boards. It is known as Godwin’s Law. Follow the link for details, but it essentially says that as any online discussion thread increases in size, the probability of someone making a comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches 1. Since initially invented, the meme has expanded somewhat to include the proviso that the point where Hitler is first mentioned, all further discussion becomes irrelevant and the person who raised Hitler is immediately considered to have lost the debate. argumentum ad Hitlerum.

May I humbly suggest it is time to suggest a new Corollary?

Anyone in the least bit interested in the science and politics behind Anthropogenic Global Warming will recognize this. Any online discussion about AGW inevitably results in someone raising the spectre of Al Gore, usually as a purportedly stunning rebuke against an actual rational point. At that point, any further discussion becomes irrelevant.

…argumentum al Gorium.

NWEP AGM: Separated Bike Lanes

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The NWEP had a forum on urban transportation on November 9th, with several speakers touching on various topics realted to the evitable shift to more sustainable transportation. This is the first in a series summarizing some of the topics.

The first speaker was Jerry Dobrovolny, the Director of Transportation for the City of Vancouver. He also happens to be a New Westminster Resident, and was once a City Councillor here in Richmond. He spoke on two topics wrapped in one title:

“How the Olympics and Separated Bike Lanes are helping Vancouver become the Greenest City in the world by 2020”.

First, on the bike lanes.

Jerry brought a lot of perspective to the issue of the Separated Bike Lanes that is lost in the recent media hype about the issue. Surprisingly, these bike lanes are not an evil conspiracy of a single bike-friendly Mayor, or even of a rabidly socialist Vision Vancouver Council . They were established as part of the 1997 Transportation plan that was passed under (NPA) Mayor Phillip Owen, supported by (CoPE) Mayor Larry Campbell, (NPA) Mayor Sam Sullivan, and the current (Vision) Mayor and Council. They are one link, (the previously “missing link”) in a City-wide cycling infrastructure program that has been happening for more than a decade.

They are also not new, but reflect what is quickly becoming the “standard” for road construction in urban areas, in Montreal, in New York, in Portland… Not to mix metaphors, but we aren’t reinventing the wheel here.

And it works. The money being spent on these cycling improvements in Vancouver is about $4 Million, out of annual transportation budget of about $125 Million, so about 3% of the budget. But in the downtown core where these improvements are happening, around 12% of all trips are by bicycle. Cyclists are no using roads they don’t pay for (roads are overwhelmingly financed by property taxes), they are actually subsidising other road improvemetns by a factor of four.

Since the 1997 transportation plan, the City’s population has increased more than 25%, jobs more than 20%, and the number of cars entering the city on a daily basis has gone DOWN by 18% (and these numbers are from before the Canada Line opened).

Yes, a few parking spots were lost on Hornby; 158 spots in total. However, as part of the program, 162 spots were added to Howe and Seymour Streets (one and three blocks away, respectively), which pales in comparison to the 10,000 off-street parking spots available within 1 block of the Hornby Street bike lane. If you survey people on Hornby, you would find 90% of them walked more than 2 blocks to get to their desination. In other words, the parking issue is another non-issue.

I wish Big, Fat, David Pratt and professional blowhard Bruce Allen were challenged with some facts for a change. Alas, that isn’t their job, is it?

I couldn’t vote for Kodos

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I try not to get too involved in American Politics. It isn’t my country, I can’t vote there, why worry about something you have no control over? However, when I think I have given it up, when I start to think I really don’t care: they drag me back in. It is a gong show, it is a child’s playground, it is a drunken brawl of stupidity, but I can’t stop paying attention.

One reason, of course is that we currently have a Federal Government who can’t seem to do anything without marching orders from below. This has always irritated the “left”, but now even the “right” is starting to get worried about the rudderless ship (or about who‘s hands are on the rudder).

Climate change is too big an issue for this guy to be deciding Canada’s energy policy:

Ironic that, once again, the Onion proves to be America’s Greatest News Source, as it actually get this story more right than most of the real media.

Adventures in Composting #1

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

Green Cone installed

I woke up this morning with an extra hour in the pocket, and found the sun shining. A day for raking leaves, cleaning up the garden, and installing a Green Cone.

As is increasingly common for those fortunate enough to have a yard, I have a compost system. Mine may be a little more complex than others, as you may see here:

In the centre is the two-box compost I built a couple of years ago with some wood and chicken wire. One side is always receiving new materials (non-stinky kitchen scraps, coffee grinds, vegetable cuttings, leaves, grass clippings, a bit of paper, etc), while the other sits fallow, letting the worms do their thing. The idea is that the worms and other soil-making invertebrates will migrate to wherever there is food, moisture, oxygen and warmth. I have an aerator stick I use to stir the fallow side occasionally (to keep things aerobic), and when the worms start to run out of food, they migrate over to the fresh food side.

Every couple of weeks, I take several pounds out of the bottom of the fallow side and stick it in the rolling composter to the right. I add water if it looks like it might need it, worms from the active side if the population looks small, and some fresh (by “fresh”, I mean really rotten and nasty) veggie food to get the worms going. As this bin gets stirred every couple of days, and it is a closed cell, the composting kicks up a notch. What comes out of it after a couple of weeks is nicely textured, and ready to go to the garden. As a bonus, the extra liquid collects in the reservoir underneath, and can be cut for use to fertilize indoor plants. Yum.

Often the production of compost exceeds my garden needs, so I have a little soil pile on the side, wrapped in plastic to keep the rain from leaching all the good nutrients out.

Then there is the space-ship-looking thing over to right. The Green Cone.

I found a fairly sunny part of the back yard, not “full sun”, but warm enough that the rosemary seems happy there, and close enough to the back door to be convenient, but hopefully about 2 fruit-fly-flights from the house, just in case. The first step of installation is digging a 2 ft deep hole with a radius of about 2 ft.

Back-of-the-envelope says 6 cubic feet of dirt weighs about 600lbs. This step took more time than I expected, and gave me a lot of time to contemplate a greater respect for gravediggers, and how mobsters in movies who tell people to dig their own graves must have a lot of spare time on their hands… but I digress.

Once the hole is dug, the rest of the installation took only a few spins of a phillips screwdriver. Once in the ground, the cone is much smaller than it looks prior to installation, much less like a spaceship, and doesn’t look too bad in the garden.

Ready for it’s first load of food.

Happy Carl Sagan Day.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

Science is not very good at promoting their saints. Although we have holidays and annual marketing exercises dedicated to someone who allegedly got nailed up for saying let’s all be nice to each other , ran snakes out of Ireland, or lost his head after a life dedicated to watersports , where is the single national holiday dedicated to science or scientists?

Newton Day? Einstein day, Medeleev-fest?

If we were to pick one contributor to science who deserves his own day, it would be Carl Sagan. Some people are (not surprisingly) ahead of me on this. Carl is a hero of mine, because he excelled at “real science” (so many of his early informed speculations about conditions on Mars, Venus, and the moons of the gas giants were proven to be true), at “applied science” (with his contributions to the unmanned exploration of space with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory), and most importantly, at the popularisation of science and scientific thinking. He also wrote great fiction.

He was also a vocal advocate for rational thought. Not a nebbish lab geek or aloof scientific theorist, he was always concerned about the human condition. He warned about the (at the time) poorly understood risks of nuclear war. He was outspoken about the impacts humans were having on the Earth, he was, amongst other things, a vocal, informed, and active environmentalist.

And he lived his life full of wonder. Never satisfied to say “just because” he always asked why, knowing there must be a reason. And always suggested others do the same. He wasthe personification of Douglas Adams’ quote: “I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.”

My favourite quote of Carl’s:
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”
–which is just his way of saying all science is Physics.

Put to music here:

Good news on the Garbage Front

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

Like any good Canucks Fan, I am adept at climbing onto, and getting off of, bandwagons . Many sports fans are like that with the home team, excited when they go on a win streak (remember last May and all the moth-eaten Habs Jerseys that came out of the closet for a few hours?) and dejected when the news is less good.

So it is with me and New Westminster City Hall. They build up my faith, only to occasionally knock it down. However, this week you can consider me “on the bandwagon”. I attended the Brow of the Hill Residents Association meeting last night, and the Supervisor of Solid Waste and Recycling for the City was talking about the Clean Green collectors and automated trash collection roll out.

He brought good news: The City is collecting a lot of organics, more than 8 Tonnes a week. The clean green bins are being used heavily, and there is a measurable decrease in the volume of trash going to “garbage” right out of the gate. There were some predictable roll-out issues, but they seem to have a good plan for addressing them, and are dealing with complaints on a house-by-house basis.

Best news I heard: they are considering making smaller Clean Green bins available (essentially, buying some green lids for the 120L bins). This is good, as it was one of the nagging complaints NWEP had during the announcement of the program. For those of us composting and otherwise reducing our trash footprint, it will be nice to not have the 240L Green behemoth in the back yard.

And speaking of my backyard, I also managed to secure a demo Green Cone organic waste digester. I am hoping to get it up and running in my back yard this weekend. Stay tuned, I am really interested to see how well this thing works for the stuff that can’t go into my compost.

They are also ready to swap my (so far, completely unused) 240L garbage bin for a slimmer, trimmer 120L model. I will be taking the trash out for the first time in a month next week.

This is the year.

More on transportation

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

My letter in Today’s New Westminster News Leader (with some links added, for internetty reasons):

It was interesting to read the recent discussions in the NewsLeader about Tenth Avenue and the Stormont Connector, the routing of the planned Pattullo Bridge replacement, and the impacts of these regional transportation projects on our neighbourhoods.

I couldn’t help but note that the compelling arguments Mr. Crosty made for “encapsulating” McBride Boulevard (reduced traffic and safer communities, reduced pollution, reclaiming valuable land while bringing our divided community together) could equally be made for completely removing McBride Boulevard.

Instead of spending billions burying a problem soon to be made worse by expensive expanded bridges and new connectors, perhaps we should take a fresh look at what the alternatives are to building more roads.

Are we still labouring under the illusion that building roads is a solution to traffic?

This topic and others will be the basis for an open forum on transportation planning that the New Westminster Environmental Partners will be holding as part of its annual general meeting.

We will be bringing together transportation experts and sustainable transportation advocates to discuss the future of the regional transportation system and how this will impact New Westminster.

If you have questions, concerns, or ideas about the Pattullo Bridge, the Stormont Connector, the ongoing TransLink “funding gap,” or other aspects of the local and regional transportation puzzle, please come by the Douglas College Student Union Lounge on Tuesday, Nov. 9, at 7 p.m., and join the discussion.

For more information, see the NWEP website for details: www.nwep.ca.

For those in need of inspiration that sustainable transportations work in the real world, I suggest showing up to see Jerry Dobrovolny talk about the transportation plan for the Olympics, and how it really, actually, in reality, no shit, worked.

Another really inspiring story is that of Cheonggyecheon, and some more examples of Braess in action.

See you next week.