Stephen Rees's blog

San Francisco Chronicle

This new piece today updates what I wrote recently about Cindy Chan Piper and Vauban near Freiburg. There is a nearly car free community planned one and half miles from  a BART station on the east side of San Francisco Bay. It is to be called Quarry Village.  

While some may say they are wiling to walk twenty minutes to get to good transit service, I note that “Shuttles would ferry passengers to the campus and BART.” 

In Vauban, an electric streetcar runs through the community’s only main street and connects riders with downtown, a university and several business parks. At Quarry Village, a main public transportation line would be more than a mile away.

“I’m skeptical that you can eliminate cars in a development that is not directly on top of transit,” said Jeff Loux, a land-use expert and UC Davis professor who has visited Vauban. “You have to make the alternative almost as convenient and, hopefully, cheaper than cars.”

I must say that based on my personal experience I tend to agree with him. I have lived in a variety of places – including those a 15 minute walk from a tube station. Indeed one of the big issues at my late mother’s house in the outer suburbs of Essex was the commuters who would park outside her house as there were not restrictions there as there were closer to the station.  Yes there was a station car park but you have to pay for that. Even drivers will walk a ways to get free parking. But they will not walk very far. 

It is also not yet built, so all we can say at present is at least someone is trying. But I think we need to acknowledge that we can do very much better in planning our suburbs. Of course in Metro Vancouver that is not going to happen south of the Fraser, since we are going to expand the freeway – and build new roads and a new Port Mann Bridge. There are vague promises of transit sometime in the distant future – but absolutely no commitment at all to expanding the operating funds of Translink. The senior levels of government are still stuck in the mindset of capital spending to cure the depression, with tax cuts for the well off the only fiscal policy and bailouts for incompetent automakers.

I wish the developers well, but I do think we need to see something much better – and a lot more of it. I am not going to get excited about one, so far unique, exception to a depressing rule.

Vancouver Sun

Of course this is exactly what opponents of the Gateway always said would happen. 
 

Artist's rendering of a proposed $170-million, 600,000-square-foot shopping mall near Abbotsford's Mount Lehman interchange.

“The potential regional draw for that centre is enormous,” Abbotsford Mayor George Peary said in an interview about the $170-million, 600,000-square-foot Shape Properties development, dubbed Abby Lane.

“It’s huge and it’s got amazing freeway access. I think this will be the largest mall in the region. It will be relatively easy for people to get there from Langley, Chilliwack and Mission. Millions travel that freeway and they’re all potential customers.”

And for the Mayor that seems like a Good Thing. For many however, it seems like a very Bad Thing indeed. For a start the freeway between Langley and Abbotsford runs through what is currently green space. In many parts of the world that is seen as a desirable quality – and there has been legislation (in the UK and other places) to stop “ribbon development” and the gradual coalescence of places into “megalopolis”. That indeed has been one of the main principles in regional planning of both Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley.

But also very significant is the recognition of the traffic generation this kind of development produces – which is something that the Gateway proponents have tried to ignore or at least downplay: “it happens anyway”. Well you might try telling that to the stores that will close in those places. The amount of time and money that people have to spend shopping is finite. The money that gets spent in Abby Lane won’t get spent elsewhere. You can see this all over North America – in fact, thanks to the economic decline of recent years, the process has accelerated. There are already too many shops – and older malls and town centres have been in steady decline. Even in good times that happens – and one of the features of North American buildings is their very short design life. So when the two new plazas at No 5 Road and Steveston Highway opened, the shopping centre at Shell and Williams closed, was demolished and is now town houses.

Obviously if in future more people from Langley and Chilliwack decide to shop in Abbotsford that is a longer car trip than happens now. That means more pollution – both common air contaminants (the stuff that causes our current air quality advisory) and greenhouse gas emissions – that’s the stuff that means the glaciers melt and the pine beetle thrives. It is not only the polar bears that suffer! And note that this is happening beyond the reach of the Gateway project – which ends at the Langley boundary – although a new hill climber lane is being built westbound out of Abbotsford at present. So of course there will be even more pressure to widen the freeway through Abbotsford and upgrade the interchanges. That is the lesson of everywhere that has widened freeways – it creates the “need” for more widening and is never ending.

Well never ending up to now. Because the other thing that the Mayor is ignoring is that peak conventional oil has passed – and peak oil is close too. So there will not be lots of cheap gas for all those car trips. And maybe in future even the charms of yet another corporate clone big box “power centre” will be much less if if costs too much to get there. This development might not be such a good idea after all. It will certainly cause others to close – but in the not too distant future we may well not be quite so keen on shopping. We may prefer to find happiness in other ways – and relearn how to make things last longer.

It is certainly a choice – and the last election showed that most people are not yet willing to make that change voluntarily. Which means when it does come they are not going to be very happy about it at all. And  George Peary could well be the target of their wrath.

Richmond News

I covered this during the election campaign when the Green Party held a media conference at Garry Point. I am pleased to see that the City of Richmond is also determined to fight this daft idea.

The problem is that “the pipeline through Richmond is subject to a provincial environmental review.” Which means that no matter how bad the idea it cannot actually be stopped by this process – though some applicants have been sufficiently shamed to withdraw. All a provincial EA gets to do is require “mitigation” or change some details – like alignments. The worth of the proposal itself is never tested or questioned.

The proposal is also based on the untenable idea that demand for aviation fuel at YVR will continue to grow. That simply cannot happen. Firstly, peak oil means that in future there will simply be less fuel available for aircraft. Currently there is no viable alternative to kerosene for jets – though Virgin is hoping it can get some biofuel into the mix, that in itself is problematic, and not necessarily carbon neutral. Air travel is in decline around the world, for when times get tough a lot of travel turns out be unnecessary. We are going to have to get used to the idea that importing fruit and vegetables, as well as fresh cut flowers, by air was always an extravagance – and now one that we cannot afford. 

But secondly the Fraser River still has some salmon runs. They may be pale shadows of what they once were, and more open pen fish farms are going to be an even greater challenge to young fry trying to migrate. But an oil spill would cause incredible damage to an irreplaceable habitat – and many species would be put at risk. And for what? So we can save a dollar or two on a trip to Cancun?

Women’s Transportation Seminar Speaker Series 3 June 2009
Cindy Chan-Piper Translink Governance: The First Year

Held in the KPMG training room in a high rise office block downtown, I think this must be the first WTS meeting I have attended. Apparently, men are welcome. I heard about it through the Institute of Transportation Engineers, and recognised many people – either former or current Translink staff members. All of us curious to find out what goes on in the Translink Boardroom now that all meetings are held behind closed doors. Ms Piper’s opening was that she would reveal no secret inside information on Translink.

She started with why the Board was changed: “I wasn’t there. It wasn’t working. Mayors are elected to represent their constituents so they tended not to think on a regional basis, there was too much testosterone: they were not rational and there was too much silo thinking.” While there was “anger and angst about firing the Board” that was now declining.

She spoke about how she was hired: she saw an ad in the newspaper and was initially intimidated, but submitted an application on line. There was a screening panel (chaired by Gordon Price) And after being called in for interviews there was a short list then “more process” from which the Mayor’s council selected from 12 candidates for 9 positions. One third of the Board is replaced each year so while she initially had only a one year contract she recently got renewed for 3 more years. Skip Triplet moved out of area and was replaced by Howard Nimton.

CEO Pat Jacobsen resigned within a month, she was “worn out” and while the board looked for new CEO, Dale Parker the Board Chair became an interim CEO.

Translink has “lot of projects and no stable funding – we’re broke – hence 2010 budget plan.” While there are a lot of ambitious projects the province’s transit plan, there is no funding. Initially the new board faced a lot of uncertainty: there were “big thick board packages” which overwhelmed them. Previously Translink worked like a municipal system with “all decisions made by the Board. “Staff wanted to give us all the possible information but we tried to get them to give us less. We changed the team: we wanted to work with the executive and tried to get VPs to sit at the same table with us. They preferred to sit not at the table but round the outside of the room. In the end we had to take the chairs away.”

“We are now feeling more comfortable. We changed procedures, paring down the board package and flattening the hierarchy. We are still presented with Provincial initiatives without funding – all of these announcements but show me the money!”

“I have been trying to get across the idea that land use and transportation are intimately linked but it is hard for them to understand. This basic stuff was a challenge but the new CEO Tom Prendergast gets it. We needed to run Translink like a business. The board is good at that fiscal stuff but I am good at that mushy stuff “how does it feel on the ground”. My fellow directors getting it now, as I am starting to hear my own words coming back at me: they buy into it now. We are making progress. The board is healthy: we don’t agree but we do respect each other. A third party evaluation of the Board was positive and we get to consensus.”

The next challenge was to overcome anger of Mayors. They were invited to meetings and Dale Parker visited every one. “We tried to include them in the budget process.”

“We brought in a whole bunch of governance structures”: it is now a hybrid between a commercial and a municipal organsiation. Most of the Board “feel really good with numbers” – kpis (Key Performance Indicators). New guidelines were introduced and a peer evaluation process so that there is a “lot of accountability”. She also claims that the Board is “transparent within mandate”. Meetings have to be private because they are talking about land, employees etc but “all minutes are open within a month or so (or is it 2 weeks?)”. Since there is no public or press present there is no need for “grandstanding”. “All have the best interests of the region at heart. What we discuss does not get misconstrued in the media and discussion is more heated than it would be if media were present.”

Her list of initial Board achievements included “we put together the 2010 Transportation Plan” (i.e. the plan for the two weeks of the Olymics) and are now “Halfway through the corporate strategic plan”. But most of the work is mainly about finding the funding. The 2040 Plan has been published and the next 10 year plan “shopping it out”.

“The surplus will be gone by 2011: without an additional $150m we have to cut services. We need $450m to meet what province wants. The Mayors do not want it to come from property tax. If we compete for those dollars everybody loses. We are looking for diverse sources of funding.”

The Canada Line is ahead of schedule and under budget as is the Golden Ears bridge “quite an accomplishment based on my experience” and “we are starting a smart card which will provide much need data and will be easy to use. We have projected a deficit this year. Transit Police have been built up, we have a new communications system there has been fleet expansion both for bus and Skytrain, and a new GPS driven on board annunciator.”

Q & A

1. Gavin Davidson: Only questions worth $50m or more go to the Board – this means that issues around pedestrians and cyclists do not get to the Board

Under $50m the decision goes to the VP. We only look at “major” projects. This is because we believe in teamwork, trusting your executives. It is not that we didn’t want to hear about pedestrians and cyclists and if it is a policy decision we do but the details are at the VP level. We don’t want to micromanage. If there is something you think we should see, bring it up as a policy question.

2. Tanja Baja – will you use open architecture for the smart card?

We have not made a decision yet.

Does the Board understand the difference between car pooling and car sharing?

No its a work in progress

3  One of three people from Bunt & Associates pointed out that in the UK “gas tax” is much higher “also pays for health – more equitable” [Actually taxes on fuel all go into the central government's "consolidated fund" - there is do dedicated taxation in the UK]

” We will look at anything – if its money we’ll take it. But we are limited by legislation. There was a lot of controversy over our proposed cell phone tax but lots of US cities do that.”

4. Jan Pessaro – what would the board decisions be if we had an all female board?

“There’s three of us. There are not many women in transportation and we do value the testosterone. We do not want just one point of view. We need more female directors for a better balance but I like a mixed board.”

Gordon Price intervened “What other voices are needed?”

Another land use planner – younger people – younger men are open minded. We have one women VP but she is the best performer

JP “How might we approach Translink to advance women?”

Talk to Tom Prendergast

5. A planner from Surrey asked what is the policy for density around rapid bus corridors?

“You are not going to get a station if you don’t put in density, but we are not going to dictate specific numbers. We need evidence that density will increase.

The planner replied that somebody has to come up with some kind of numbers

Her reply seemed to me to indicate that the decision would turn on existing ridership so I intervened and said that we had to get away from serving density to shaping growth.

Ms Piper replied “I think we should shape growth. We need to think on a regional basis. Metro just released its growth strategy: it is not clear and we need more information. We have to work with metro and municipalities. We can’t keep going with silos.” However the new VP of planning has only been on board for 3 weeks.

6 A planner from the City of Vancouver said that a recent study of pedestrians showed that people will take a 20 minute walk for a frequent transit service, and that “old thinking” around transit staions and a 5 minute walk needed to be revised. She asked “How well does the Board understand the municipal professional staff (as opposed to the Mayors)?”

“They are learning but they do not go out to Maple Ridge: they don’t know it on the ground

Ms Piper then spoke about a recent Globe and Mail article of a town in America where everyone takes transit or cycles and there are no garages. I think she was referring to the article about Freiburg in Germany, recently reviewed here, in the New York Times. There is nowhere like that in the US. Even there,  there is a large multi-storey car park, and though car ownership is low, it is not zero.

She apparently thinks that there will be dense development corridors along the frequent transit network. While she may be right I suspect Translink will first have to rethink what it means by “frequent”.

7 Finally Gordon Price asked the question about Gateway – “how you integrate that into your frequent transit network?”

“We are not thinking about that. It’s not our project. We should. I don’t think we should be doing Gateway but that’s just my personal view.”

==============================

On the whole I was more favourably impressed by Ms Chan Piper than I wanted to be. I think if she were running for office I would probably vote for her. But some of the quotes above show that she has gotten too used to speaking “off the record”. For instance, if you reversed her comments about Sheri Plewes – suppose there were just one male VP and he was “better than all the rest” – or had (as Ms Plewes did) taken on three major positions at the same time – would that not have been seen as empire building? And does having a women only board mean there would not be a diversity of views?

The professional Board actually cannot achieve what it has set out to do for, as she noted, the legislation not only lists the potential funding sources, it also caps them. And Kevin Falcon has gone on record as deprecating the idea of new revenue sources. Besides, even if you have multiple streams of new revenue, when the economy tanks they will all dry up. This is what is happening now across the US. Multiple transit agencies have higher than ever demand at the same time as their revenues have dropped – and all are proposing to raise fares and cut service as the only way to balance the books. While she is probably right about property tax that is obviously the target the province has its eyes on. And, as it happens, when my old employer the GLC got control of London Transport, it decided that raising the rates (as we called property tax in the UK then) was the only way to get the system working properly. That of course brought about the Thatcherite backlash that destroyed not only regional government but also replaced the rates with the “Council Tax” – a draconian, regressive poll tax. Because senior governments cannot tolerate municipal governments that demonstrate independence.

That list of achievements does not impress me at all. Most of those initiatives were started by the old Board years ago and simply got completed in the new Board’s first year. They cannot take credit (or blame) for the Canada Line or the Golden Ears Bridge. And they were arguing about IT “architecture” back when Translink started in 1999.

The simple fact remains that the current Translink Board is not democratically responsible but is spending tax payers’ money. That is intolerable. They are not a business but an Authority, and they are not accountable, or open, or “transparent”.  They may be well intentioned but that is not enough. And yes, politicians have to “grandstand” because they face re-election – but that also means they can be replaced by the people . If you want to know what a professional does, when he has control of a revenue source and no need to concern himself with voters, read the biography of Robert Moses. And be afraid – be very afraid. Ms Piper is one among nine. They may work by consensus now, but when the crunch comes she will be over-ruled.

Vancouver Sun

Does it really? Not surprisingly the comments that follow the on line version are (so far) universally negative. What Translink is trying to do with its latest exercise is to avoid the fate of the vehicle levy. Ever since it was created the regional transportation authority has not had adequate resources to do the job it was assigned. Previously the Vancouver Regional Transit Commission took the (quite reasonable) view that gas tax only collected in the region was “regional revenue” and therefore counted as the local contribution. The province took the view that since they collected the gas tax it was a provincial contribution. The VRTC simply banked the money until the argument could be resolved to their liking. The creation of the GVTA was in response to regional pressure – and the gas tax was raised but also split. So now 6c a litre  is raised regionally and a further 6c comes from the province’s gas tax: at the same time the region also has responsibility for downloaded roads and bridges. To get the City of Vancouver on board (since they did not have provincial roads to be downloaded) some municipal arterials were added to the Major Road Network. The City – being mostly unable to expand any of its roads – wanted to spend most of its allocation on other things – which did not go down too well with the other engineers who control these things, but it did not matter much as the Board itself got almost but not quite eliminated when it showed dangerous signs of independence over the Canada Line. So the reformed SoCoBriCTA now has a “professional” board (i.e. one that does as it’s told) and the Mayors only get lumbered with the unpopular bit – raising fares and taxes.

The consultation process is unsubtle. Either you allow a package of fare and tax increases or services get cut. There is no other alternative and none of the questions are exactly open ended. The idea is, I think, that the only people who can oppose a tax increase have to consent to the service cut.  You can already see that the Sun readers who like to comment feel that cost cutting need not necessarily affect service – or that they have no service anyway so are unfazed by the prospect of cuts. The timing is crucial. Translink has already spent a great deal on capital projects like the Canada Line and the Golden Ears Bridge. So those things will not be part of this process – and indeed were never seriously subjected to any kind of objective public process. But in order to pay for what has already been committed, Translink only offers cuts to transit service as an alternative to more taxation.

To some extent this does reflect the present reality. The Province is in control of major capital projects like freeways and new rapid transit lines. It – and not Translink – decides what gets built and when. Which is why even though there is still no progress on the Evergreen Line we are here debating yet another subway for Vancouver. That comment thread has got very long – not surprisingly – but the real issue (“how would you like to pay for that”) will be after this post. I will be interested to see if there is the same level of interest for this one.

I also wonder if the “consultation” meetings will actually get much notice. My bet would be that there will be a fare increase and a property tax hike – because that can be “blamed” on the Mayors – but no new revenue source because that would require provincial action. And now is not the time for tax increases: actually it never is. I can already find the provincial speaking points – they were using them during the recent election. “We have been spending more on transportation then ever before. Major transit expansion under way. $14bn transit plan” yadda yadda. Nothing about operating funds of course – all capital funding. Most of it supposedly free money from P3s (hah!) Very much the same as has been happening to the south of us. Every day my Google news search of “transit” has another agency raising fares and cutting service in the face of increasing demand, with the only new money being available for “shovel ready” capital projects. Meanwhile maintenance is neglected and a “state of good repair” remains an unreachable goal for most systems.

Doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome is a workable definition of madness. Yet look what is happening here. Do you expect it to be different this time?

The Guardian is hosting a documentary  by Nick Broomfield about the ‘Kingsnorth Six’, the environmental activists who scaled a tower at a coal-fired power station in protest against pollution in 2007. The resulting court case drew support for them from leading scientists, and their subsequent acquittal proved historic and changed government policy.  I would like to embed the video here but apparently I can’t do that so here is the link. The video is about 20 minutes but is well worth your time.

You can also read the story and download the music. 

Al Gore famously said that he did not understand why people were not chaining themselves to power stations. Actually I think that may well be because the elites who control our society have come up with fairly effective strategies for convincing people that protest and direct action are pointless. After all action at Eagleridge Bluffs did nothing to stop an absolutely needless desecration of a unique habitat. And last week Betty Kraczyk once again lost another of her court cases over that protest. The timing of the protest at Kingsnorth was crucial. It came before an election and at a time when the environment seemed to matter to people i.e. before the great financial crash.

The people in this video talk about why they felt they could not wait for an election. “It would have locked us in” they say. Well that is what our decision to continue to widen the freeway will do to us – with similar consequences for greenhouse gas emissions. Interestingly it is only CO2 that they talk about, whereas obviously there is a lot of very nasty stuff indeed going up that chimney. And Jim Hansen came over to defend them.

At one time I would have supported some kind of direct action to try and stop the Gateway – even though I knew it would have been a quixotic gesture at best. And by the time we did do the democratic right thing, the attention of the voters was elsewhere. I very much doubt we could have secured a jury trial (something the English prosecutors must now recognize was a strategic error) but even if we had, the probability of twelve people understanding the legal principle that Kingsnorth established being repeated here is slim to none.

My admiration of this small band of ordinary people is boundless. I know I could not physically have done what they did – but what they risked was much greater. The important point is that they did actually change government policy. I do not think any action – no matter how bold or well timed – could change policy here: while Britain’s “New Labour” may be “Thatcher in trousers” they are still in the social democrat tradition. The BC Liberals – and the federal conservatives – are quite a different matter.  

More sobering for us is not only the Gateway going to proceed but the possibility of some kind of democratic breakthrough has also vanished for another generation at least. For us, the time came, and went: and we missed it. And now we have to live with the consequences. We have governments here that are determined to widen freeways, build a pipeline and a terminal to export oil from the tar sands, expand the production of oil, gas and coal, allow open net salmon farms on wild salmon runs, allow free range to run of the river power no matter what the consequences – and so it goes. The “Best Place on Earth” will be pretty much trashed by the time any change can happen. No matter what else the rest of the world decides to do, for Canada it will be business as usual for the foreseeable future.