corey.burger – Page 23

Notes from yesterday’s BCTransit open house

The latest in the seamingly endless studies about rapid transit is entering it’s public consultation and thus BCTransit is holding a series of open houses.This one is called the Victoria Regional Rapid Transit plan and managed the first open house yesterday at the Legion Hall on the Gorge. I doubt this will be the last study. If you want a good idea of just how often this has been studied, see page 2 of this PDF. I must confess all this leaves me just a little jaded.

Potential corridors for the VRRT project

This specific plan is an outgrowth of the recently-failed Douglas St. busway, which did yield one concrete result: BCTransit now owns the right of way to the centre 2 lanes of Douglas St. north of Fisgard. Unlike the Douglas St. plan, this one doesn’t presume the use of specific corridor, rather they are looking for input on what corridor they should be using. See the map to the right or the full PDF for the options.

For the Downtown to Uptown route the logical route is Douglas St, as we already own the corridor, it would require less work than Blanshard St and the potential, with the right technology (ie. rail), to stimulate a lot of needed development in the north Douglas area.

From Uptown I think we should run with the Trans-Canada Highway and the Galloping Goose. Between those two alignments there should be plenty of room to run two full tracks while keeping the existing trail and the highway. It also passes right by the Victoria General Hospital, a major employer.

It should then shift to the E&N Railway when it nearly joins the highway in View Royal, because the corridor is already publicly owned (by the Island Corridor Foundation) and it runs straight into downtown Langford, where they have just finished building a beautiful new transit station.

As for technology, they claim that they have no bias one way or the other, but as I have pointed out before, I really doubt that. Maybe by picking at least part of the E&N, they will be forced to use rail.The plan is for the prelimiary consultation to be done by the this fall with the larger work starting in 2010. Implementation is 2011 or later. Likely later, given there is no concrete funding from any level of government. Interestingly, this timeline aligns very neatly with the new CRD Bike/Pedestrian Master Plan. I wonder if they have been talking with each other…

But don’t take my word for it. There are two more consultations: one tomorrow in Colwood and next Monday at Victoria City Hall. See the schedule for more information as well as PDFs of most of the handouts. As an aside, this also the 100th published post on this site.

Come support Oak Bay Sea Rescue tomorrow night

Dallas Rd. storm. Photo credit flickr user dewolfe0001. License CC by sa 2.0

Tomorrow night the Oak Bay Sea Rescue Society, Coast Guard Aux. Unit 33, is up before council for a rezoning request for their new boat house. The Times Colonist has covered the story half-decently, but I thought I would point out a few more things

1. The $4,000/year they are paying for rent for their second boat could and should be used for rescue equipment, like an automatic debribulator that they want to buy.
2. If they don’t get it built this season, their new boat risks serious damage in the upcoming storm season

3. The Oak Bay Marine Group has never seen fit to actually attend any council/comm. of the whole meeting where this has been discussed in the past 6 months, despite being invited. In contrast the OBSR has been out at every meeting and sat patiently to get their turn to speak.

4. The new boat house will only be slightly larger (about 10′ longer and about 5′ wider) than the existing boat house. From Beach Drive I seriously doubt anybody will notice the difference.

Lastly and most importantly: This is an all volunteer outfit that protects you, the average user of the water. As Jeffery Dubney of the society said to me,

Members risk their lives for others and they should not
have to prepare for a mission at 2 AM in sub zero temperatures by being
forced to put on protective clothing outside in driving rain in 50 mph winds
because there is no room in the existing boat house.

It usually isn’t during the sunny, nice days they called out. It is times like this storm on Dallas Rd. in the picture that they go out and rescue people who have gotten into trouble. So come out tomorrow at 7:30pm at the Municipal Hall and support the Oak Bay Sea Rescue Society in their bid to provide better service for all users of the water.

Things to do this weekend

The Victoria Francophone Society is hosting St. Jean Baptiste Day in Willows Park this Saturday the 20th. The event runs from 12pm-5pm with lots of free music and dance all afternoon long, kids’ entertainment including giant games, bouncy castles, sumo suits & crafts, as well as poutine & treats on sale for all. Cost is by donation. More info at harbourliving.ca.

The Old Cemeteries Society of Victoria is holding a Father’s Day walk with Sunday the 21st starting at 2pm at the Starbucks in Fairfield Plaza. It is hosted by Mayor Chris Causton and will lead people to graves of notable Oak Bay residents. Cost is $5 for non-members, $2 for members. If you miss this one, there are lots more tours this summer on different subjects.

Oak Bay sewage forum tomorrow night

After popular demand by our very own John Herbert, the CRD has added a public consultation in Oak Bay tomorrow evening at Emmanuel Baptist Church (2121 Cedar Hill X Rd (google map), right by the entrance to UVic) between 3pm and 8pm. As Cllr Herbert said:

“If they’re proposing to have one of these sites in Oak Bay, then they need to have a meeting in Oak Bay to allow the residents to have their say.”

While I disagree with John Herbert on a great many issues, this is one of the few of them that we actually agree on. See you all tomorrow night.

Notes from yesterday’s CRD bike/ped plan launch

The CRD is building a new bike and pedestrian master plan and to get the ball rolling, they hosted a launch & lunch party yesterday and they were kind enough to invite myself, Lesley Ewing and Gerald Smeltzer, all of us on the core team of the Oak Bay bike master plan. The event was well attended, with staff from every municipality save Colwood there, lots of CRD staff, and community activists from the Greater Victoria Cycling Coalition, the Saanich Bike/Ped Committee, the sadly non-defunct Parent Advisory Committee for the Safer School Travel Plan as well as us. (Update: Michael Baxter, the engineer from Colwood on the comm., was out of town)

We started off with an excellent lunch in the 6th floor boardroom of the CRD building. You can quite literally see for miles up there. To kick off the presentation portion, Tracey Corbett of CRD’s Regional Planning and View Royal Mayor Graham Hill both spoke briefly. Tracey spoke about how this grew out of the CRD’s Travel Choices work a few years back and Graham gave an excellent overview of the challenges we face, with the “perfect storm” of peak oil, climate change and growing health issues).

After Tracey and Graham, Mira Birk and the Alta Planning + Design team out of Portland, OR, Urban Systems from Vancouver and John Luton, their local advisor, got up to talk about what they were going to do and what tools they brought to the table. They spoke about some of the GIS tools they have developed over the years to look at quality of bike and pedestrian infrastructure and make it easier to plan a complete street. For more information about these tools, Birk gave a talk on the cycle portion at the 2008 ProWalk/ProBike conference.

She went on to make some interesting points of the challenges of planning for bikes and pedestrians, in that most models of transportation don’t yet account for how new bike lanes or sidewalks change travel habits or factor in the health and societal benefits to more people walking and biking. This makes it hard to “sell” these improvements to people educated in the old school of planning for cars and single family homes. She also pointed that until recently few universities in their planning depts had people that could teach the next generation about how to plan for bikes, walking or mixed use development.

So where do we go from here? Hopefully the website will be appearing online shortly, so that most people can learn about the project. There will also be a citizen’s advisory committee and a planners/engineers from each municipality committee. Alta is hoping to finish the 1st phase by the Fall of 2009, with the 2nd and 3rd phases late spring/early summer 2010.

Will they be concerned when somebody gets killed?

Bowker & Cadboro Bay Intersection. Photo credit: John Luton

The Oak Bay Police are claiming that the intersection of Bowker and Cadboro Bay Rd. isn’t a problem, because most people do the speed limit. Let me rephrase that, while the police watched, people didn’t speed. Colour me not shocked.

Having lived on Cadboro Bay Rd for just over three years, if most people are doing the speed limit, I would be truly surprised. I can definitely say that the width of the road encourages people to speed, as the picture to the right shows.

As I have mentioned before, pedestrian fatality percentage rises sharply between 30 and 60 km/hr. 5% to 85%, to be exact.

Cadboro Bay Rd width. Photo credit: John Luton — Looking north on Cadboro Bay Rd near Willows School. Photo credit: John Luton

So what can be done about it? A traffic circle is very needed, but before that there are three simple steps to keep speeds down:

Bulge out the sidewalk at the crossing near Willows School. This shortens the crossing and puts the pedestrian beyond the parked car and in the sight of any oncoming vehicles.
Bulge out the sidewalk at the two ends of the school zone. This narrows the roadway, slowing drivers down.
Add bike lanes. The road in front of my house is ~11m wide, which is enough for two 3m travel lanes, two 1.5 m bike lanes and one 2m parking lane on the west side of the road. The loss of parking on the east side is mitigated by the fact that few people park on the east side of the road most of the day anyway.

Will any of this happen? I hope so. It will take a lot of work to convince council that these steps are needed to keep kids and people of all ages safe. Maybe they should be reading this pedestrian injuries report from Safe Kids Canada.

Bowker Creek Celebration Walk

This Saturday was the Bowker Creek Celebration walk, co-hosted by the Oak Bay Community Association and Bowker Creek Initiative The walk started out at the upper parking lot of the Oak Bay Recreation Centre with it’s their freshly-painted lines and walked down the creek towards the mouth. The point of the walk was to showcase the need for a greenway or trail along the whole length, not just a few disconnected lengths. Sadly due having a generally crazy day, I was only able to make the first part, but I did take a few pictures, which you can see in my flickr set.

The demand for better access to waterways is not unique in the Bowker Creek area. Across North America there is an effort to “daylight” creeks, that is to remove the culverts and let them flow in natural streams along the surface. The High Country News near San Francisco recently ran a whole series on “rebooting” creeks in poorer neighbourhoods in San Francisco.

Site of Broom Pull – View Larger Map

Nearer to home, a group in Seattle won a victory about the Thorton Creek underneath the Northgate Mall. Too bad Hillside isn’t doing anything with the section of Bowker Creek that runs underneath the western edge of that mall as they expand. However, the BCI is hosting an ivy pull on the 27th of June between 10am and 12:30pm across the creek from the existing community gardens.

Cyclist hit on Beach Dr at Estevan?

According to the Oak Bay News, a cyclist was hit at the corner of Beach Drive and Estevan Avenue on Friday. Given the claim of the vehicle running the stop sign, it must have been on Estevan, not Beach Drive. The 32-year-old man apparently tumbled over the hood of the car. This likely means that he was right in fromt of her when she accelerated. Thankfully he apparently wasn’t seriously hurt, although who knows what kinds of long term injuries he might have sustained. As per usual, the drive got off nearly scot free:

The woman, 32, was ticketed for failing to stop.

How about driving without due care? I guess you need to kill somebody before you get this one. As light bedtime reading, I suggest Death of Cyclists in BC, by the Helmet Safety Institute. The report was written by the Chief Coroner of BC’s office and covers accidents from 1986-95. Wonder if the numbers of deaths has gone down since then, given that more cyclists equals less deaths in total. I think I would have to plumb the byzantine depths of ICBC or maybe WCB to get that info. Maybe another day.

Possible sewage treatment location in Oak Bay

The CRD has now identified the three possible locations for the Saanich East/Oak Bay North sewage treatment plant and one of them is in Oak Bay, despite the fact that the only public consultations this month are in Saanich. Two of these properties are on UVic land, at opposite corners of the campus.

Likely one potential site of sewage treatment — Old orchard on UVic property

The site in Oak Bay is the old orchard on Cedar Hill X Rd near Crestview Rd as can be seen on the right. This is a part of UVic and is a very common dog walking site. I have no idea how much of the site they are planning to use or if the orchard will remain, but I expect at least some of that information will be at the upcoming public consultations. I wonder what Citizen Canine will say about the possibility of using this location.

The second site on UVic lands is near McCoy Road in the fields there. Again, I have no idea how much space they are going to take, but I sincerely hope that they don’t remove the trail that connects to the end of McCoy Road. That is a great biking and walking connection to avoid having to go all the way down to the corner of McKenzie Ave. and Gordon Head Rd.

The last site is the previously mentioned lands in Haro Woods that the CRD purchased last year. I don’t know exactly where in Haro Woods, as outlined in yellow in the map on the right, but I know that UVic owns a portion as well. There isn’t much more to say about this, except that it is one of the few pieces of relatively intact forest left in the area. Also, there is a large field on Queen Alexandria lands just across the road. In all the years I have been going up that direction, as I used to go to school at Frank Hobbs elementary, that field has been sitting largely empty. Why not use it?

Haro Woods, because it has been previously announced, has already attracted a lot of attention. There is a Save Haro Woods website, and the Cadboro Bay Residents Association has come out strongly against this site as well, asking for it be turned into a park.

There are two open houses coming up, on the 16th at Gordon Head United Church and the 17th at Cadboro Bay United Church. Both of those forums run 3pm to 8pm. There is also neighbourhood workshop that requires pre-registration on the 22nd of June between 6:30pm and 9pm at the Queenswood Centre. This information and more can be seen on the wasterwatermadeclear’s public forums page. There is also a report from the CRD’s contractor about the feedback from the previous public forums and the principles used in deciding a location.

Personally, I like none of these sites, but I think the orchard site is probably least worst, provided the orchard itself survives and public access for walking dogs is preserved. However, if they do choose the Haro Woods site, they are really setting themselves up to fail. I think we will see UVic students and other environmental activists chaining themselves to equipment and tree sitting, potentially delaying the project months. I almost wonder if this is why the other two spots have just appeared, to avoid that very scenario.