Anyone reading this blog likely loves words. Many of you, I know from personal emails, particularly love words in books. So the transformation of libraries in the last decade (pushed by the information flood available from Google, pulled by the cool book-marketing ideas of places like Chapters) has not gone unnoticed: more space for computers, […]

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This out today from the NPA, an announcement about two more park-board candidates. Now, the party needs to find more school-board candidates. At the moment, it doesn’t have enough to form a majority there, even if every one of its candidates was elected. Vancouver — NPA Mayoral Candidate Suzanne Anton and the rest of the […]

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After listening to screaming debates for a year about Vancouver’s separated bike lanes, I was intrigued when a news release crossed my screen recently announcing the opening of two lovely new bike bridges in Surrey. Made me remember that it’s not just the green fanatics in Vancouver who are promoting cycling but other municipalities elsewhere. […]

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Love this kind of stats analysis that tells us how the city really works. Chad Skelton at the Vancouver Sun looked at transit use, broken down by census tract, to find out which neighbourhoods use transit the most. I’m sure that he, like all of us, can hardly wait til 2011 numbers start coming out […]

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Everyone thought that it would be a simple solution for conflicts over dogs in parks: Off-leash areas. Then, when it seemed like that wasn’t quite enough, some fenced dog parks. But no one’s happy with that either, as I discovered when I got assigned to research this story. The Vancouver park board, Metro Vancouver, and […]

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Good column by Vaughn Palmer about the back and forth that’s been happening between the Christy Clark government and the group of people who represent the thousands of municipal politicians in the province. You can understand why city councillors might be feeling a bit wary of the province weighing in on how they run their […]

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Every new news bulletin from England seems more unbelievable — not to mention the news flashes from Philadelphia and Chicago about curfews being imposed there to prevent rioting. As I read the latest comprehensive story, I can’t help thinking of comparisons with Vancouver: the media fascination with the Twitter/Blackberry-led revolutions; the immediate jump to all […]

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The city’s 35-page housing plan is rich with tantalizing one-liners about new things that are going to be tried to create affordable housing for working people squeezed out of the market and homeless people just squeezed. I’m working my way through, line by line, and came across one on page 31 that said five neighbourhoods […]

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The New Yorker has a good round-up review of the latest spurt of books about cities, a popular topic these days as more and more writers weight on how cities should work in the future, are working now, didn’t work in the past and so on. One of the constant themes I’m struck by when […]

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We the media tend to focus on pedestrians killed or injured in Vancouver, except for rare, dramatic cases. But the reality is that, year after year, more pedestrians are killed and injured outside Vancouver proper, a point that I made in looking at the region’s record in a Globe feature on the weekend. I also took […]

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