I’m still awaiting the scintillating guest blog posts I’ve been promised, but, in the meantime, here is the open forum that I always set up when I’m on vacation and therefore only blogging erratically. Your burning thoughts on any Vancouver issues welcome here.

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And here is my account of nine days in Paris, using Velib for various trips around town (though not all). Completely anecdotal, with no statistics except my own experience. So, I love bike-share systems. They make it so much easier to hop on a bike and get around than the usual procedure of tracking down […]

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For those who haven’t guessed already, I am away from the city right now and will be away until the first week of July, as part of my annual ritual of city observation elsewhere. (Known to others as “a vacation.”) I’ll be posting some stuff of my own — been riding a lot of bike-share […]

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Let it not be said that a stone has been unturned in the City of Vancouver’s quest to find patches of ground on which to build housing. The latest suggestion has been housing on top of a fire hall that has to be rebuilt. The idea of building on top of city property isn’t new. […]

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If you were trying to get a hotel room in Vancouver from Thursday on last week, good luck. They were filled up with city councillors, mayors, city managers, and city financial officers from across the land, coming here for the annual convention. While they were focused on garbage, sewers, housing and roads, we in the […]

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Vancouver’s official advocate for the homeless had her last day at city hall Thursday, along with her birthday. My story about her in the Globe is here but I wanted to add a few words. I started covering city hall for the Vancouver Sun in the fall of 1994 (when I was a toddler, of […]

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Sometimes as a journalist, you write about things because you have to. Other times, you get to write about what you love. This is my story about the new old corner store. Many thanks to Andy Yan for generating the map and data on their locations. (BTW, a piece of information I didn’t squeeze in […]

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Last week, the Vision council brought out the first recommendations from its Engaged City Task Force, with more heavyweight ones to come later on. The report with their recommendations is here and my story, one of several done on the day, is here. A few of the quick starts here inspire me with a certain […]

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This just out from the city’s communications people: The City of Vancouver wishes to advise residents near the lower Fraser River that on Friday, May 24 there will be several planned and authorized helicopter low altitude fly overs. The flights are all part of two filming projects underway around the city. The pilots are not […]

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I post this story with trepidation, having observed already on a few Twitter exchanges that the cycling crowd immediately jumped into trashing these businesses for not being progressive enough while the predictable anti-bike crowd weighed in. Can I just reiterate one more time. These businesses ALREADY HAVE 4,000 bikes a day going past them, so […]

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