Category: Transportation

Health, active transportation and the city

That walking and biking both makes people healthier and helps with climate change isn’t exactly a shocker, but when The Lancet, a well respected medical journal, publishes a paper to that effect, suddenly it becomes news.  The paper, entitled Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: urban land transport, is part of series in the Lancet on climate change and public health. All of the papers and the accompanying commentary are actually available online, which is rare for an academic journal. Kudos to them.

Ironically, this paper comes mere days after the Oak Bay Council passed a watered-down motion to set priorities for funding various transportation options which explicitly mentions public health in its preamble:

WHEREAS climate change is an issue of vital local, national and global importance and local initiatives aimed at reducing greenhouses gases will contribute to protecting air quality and public health;

The original motion(PDF) was brought forward by Nils Jensen, always a strong supporter of active transportation, who is trying to get the municipality to set priorties in transportation planning. It also directed staff to see where the 2010 budget, already in drafting, could be changed to reflect those priorities and a report for the 2011 budget. Sadly this was too much “the cart before the horse”, as Councillor Cassidy, put it for some, so the motion was amended to merely list the four types of road users with no specific priority. Hopefully the staff report, which will likely be out sometime in mid-2010, will have some information to help sway council members.

Within the planning community, links between climate change and active transportation are already fairly well understood, with the Canadian Institute of Planning’s Climate Change Program, and the message from scientists to planners is that it is time to step up. We in BC are ahead of the pack in terms of planning healthy communities, with the Provincial Health Services Authority’s Healthy Built Environment program, something that caught the eye of the federal Public Health Agency in a report not too long ago. There are also dollars coming down the pipeline from the provincial government’s LocalMotion, which partially funded the Henderson Road bike lane project, and BikeBC programs.

Now that the links between climate change, health and active transportation are getting better known, the last thing we need is a reputable organization showing how having healthier, active and climate conscious communities can save governments money and keep tax increases in check to help sway those last few not yet convinced by the mounting evidence.

LA without cars

Michigan Central Station, Detroit (Photo credit: Matt Callow)
Michigan Central Station, Detroit (Photo credit: Matt Callow)

The subject of empty cities has been getting a great deal of attention recently, with the Life after People documentary and television series, plus the stream of pictures of abandoned buildings, both in Detroit from long economic decay, or newer houses left empty as part of the sub-prime crisis. Flickr’s abandoned pool is a great way to waste a few hours, as is Forgotten Detroit, although it appears that the latter hasn’t been updated in a few years.

But I think it is Tom Baker’s set on a modern LA devoid of cars that is the most haunting and provocative, hence the title of the post. LA, like Detroit, is a city defined by the automobile, although I think LA got the “better” bargain, as they got the sexiness without the industrial pollution of the manufacturing. Even But what Tom has proved is that hideous highways can be turned into art, as can be seen below,  one of the nine images he has stitched together with a great deal of patience and time.

Empty intersection (Photo credit: Tom Baker)
Empty intersection (Photo credit: Tom Baker)

Weekly news roundup

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:

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.

Ford saves GM bus

The GM bus in question Photo Credit: The Ford Foundation
The GM bus in question Photo Credit: The Ford Foundation

The Henry Ford Foundation is working hard to preserve a General Motors bus. This bus carries the serial number of #1132 and used to be part of the Capital City Street Railway Company or The Lightning Route, established in 1886, in the city of Montgomery, Alabama.

So why is Ford money being used to save this GM bus? Because one day in 1955 a woman decided that she didn’t need to get up just because of her colour. The rest, they say, is history.

Interestingly, the same year that the Lightning Route was being built, another street railway got it’s start up north. That was the Scranton Suburban Electric Railway in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Why Scranton? Jane Jacobs was born in there in 1916; who was later made famous by her opposition to Robert Moses in New York.

World Blog Action Day on Climate Change

Despite what a lot of people seem to believe, climate change is real. Thankfully, there are solutions to the problem. One of those is Blog Action Day, where blogs can unironically use electricity to talk about how to save the planet.The list of blogs from Canada is quite large, and there even a few from around our neck of the woods.

In a more concrete move, I will be at the Gaining Ground: Resilient Cities Summit in Vancouver next week. Thanks to the organizers for letting us poor students volunteer to save the cost of entry.

Speaking of Vancouver, the city of about to embark on a massive traffic calming scheme known as the Olympics (Globe & Mail). The first road closures start next month, with more as Olympics gets closer. While I expect a day or so of traffic chass, Vancouverites are about to discover that traffic demand is elastic, not fixed. Too bad it is unlikely that the Olympic closures will stick, as there is a real chance of real change being offered here.

Say goodbye to rapid transit in Victoria

So the new alignment study is out and it (Times Colonist, BC Local News), as I predicted, takes Douglas St to the Highway and then the E&N route. All is good except for one little detail: they ditched the centre running lanes for curb lanes. What a lovely disaster.

So lets count the ways they have set themselves up for disaster:

  1. Curb lanes will be slower running than centre ones, because there is simply more chance for cars to stop or slow the transit vehicle, be it bus or train. Centre lanes have a major challenge with stops, as they mentioned in the article by the BC Transit CEO and was the public reason that the Chamber of Commerce opposed it last time. However, many cities have solved this problem successfully, something the Human Transit blog points out.
  2. Where is the bike lane going to go? Sandwiched between the transit lane and the parking? Spacing Toronto has a good post about what they do in Copenhagen.
  3. Which brings us to parking. Are they going to remove the parking or take away a travel lane?
  4. Given BCTransit is likely to be choosing buses for this, how are they going to convince the ICF to let them pave part of the E&N?

That is a lot of fail. There are two open houses, one this Thursday between 4 and 8pm at the Colwood Muni Hall and another between 1 and 7pm on the 20th at the Victoria City Hall. I will be out of town on the 20th at the Gaining Ground Summit, but I hope I can come away with some answers after this Thursday.

My Great-Uncle’s memorial bike rack

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:

Memorial Bike Rack
Memorial Bike Rack
Close-up of memorial plaque
Close-up of memorial plaque

If you want to visit it, the rack is right in front of the green roofed building:


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Daily news roundup

  • The sewage issue continues to barrel along, with a decision expected by Wednesday. The latest twist is that a proposed plant may straddle the border between the new CRD land and the existing Saanich land. Both the Times Colonist and the News Group aka Oak Bay News have stories on this and if you want to
  • Although both View Royal and Oak Bay continued their composting trial, there is no sign of it spreading to other parts of the region. However, there are plenty of other options, as the Times Colonist pointed out today.
  • Due to a power failure, one of the keynotes at the just-finished Canadian Institute of Planners AGM in Niagara was done by candle-light. Unexpected irony as the theme was coping with climate change.

Transit & Rail

The ridership risk of introducing the 12 Kenmore is not that performance targets for community bus could not be met, but rather than at key school oriented times, community bus capacity would be exceeded requiring the introduction of conventional transit vehicles on this route.

  • Come January there will be a whole pile of new services, including the new Dogwood Line, late night buses and more service hours. See the Transit Commission report (PDF) for more. The Dogwood Line is the first attempt at a B-Line style bus route in Victoria, which is a good thing, especially given just how busy the bus routes to UVic from Downtown are.

Malahat crash shows need for better rail

Budd Car on Blue Bridge. Neither likely to be replaced anytime soon. Photo Credit Mick Hall
Budd Car on Blue Bridge. Neither likely to be replaced anytime soon. Photo Credit Mick Hall

The Malahat crash that killed at least one person is merely the latest in example of why we need to fix the rail link up the island. Imagine if this accident has involved one of the dozens of trucks carrying dangerous chemicals and gases up and down the island? The consequence are pretty horrible to think of. And as we approach winter, we are again reminded that the Malahat is one of the few places on the island that regularly gets snow and ice during the coldest parts of year, merely adding to the danger.

Thankfully the solutions are actually pretty cheap. Just rebuilding the track bed would allow expanded freight service and a modest investment in new passenger vehicles would make passenger trips much faster and more pleasant. None of these things have a huge price tag. The Island Corridor Foundation, a consortium of Native bands, municipalities and others, who own the trackbed and land have estimated the cost at a mere $30 million to rebuild the entire corridor to modern standards. This is just a little bit more than the cost of either the stalled Spencer’s Road or new McTavish Road interchanges. As for passenger service, the Ottawa O-Train pioneered the use of time separation to allow running of lighter trains on the shared lines. (There are some arcane North American rules about crash ratings for passenger trains running on mixed tracks, something Europe is not burdened with). The O-Train uses Bombardier’s Talent diesel trains (usually known as DMU, or Diesel-multi-units), which were tacked onto a German purchase. For more money numbers and and some interesting background info, I suggest Transport Canada’s case study of the O-Train.

Are we likely to see any of this in the near future? Well, BC Transit is busy spending that money it was given by the province to study rapid transit in the CRD and scuttlebutt says that at least some portion of the E&N factors into those plans. As for the larger corridor itself, the Cowichan Valley Commuter might spur some interest on the northern side of the Malahat. However, I am not holding my breath.

The new CRD Bike/Ped plan

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.

1897 Bicycling Map of Victoria
1897 Bicycling Map of Victoria

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:

  1. People like to bike
  2. People don’t like to bike with cars
  3. You need a dense network
  4. The network has to go places (that people want to go)

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:

  1. Engage (the public, businesses, etc.)
  2. Build support from diverse camps
  3. Take the short view (get things done quickly)
  4. Take the long view (think where you want to be 10, 20, 30 years from now)
  5. Take the heat (be out there to support politicians that support you)
  6. Tell the story (stats and stories are both needed)
  7. Be polite and respectful (be thankful)
  8. Be a regional plan (make certain it effects all parts of the region, leave nobody out)
  9. Chase the money (with money, nothing gets built. Be where the money is)
  10. Don’t forget fun

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.