Author: corey.burger

Irony

Yesterday evening I managed to make it to the community roundtable on the legalization of secondary suites. I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people who actually supported the legalization of secondary suites in the crowd. There were at least a few at every table save one. I have no idea as to the make up of other tables, but ours was pretty evenly split between those that supported it and those that didn’t.

I did find a few things telling. There was a gentleman who called for a referendum on the issue. This would mean delaying any decision until 2011 at the earliest, as running a referendum during a non-election year is simply too expensive. Given how long the issue has been left untouched, this is not really a major issue. What galled me was that he called for a referendum of “home-owners”. Not taxpayers, not voters, but home owners. Renters like myself pay taxes, albeit indirectly through our landlords, and we have the right to vote. We have as much say in the running of Oak Bay as those who are fortunate to be able to afford a home. I find it sad that there are those that forget that.

The event was also well attended by the municipal council and candidates from the last municipal election. Nils Jensen, Pam Copley and John Herbert are all members of the committee but were joined by Tara Ney and Allan Cassidy with Mayor Causton sending his regrets. With Michelle Kirby and myself both there, the only candidates from the last municipal election missing were sitting councillor Hazel Braithwaite and candidate Chris Smith.

Which brings me to the irony. One of the major issues people raised was the more renters would somehow change Oak Bay for a worse, introducing a more transient population that doesn’t take care of the properties they rent and throws loud parties. Parties like the one my roommates and I were having earlier this evening, hanging out on our front steps, drinking beer and chatting about life.

All is not lost on the secondary suites fight. It is important that the committee hear from as many people who support legalization as possible. Those that oppose legalization are out in force and they are well organized. The next time you can tell the committee of your views is April 23rd, 5:30-7:30pm at the Municipal Hall.

Unconscious bias: the new BCTransit logo

BCTransit has slowly been rolling out the new corporate look for the past few months and as part of the new look, they got a new logo:

One of the interesting things about this new logo is the inclusion of a stylized road. Few transit logos include any explicit reference to the service they are offering. I expect this is largely an unconscious decision, as few logos in any field explicitly reference the product or service they are associated with. For example:

Image courtesy of Julie & Co, a design firm out of DC.

Rebranding of any kind usually involves most of the senior management, which brings me to the point of this post: I think that the senior management of BCTransit is biased against rail transit. I don’t think this is a conscious bias or that they are even aware they have it. After all, knowing you like blue doesn’t mean you always think about why you choose the blue thing. BCTransit’s management has so internalized that rail transit is not an option here in the CRD that they made their corporate image exclude it.

This is despite having an existing rail corridor running from the core into downtown Langford, arguably the two places we need to link most with transit. All this means that the shiny new study will suggest exactly the same as every other study listed on this page: do nothing. Talking about unconscious bias. The URL to the Victoria Regional Rapid Transit project is busonline.ca.

Bottled water ban suggestion passes

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities has passed a resolution to urge cities to ban bottled water. As I mentioned last Wednesday, the environmental impact of bottled water is two-fold. Not only does it use a massive amount of plastic, it also depletes aquifers and generally threatens safe water supplies. The Canadian Bottled Water Association, the industry’s trade association, is not impressed, claiming that they were not consulted. Funny how they care so little about this resolution that they didn’t even release a press release

Closer to home, Oak Bay Councillor and chairman of the CRD’s water committee Nils Jensen noted that the Oak Bay council already uses a carafe with tap water. The last time I was at Oak Bay Recreation Centre, there was definitely still bottled water for sale there. Nor has any councillor raised the issue at any meeting. Hopefully Nils or one of the other council members will have the guts to suggest such a ban.

Banning bottle water sales for fun and profit

Late last year Toronto decided to ban sales of bottled water on city property, it the latest in a long series of municipalities that have banned bottled water sales. This Saturday here in Victoria the Federation of Canadian Municipalities is voting on a voluntary policy to urge all municipalities to ban bottled water. Much like the recent motion passed by the Oak Bay Council involving the replacing of plastic bags with biodegradable ones, nothing in the motion forces anybody to do anything. But coupled with the recent drop in bottled water sales, this is promising news.

Plastic is among the most damaging material we produce because it isn’t biodegradable. Worst than that, it breaks down into little tiny pellets that choke living systems, filling bird and fish stomachs, causing them to slowly starve to death. Of course, not everybody agrees with this. Save the Plastic Bag presents the alternative view. Too bad they don’t tell you who funds them.

Beyond the issue of the plastic packaging, in a water-scarce world, the wisdom of moving large amounts of water vast differences is questionable at best. The Wikipedia article on bottled water documents a few of these problems. Of course, the irony is that by 1999 25% of the bottled water sold was Coke’s Dasani or Pepsi’s Aquafina, which both are rebottled municipal water. This little white lie bit Coke badly in 2004, when they had to pull Dasani off the shelves in Britian due to illegally high bromate levels. This led to the joke that only Coke could take Thames water and make it less drinkable.

Whether or not this FCM motion has any affect in the Greater Victoria region remains to be seen. I truly hope that it does but I am not holding my breath. Watch the CRD and the municipalities to pass the buck back and forth for awhile before anything gets done.

Driver who hit pedestrian charged with attempted murder

On Saturday, when I sadly noted that killing a person with a car nets you a $1500 fine, I also was pleased that the RCMP seemed to take the recent hit and run in Port Alberni seriously enough to consider it attempted murder. Today we learn that the driver, one Daniel Marc Akerley of Port Alberni, was charged of attempted murder.

While it is nice to see charges of attempted murder in this case, it was a pretty hideous crime. It seems there was personal bad blood between the victim and Mr. Akerley and he chased the victim down, missed him once and then when he finally hit him, drove over him a second time. This is not your usual hit and run. It is pretty clear you need to have motive in order to get charged if you hurt or kill somebody with a car.

So if we are not going to charge these drivers, we should at least be building our streets to slow them down, so that when they do hit somebody and get away with it, there is less likelyhood that they will kill somebody. After all, the chance of a pedestrian getting killed drops from 45% to 5% when the speed of the car drops from 50 km/h to 30 km/h.

Kill person with car, get $1500 fine

There was another great example of how little our society values the lives of the non-car driving public. A woman with extensive speeding tickets and “moving violations” has been fined $1500 and given a 4-month suspension of her license for killing a motorcyclist while passing on a double yellow. The Times Colonist has the full story.

Also in today’s paper was a story about a man running over a pedestrian twice in Port Alberni is what looks like a road rage incident. At least in this case the RCMP officer said:

“The only difference between this one and a homicide is that the guy’s living,”

Hopefully the driver, who is apparently known, will be charged with attempted manslaughter or assault with a deadly weapon. I am not holding my breath, however.

Further afield, the DA in New York city has decided not to charge the driver of a van which, while running and unattended, jumped the curb and killed two children. The families of the two dead as well as pedestrian and safety advocates held a rally recently to demand action.

These kinds of stories are all too common. Often the driver is not blamed and the incident is called a “tragic accident” or “an act of god”. What will it take for society to consider cars to be the dangerous weapons they are? If the driver who killed that motorcyclist had pulled out a gun and shot the man, it would have been considered manslaughter. There would have been a huge outcry, just as has happened recently with all the apparently gang related shootings. Just because they used car doesn’t mean that we should treat it any differently.

New Safer Cycling Oak Bay website goes live

Lesley Ewing and I have been working on a new Safer Cycling Oak Bay website for the past few weeks to correspond with the launch of a new project we, amongst others, have been working on. Rather than being stuck at the old Telus.net webspace, we have finally launched the new website at scob.ca, a nice short and easy to remember url. Expect to see more on the SCOB website in the next few weeks.

Metrocascade: a new website of Victoria blogs

A new one-stop shop for all of the blogs about Victoria, including the Times Colonist, was launched recently at Metrocascade.com. Alongside a whole bunch of blogs I didn’t know about, Metrocascade includes Michelle Kirby, Sean Holman’s Public Eye Online and Bernard van Schulmann, all fairly well known. The site itself has a blog, which apparently puts the start as early February, probably why I only saw the first visitors to my site yesterday. It is great to see more websites devoted to our little part of the world and I will be following this one quite closely.