Stephen Rees’s blog

Miro Cernetig talks to Larry Beasely

The ostensible reason for the article is that we have moved up another of those best city lists.

These rankings take our attention off the question that’s really at hand: With a million more people expected to be here by 2030, how are we going to stay on the cutting edge of urban planning that’s put us in the livability big leagues?

Larry of course is building not one but two cities in the dessert of Abu Dhabi and

“I’m learning we’re not as far ahead on some of this stuff as I thought we were,” he says.

Which is refreshing. The problem with these rankings is they have gone to our head - or at least to the collective heads of the planners. And upstart furriners like me who keep saying “The Emperor has no clothes” are simply not listened to. But Larry, with his OC and new perspective will be.

The trouble I have is that they think it is about buildings and especially cultural institutions. Which seems to me to reflect the priorities of Marie Antoinnette.

There are some very basic things we need to be doing - and architects are not going to be the most important component of that, neither are the problems or their solutions the exclusive domain of the City of Vancouver. No doubt working for a Crown Prince with few budget constraints is a heck of a lot easier than herding cats, but in a metropolitan area being run (and ruined) by the province, that is what has to be done.

For starters, there is the problem of housing, and the related issues of mental health and welfare. These are basic social problems - and in my mind the quality of society is measured not by its glitzy buildings or cultural institutions, but by the way it treats its most vulnerable citizens. And right now the only thing that seems to be grabbing our attention is how to conceal the extent of our social policy collapse during the weeks of and around the 2010 Olympics. Lack of affordability of homes to buy is actually the least of it. We are supposed to have free at the point of service for public health, yet people with multiple diagnoses are simply turned away from treatment. We shy away from creating more and better public spaces for fear that the homeless will move in. We cannot buy a decent bus shelter or bench in case somebody finds it a better place to sleep than a doorway. And instead of building more public housing, we simply buy up a few more roach infested SROs, and do a half hearted job of trying to clean them up, displacing more people in the process. And actually destroying some of the best public housing we have, and rebuilding it to provide more marketable homes!

It is not the buildings that are the problem. They simply reflect what we are willing to pay for. And the answer here at present seem to be not much since the land costs so much. But it is the spaces in between the buildings that matter - and in the words of that tired old cliché we have private affluence and public squalor. We devote more space to car parking than almost any other activity. Our streets may be broad, but the sidewalks are mean. And public places where people gather are few and inadequate. And we concentrate on Vancouver - and especially downtown - as if that were the only place worth considering.

And I haven’t even started on our infrastructure. “World class” cities surely need good waste disposal (liquid and solid) as well as reasonable movement alternatives for goods as well as people.

Oddly enough there is no need to “push the envelope” with any of this, the solutions have been around for decades. We have just turned our back on them in our obsession with finance and profitability, as if that is the only way to measure worth. How can we boast of our GDP per capita - when so many of those heads have no pillow?

By Jeff Nagel
Black Press

Jul 07 2007

Groups representing the disabled and other users of HandyDART are applauding TransLink’s move to overhaul the custom door-to-door transit service.

Right now the GVRD is carved up into eight zones, with eight different contractors running HandyDART service. Administration, dispatch and other functions are heavily duplicated and trips across zone boundaries can be complex to coordinate, with lengthy delays.

By 2009, a simplified three-zone system is to be in place that will operate much more like a single unified system.

A new office will offer a single point of contact for users to register, book trips and get information.

Shorter advance booking times and online booking are among the promised advantages.

“These improvements are like a dream come true,” said accessible transit advocate Laurie Hill.

The changes are mapped out in TransLink’s new Access Transit Plan, the culmination of a more than two-year process, which was approved last week.

Reform of handyDART is long overdue. The system has been overloaded for years, and many trips cannot be made. The system has not been able to cope, and the public health bureaucracy has taken advantage of its existence. People who find they cannot get a ride give up trying to book one, so the statistics for rejected rides are useless. Many people who use the service are frail and vulnerable, and many fear that if they complain, their requests for trips will be rejected. This belief may be founded in their experience of the institutions where they are - or were - housed, and have nothing to do with HandyDart at all, but it is a perception that is hard to change.

Since there were always more requests than capacity, so a system of rationing had to be devised. This was based on giving priority to regular trips - those needed by people who work, attend post secondary eduction or need to get medical treatment. It is this last category that has ballooned. Partly because the health system has been closing beds, and relying more heavily on “care in the community”. For the hospitals, getting long term patients out of acute care beds into care facilities has been a high priority, but the same people still need care - and often have to be transported from the facilities where they now live to where they can be treated. Centralization of care was often seen as a way of achieving economies of scale even when patient care actually suffered due to the arduous nature of the journeys patients had to make to get treatment. But the other reason for the growth in health related demand is that other trip purposes do not get priority - so if you want a trip to go shopping or get your hair done, hard luck. Smarter people make sure that their dentist or chiropractor is located in a mall and multi task on the priority trips they can book.

Nearly 70 per cent of the service is consumed by medical and social services trips.

And an estimated 12 per cent of all custom transit trips carry patients to local hospitals for kidney dialysis.

Margaret Birrell, executive director of the B.C. Coalition of People With Disabilities, said area health authorities should contribute towards the cost of medical trips, estimated at $10 million per year.

I know where she is coming from, but this is not going to happen. The best parallel I can think of is the food bank. It was supposed to shame the Province into reversing its cuts to welfare. Didn’t work. Politicians have no shame. The food bank is still with us twenty years on, the welfare cuts are worse than ever but the food banks’ use increases and fewer people actually starve to death. The Province uses the food banks’ existence to avoid raising welfare rates. The Health Authorities have cut back on the transport provision (”Not part of our core remit”) because HandyDART picks up (some of) the slack.

And anyway, the high percentage of medical trips is the inevitable outcome of the priority rules. But that is not something that they can now get out of.

No one ever looks very hard at who is booking trips. Frankly, one view is that the service is so bad that no-one who had any other choice would want it and therefore it is self regulating. Other systems have used more rigorous eligibility criteria. Calgary looks at every trip and the options available, and will tell people to use conventional accessible transit if that can cover the trip for that individual. For one thing, this develops self reliance and confidence - but that is well, outside handyDART’s remit. (Calgary is an integrated local authority that provides both transit and social welfare services.) Basically the response up to now has been that eligibility is something that is too sensitive to take a chance on changing.

The introduction of low floor accessible trolleys will have helped quite a bit. This is removing the last major barrier to accessibility in terms of vehicles on the bus system. Of course, that is also one of the reason why the new buses have fewer seats. The low floor design means the wheel wells protrude - loss two seats each. Then the designated area for wheel chairs has tip up seats - and loses two or three seats when occupied. (The other big loss is at the back where perimeter seating is used to encourage people standing to move to the back.)

Community Shuttles should have helped too, but they have been used to provide fixed route small bus services, not the flexible “closer to your door” service originally anticipated. Their main function has been to release big buses for busier routes - and we have plenty of those now.

The taxi system is also supposed to be able to help - but this piece is long enough already. The sad story of the accessible cab business I will leave for another day.

Plenty of other barriers remain: lack of sidewalks, lack of curb cuts, no space at bus stops to deploy ramps, no shelters and so on. All these issues are outside Translink’s remit - they fall to the municipalities and performance there is variable - from dismal to non-existent.

Reorganising the number of contractors will help a bit, but the fundamental issues remain - and will continue to cause concern. One day, someone will have to grasp the nettle.

Jake Rupert, The Associated Press

Published: Friday, June 29, 2007 in the Ottawa Citizen

After a finding that OC Transpo drivers not calling out bus stops breached a blind man’s human rights, transit officials are instructing drivers to do so and are seeking $8 million to install automated announcement systems.

“The technology required to automatically announce stops will be phased in over three years, beginning in 2008,” says report from city transit staff on the issue. “In the interim, we will maintain vigilance in fostering good customer service by announcing major stops when possible.”

The report, which will be tabled at the city’s transit committee next week, comes in response to a ruling by the Canadian Transportation Agency in April.

Another one of those “quality of service” issues - and because it touches on the case of a person with disabilities something is being done about it - in Ottawa. But the practice of calling out stops matters to many people, not necessarily those who may have recognised disabilities. If you are travelling in the evening, or when it is raining and the bus windows are all steamed up, or you are in an unfamiliar part of town, getting the driver to let you know when your stop is coming up can be very important. Of course, that means the driver has to remember which stops have been asked for. The #98 B Line did have an automatic annunciator but that died with the rest of the GPS system. (In London the drivers call the automated voice “Sonia” - because she “getsonianerves”)

So far as I am aware it is pretty hit and miss here - but this should set a precedent and other transit systems ought to sit up and take notice. But I would bet that because our provincial human rights watchdog is now almost totally useless that Translink will try to duck this one.

But they shouldn’t. And they have to realise that making the system work better for people with disabilities makes it better for everyone. Yes there are trade offs. You loose some seats with a low floor bus and some time at stops when someone in a wheelchair gets on and off. But you make that up in much faster loading and unloading for everyone else, and people with heavy bags and strollers thank you too.

Besides, the days when we treated some groups of people in ways that separated them from the rest of society should by now be long over. Equal access for all should not still be a campaigning slogan but a universally accepted principle. It is to the shame of the transit system here - and in Ottawa - that it is not yet.

I do not read ASL.

My late mother and my late brother were both deaf. They were not born deaf, but had a familial condition which worsened as they aged. I probably have it too, as I have tinnitus, but all that does at present is annoy me and block some high frequencies. But I appreciate how frustrating it is to be deaf. As with so many disabilities, the real problem is not the condition itself, it is the attitude of other people. Deaf people are typically treated as though they are idiots - simply becuase they have difficulty understanding what we say - even though we cover our mouths when we speak, or mumble, or turn away while speaking.

But the biggest issue that I am aware of is the lack or inadequacy of subtitles. The advent of teletext in UK transformed my mother’s life: she could now get subtitles for most tv programmes - and subtitles that she could actually read. DVDs now usually have subtitles. Digital tv can add subtitles. But they are very rare on internet videos.

I have noticed that US broadcasters and some governments at least are now providing ASL - sometimes.