There was a time when I didn’t know much about Vancouver city hall except where it was on the bus route. I hadn’t even thought about becoming a journalist in 1975 and was just starting my journalism career in the 1980s. I never imagined that I would ever be interested in things like zoning, bylaws, development, density, single-family housing, lengthy council debates, or any of that. It was all a bunch of old guys in suits doing boring things, as far as I knew.

But there was this writer who wrote columns on the last page of Vancouver magazine all about city hall, from 1975 to 1991, and he made what happened at 12th and Cambie sound interesting, as interesting as All the President’s Men (almost). There were dramatic stories and personalities and skulduggery and people making pompous speeches.

Sean Rossiter made me care about city politics and see that what was going on there was funny, tragic, important.

Others in town knew him much better than I did, and so wrote more detailed tributes to him last week upon his death. Charles Campbell’s is here. I just want to thank him again (I got to do it once in public a few years ago) for blazing the trail, making people pay attention through his careful, descriptive, sharp reporting.

His family and friends are getting together at Sun Yat-Sen Gardens tomorrow (Thursday, Jan. 15) 4:30 – 6:30, for those who haven’t received the word privately yet.

I really related to this story, since my old clunker of a ’98 Chevy Venture did not pass its last AirCare test last year, forcing me to spend a few hundred dollars to get that dashboard light to go off.

So, as the story says, (for those of you for whom clicking on a link is just too time-consuming), Metro Vancouver air-quality staff are noticing more old cars, cars whose owners cheerfully note that they haven’t passed AirCare, are starting to show up in the ads. A quick search in Craigslist was all it took for them and me to find them.

Now, they’re wondering if this is going to mean the return of the beater to the roads. Shurely not a Cuba-style automobile demographic, I’m thinking, but perhaps a few more vans like my ancient Chevy. (It’s gone now, btw.)

Much hay was being made a week or so ago about the fact that NDP MLA Andrew Weaver wasn’t gung-ho supporting a Yes vote in the transit plebiscite. But the local Green Party rep, Adriane Carr, said she plans to support it in a motion coming to council next week from NPA Councillor George Affleck.

My story here, for those who missed it while in a shortbread coma, on why they are pro-Yes.

Some people feel I haven’t done enough to document the personal lives of our politicians. So here is my new year effort.

Green Party Councillor Adriane Carr is vacationing on the Sunshine Coast until Jan. 19, thanks to a very convenient city council schedule that has the first meeting not on the schedule until Jan. 20. Vision Councillor Heather Deal is still recovering from a crippling knee injury incurred during election door-knocking (sidewalk, a twist, a popping sound).

And, contrary to the nasty little rumour passed around all last fall in emails, conversations and even brown envelopes dropped at doors in the west side, the mayor is not dating a well-known person in the development industry. Instead, according to extremely reliable sources (this is not gossip), he is currently seeing Wanting Qu, a 31-year-old Chinese popular-music star who has a lot of buzz in Vancouver. For more info on Qu, see here and here.

I will leave it to others to do the heavy lifting and ask what the implications are for Vision’s Chinese voter identification in the 2018 civic election or Canadian-Sino trade relations.

I am losing hours of my life these days, standing perplexed in front of rows of recycling bins, trying to figure out where to put the component parts of my garbage.

To make it more confusing, every place I go to seems to have a slightly different system. Just dumped off a bunch of papers at Langara College, where I teach, and which has a bin for ALL mixed paper, newspapers and regular paper. Just seems wrong to me, since I separate them at home, so I spend extra time studying the sign to make sure I have understood correctly. When I go to UBC, where I also teach, another system. When I go to a public festival or market, another system. (Fortunately, the Vancouver Folk Festival stations one or two volunteers at every row of recycling bins to help out with proper throwing away.)

All of that prompted me to start asking if anyone is trying to standardize the system or make it more coherent. And, to my amazement (my story ideas don’t always pan out like this), it turns out that very smart people are trying to figure this all out.

My story here in the Globe is all about how Metro Vancouver, Multi Material BC, and researchers/designers at UBC and Emily Carr are all trying to figure out how the best way to help people figure out, in split seconds, where to put there garbage. Pilots are coming to three communities — Penticton, Richmond, City of North Van — in the summer.

Why should only the paid media pundits get to do this? I’m sure this group has thoughts.

So do I, actually, but my brain is far too goose-and-turkey-logged to formulate them into anything coherent. But I can tell from the sporadic comments even over Christmas that many of you are still firing on all cylinders.

The housing non-profit Atira built a three-storey building out of shipping containers a couple of years ago. Now Atira is launching an even more ambitious effort, a seven-storey building composed out of 80 to 90 shipping containers.

My Globe story is here, with a render. You can also look at the rezoning proposal on the city’s website here.

Lots of reaction to this project. More than one person, besides Michael Geller quoted in the story, raised questions about whether building with shipping containers is any cheaper than conventional construction.

I didn’t get into it in the story, since that was focused on construction trends, but there is some dismay from some in the neighbourhood about the added stress and demand for more social services this will bring in a community that already has high demand for childcare, community-centre services and more.  Then others think this is just a bad area to be permanently housing women and children. And there have been some concerns about the height of this building, which will be backing onto an alley that has much lower houses on the other side.

All valid issues, but I know one of the ongoing problems with trying to create social housing is simply the cost of land. So where a city or a non-profit has land already available (which Atira does in the remainder of the lot behind the Rice Block that this project is planned for), that seems to trump all the other factors.

For those who don’t follow me on Twitter (are there any?), I was in Los Angeles recently. Yes, one of my favourite cities, which I’ll explain another time.

But while I was there, observing the anguish of house monsterization (a real word, it appears), the worry about gentrification brought on by bike lanes (a real debate, it appears), the angst over a developer building fortress-like apartments in downtown LA (a real architectural sin, it appears), I also had a chance to interview one of the architects of the coalition that helped get 67-per-cent approval for a half-per-cent sales tax in LA in 2008 to pay for $36 billion in transit improvements.

Denny Zane is one of those great old-fashioned American leftists, still fighting for the people. In his downtown office building, complete with a giant photo of a young Cesar Chavez, he talked for an hour about how to win the transit fight and why it’s important. Interestingly, there was a lot more focus, when he talked, about how important transit is to working-class people than I hear in debates around Vancouver (where the left and the NIMBY right seem to view it currently as some evil developer plot).

Here’s my story summing up his main points. More to come.

We’ll be hearing any hour now what the final wording and funding choice is for the regional mayors, as they head into the referendum. But all indications I’ve had the past two weeks is that it’s the sales tax only, as I wrote in my Globe story.

Fuel tax is seen as a losing proposition — revenues from fuel taxes are going down, as taxes plus other car costs are pushing drivers to drive less, buy more fuel-efficient cars, etc. A regional carbon tax would suffer from the same problems.

And a vehicle levy would be seen as penalizing drivers only, not the way to win a transit referendum. As TransLink surveys have shown in the past, people who predominantly drive tend to have more negative views of TransLink, are more likely to think money is being wasted, don’t have as positive views of transit as those who actually use it, etc.

So even though a sales tax has its problems, it’s spread around in a way likely to be perceived as more equal. (Yes, I know, transit riders will now be double-paying, through fares and the sales tax.)

And it seems as though Transportation Minister Todd Stone, after a strange wobble last week that threw everyone into a panic, is back on board (pun intended) with the general idea.

So the Retail Council of B.C. likely won’t be on side with this, and Langley businesses probably won’t be unhappy. But there are no great choices.

I know the mayors’ council and many others would like to move to a total road-pricing scheme at some point, i.e. billing people for their road use based on kilometres, size of vehicle, and time of day that they past through certain congestion points. A system like that could encourage people to travel during off-peak times to save money, which is as good as building new roads in terms of creating more capacity. And there’d likely be some kind of discount for people who have to drive, because there’s no decent transit in their areas.

But all of that will take time to figure out and the mayors figured they needed a money source they can tap into instantly, so the buses can be ordered, and the planning for the Broadway subway and Surrey light rail can start.

We’ve seen the announcement of the coalition supporting this emerge. Now waiting to see who will be lining up on the No or Nitpicking about Details side.

Okay, go ahead and comment. What more can we say?

The new mayors’ council is about to see this Friday the proposed preamble and question that will go to the province for approval. By next Friday, they have to sent their tweaked version on to the province and cabinet.

Everyone is gearing up to take on this daunting challenge — getting a referendum on a new tax or fee with only a three-month campaign in order to pay for a complex $7.5-billion, 10-year plan that promises something for everyone in the region.

I feel tired just thinking about it. But … we have no choice because this is required for all major public transportation projects in the province. Oh, right, it’s not. Anyway, here we go. Your thoughts.