The whole debate over putting in turnstiles on SkyTrain has been boiling along for a couple of years now, with TransLink insisting for the most part that it’s not cost-effective (it would be more expensive to put them in and maintain them than the fares you recover) and the public + former minister Kevin Falcon, who just couldn’t stand the idea that punks were getting away with not paying their $2.50. (And it appeared to me that Vancouver was in the unfortunate position of being a middle-sized city, with no clearcut model on whether it should have turnstiles or not. Smaller cities almost never do, not worth the money. Big big cities always do, definitely worth the money. Vancouver stuck in the middle.)

I had a hard time keeping track of what was actually happening, but it appears from this morning’s announcement as though things really are moving along in that direction. News releases not my preferred mode of communication, but I know the transit junkies will love this.

TransLink selects companies to propose Smart Card / Faregate
system for transit

Three consortia that supply smart card electronic fare payment systems and faregates to some of the biggest transit operations in the world have qualified to submit proposals to supply a Smart Card and Faregate system for TransLink, to be in operation by the target date of first quarter of 2013. The three groups are:

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This is not news to any parent with children under school age, but the childcare situation in the city (province/country) continues to be the equivalent of an unseen Hurricane Katrina, an ongoing disaster that never seems to get fixed. My son is 27 now so I’m well past the childcare stage, but I’ll never forget the sense of complete desperation that finding childcare used to induce or the relief when there actually seemed to be sane, rational, affordable help provided. The then $35-a-week all-day summer daycamps provided by the park board was one of the positives.

I still find it odd the way governments pour money into so many other endeavours, but nurturing children between the ages of zero and five continues to be an area where parents are left to flounder in the open seas with such restricted help.

I remember an editor of mine long ago saying there had to be some kind of kickbacks or fraud going on in a city with so many construction cranes on its skyline. My response was that I had never heard a whisper of that because developers were too preoccupied with the city’s form of institutionalized kickback, i.e. charging developers massive fees in order to process their applications.

However, it seems that (alleged, not proven yet, etc etc) individual enterprise may not be dead after all, according to this tantalizing story from Kevin Diakiw out in Surrey.

I fear that Michael Geller is starving to death on his visit in China, due to a lack of internet connectivity. Here is compilation of a couple messages he has sent out this week and I’m adding a link to his blog post at the Vancouver Sun.

This is quite the popular place for Vancouverites these days, for those who didn’t know. The city of Vancouver sent over its sustainability demo house that it had open at the Olympics and a veritable parade of people from here are making there way over. Among them, Roger Bayley of Merrick Architecture, the design manager for the Olympic Village, is there talking about it as a model of sustainability. But now, heeere’s Michael.

Hello  family and friends…sorry there are no interesting blogs yet, but I cannot write my blog from Shanghai….nor can I get into facebook or twitter!  So I will have to make alternative arrangements.  However, I can say the Shanghai Expo is quite fantastic, and almost surreal….I’m not even Chinese but I am proud for them.

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The announcement is at 10 and here’s what I know so far, which was in the Globe this morning

TransLink is pretty darn happy with itself these days, winning awards for service-in-the-face-of-crushing-Olympics-crowds and other categories. This came out earlier this afternoon.

Transit numbers after the Games:

You came, you rode, you kept riding

While TransLink earned worldwide applause for its performance as part of the Transportation Plan during the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, one question lingered: would that momentum translate into increased use of public transportation options once the Games were over?

Newly released statistics suggest the answer is ‘Yes’.

Revenue ridership during the month of January rose a respectable 3.1% from January 2009, and then in February, Games Time usage pushed that figure to nearly 22.9 million — almost 51% higher than the previous February.  Then in March, ridership hit 18 million, an increase of 19.3% over March 2009.  Some of the increase was due to the additional riders attracted to the Canada Line before and during the Olympics.  The newest SkyTrain line carried 2.49 million riders in March (not counting those transferring from South of the Fraser bus routes, which had formerly travelled into downtown Vancouver).  A sizeable amount of the remainder also likely reflects people who made the switch to other parts of the transit system during the Olympics and, finding that it worked well for them, stayed on after the Games.

“It was important for the future of Metro Vancouver that we do more than move enormous numbers of people during the Olympics.  It was important that local residents see what their transportation system could do,” says TransLink CEO Ian Jarvis.  “Many found out that there are alternatives beyond driving alone in a vehicle; there’s walking, cycling, ridesharing and especially, that our integrated transit system is a surprisingly viable option.”

Levels of transit service have been growing steadily in Metro Vancouver over the past five years, reaching its current level – the highest ever – at the end of 2009.  TransLink’s current budget enables the Authority to maintain that number of service hours; the integrated system is able to handle these increased loads with the capacity added last year and flexibility.  The Service Rationalization Initiative currently underway over the next 18 months will identify ways of further optimizing TransLink’s resources, system-wide.

Maintaining ridership after the Olympics, coupled with the highly successful TravelSmart program, are key factors in achieving the region’s goal of increasing the share of trips by walking, cycling and transit to more than 50% of all trips by 2030.

The 10 acres of land that the Squamish own near Burrard Bridge became an object of curiosity this week, with much talk about the development that they have planned there for some time in the future.

Don’t expect anything soon. I talked to other municipalities who have worked with the Squamish and they say things proceed with caution after lengthy internal processes about the right way to go. But it is interesting to see what their preliminary thoughts are — and who is advising them, like one-time Stephen Harper ally Tom Flanagan. His paper for the band is here.

I wrote a story for the Globe on this Friday, which somehow isn’t on the website, but here it is.

Much is at stake for Squamish in launching ambitious project, on a site big enough to house another Olympic village
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It was packed last night at the Robson Square Theatre as people came out to hear the debate over whether and where the Vancouver Art Gallery should move to, along with contributing their own opinions.

Fourteen people spoke in all. Seven were outright in favour of the gallery moving to a new site, including documentary film-maker Michael Cox, who said he’d come in against the move but been convinced that it needed to move. Another two people offered qualified support for a new site, saying that the gallery should either share it with other cultural institutions (Sean Bickerton) or split its collection between two sites, the existing one for more historical work and the new one for one contemporary work (volunteer Cathy Burrell).

Noted architect Bruno Fresci suggested expanding into the Erickson’s courthouse and getting the offices now there to move elsewhere. UBC architecture professor emeritus Andrew Gruft suggested gutting the existing courthouse and building something new over, around and under it. Brenda Burke said the gallery needs to convince her and others that it can serve the people who can’t afford a $21 entrance fee before it asks them to pay the taxes to support a new building.

All in all, a wide-ranging discussion, which Globe reporter Marsha Lederman has detailed more of here.

And just to give you a perspective from outside that room, here’s my most recent column in Vancouver magazine, where I talked to people elsewhere, including the director of the National Gallery in Ottawa and one of the VAG’s major supporters in Toronto, about the VAG and the debate swirling around its potential move.

This debate is so mesmerizing because it really is about how we think of Vancouver and how we imagine it in the future. Artist Ian Wallace mentioned several times that Vancouver is a frontier town that needs to take the next step into the future, although being a frontier town, it tends to be conservative when faced with change. Andrew Pask from the Vancouver Public Space Network provided an interesting insight into the past about the Larwill Park site where the gallery’s directors want to move it. While some say that would remove the gallery from the centre of town, he pointed out that Larwill Park used to be a major public space that hosted city demonstrations and protests, military displays, and carnivals. It could become a locus of that kind of public gathering again.

What has become clearer to me as all the points of view roll out is what should be (and should not be) explored more.

It seems to me, if the gallery is going to make its case to the public, it has to prove:

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I ran into Penny Ballem at Bob Rennie’s UDI speech at the Hotel Vancouver yesterday and was surprised when she waved a booklet of bus tickets, saying they were her way of getting around these days. I’ve only ever seen her on her bike until now. What happened, I wanted to know, thinking perhaps she’d decided the traffic in Vancouver was too awful or the status of her job required something more formal than rubber boots and a bike.

No, alas, Ms. Ballem has suffered the awful fate of hundreds of cyclists in this town. Her yellow Brodie Energy mountain bike was stolen from right in front of the security office at city hall. She parked it at the bike rack around 2 p.m. a couple of weeks ago and saw it again at 4 p.m. But when she came out at 10 p.m., all that was left was her Kryptonite bike lock, twisted like a pretzel.

She hasn’t bought a new one yet because she hasn’t had time. And I got the sense that she isn’t sure she’s going to find something else that fit her so perfectly as the Brodie that she’s had since 2003. So if anyone sees it (it also has an MEC rack on the back with “a little cushioned thing for milk”) around town, they could think about returning it. Who knows? Perhaps your tax bill would be forgiven for the year.

The trial for the Dunsmuir bike lane (soon to be followed by a trial Burrard or Thurlow lane, is my guess) is being voted on tomorrow morning at the 9:30 committee meeting, item 4 on the agenda. I think there might be some strong opinions on this (a joke, get it?) so I’ll get the ball rolling with this comment sent to me by someone planning to make a presentation tomorrow. City report: DUNSMUIRBIKELANE

My submission is to bring to your attention the omissions in that report that makes the conclusions included in that report questionable.

Impact on congestion and pollution

There is no discussion on the impact on traffic flow, resulting congestion and increased pollution from the proposal to remove vehicular traffic lanes on Dunsmuir Street.  The report identifies that turning from Dunsmuir street will become more difficult but does not make any attempts to deal with that problem.  Further, the report indentifies that buses will be negatively impacted but fails to consider the impact on bus commuters.  This shows complete lack of preparation on how to deal with congestion or even most rudimentary estimate of the extent of the gridlock.  The Council is being asked to take on the responsibility for the worsening of transportation infrastructure without being given any reasonable estimates how much worse off will the commuters be.

No consultation

The Council is being misled that the Staff conducted broad consultations with various stakeholders.  The report devotes most of its space to conversations with the Bicycle Network Subcommittee – a group that is biased in its support for dedicated bicycle facilities.  68 out of 1000 surveys that were returned from local businesses indicate how flawed and ineffective your communication methods were.  Delivering a brochure to an employee of a business along Dunsmuir street without ensuring that the owners are reached for their comments is a waste of taxpayers money and your staff time.  Finally, you will read about the online survey that was flawed by not controlling for multiple responses from the same IP address and the fact that the survey was broadly publicized among cycling activists but no similar effort was made to reach delivery companies, taxi services and bus drivers operating in Vancouver.  This show the failure on the part of the Staff to provide the Council with the broad and balanced feedback from the public.

Pressing funding needs

Considering the lack of documented public support for this project, failure to consider the impact on the commuters and businesses and the $800,000 price tag for this project and contrasting it with the financial challenges facing the Council it would be prudent to reallocate this funding to the Public Libraries or the Vancouver Fire Department to compensate them for the cuts that they suffered in the current budget.

Respectfully,

Maciek Kon