The Times Colonist has a great piece today about the Integrated Road Safety Unit using their empty cruisers to be phantom speed traps. Slowing down cars is all well and good; the problem is in the implementation. Specifically, the picture from the TC shows two cop cars parked on the shoulder. This is exactly where a bicycle would be, so these cars are actually making it less safe for everybody by forcing that bicycle into the traffic lane, endangering them and the cars coming up behind.
Ten years ago today I stood on a beach on the island of Cousin (Wikipedia info) in the Seychelles, idly wondering if Y2K could bring down the global air traffic systems, thus preventing me from leaving five days later. Sadly it was not to be, so back I came to Canada to the relatively mild but still cold to me winter of Victoria.
This new years I have been nowhere so exotic, as I work through my Geography undergrad. The past ten years have brought a lot of changes. I still live in Victoria, although I have lived in ten different houses over as many years.
I am excited for the new year. The world is looking brighter now, with the finishing of the bike master plan coming this spring, another school term towards my degree and more. I will refrain from making any predictions, but I will say that I agree with the Oak Bay News editorial, especially the last line:
Will our so-called “green” municipality take steps to increase the number of designated lanes for cyclists in 2010?
Here’s to a new year!
Councillor Nils Jensen, a major sponsor of active transportation projects in Oak Bay, has decided to ask council to create a bicycle advisory committee for the municipality at this upcoming council meeting on Dec. 14th. Much like the City of Victoria’s Cycling Advisory Committee, the goal would be to help council with both policy and engineering direction for bicycling in the muncipality.
If passed, Oak Bay would join fellow municipalities Victoria, Saanich (combined bicycle and pedestrian), North Saanich & Colwood. Both View Royal and Esquimalt had cycling advisory committees as late as 2000, but I can find no record of them since then. The Highlands has a Trails Advisory Comm. (PDF), but no specific cycling one.
The meeting will be held at the Municipal Hall (2167 Oak Bay Avenue) at 7:30pm. It is important to show council how important many people support such a motion.
The Times Colonist is running a series of articles called Outlook 2010, covering a vast variety of issues around Victoria. Two today caught my eye:
We think that in order for downtown to be a smart, livable downtown, it needs to be more people-oriented than it is car-oriented
In other news, everybody’s favourite forestry company property developer Western Forest Products is off selling land again (Times Colonist), this time in the north Island area. This as the CRD has now drafting a new bylaw governing the Juan de Fuca lands that include those WFP is trying to develop.
What really gets me about these removals from the Tree Farm Licenses is that are an explicit violation of the social contract that timber companies signed up to when they took on the TFLs. In return for access to Crown lands for forestry, the companies had to operate local sawmills and manage their private lands “sustainably”. Guess the second two parts of that agreement have kind of been forgotten, as the Times Colonist article says,
Cash-strapped WFP wants to concentrate its forestry operations on Crown land and needs capital to renovate its mills.
This kind of bait and switch isn’t exactly new, as the Dogwood Initiative points when looking at the Dunsmuir land grant for the E&N.
In a slightly better note, they have discovered a use for broom: biomass fuel (Goldstream News Gazette). While that broom is going to other places, I wonder if enough broom could be pulled out of some of the other parks in the region to feed Dockside Green’s biomass plant. As far as I know, they are still looking for biomass to burn, a task made harder by the lack of sawdust and wood chips from the shutdown of many of the mills on Vancouver Island.
Last spring, my great-uncle (my maternal grandmother’s younger brother) died. As part of his legacy, he requested a bike rack be installed in his home town of Port Alberni. At his memorial service a few months back, the rack had been installed in front of the Cup & Saucer Eatery but the memorial plaque wasn’t. Today it has been:
If you want to visit it, the rack is right in front of the green roofed building:
While some poor CRD staff get to deal with sewage, others are much luckier, working on the new Bike and Pedestrian Master Plan. As was reported in our local rag, the public kick-off events for the plan were earlier this week, although some of us were “lucky” enough to get involved a bit earlier. For my sins I have become part of the Citizen’s Advisory Committee, one of two groups to advise the CRD and it’s consultants.
First up Monday night was a short meet and greet of the aforementioned committed, before the public advocacy session. The committee as a whole totals about 20 people, with representatives from many groups the GVCC, Capital Bike and Walk, Roads, Rails and Trails, Bike to Work Society and others I am surely forgetting. Oak Bay is fairly well represented, with myself, Lesley Ewing and Gerald Smeltzer, who wears dual-hats, both the Oak Bay Bicycle Master Plan core team and the Oak Bay Community Association.
The main part of Monday night was actually the public advocacy session, attended by 70+ people from all stripes, although the crowd was heavily tilted toward bicycle advocates, a trend that continued the next day. To start the evening off, Tracy Corbett, Senior Manager of Regional Planning at the CRD, pointed out this isn’t the first bike plan the regiona as a whole has created, showing the 1897 bike route map seen on the right. This is also about the era that bicyclists where leading the fight for paving of roads, something forgotten in the recent celebration of the 100th anniversary of the first concrete road.
But the highlight of the night was a talk by Scott Bricker, Executive Director of the Bicycle Transportation Alliance, an Oregon bike advocacy group that has made great strides in making Portland and the rest of Oregon the bicycle-friendly place it is. He stared off by stating the core principles of the BTA:
While obvious on the face it, these core principles evolved to become part of the official Portland Bicycle Master Plan. Beyond core principles, he spoke extensively about to advocate effectively, including such truths that businesses are some of the most effective advocates of bicycling and that you need both the bicyclist in the suit and the more fringe elements some of us would rather go away.
As a wrap up to his talk, he gave a quick top 10 list for what makes a good regional plan:
Overall, it was a great night. Thanks to the Road, Rails and Trails people for bringing Scott to Victoria to talk with us. Of course, this was only day one of two for those of us on the citizen’s committee, as well as the Gil Penalosa talk on Tuesday evening at UVic. More on both of those later.
This weekend in Centennial Square the Greater Victoria Cycling Coalition and a whole host of community partners, including Safer Cycling Oak Bay, are hosting Velo Victoria: a celebration of bike culture. The festivities start up at 7pm on Friday night, with movies and music. Saturday morning comes the kids bike decorating event followed by a bike parade for kids, a place to get your bike fixed up, consignment sales and more. Check out the schedule for full details.
Safer Cycling OB will be there to talk about our upcoming bike master plan, which we are still deep in data collection for. We are still looking for volunteers to help with counting, so if you are interested, drop us a line.
It has been a long time since I last posted, but I haven’t been any less busy. Today was case in point, as I helped out with the Greater Victoria Cycling Coalition‘s “booth” at the MEC Bikefest in Market Square, one of many that MEC plans to hold across the country. Aside from the GVCC, on hand were the Pedal to Petal composting people, Moksana Yoga, South Island Mountain Bike Society (SIMBS) and bunch of smaller outfits.
Like any good bike event, free tuneups were had, this time by no less than three different groups, including MEC itself. This begs the question whether MEC will get into selling bikes, to which the answer is “it depends”. Speaking with an MEC staffer, here in Victoria we are unlikely to see MEC enter the market anytime soon, due to lack of staff and space, not to mention the massive amounts of competition already here. However, you can already buy bikes from their Vancouver & Toronto stores, with more on the way.
All in all, we had a blast. The weather was great and lots of people stopped by, including one of the people from the Santa Barbara Bicycle Coalition who was making his way back down the coast by bike. You can see more pictures in my 2009 MEC Bikefest Flickr set. See you all tomorrow at the Organic Islands Festival.
If you are looking for something interesting to do this summer, why not volunteer? There are a lot of places that you can do it, but here are a couple that might strike your fancy:
July 1st – Canada Day Picnic on the Gorge Waterway Park with the Greater Victoria Cycling Coalition – 10:00am – 4:00pm
The GVCC is looking for people to help at their mobile information booth, otherwise known as “the whale”, probably because it handles something like one. At least 4 volunteers are needed, although the more the merrier.
July 4th – MEC BikeFest in Market Square with the GVCC – 10:00pm – 3:00pm
As with the Canada Day event, they are looking for people to help out at with “the whale”. This is MEC’s first event of its type and is designed to attract the bicycling members of MEC. This is a great opportunity to connect with this potential membership base. At least 4 volunteers are needed, although the more the merrier.
If you are interested in helping out with either of these events, contact Darren Marr at dkmarr@shaw.ca by Saturday the 28th.
July 25th – Luminara in Beacon Hill Park
The Luminara people are looking for more volunteers to help out with setting up and taking down the lanterns as well as other work. If you can’t volunteer on the 25th, there might be spot still available in the days before. Contact Audrey Deutschmann at volunteer@luminaravictoria.com or 250.388.4728 ext. 130.
August 2nd – Self-Transcendence Triathlon and Duathlon in Elk Lake Park
They are looking for people to marshall foot and bike races. You need to be there by 7am, so this is one for early birds. Email info@scmt.ca or call 250.592.6211 for more information.
If these events don’t do it for you, Volunteer Victoria’s Volunteer Database is the clearinghouse for all sorts of interesting volunteer jobs, both this summer and ongoing. Have fun and happy volunteering!
Spacing Toronto, an excellent blog by the equally excellent people who create Spacing magazine, is running a well written piece on new approaches to street design. The key point made is that what we have done in the past, both being car-centric and using cookie-cutter designs isn’t going to cut it anymore. They use the example of Annette St. in Toronto, which was to get bike lanes but then was downgraded to sharrows instead. Very much the Monterey Ave. controversy last summer (Committe of the Whole minutes: Aug 11 & Oct 6).
Complete streets are something I have mentioned here before and I truly hope they are catching on around here as well. San Juan Ave isn’t the only street that Saanich is working on and the CRD is working on their new Bike/Pedestrian Master Plan. Here in Oak Bay the Bike Master Plan a group of us are building is ticking along quite nicely, but we are always looking for more people. Email the projectteam if you want to help out with bike counts, mapping or anything else.