Month: April 2019

Price Talk

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I was fortunate to be able to attend the taping of a Price Talks podcast. It was a real transportation policy geek fest (and, alas, a real sausage fest). Jarrett Walker is a transit planning consultant, an author, and an academic with an incredibly cosmopolitan view of urban transportation systems. He has worked on 4 continents, and can see the universal truths expressed in the great variety of built forms in cities around the world. The conversation was wide reaching, from Coriolanus to Elon Musk, from the inescapable geometric truths of urban transportation to aesthetic as a guiding principle in urban planning. There were dozens of quotable nuggets in the talk, some I will be chewing on for a long time as I think about how to apply them to my neighbourhood and community

My favourite nugget, however, was the 4-minute summary of ride hailing and its impact on communities. You can skip to 1:09 to hear this as part of the Q&A at the end of the evening, but to fully appreciate his answer, you need to hear his earlier discourses on the phenomenon of Elite Projection, and how it is the scourge of most North American transit planning.

Walker is much more profound on this topic than I can ever be, but the short definition of Elite Projection is the tendency for the most wealthiest and most influential minority in a population to think what is good or attractive to them is best for everyone. It exists throughout hierarchical decision-making, and once you open your eyes to it, it is everywhere. In urban transportation, it is manifest in Musk’s The Boring Company and in “cute streetcar stuck in traffic” approaches to urban transit world-wide. There may be a few local examples: here, here, or even here.

The heart of his argument about ride hailing is best summed up in this quote (based on his observed experience in American cities where it has rolled out):

“…it has been a great way to draw out the worst aspects of elite projection, because people who can afford it have become addicted to it, [and] expect as a matter of course that it will be available… [but] like anything to do with cars, it only works as long as not many people use it.”

Part of the problem is that providing mass transportation in an urban area is not a profitable business. It never has been, and never will be. Uber and Lyft are losing billions of dollars a year, their underpants-gnome business plans being propped up by venture capital silliness, while they can’t even pay living wages or provide basic workplace protections to the people doing the labour (we aren’t allowed to call them “employees”). At the same time, they cut into public transit revenues while increasing traffic congestion making those transit systems less reliable, pushing customers over to the ride-hailing industry, exacerbating the impacts. He doesn’t even touch on how ride hailing demonstrably correlates with less safe roads for people in cars, pedestrians and cyclists, but he doesn’t need to.

The warning for Vancouver is that the introduction of ride hailing could be “really terrible” for our traffic systems and our livability, for obvious reasons. The promise of ride hailing is that it reduces parking demand by increasing traffic congestion – this is not conjecture, but the demonstrated experience around North America. That is no win at all.

For you Uber fans out there, Walker does provide a clear policy recommendation about how we can make ride hailing work in our jurisdiction without externalizing these real impacts, but I guarantee Francesco Aquilini and Andrew Wilkinson ain’t going to like it…

Give it a listen, it is a great conversation:

A Night with Jarrett Walker: Building Human Transit with Shakespeare, String & Elephants in Wine Glasses

Miner improvements?

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

I went on a bit of a rant last week in Council on pedestrian crossings, and it is worth following up a bit here to expand sometimes on the things I rant about. In this case the subject was something we can all agree on – making pedestrian spaces safer in the City – but the details of the discussion outline how difficult it can sometimes be, even when everyone is on the same page. The hill on Richmond Street provides a great case in point about how we want to do things differently, but are stuck with a bad legacy to clean up. And that costs.

The Fraserview neighbourhood is somewhat unique in New Westminster. Most of our community is based on a well established and dense street grid that reflects how humans move around their communities – a layout that is “human scaled”. The Fraserview neighbourhood was developed out of the abandoned BC Pen site in the 1980s, which was the Canadian peak of auto-oriented suburb design. This is not the fault of the council or staff of the time, or of the people who live there now, but a result of where we were and how we valued space as a society in the 1980s.

The buildings on this map are coloured by the decade they were built. See Sapperton and Queens Park with a blend of ages and traditional dense street grids, Fraser View with 1980s houses (red) and 1990s condos (blue) with the suburban road scheme so sexy at the time.

At the time, New Westminster built this strange little auto-oriented suburb in the gap between two dense urban community centres. Since the primary built form was “house with a garage facing the street and a private yard in the back” (note this is a generally unusual built form in New West!), the streets were designed with the same exact mindset – they will be used to move cars between garages, and not much else.

This resulted in some road design ideas that were the opposite of current thinking. Instead of straight lines and a dense grid to connect pedestrians, we build a meandering “arterial” road connecting capillaries of culs-de-sac. Of course these are ostensibly “family neighbourhoods”, so we kept the speed down to 50km/h by putting up a sign, and left plenty of road space for road-side parking and car passage. The curvy hill part of Richmond has wide 20m right-of-way between property lines, but the road profile part (travel lanes and sidewalk) are a pretty typical 14.5m. This feels wider partly because the sidewalks are less than the 1.8-2m wide we would shoot for in 2019, there is no buffer space between the sidewalk and the road, and the parking spots along the road are unmarked and not very heavily used. Add this up, and you have no visual “friction” giving drivers cues to slow down. Wide roads tell people to drive fast, it is human nature.

This is how the road was built in the late 1980s:

I like to think if we were building the road today, it would more like this:

But that is just a representative cross section. There is another issue that makes the pedestrian experience even more uncomfortable. If you look at the intersection of Richmond and Miner, where staff were asked to evaluate placing a crosswalk, you see the corners are rounded off to facilitate higher turning speeds:

The technical term for this shape is “Corner Radius”. In this diagram you can see the curb follows a curve with a radius (blue) of about 8m, and the effective turning radius (tracing the track a vehicle would actually use for a right turn) is closer to 15m. By modern standards, this is a crazy wide corner, more suited for a race track than an urban area. Reading up on modern urban streets standards, curb radii smaller than 1m are not uncommon, and radii bigger than 5m (15 feet) fall under the category of “should be avoided”.

The impact of such a wide radius is bigger than just facilitating faster turns, it also creates a variety of sightline problems. See how far back the stop line is on this corner? How far around the corner can a driver practically see? This results in the confusing stop, creep forward, peek, make aggressive move intersection action that opens up opportunity for driver error. This is made worse when there is no clear demarcation of where the parking zone ends near the intersection. Our Street and Parking Bylaw says you can’t park within 6m of the nearest edge of an intersecting sidewalk or crosswalk, but it is less clear where that 6m buffer is when the sidewalk geometry is like this. moving the stop line further forward creates a conflict with pedestrians trying to cross the street at a rational place – where the curbs are closer.

For pedestrians, these big radius corners increase the crossing distances, expanding the time that someone (especially a young child or senior citizen, who travel slower) is exposed to traffic. Crossing Richmond Street at this intersection, the distance between curb cuts is almost 20m, where the sidewalks are only 11m apart a few meters outside of the intersection:

So what do we do? There are lots of useful guides like these great NATCO manuals that show how an intersection like this can be made safer for pedestrians. We can narrow the road at the intersection, paint new crosswalks, and reduce the turning radius through curb bulges:

But my bad painting skills here represent couple of hundred thousand dollars in concrete, road paint, asphalt, curbs, soil, planting and storm drain realignment (never mind a complete re-design of Richmond Street to pull it into the 2000s as I showed in the cross sections above; that would cost millions). And this is one intersection in a City with more than 1,000 intersections, some better designed than others, some more used than others, some with worse safety records than others. I want to change this specific intersection tomorrow, but who is going to come to Council and ask us to raise property taxes by 0.3% to do it? And why do it here and not at the intersection that bugs you in front of your house?

All this to say that some changes are going to be made to Richmond to improve pedestrian safety, and three other intersections (8th Street at 3rd Avenue, 12th Street at Queens, 6th Avenue at 11th Street) that have been prioritized for this year’s Pedestrian Crossing Improvement program, totaling about $200,000 in work. The work is, necessarily, incremental, and because of that it is never enough, and never fast enough.

Be safe out there folks.

Council – April 8, 2019

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

We started our regular meeting on April 8th with our annual review of the Parcel Tax Roll. There are a number of properties in the City that voluntarily pay and extra parcel tax to cover all or part of the cost of some special service the property owner enjoys. This may be taking part in a BIA, or special road or drainage improvements related to a neighbourhood improvement project. This requires a procedure every year where the roll is “reviewed” and signed off by Council, after giving people a chance to challenge their place on the roll.

The regular agenda was a long one, and started with an Opportunity to be Heard:

Development Variance Permit DVP00653 for 310 Salter Street
One of the final pieces of Port Royal is an 87-unit mid-rise residential development comprising three buildings around a central courtyard, consistent in scale and character with the multi-family buildings on both sides of the site. There is a combination of apartments and stacked townhouses. Variances are required to permit the height (to bring the tallest building into the same heigh range as adjacent buildings) and setbacks (to provide better street interface along the waterfront trail). The Residents Association provided a letter of support, and the Design Panel approved of the design, and the public consultation feedback was generally positive. We received no correspondence, and no-one came to speak to the variance. Council voted to approve the variance and grant the development permit.

We then had a Presentation from Staff:

65 East Sixth Avenue (New Westminster Aquatic and Community Centre): Project Update and Design Review Preliminary Report
This is the next stage in design for the facility formerly known and the Canada Games Pool and Centennial Community Centre replacement. It has been a bit of a task managing the many, many site constraints, not the least being the desire to keep the existing CGP and CCC operating during construction and replacement. And just like everyone else, we need to go through a design review in light of our existing zoning laws. As we are about half way through the design process, it is a good time to do a check-in with Council and the Public.

There will be two public open houses on April 21 and 27, and an on-line survey, so you can give the City some feedback on the design as it sits.

The following items were Moved on Consent

Financial Plan 2019 – 2023
When all is said and done, we need to approve a financial plan for the next year (well, for the next 5 years, but we change it every year). I have already written about this, and enjoyed extended Facebook comment threads on the topic. This needs to be formalized as a Bylaw, which Council voted to give three readings.

2019 Tax Rates Bylaw
The second half of that financial plan bylaw is passing a tax rate bylaw to support the revenue to make it happen. Of course, I will write another blog post about our tax rate increase and where it puts us in comparison with other munis in the Lower Mainland when I get a chance. Not enough hours on my current clock.

This is a good time to remind residential taxpayers to apply for their homeowner Grant ($570 – $845 in free money!) or defer taxes if that option is available to you (the interest rate on deferment is competitive with investment returns you can make on that money – you can literally make money deferring taxes).

The Queensborough Electric Utility Infrastructure Loan Authorization Bylaw No. 8041, 2018 – Results from the Alternative Approval Process
We received 31 responses from people in New Westminster who don’t want us to borrow money to build a new substation in Queensborough. That is not enough to force the Bylaw to a referendum, and the electrical Utility will move ahead with the loan and procurement of the substation.

Recruitment 2019: Library Board Appointment
We had a vacancy on the Library Board. It is now full. By the way, did you notice the library is open again?

Naming of Two Streets in Queensborough: Street Naming Bylaw No. 8045, 2019 for Three Readings
Back on March 11, we talked about names for two new streets being built in Queensborough. Those names (Kamachi Street and Ota Avenue) need to be formally approved through a Bylaw. Council voted to give that Bylaw three readings.

488 Furness Street: Temporary Use Permit for Sales Centre – Issuance of Notice
A new townhouse development being built in Queensborough would like to use a couple of the early townhouses as sales centres for the rest of the development. Of course, they are zones for residential use, not commercial, so we need to give them a Temporary Use Permit to allow this use. Well, we don’t need to, so we will have an opportunity to be heard on April 29 to hear if the neighbourhood has a significant concern about this.

2019 Spring Freshet and Snow Pack Level
Snow Pack across the province is at or slightly below average, meaning freshet flood risk is low this year. Of course, this may change if we have a real pineapple express that drops a bunch of warm rain on the melting snowpack and accelerates the melting, but barring unusual weather systems, we likely will not need to activate a flood response plan this year.

Proposed Sanitary Forcemain Crossing Agreement on Boyne Street with Southern Rail Link – Animal Services Facility
The animal shelter being built in Queensborough needs a water line and sewer and such, which requires an agreement with the railway to cross their right of way because railways are special in Canada and we are beholden to them in ways completely irrational for multi-national corporations operating in our country. Or not.

2018 Filming Activity Update
There was a bunch of filming in New West over the last year, which resulted in more than $800,000 in revenues for the City, slightly less than the last two years, but more than twice what we were pulling in only 5 years ago. Of course, this is not all “profit” for the City, as it includes the cost of providing permitting, police and engineering support and such. However as much of this filming happens on City lands, we *do* charge for its use, and made more than $500K in net revenue on that.

218 Queen’s Avenue: Heritage Revitalization Agreement – Bylaw for Two Readings
This project to protect two heritage homes moved on to a large lot that already has a heritage home on it will go to Public Hearing on April 29th. I’ll hold my comments until then.

1005 Ewen Avenue: Rezoning and Development Permit – Bylaw for Two Readings
This project to put townhouses and a commercial building on that empty lot at the gateway to Queensborough will also be going to Public Hearing on April 29th. I’ll hold my comments until then.

The following items were Removed from Consent for discussion:

Intelligent New West Operations Plan 2019
The Intelligent New West file is moving along with three main emphases: supporting a local high-tech business environment, using innovation to improve internal processes in the city to improve service, and adopting more intelligent technology in our infrastructure plans.

There is a part in here that I don’t think was emphasized enough in the report around digital inclusion – how are we assuring that access to the “digital revolution” or “the internet of things” or whatever cliché you want use, is available to all of our residents. There is some more coming on this in the next few months, and it is pretty cool.

Formation of New Residents Association
The residents of Victoria Hill and the adjacent multi-family residences on Ginger Drive have banded together to form their own Residents’ Association. Previously part of the much larger and diverse McBride-Sapperton RA, they felt they had a large enough population and a unique enough set of concerns and circumstances that they decided to strike out on their own. The MSRA supported this move.

This was really an information report, as the City has no policy about how it will acknowledge new RAs starting in the City. However, there are costs and considerations to RAs, in that we provide staff support, provide them seats on several City Committees, and provide them special rights in our development review process, like an expectation that they be proactively engaged by the development community. For these reasons, I am a little concerned about our lack of policy here, and asked staff to come back to council with some policy direction.

Cannabis Retail Sales Locations: Consideration of First and Second Readings for Five Cannabis Retail Locations
The five locations that made it through the first round of application screening for new cannabis retail locations still require rezoning. We will have Public Hearings as soon as April 29 to review these rezonings. C’mon out and tell us what you think. *note the process to get these applications through the provincial hurdles looks to be delaying our Public Hearing timing*

A few asides: we probably should have seen the conflict between private and public stores, and not tried to put them through the same application process. This kind of blind spot is to be expected as we go through an unprecedented regulatory shift. We will be reviewing that issue and coming back with some changes. I expect this will happen before we have the next round of applications that we initially scheduled for 6 months from now.

The provincial requirement that these businesses have opaque windows is, frankly, ridiculous. The idea that “youth are protected” from being aware of a product because of opaque windows is insulting to the intelligence of those youth, and for a bunch of safety and urban planning reasons, opaque windows are not preferred in our commercial areas. We will continue to ask the province to change this rule.

Safety and Regulation of Clothing and Donation Bins
There was a concern raised a couple of months ago around the safety of clothing donation bins, and we asked staff to look at what other communities are doing and whether we should address them as a public safety measure. Short version is we can remove them from City property, but our zoning bylaw does not currently ban the on private property.

We are going to ask that all 8 operators of clothing bins and ask them to assure they are made safe, but this is not far enough for me. I want the power to *require* that they be made safe or removed, and Council will be following up on this.

Victoria Hill Parking Study
There is not enough street parking in Victoria Hill for the residents there. There are at least 50 residences in Victoria Hill who own more personal vehicles than they own a parking spot for. Of course, limited free street parking is the preferred response to this situation for some, but there is limited space in Victoria Hill to make this happen. Others realize that adding street parking will not improve the situation unless we actually price or otherwise limit that street parking.

A 2011 study found that even at peak times there are about 500 empty off-street parking spaces in Victoria Hill. In a less comprehensive 2018 study, there are still more than 300 empty underground parking spots at peak times. There is definitely a parking allocation problem, but the idea of cutting down 35 trees and spending a couple of hundred thousand dollars to put in 60 new street parking spots when there is a residential oversupply is contrary to the community plan, to our Master Transportation Plan, and will ultimately not solve the problem.

Here is more work to do here, and fortunately we have a new RA to engage with!

2019 Pedestrian Crossing Improvement Program
I’m becoming one of those Councillors who rants about his area of specific interest during council meetings. I recognize this and am seeking therapy. Anyway, there are going to be some fixes to pedestrian crossings in the City, and actions to try to make the hill on Richmond street safer for pedestrians. You can watch my rant on video, or maybe I’ll write a follow-up blog post, but there is little need for me to re-hash it here.

631 and 632 Second Street: Heritage Revitalization Agreements for Compact Lot Subdivision
This is a preliminary application review for a couple of infill density projects on the same corner in Glenbrook North. There is quite a bit to unpack here, and both of these projects, if they proceed, will go to a Public Hearing, so I don’t want to dig too deep into them now, but Council moved to let both of them proceed through the process and get there.

We then had two late additions to the Agenda:

Participation in a Regional Recycling Facility
Metro Vancouver is building a new waste transfer centre and recycling depot just across the border in to Coquitlam at United Boulevard. The City of New Westminster has an option to join the Tri-Cities in co-operation with the running of the facility, which will provide better recycling services than our existing yard, but at a much lower cost. This is an information report, as there are some details to be worked out yet.

Multicultural Festival Extra Funding Request
The Multicultural Festival at Pier Park has run for a few years on Canada Day, but were not happy with the grant they received through the Festival grant process. Council moved (in a split vote, I was among the opposed) to provide them another $5,000 to help with their 2019 festival.

And, finally, we went through our Bylaws, including the following Bylaw Adoptions:

Electric Utility Infrastructure Loan Authorization Bylaw No. 8041, 2018
Electric Utility Infrastructure Temporary Borrowing Bylaw No. 8051, 2018
These Bylaws that authorize the borrowing of up to $30 Million for the construction of a new substation in Queensborough was adopted by council.

Active Transportation

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I know I haven’t blogged about this week’s Council meeting yet, I haven’t had time to edit and get the post up. It’s coming, I swear. In the meantime, I want to get this out, because it has been in my outbox for a little while and it has suddenly become time sensitive.

The Provincial Government is asking the public about active transportation. I have been known to criticize the Ministry of Transportation in the past about their approach to “cycling infrastructure”, but I am going to hope that this is the start of a new approach. You have until Monday to answer their questions!

If you are too busy to write your own thing, you can go to HUB and fill in their form letter, but as an elected person, I like to receive input that brings something new – a 1000-person petition is not as powerful as 100 personal letters that each bring different nuance. So I encourage you to take a few minutes and fill in the answers yourself. If you want some inspiration, here are my answers I will submit this weekend:

Question 1: What does active transportation mean to you and how does it fit into your life?
Active transportation means healthier, safer, happier communities where youth are safe to ride a bike to school and the elderly are comfortable walking to the grocery store. It is about replacing fossil fuel dependence with transportation independence. When we build the infrastructure to support active transportation, we give more people the freedom of choice in how they move around their community, reduce their reliance on volatile international oil markets, keep more of their money in the local economy, build resiliency in our communities and connections between neighbors.

Question 2: What are some of the challenges in your every day life that prevent you from moving towards using active transportation modes? What are some of your concerns about active transportation?
As an active transportation user, and a local government decision maker, the biggest challenge I face is addressing the “gaps” in our systems that make active transportation less safe and less comfortable. I am lucky to live in a compact, dense community where most services are a short walk or bike ride away, but so many of my neighbours still feel it is unsafe to make the journey unless surrounded by two tonnes of steel, which in turn reduces the perceived safety for other community members.

Too much of our active transportation infrastructure is developed as baubles attached to the side of new automobile infrastructure. Sidewalks, crosswalks, overpasses, cycling lanes, and transit supports are evaluated in how they support or hinder adequate “Levels of Service” for automobiles, while the high LOS goals (fast, uninterrupted vehicle travel) acts to make active transportation space less safe and less comfortable. An overpass over a busy road is seen as a pedestrian amenity, when it actually serves to provide more space for automobiles to have unrestricted travel. The trade-off is usually a longer more difficult journey for a pedestrian and introduction of a new barrier for people with mobility challenges. We need to see active transportation alternatives as a solution to community livability, not as a hindrance to the flow of traffic.

Even the language of “transportation” vs. “active transportation” reinforces the idea that using your feet and your own body to move around is somehow lesser than – a secondary consideration to – using an automobile. I have to explain to people that I use transit to get to work, I use a bike to run errands, I walk to City Hall, like that is some sort of radical action instead of a rational and normal way for a person to live in on a modern urban city. Let’s switch that default, for the good of our communities, the good of our budgets, and the good of our planet.

Question 3: What is the most important action that government could take to promote active transportation? What is unique in your community or region that needs to be considered?
Of course, funding. Local governments are straining to provide services as our infrastructure ages. We receive 8% of the tax revenue in Canada, yet own more than 50% of the infrastructure. This inequity is sharpest when it comes to transportation infrastructure. Billions flow for highways and bridges that direct automobiles into our communities (with, admittedly, the requisite active transportation baubles attached), but the local improvements to help us move around within our communities are tied to expectations about “Level of Service” for those automobiles. The cycle is vicious.

My community has one of the highest active transportation mode shares in the province. New Westminster is a transit city, it is an easy city to walk in and the revolution in electric assist bicycles means that residents no longer need to be athletes to manage our hills. We have some of the lowest car ownership rates in Canada. This is not an accident, the City has a dense urban fabric that puts most services near where people live, we are concentrating our growth around these transit hubs and working to make our pedestrian spaces safer and fully accessible. Yet we are choked by through-traffic that makes all of our active transportation spaces less safe and comfortable. This load means we need to spend millions of dollars every year in maintaining our asphalt to provide the level of service through-traffic expects, while struggling to find the thousands of dollars to build better cycling, pedestrian, and transit-supporting infrastructure.

We need help making our transportation system work better for our community, but as long as that transportation funding is tied to our ability to get cars moving, to provide high automobile “levels of service”, we are putting out fires with gasoline.