Author: corey.burger

Jaywalking and pedestrian space

There is a minor little stink going on in downtown Victoria over a recent crackdown on jaywalking. The Downtown Victoria Business Association is quite annoyed, feeling it will drive people out of downtown. Jack Knox quite correctly points out that ICBC, who funds this work, and the writing of tickets themselves makes lots of money for the municipalities. Jaywalking, as defined by Wikipedia is:

an informal term used to refer to illegal or reckless pedestrian crossing of a roadway

The core concept behind jaywalking as a crime is that there needs to be separate spaces for cars, pedestrians, bikes, etc. All well and good, until you realize that one of the areas they targeted for enforcement was Government Street. For reference, a picture of Gov’t St: Government Street

It didn’t always used to look like this. Until a reconstruction in the 20th century, Government St. was a four lane road like Douglas St.:

The Government Street of today is about as close to a pedestrianized street as you can get without actually closing it to cars. If they lowered the speed limit to 7km/h, it would easily classify as a woonerf, or living street. The whole point of these types of streets is that various travel modes, especially pedestrians, are supposed to mix.

But beyond Government Street, I disagree with ticking for jaywalking in general. The term was only invented by auto-owners, tired of people walking all over the streets and blocking their cars. So they decided that if only they could confine pedestrians to the sidewalks. It has worked well, as can be seen on Oak Bay Avenue: From a pedestrians perspective, most of the road is unusable, coloured red. Only the narrow strips of the sidewalks are clear green, with crosswalks in yellow: pedestrian Yet from the car’s perspective, the world is very very green: car

(Aerial photo from CRD’s Natural Areas Atlas, colour added by me)

It all boils down to what sort of city we want to live in. If we want one where cars keep pedestrians penned up on sidewalks, by all means, enforcing the rules around jaywalking is a great idea. But if we want a city that celebrates walking, we need to tame the car, not punish pedestrians for daring to try and take back space which should be theirs.

A few thoughts on tonight’s town hall meeting

Mayor and council held a poorly-publicized open house tonight at Windsor Pavillion. Despite that fact, the attendance wasn’t too bad, as about 20 people attended the two hour event. As an open forum, the topics wandered, from tree preservation to secondary suites to improving the website. I did note a few things:

  • Oak Bay’s tree preservation bylaw “scares” a lot of arborists, as it is apparently quite strict. Given how endangered the Garry Oak is, this is probably a good thing. However, whether or not the bylaw going to become a major challenge as our urban forest ages and needs replacement in the next 10 to 20 years is an unknown. The science of tree removal is also not well understood, so some education is going to be needed to help people understand why apparently healthy looking trees are being cut down.
  • The secondary suites committee is finally meeting. This can only be a good thing. Notice of the secondary suite committee will be sent out via property tax notices, which misses renters. However, when I pointed this out, both council and I agreed that there is no good method to reach renters, especially those in existing illegal secondary suites.
  • The website was raised a lot. Yes, I still owe Chris Causton a short page or so about how to improve the website.
  • The room’s layout was very much like a council meeting, with the mayor and council at tables at the front and the public sitting in seats facing them. While it helped focus the meeting, it made it hard for various members of the public to sometimes see and hear the other members of the public were speaking. Alan Cassidy should be praised for choosing not to sit behind a table and Tara and Pam for following suit.
  • The covered bike racks that are likely to go in on the Avenue were mentioned, specifically council was praised for driving that initiative. It does illustrate the woeful lack of bike parking in the municipality and the fact that we don’t even really know where all those racks are and what state they are in.

There is probably a great deal I am forgetting, but all in all, it was a good meeting. I have no idea when the next one is going to be or what sort of format it will follow. I hope we can have a more mingling style social event, maybe with a like/dislike wall and some maps of the municipality. Refreshments would have been nice, even if just a few cookies, drinks, etc. But kudos to the mayor and council for taking the step to be out there in a more informal but planned gathering. I look forward to announcement of the next town hall meeting.

Bike parking on the Avenue

At tonight’s Committee of the Whole meeting, the council discussed the addition of covered bicycle parking to the avenue. Apparently instigated by the Mayor, this is long overdue recognition that bike parking on the Avenue is sub-par. Currently there are no covered spots anywhere on the Avenue and even the few racks that do exist are substandard, such as the ancient metal rack at the corner of Fairway Market closest to the Municipal Hall.

The plan presented at tonights meeting initially called for the removal of two parking spots on Wilmot on the eastern side closest to the Avenue. Councillor Herbert mentioned that there is a lack of handicapped parking on the Avenue and these two spots might make a good location for them and the bike parking could be moved to the north end of Wilmot right by Theatre Lane. Thankfully Tara Ney suggested that rather than moving them further away from the Avenue, the lawn of the Municipal Hall might make a better place, between the small information stand and the building itself.

As for what they will look like, there were two examples given, one from in front of the MEC building downtown:
mec bike shelter complete

This is quite a modern design. There is also this much older design seen around UVic:
uvic shelter 101

(Both photos credit John Luton of Capital Bike and Walk and more recently a Victoria City Councillor. He has an excellent set about Best Practices and another, Bike Parking 101.)

Estimated at around $20,000 for purchase and installation, the question of where the money will come from came up. A recent change to the Local Government Act allows municipal governments to take money out of their parking funds and put it into funding alternative forms of travel: walking, biking and transit. As such, Oak Bay is apparently going to be setting up an Alternative Transportation Infrastructure Fund, although no money has yet been moved around.

As the money will likely come out of the parking fund, Council decided that the Business Improvement Area who represent businesses on the Avenue, should be consulted on any spending of the parking fund on things other than parking. I am a little worried we’ll get some classic old-school 20th century thinking from them, but we will see.

Overall, I am hopeful that the bicycling community here in Oak Bay may not have to fight tooth and nail for every scrap of bicycle infrastructure. I was also heartened that during the nearly hour long discussion of the the traffic problem at the corner of Cadboro Bay and Bowker, several residents mentioned that bike lanes in the area is something they would like to see, even at the expense of parking. All in all, 2009 should be a good year for biking here in Oak Bay.

Labour intensive buses are a problem

So laid-off lumber workers don’t want to relocate to Victoria or commute to get paid less driving our buses? So says the Globe and Mail.

Imagine if we had a transit vehicle that would have a better rider to driver ratio? Oh wait, we do. It is called rail transit. I guess all those years of ignoring it are coming home to roost.

The upcoming demographic tsunami isn’t going to make it easier to find people. Figuring out how to move all those old people is something that keeps a lot of planners up at night, as this page on the Canadian Urban Institute website shows. Given all the talk of stimulus plans, now is a great time to start investing in capital-intensive rail transit over labour-intensive buses, before we have nobody to drive our buses.

Book Review: Stuck in Traffic

Stuck in Traffic Cover

I was lucky enough on one of my recent trips to the second hand book stores of Victoria to find a bunch of good books and magazines, including back issues of Urban Land, by the Urban Land Institute. However the prize catch was a copy of Anthony Down’s Stuck in Traffic: Coping with Peak-House Traffic Congestion published in 1992 by the Brookings Institute.

This book is a great find because it is such a no-nonsense look at traffic congestion and how to solve it. It makes the now common argument that you cannot build your way out of congestion and explains why it is. Downs postulates that you end with a “triple convergence” when new road capacity is added. Firstly, you have new people driving because the congestion has now decreased. You also have people shifting routes and people shifting from other modes, such as public transit back to the road system.

The book also advances the viewpoint that peak-hour road and parking pricing can help reduce congestion by letting people see the true costs of their actions and using financial measures to help change their behaviour. However, Downs also correctly points out that road pricing is usually considered to be unacceptable by the driving public, as they feel they have “already paid for the roads.” The recent scaleback of London’s congestion charge and the failure in New York City are classic cases of this.

However, despite all the good things the book says, it does have a few dated statements. Firstly, Downs says that public transit cannot reduce congestion due to a number of factors, including low housing and job density and less convenience. However, when the book was published, in 1992, the massive success of public transit recently had not yet taken place. Gas prices had made driving cheaper than almost ever before and the beginning of the SUV era was upon us. He also fails to predict the recent successes of transit-oriented development, even in older systems such as BART in San Francisco.

At the back of the book there is a handy chart of all the remedies he has suggested, ranking them by type, effectiveness, cost and political acceptability. Given the era the book was written in, it is not shocking that there is not a separate column for environmental effectiveness.

One of his suggestions, making streets one-way, is often brought up.. While this change does bring about increases in flow, it also increases traffic speed, likely because the road is seen as “safer” as there is no longer any oncoming traffic. In the summary table, he says that the cost of society of this and other bundled changes is low. I completely disagree with this. One way streets and the attendant increase in the speed of traffic bring out massive social costs, as people are less likely to walk and linger on that street. In fact, the size of the road and the speed of traffic is shown to directly affect how big people see their neighbourhood to be.

Overall, this is a well written book and should be read by every traffic engineer and planner. Readers should be aware of the era and context the book was written in and thus should  subject each of the proposed solutions to critical analysis with newer research. There is also a newer title by Downs called Still Stuck in Traffic that was published in 2004 by Brookings. I have yet to read it, so I don’t know if it deals with the problems I mention above.

Rebuilding Canada: a look at P3s

Can P3s (Public-Private Partnerships) save our infrastructure? This is the focus of TC’s series latest story on rebuilding Canada. The second looks at the negative side of P3’s, with cost overruns and some projects ultimately having to be nationalized.

British Columbia has a mixed record with P3’s, as pointed in the article about its critics. We have Partnerships BC (which is being emulated in California) and a requirement that all large infrastructure projects be “evaluated” for being a P3.

Here in Victoria we have the new Save-On Foods Memorial Arena being run by RG Properties Ltd., after the spectacular collapse of the previous attempt at replacing the Memorial Arena under then Mayor Bob Cross. We also have the upcoming sewage treatment plant, which is likely be a P3, although not if the Keep our Water Public campaign succeeds. A recent poll also found that the vast majority of people wanted to keep any sewage treatment public. For the record, as a municipal candidate, I completely supported keeping sewage treatment public and I still hold that position.

With the world financial markets busy melting down around us, one of the biggest challenges right now for P3’s is simply getting credit. As Livable Blog points out, a number of the projects either in the construction phase or on the table in Vancouver are threatened by this. NowPublic also has an excellent post on the matter. It is highly conceivable that one or more of the companies involved in these deals could fail. Read the end of this story about the potential failure Macquerie Bank, a large funder of P3s around the globe. Now where would that leave the governments?

Overall, I wouldn’t want to be a company involved in a P3 or a government that might be left holding the bag if it fails. I guess there are small blessings to having lost the election. As for whether or not the credit crisis will stop the P3 steamroller, I guess we can hope.

Cars kill 300 year old tree

500 block of Victoria St, centred on large tree
2007 air photo of the 500 block of Victoria St, centred on a large tree, likely the removed Garry Oak.

Another piece of Oak Bay’s urban forest was lost this week. A large Garry Oak in the 500 block of Victoria Avenue was removed because it was diseased and thus was a potential risk to falling over. Given it was around 300 years old, age does tend to catch up to even the best of us. But this tree did not really die of old age. It was felled by root rot. What caused the root rot? Well, the story in the Oak Bay News lays it all out:

A younger Garry oak might have been able to fend off the disease, but the Victoria Avenue tree’s age and damage done to it when the street was widened in the 1970s weakened the root system left the oak vulnerable to disease. (emphasis added)

Thats right. It was killed because the road needed to be wider. What can clearly be seen from the photo to the right above is that the road and sidewalk ran almost right against the trunk. As evidenced by this case, driving on a trees roots damages them via soil compaction. But how far out do they extend? A good rule of thumb is the that the roots extend at least as far as the branches or crown does, often further in urban areas. (The Southern Nevada Water Authority has a good graphic and explanation).

Parking lot at Camosun's Lansdowne Campus
Parking lot at Camosun's Lansdowne Campus. 2007 air photo from the CRD.

Of course, Oak Bay is not the only offender. Parking lots are great places to see just how bad it can get for these poor trees. Case in point; the parking lot at Camosun’s Lansdowne Campus as seen to the left. Formerly a Garry Oak meadow, the trees remain but the grass is now concrete.

The Garry Oak ecosystem is amongst the most endangered in the world and its centerpiece species, the Garry Oak, the only native oak west of Manitoba.

Coincidentally, a lady from the Garry Oak Ecosystem Recovery Team was at Oak Bay council on Monday night looking for some funding to help print their book, The Garry Oak Gardener’s Handbook (PDF link).Thankfully council was able to give them about $200 for 40 copies. She also had a few on hand, so I picked one up and having read through, I highly recommend it. I am looking forward to the newer, larger, edition coming out later this year.

Photo credits: CRD’s Natural Areas Atlas

TC’s special on Rebuilding Canada

The Times Colonist (and presumably the whole Canwest newspaper chain) has a special entitled “Rebuilding Canada”. That they are running such a piece now isn’t really a surprise, given the massive number of stories talking about an “infrastructure stimulus“. What really gets me is the focus on rebuilding and adding new roads. One of the choicer quotes comes from a story titled “The scramble to make our highways safe“:

Elsewhere, Edmonton has a $260-million interchange project to unclog a bottleneck on a ring road.

Twinned Port Mann bridge
Twinned Port Mann bridge. Notice the lie of the mostly empty lanes

You can’t build your way out of congestion. This is the hard lesson Boston is discovering, after their giant “Big Dig” project. Aside from all the well documented problems with quality of the construction, what they have found is that the faster traffic flow in the core has simply pushed bottlenecks outwards. The traditional answer to this would be to “fix” the new bottlenecks with more roads, which would just be perpetuating the cycle of endless construction, which is how we ended up here in the first place. We need to build less roads and reduce the number we already have, not be adding more.

But where is the talk about using transit to solve some of these bottlenecks? The problem is that planners and governments fail to look at mobility holistically. Essentially, we need to be planning how to move people more efficiently, not cars. Some organizations get it, such as Washington States Department of Transportation and their page on bottlenecks and chokepoints. Others, well, just don’t.

Seattle Street Edge Alternative
Seattle's Street Edge Alternative program. Photo credit CRD

Of course, roads are not the only piece of infrastructure that is crumbling. Recreational facilities and housing, garbage disposal, sewers and public transit are all covered as well. Sewers are an interesting one. Apparently the City of Victoria has some of the oldest sewer pipes in Canada, at almost 100 years old. All well and good, but where is the discussion of using bioswales (CRD on bioswales) and green roofs (Ecogeeks has a good photo-filled FAQ on green roofs) to reduce runoff into our sewers? As the CRD plans to charge municipalities based on flow, reducing runoff means less tax dollars wasted.

Overall, I am deeply disappointed with this whole series. It is typical tired journalism. Given the recent cuts in the Canwest newsrooms, I am not surprised they are failing to produce good, innovative stories. I guess that leaves it up to the poor bloggers to tell the story.

Silly pedestrian, sidewalks are for cars!

Today while walking back from Camosun, I saw no less than three trucks parked on the sidewalk. Frustrating.

truck1
This looks like a contractors truck, given the construction in the house right at this location.

truck2

truck3
This Cadillac Escalade is owned by somebody who lives here. I see this car here nearly everyday, usually parked on the curb to some degree on another.

Tomorrow is my first final of three. I hope to get back into the blogging spirit as we roll closer to Christmas.