Tag: Life

An April bike ride report.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I like to ride bikes.

I do a lot of different bike riding types. Sometimes I commute to work on a bike. Sometimes I use a bike to get around town. Sometimes I hop on a mountain bike and go up Burnaby Mountain and ride the trails I have known intimately for more than 25 years. I used to race bikes, with a remarkable level of non-very-goodness. Sometimes I get on a road bike with friends and pound a few score kilometres off between coffee breaks.

That last one is where the Fraser River Fuggitivi comes in. FRF is an informal group of something like a dozen people, some sub-set of which meet up regularly on Sunday Mornings (in months without an “r”) at the River Market in New West and ride to a distant coffee shop. Very social, sometimes fast, always fun.

This year, the FRF took a group approach to a spring ride that has been a Vancouver tradition for 29 years: the Pacific Populaire, run by the BC Randonneurs Cycling Club. And that, I suppose, takes some definitions.

A Randonneur is a person who likes to ride a bicycle very long distances. It is neither touring (where you travel through the countryside or across the country carrying tents and sleeping bags, and enjoying the sights), nor is it racing (where people compete to get from A to B as fast as possible). Instead, they do rides called “brevets” which are measured distances (typically 200, 400, or 600 km) that must be completed in some minimum time. For example, a 600 km brevet must be completed within 40 hours. Each rider can decide how much time they spend riding or sleeping in those three days. The mother of all Brevets is the Paris-Brest-Paris, a 1200-kilometre voyage into the depths of your own soul that must be completed in 90 Hours.Madness.

A Populaire is an ever-more-rational and somewhat more social event. The Pacific Pop is an annual spring event held the first weekend in April. Although it is structured like a brevet, it is “only” 100 km. The idea is not to make record time, but to shake out the winter cobwebs and have some fun. The roads are (mostly) not closed, but some of the usually-strict Randonneur rules (mandatory fenders and tail lights, etc.) are relaxed.

Several members of the FRF took to the streets of Vancouver for the Pacific Pop this year, and with the weather marginal to good as the day went on, the day was exceptional in its pleasantness, for April in the Rain Belt. Below is a bit of a photo essay:

With a marginal forecast and an early start, it was rain coats and espresso to
enhance the pre-ride jitters.
In rainy weather, a rear fender is more a courtesy to your fellow riders than an attempt to keep dry. With a showery forecast, many of the FRF went for the Fender Mullet: Business in the back, party in the front.

The 2014 Pacific Populaire had 700+ riders, which makes for a crowded start area.
Luckily, the first kilometre or two are closed to cars, to give the riders a chance to spread out and make space. Unlike a race or a Fondo, the traffic lights were operational for the entire ride, and the entire group generally followed the rules of the road (two-abreast riding notwithstanding).
See the FRF rider gritting his teeth like Hinault on the Col de Marie-Blanque? Then note the couple behind him on city bikes with baskets, she in skinny jeans. They finished about the same time as us…
I seem to remember saying to Matt about this time: I know you feel good now, but with 80 more km to go, let’s think about saving energy.
Always as good reminder.
The control station was on Dyke Road in south Richmond, about 45km in. Here riders get a time stamp for their cards and fill up on baked goods, oranges, and Gatorade.
Then back on the rural roads of east Richmond for some serious paceline action to make up for the lost time. 
River Road in north Richmond is the regular FRF stomping grounds. The rains refused to come, but the headwind here was feeling rather unkind.
Back over the best piece of bicycle infrastructure in Greater Vancouver. I hope they had the traffic counters on for the bridge today.
As prophesied, the long road up Marine to UBC into the breeze got me. There is nothing a rider hates to see more than this: an expanding distance between your front wheel and the pack…
…and the gap begins to grow. Time to dig deep and close that gap, only because 5 minutes of big effort will make the rest of the ride so much easier…
It took more than 5 minutes, but the gap is closed, and I hook back up with the FRF folks.
Just in time for us to the finish… no “finish line” in this non-race, just a line-up for the check-in and…
A completed time card and souvenir pin, the only prizes at a Populaire…
…and the real reward of 100km in April.

MoreMilesMoreBeer. That’s the FR Fuggitivi motto.

On Competition for Groceries

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

With a spate of new (but remarkably familiar) signs going up around town, and everyone wondering about how increased consolidation could possibly result in increased competition, I have also been thinking about the changes in the New West retail world, and what they may mean.

Admittedly, I may be the wrong person to opine on this. I pretty much hate shopping, and by Brand Loyalty gland seems to have swole up and broke. Allow me to explain.

I spent much of my young life working in retail. My parents were small business owners, and I worked around the shop from a young age. Even when not working around the shop, it was the place I hung out at after school in those pre-teen years. Eventually I was cleaning shop, merchandising goods, helping with inventory and sales, waxing skis and fixing bikes. Although I did a variety of other jobs when I was young (pulp mill, bike courier, logistics, dishwashing and kitchen prep, etc.), pretty much all of my beer money through my undergrad came from working in bike shops – I loved working in bike shops. It may be because of these retail experiences that I am kind of cynical about retail sales, and generally dislike most retail experience decades later. I suspect it is some combination of subconsciously seeking the approval of the retail salesperson (wanting to not be one of those “bad customers” we criticized in the back room) and my internal critique of everything that a retail salesperson is doing to persuade money from me. I’m sure a therapist could work these knots out of my psyche, but as the end result is my buying less and living a more affordable lifestyle, I’m not sure it is top of the list of personality problems I need solved.

For likely unrelated reasons, I am not “brand loyal” at all. I essentially don’t care what name is on the outside of a store, but I do care about what is inside the store. I like to shop locally, and help out a small business person if I can. I don’t want to buy my underwear and spark plugs in the same store. I want the person selling me something to know more about it that I do. I will pay more for a higher-quality more durable product, if that option is available to me, but only up to a poorly-defined point of marginal gains. When shopping for apples, I look for the BC label. For larger purchases, I do my research, know what I want, and am rarely swayed from my opinion. I hate when shopping is a hassle, and more often than not, I find shopping to be a chore worth avoiding than a pleasurable way to spend my time. Again: the rich psychological tapestry.

With that context out of the way, how does this manifest on grocery stores? I have an internal algorithm that balances proximity (because I would rather walk), large but not too large (enough selection to find what I want, but not to be overwhelmed by variety or scale), a good produce section (because I like to buy ingredients as opposed to prepared foods, and this is where a quality difference makes a big difference) and easy to manage (reducing the hassles). When living near Lougheed Mall during my SFU days, that added up to the Lougheed Safeway. When living in downtown Langley a decade ago, that added up to the old-school Overwaitea/Save-on-Foods a block away. When living in Champaign, Illinois, that added up to a Meijer, which was a humungous big box store on the edge of town, but had an excellent compact grocery within and the only decent produce section in town. At my current Brow of the Hill address, that adds up to the Save-on-Foods in the Westminster Centre.

In my experience, the brand of the grocery store doesn’t matter that much – the difference in the shopping experience is a product of the staff and managers. Some stores are, simply, better run than others. They are all selling the same stuff in different packages and most analysis I have read suggest that if some have higher prices on some types of goods, they almost invariably have lower prices on other types. If a store has lots of expensive high-end packaged goods, they can generally afford to sell the staples at lower margins, and vice versa (which in part exacerbates the paradox that staple foods can cost more the lower-income neighbourhoods).

I love(d) the Thrifty Foods in Sapperton every time I was in there. In a very short time, it became my favorite grocery store in town, but I rarely shopped there – the proximity part of the algorithm just didn’t work out. When I was near-by, I shopped, but for the most part, the more local shop won. The Safeway in uptown is strangely too big and too hard to navigate, and I cannot get over the impression that things I buy there cost more than at Save-on (I have no data to support this, only personal anecdote). For quick-shop things, I often run to Uptown Market, which is a great little grocery, and in the summer months, try to buy produce from local producers along Marine Drive in Burnaby and, of course, at the Royal City Farmers Market. I am convinced by my own theory that the things that make the stores I prefer better are the staff and managers.

So when I heard that Thrifty Foods in Sapperton is being converted to a Save-on-Foods, I was glad to hear the staff were staying put. In fact, the order from the Competition Bureau insists that they not change staff when they sell the store off. The management and staff of that store have been exemplary to deal with. Not only has the shopping experience there been great, they have taken a really proactive role in community outreach. They contribute to community festivals in fun ways and have contributing to amateur sport in town. The General Manager, Doug Ford (no relation) has gotten involved in local organizations and is a great guy to chat with. He seems to understand community and his store’s role in it. I have no reason to believe that will change when the CEO changes from Marc Poulin to Jimmy Pattison. Only time will tell.

As for the Competition Bureau decision, we need to keep in mind that this was part of a country-wide purchase of 213 stores. When you read the Position Statement, you can see how they arrived at the decision they did. The math was based on distance to closest stores, competitors and non-competitors, and community mobility. In a dense urban area like ours, they looked at the make-up of the closest grocery stores.

Before the change, here is what the Competition Bureau saw (colours represent ownerships, distances are kilometres “as the crow flies”, and the black bars are to scale of relative distance):

After the owner of Thrifty buys Safeway, this is what it looks like:

All of the sudden, New West is looking pretty red. The Competition Bureau moves in, and here is the result:

seen form 10,000 feet up, it would be easy to argue that this is a more level and competitive field. One has to recognize this does not reflect exactly how the neighbourhoods work, nor does it include the smaller grocers (specifically exempt from the analysis the Competition Bureau performed, based on their Position Statement) like Donald’s. The analysis also did not anticipate the selling of the old IGA location to Save-On/PriceMart, or the introduction of a WalMart to uptown, but even the Competition Bureau can’t predict the future.

Me? I’ll still go up to Save-on-Foods in Uptown, because my personal algorithm hasn’t changed. If it closes (as I suspect it will, even Uptown can’t manage kitty-corner Save-on-Foods), the math will shift with it, and maybe the other Uptown Save-on will be the winner.

Resistance may be futile.

Remembering Jack

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

The news came down a couple of days late, as tends to happen when Gulf Islands are involved. Last weekend when we had heard that our neighbor had died, it had already been a couple of days.

It didn’t come as a surprise, but that makes it no less sad. Jack’s health had been in decline for a number of years. Emphysema had sapped him of much of his energy, and the oxygen tank was always present the last few years. When we saw him last fall, he was using a scooter to get around and had pretty low energy. But it seemed for a few years that every winter was tough and he would perk up during the summer. 83 is a good number of years, but I guess we all hope for one more good summer…

All images are photos of Jack Campbell originals and prints from our home.

I met Jack Campbell a little more than a decade ago. He was a resident of Saturna Island, where my in-laws also reside. It is a small community, and it doesn’t take too many weekends to get to know most everyone. Jack stood out at first because of the bright sign at the top of the Missing Link directing people to his gallery. It was a vibrant watercolour of a forested stream, grey rocks and blue water and green trees cross-cut with sharp blades of light. “Pieces of Light” was a phrase he used to describe the style he employed commonly while painting natural areas of Saturna Island and the built environment of New Westminster. It was just a coincidence that the three places Jack spent most of his life, New Westminster, the West Kootenay, and Saturna Island, are three places I called home at different stages of my life, and another coincidence when we bought a lot on Saturna, Jack was our neighbour.

The boldness of his watercolours appealed to me immediately, starting with the Gallery sign. I always preferred his New Westminster scenes, mostly pained back when he had a gallery on Columbia Ave during the Bingo-Parlour-and-After-Hours-Club era of Downtown New West, and the River was more of a working place of log booms and beehive burners and fishing vessels.There is one great original piece in his galley (“that one is not for sale” he would say in his gentle, gentlemanly way) that was a drawing of the Queensborough Bridge being built, with the mills of Queensborough smoking behind, and his green Volkswagen in the foreground. It belongs in a museum.

MsNWimby preferred his later work, where he found organic forms in the shorelines and arbutus trees of the Gulf Islands. We always tried to support his small gallery, although most of the time our finances didn’t really allow us to support him the way we wished to!

Jack was raised in New Westminster, and had strong connections in this community. He painted posters for the old Fraser Fest events, and there are various places around town where his paintings still pop up (including one of my favourite works of his in a dentist office up at Royal City Centre). He was a generous man with his talent, often painting posters and postcards for free to be used for events like Fraser Fest or to be auctioned for good causes, and teaching a generation of artists though 14 years of teaching at Emily Carr and 8 more at the Kootenay School of the Arts in Nelson. When he “retired” to Saturna 15+ years ago, he created a new legacy on the island. His work is well represented in a wall mural in the old community centre, and even as the artwork on the back of your library card at the Saturna Island Library.

Although is work is in collections around the world, it never made him rich; People tell stories of him sometimes paying rent in the form of paintings. However, he created a lot of beauty in this world, and made a lot of our lives richer for having done so. I’ll miss running into him out walking around our pond with Carole and Warbie (their rambunctious little pup named after Warburton Pike), and his welcoming hello whenever we dropped by his gallery.

I feel very lucky to have met him, and to have shared a planet with him, if just for a little while.

What I’m working on

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Wow, I haven’t posted anything in a few days, so I thought I should just update folks on what I’m doing these days, just so my dedicated reader (Hi Mom!) doesn’t worry.

You know, I have been busy. But I am consciously trying not to say “busy” when people ask me how I’ve been or what I am up to, because it seems a bit of a dodge that doesn’t really say anything. And everyone I know is really busy. Busy is our generation, it is our age, it is maybe our life stage. I’ll rest later, there are things to get done. Whatever, we’re all busy. I’ll just shut up about it now.

With what am I currently busy? Among other things, I have been working on research for this:

Link Here

I hope you can make it, it should be interesting.

Rethinking the Region 2014

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 3 Comments.

I really need to get a life. I spent most of Saturday in a classroom at SFU Surrey. I was not taking a course for which I would receive credit, nor was I paying or being paid to be there. Instead, I was attending a workshop for planning geeks (which I may someday aspire to be) that was addressing some of the Big Questions about the future of Metro Vancouver.

It was actually interesting, inspiring, and fun. See my opening sentence.

The event was called “Rethinking the Region”, and despite it’s revolutionary-sounding title, it was actually a more nuanced discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of our current local and regional governance systems. The crowd was mostly SFU Urban Systems graduate students (a room full of young, fresh faced, excited, interested, smart and fashionable students only a slightly depressing reminder of how long ago I was a University Student!), with a fair amount of faculty, and a number of representatives from various local governments and other agencies.

There were many different aspects of the program that piqued my interest, I met some interesting people, and lots of fun discussion ensued. However, for this post I just want to run through my impressions of the opening addresses by the panel of experts that opened the program. I didn’t take extensive notes, so my apologies to the presenters if I mischaracterize their points here a bit – these are my impressions, not transcripts, so I will be careful with actual quotation marks.

The Program was opened by a former senior planner for New Westminster Ken Cameron, who set the tone by encouraging us to not think of Metro Vancouver as 22 border-sharing municipalities, but as a single entity- he used the term “organic” to describe this entity, and it was apt. It has defined boundaries (the sea, the mountains, the US Border), we can talk about it’s inputs (resources, goods, energy) and it’s outputs (resources, goods, wastes), and we can think about different components (roads, houses, businesses, schools) as interacting organs that process those through-puts.

His talk was broad-reaching but brought some interesting insights. One was that we are fortunate to live in a region with well defined and immutable limits, as this forces us to view our resources (including physical space) as finite, and therefore worthy of careful planning to allow us to manage them better.

A second point made by Cameron was that “governance always happens”. Whenever people get together, from the smallest hunter-gatherer tribe to the largest nations, humans assemble a governance system to allow us to work together. It doesn’t always work well, but it has always worked better if the governance has a coherent plan and everyone being governed is on the same page about the goals.

This last point sounds idealistic on the surface when it seems we are always arguing about every decision our governments make. It becomes more obvious when you think about the things our modern governance systems deliver: an economic system to trade goods, a system of laws to protect the security of the person, infrastructure to support our movements and our communication, etc. It is the details around the edges of these things that we argue about, as the essential structures and ideas have pretty much been worked out, or we wouldn’t be currently enjoying all of those things.

The second speaker was Anita Huberman from the Surrey Board of Trade. She was there to speak for the need of the region’s business communities to work together with a regional vision. She spoke of the need to get out of our municipal- and industry-specific silos, and start proactively sharing resources and infrastructure, while cutting politics out of the equation (that said, it was a Board of Trade speech, so totally non-political phrases like “cutting red tape” were common).The central message was a good one: we don’t have a single regional economic planning group working together, nor do we have a regional economic strategy. However, those much-coveted “global markets” are not interested developing relationships with individual cities as much as with economic regions.

There was room to develop this thought that we didn’t get into at the meeting. Did someone in Mapo-gu, Minami, or Abu Hamour really care if the person she was doing business in was in New Westminster or Surrey or Port Moody? They would, dollars for donuts, just call the area “Vancouver”, just as we would call the above areas just parts of Seoul, Yokohama, and Doha respectively. In this sense, Surrey probably benefits more from Vancouver’s international economic development efforts than vice versa…

Anthony Perl spoke next on the topic of the regional transportation system, obviously a topic close to my heart.

He started with an anecdote about Greater Toronto of the 1980’s, when it was described as “Vienna surrounded by Phoenix” – a region that had squared the circle of providing a compact, walkable and public-transit oriented downtown core based on smart growth principles surrounded by endless car-oriented suburban sprawl. This best-of-both-worlds scenario only hit its pre-Rob Ford crash when it became apparent that having two parallel and disparate transportation systems cost twice the money to move the same number of people. Arguably, it was this unaffordable path that led to the faux-taxpayer-revolt that is Ford Nation.

The object lesson is that Metro Vancouver appears to be, 30 years later, heading down this same economically perilous path. However, Perl outlined three potential ways we could design our regional transportation system, using symbolism from the 2010 Olympics (a time when, as he noted, Vancouver had the third highest transit mode share in North America, only after the two largest Cities: New York and Mexico City).

The “Gold Standard” is epitomized in Greater Zurich. They have a similar population and physical constraints as Metro Vancouver, and have a system where the automobile is secondary to a multi-mode and integrated transportation system. They share our limited top-down planning, and little senior government investment, and make many decisions via referenda (!). The two big differences are that they never ripped up the rail infrastructure they installed in the early 20th century, and they do not have a natural resource extraction economy that requires large-scale movement of bulk goods. “Going for Gold” in Greater Vancouver will require and organized regional coalition of stakeholders, not unlike the Gateway Council but with a broader mandate than the building of roads to move freight.

The “Silver Standard” would look like Lyon, France. This would require the following of strong global trends towards shifting to post-carbon mobility. Unlike Vancouver or Zurich, Lyon benefits from significant Federal investment in moving away from fossil fuels, and has a top-down approach that has brought high-speed rail between cities and Metro within them. They also have a carbon-tax like structure that provided incentives away from burning fuel, even if it isn’t called a carbon tax. This approach in Greater Vancouver would require significant investment by senior governments, not something that seems likely in today’s political climate.

The “Bronze Standard” is what we have seen work in New York City and London, England. In both cases, it was the actions of a single strong leader having the courage to make a bold change, though not breaking completely from traditional motor vehicles. Both Mayor Bloomberg and Mayor Livingston took concrete steps to end what Dr. Perl (tongue on slightly in cheek) calls “Road Socialism” – the idea that road use should be free, regardless of the cost to maintain those roads or greater costs to society. This Bronze approach, however, relies on a strong and visionary regional leader, something Greater Vancouver seems bereft of.

Dr. Tim Takaro then took the floor, ostensibly to talk about health policy in the region. Right from the start it was clear what he saw as our major public health issue: the “wicked problem” of climate change. He showed us a few familiar hockey-stick shaped graphs, and did a quick and extremely gloomy run-down of the storms, pestilence, drought and war that are in our future unless we leave 2/3 of our hydrocarbon reserves in the ground.

I loved this summary, and will talk more on this topic in an upcoming blog post:

The final panelist was the one who surprised me the most. Vicky Huntington is a two-term Independent MLA from South Delta, and she spoke frankly and compellingly about the struggles of regional governance, in the context of current threats to Democracy in out nation today. It was stunning.

She began by talking a bit about the struggle to get where we are today as a nation, and the importance of protecting our “strange, difficult, and messy democracy”. Not to put too fine a point on it, she made a case that this is the fight we must have right now in BC and in Canada, or we risk losing our voice, and our representation. There is a real and present risk of a “Plutocracy” developing through the slow and inexorable growth of influence on decision makers made by what can only be described as “wealth”. This is tipping the balance towards a certain economic point of view, and it may not be the one that serves our community or the globe best.

Our Democracy needs accountability, responsiveness, and clarity of purpose. Unfortunately, we are increasingly ruled by the needs of Corporations, who have no requirement to be accountable to the people. Although there is much current talk of “social licence” by Corporations who want to re-draw our region, that very licence is increasingly defined by them, not us.

They create these new consultation structures where they tell us what they are going to do, instead of having a conversation with us about what we will allow them to do. The conversation is narrowly defined and expertly directed by public relations professionals. We can see this with the recent Environmental Assessments (VAFFC, Northern Gateway, Kinder Morgan, Fraser Surrey Docks, etc.), with Port Metro Vancouver expansion plans, with the expansion of the Gateway and projects like the Pattullo Bridge. Quasi-government agencies (the Port, TransLink, BC Ferries, etc.) that ostensibly belong to us and work for us are leveraged by Corporate interests, and when the people try to speak up and challenge their intention, they have the power to shut that debate down. Through tightly-structured “consultations”, people cannot hear each others’ questions, cannot speak outside of the pre-designed debate. If they get too loud, they are marginalized and bullied.

Huntington spoke about the contrast between government and corporations, and how they impact environmental assessments, putting context into the “red tape” complaints of business. We live in a Confederation that is slow and methodical. Developing consensus and true consultation to assure the public interest is served is a deliberately cautious and organic process. That is the reality of a parliamentary system, and is an unfortunate (?) byproduct of our desire for “Peace, order, and good governance”. Corporations, in contrast, need to react quickly – this year, or preferably this quarter. They cannot afford to wait. They need their social licence, and they need it right now, because the anonymous shareholders demand it. Democracy just gets in the way. However, what Corporations see as the “inefficiency” of democracy is the only protection we have.

These were just the opening panel talks. They were followed by Q&A, and a long program of small-group dialogue and workshopping around the bigger themes, and maybe I will talk about those in future blog posts. Overall, it was a great program, and I learned a lot. Makes me want to go back to University…although I suspect I now lack the fresh face or vitality.

Todd Stone and the Mayors (Part 2)

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

I am so glad I waited a few days after I wrote the first half of this story before posting the second half. It gave me an opportunity to hear Brent Toderian speak about the fundamental lack of provincial leadership that is represented by the face we are still discussing this issue. Of course, he says that nicer than I do, but the message is clear: “There needs to be a consequence for this lack of political leadership”

It is clear the failure here is on the province, trying force a referendum where one should never be, not the Mayors’ Council or TransLink for seeking clarity about how this alleged referendum will work, and the consequences of its failure.

It is important to note that TransLink, the Mayors’ Council, and indeed Municipal governments, exist at the pleasure of the provincial government. Saying “no” is not an option the Mayors have. The Minister is within his rights to introduce these legislative changes, and the Mayors need to do what they are told, or they will be in violation of that legislation. That’s the reality of being the third level of government.

However, this is not a legislative debate at this point; it is an argument about governance. The Minister has not done his job, which is to administer the Transportation System of the Province for the good of all British Columbians, including the 60% that live in the TransLink catchment. He is new to government, and arguably his Boss gave him an impossible task with an idea she sketched on a beer coaster. So now he has a Transportation Problem without a palatable solution. That creates a different kind of problem: a Political Problem.

With this letter, we have to question which problem the Minister is trying to solve. Is he even interested in finding a solution to the region’s Transportation Problem? In reading that letter, one might surmise that he has given up on that task, or (worse) it was never the problem his Boss charged him with fixing. After all, they have referendum-free tunnel/bridge replacements to build.

Instead, all the Minister’s thought and action seems directed at the Political Problem. Tell the mayors to solve the referendum fiasco for him, put them on a tight deadline, issue a few threats, cut their purse strings and remove any possible way for them to demonstrate creativity on leveraging funds. If they don’t get it done, you can kick the entire issue down the road for 3 or 4 more years, and call it their failure. Hopefully everyone will forget you failed first.

It is brilliant in its cynicism. This guy isn’t a Minister of Transportation, he’s the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert, as drawn by Machiavelli!

The mayors are being set up to fail, and as such, they are unlikely to find a solution that works here. The best they can hope is to change the conversation.

The message they need to send back has to be clear, unified and public. They need to demand that the province stop putting up roadblocks and issuing threats, and they need to start working collaboratively towards solutions. They need to point out that the province needs to work with them to do this because it is in the province’s best interest that the region has a robust, affordable, accessible and effective public transportation system. And because that is Todd Stone’s job.

Then the mayors need to point out to the public, very clearly, that there are three ways we can move forward in the region:

Option #1: We invest something in the order of several hundred million dollars a year on large and small scale expansion, and get back to building a world-class public transportation system envisioned in Transport 2040, and beyond. We can fuss later about chosen technologies (Light and Heavy Rail, Rapid Bus, 99-Line style medium bus, and regular bus, gondolas, HandyDarts, whatever works and makes the most economic sense to solve a local transportation problem). Before we have that debate, we need to know what the funds available are and when they can be delivered, as that will ultimately decide on the technology and priorities. We need this funded in 5- and 10-year commitments, so that longer-term growth can be properly planned for: no more random build-what-some-minister-wants pet projects that set us back a decade (I’m talking to you, FalconGates).

I don’t know the number, but $220 Million per year is probably the right order of magnitude. I pick that number out of the air because that is equal to 1% of the Provincial taxation revenue. We can raise taxes 1%, or the 1% that is easy to find through belt-tightening according to Grandpa Cummins and some local municipal pundits.

Option #2: We put no more money into TransLink, and we keep the transit we currently have, operating at full capacity. This is the feared “failed referendum” outcome. Of course, there will be 1 Million new residents moving to the Metro area over the next 30 years who will then lose any freedom to choose how they travel, and will be dependant on cars. Transit is full, there will be no more room for them. At the current car ownership rate, that’s 700,000 new cars. If you line those cars up, bumper-to-bumper, they will make a line more than 3,000km long. If moving, they will take up 4 or 5 times this distance.

To accommodate these cars, the Province will need to double or triple the number of lanes on all Provincial Highways (Hwy 91, Hwy 99, Hwy 1, Hwy 17, etc.) and concomitantly to build more expensive new crossings of all of our watercourses. The local roads budgets for all of our municipalities will similarly rise, as will healthcare costs, police and fire costs, and our greenhouse gas emission. To deal with these cars when they are not moving, we will need to build 2 Million new parking spaces in increasingly congested and expensive real estate.

So this option will “save” us a couple of hundred million dollars per year, but preliminary conservative estimates suggest this savings will come at the cost of ten times that amount. To quote the Minister- there is only one taxpayer.

Option #3: We do neither. We let the transportation system we have today limp into the next generation, and make only the most modest changes that we can afford without raising anyone’s taxes. This will no doubt kill our growth projections, as our livability will disappear and the economy will stall. Even at half the projected growth, we will still be stuck with almost 350,000 new cars on the road. Then we will learn what real traffic congestion looks like. Now that AirCare is being deep-sixed, our air quality will worsen, and the entire region will become less affordable and less livable. Your commute times will double or triple, it will restrict the Port’s dreams of doubling the number of containers they plan to move. Cities will struggle to keep up with road repairs as the load on them increases. It will make every business and the entire region less competitive in the global market. It will kill jobs, re-draw our landscape, and transform Greater Vancouver into a something we will no longer recognize, mostly because we will no longer be able to see the mountains. Imagine Mexico City with worse weather. Actually, that’s not fair, because Mexico City is investing the rapid transit at a rate that would make Todd Stone blush.

Which brings me to the Billion Dollar Question. If the mayors are indeed responsible for putting together the question for a referendum they don’t want, what should it look like?

One of the Minister’s primary talking points through this entire escapade is “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.” Let’s take the Minister at his word, and assume from this that Option #3 above is not an option the Minster can abide. So the referendum question is really between the first two options. We cannot have a “none of the above” option, as much as Premier McSparkles™ likes the idea.

The option of not funding transit improvement hurts the livability of our region, and does not achieve our Regional Growth Strategy, Transportation Plan, Greenhouse Gas Reduction, or Goods Movement goals. More importantly, the option of not funding transit expansion throughout the region is a very bad deal for the Province and the taxpayers. The Minister of Transportation can repeat the messaging that this the Mayors’ problem now, or repeat how the Province will not contribute because the Province will not ever raise your taxes. However, it is the Ministry of Transportation that will have to pay for the major freeway and bridge building projects that will be required to move the extra 700,000 cars through out region by 2045 if the million people joining our region are not given the choice of using more sustainable modes. Those are your taxes.

And this is the message the Mayors’ Council need to get out right now. Hopefully they can find a pithier way to say this than I could. Perhaps something like:

Please choose your favoured option:

1: Transit Expansion! (1% increase in your taxes, buy your own Compass Card).
2: Freeways and Bridges for all! (10% increases in your taxes, buy your own car).
3: Doom! (free, but you can’t have this).

That should effectively demonstrate what a foolish idea this referendum really is.

The same, but different.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Another morning waking to the drone of news helicopters. I wake up with my usual lament (“there is no better example of the great feats of human ingenuity squandered, than the Traffic Helicopter”) and flip on the radio to find out that there isn’t a stall on the Pattullo, but that a building a block from my house has been razed.

Another devastating fire; another group of neighbours spending the worst morning of their lives, looking at ashes and wondering how they will go on.

First off, we need to be thankful that, once again, no-one was seriously hurt. The alarm raised by neighbors, the professionalism of our Fire Department, and no doubt a significant amount of good luck means we are mourning things today, not people. We need no better example than last week’s fire in L’Isle-Verte to see how devastating a fire can be.

This is, of course, very different than the last fire. The impacts on the community will be different, as will the impacts on the people directly affected.

To those who didn’t call it home, the old three-story walk up on Ash Street will not be missed like the Copp’s Shoe Store and Royal City Café buildings. It didn’t have the architectural charm, it lacked in heritage features, and there are plenty more where that came from. It was a dull, utilitarian structure built in the 60s to maximize living space on the lot. There will not be a lot of hand-wringing about how to replace the gap it left in the City’s streetscape.

To those who did call it home, however, the loss will be deeper than even that felt by the business owners on Columbia. To lose your business is to lose a totem of your effort, a piece of your dreams, and a valuable part of your life, no doubt. But to lose your home is something else altogether. Every picture, every file, every piece of clothing or jewelry. Everything precious to you. Gone.

Those with foresight and means will have insurance, and will be able to replace stuff. Others will start again from scratch. But the stuff will not replace the loss of “home”, the place we return to for rest, for peace, for security. Even when I was a student and moving residences every year or so, it was easy to make my new place “home”, because I had my familiar furniture, pictures, books, toothbrush. For many who have lost all here, it will take a long time before some new place starts to feel like home. For those living on fixed incomes, and the working poor getting by from paycheque to paycheque, the task ahead is monumental.

As much as the businesses in Downtown, these people need help.

They are all fortunate that we have a well-resourced Emergency Management team in New Westminster, with a strong Emergency Special Services component. It has been educational for me to spend the last couple of years serving on the City’s Emergency Advisory Committee and seeing the different aspects of emergency planning being fine-tuned. I have some training in Emergency Operations, so I had a grasp of what happens during an Emergency response going in, but I did not realize how much work is done in preparing for after the Emergency – support systems to assist the victims after the flames are out and the portable fence is up.

For the dozens of families here, though, this will not be enough. This weekend, please contact one of the folks below to see if there is anything you can do to help. Money, clothes, dinner, petcare, household goods. who knows? The list of needs will be long, but not bottomless. We can do this.

Go to the City’s Website to see a list of organizations who are collecting donations.

The Downtown New Westminster BIA (demonstrating one of the many advantages of a BIA) is expanding their “Turn Down the Heat Week” program to help get some warm clothing for victims.

The New Westminster Chamber of Commerce is also starting a list of contacts for people offering various services. If you are a business with a skill, some resources, or an idea to help, get your name added to that list.

Reaching across the Pattullo, a business in Surrey is offering their storage space to collect larger items for donation. Communities expand at times like these.

Just as we did a few months ago, New Westminster has to step up and help our neighbours. Some may be feeling a little fundraiser-fatigue right now, but help from friends and kindness from strangers will do much to help a few of our neighbours feel “home” again here in New Westminster.

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?”

Build a Playground with a click!

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Short note, as I am getting really busy planning my December off (more on that later) and working on stuff that will fill our Januaries (yikes!), but I there is something important enough going on THIS WEEK that I wanted to add my voice to those getting the word out

It is a sad sign of our priorities as a society that the Ministry of Education will not pay for playground equipment at an elementary school. I like to think it is more reflection of the kind of Government that raises rates for the electricity needed to run schools, refuses to give the schools extra money to pay those rates, then tells the School Boards to just close some schools if they can’t afford to keep the lights on, as opposed to being the sign that our community doesn’t value our kids or recognize how important exercise and unstructured play is to learning outcomes… /end rant.

Clearly our community cares, as there is a group of aroused rabble who have been moving on a campaign to get funding from an Insurance Company to buy the playground equipment that an Elementary School should have at the new Elementary School called Qayqayt Community School which is being built currently on the old St. Mary’s Hospital site.

As the Aviva Community Fund is a national program, there are several programs competing for a few funds, but the good news is that this project has already jumped several steps in voting and promotion, and is a semi-finalist. They have 8 Days to get as many votes as they can. So go there and vote. Right now. You can even vote multiple times (once a day) and every person with a different e-mail address in your house, at your work, or in your universe can vote. Every day. So you, (yes you) can probably get 100 votes here.

The local group organizing this campaign has even made it easier for you by creating a webpage link to get you straight to where you can vote:

www.vote4robson.com

Here are the instructions sent to me by Tim Mercier from the École John Robson Community, and it was easier than the 7 steps below make it look, especially if you already have a Facebook account:

To Register;

1- Go to www.vote4robson.com
2- In the top right corner of the site (inside the yellow and above the search box) find “Sign in – Register – Francais” and click on “register” to get to the registration page;
3- Connect using your Facebook account or enter your email address and create a simple password for your account. Then scroll down the page to find the yellow “Register” button and press it;
4- Aviva will send you an email (to the address you used to register) and you will then need to open the email and click on the link;
5- This will bring you back to the Aviva page. The Sign in tab is located on the top right of the page in the yellow, click on it to go to the sign in page where you will need to enter your email address and password.
6- This will take you to your account page and Dashboard, if you want to find our entry either search for ACF17525 or just go back to www.vote4robson without logging off the Aviva site and it should get you there.
7- Once you have voted once, we will be in your supported idea tab and you can find us there.

Here you go, New Westminster – time for us to do what a great community like ours does best when a few people start a good idea – support them by showing up and give a few clicks to give the kids of the Downtown neighbourhood and all of the Qayqayt catchment a place to blow off steam so they can get some fresh air, learn better, and be healthier and happier #NewNewWest Citizens.

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.