Amid the 187 recommendations in the Transportation 2040 plan, I missed the idea of creating a greenway in the middle of the Granville Bridge, which I gather would run from Sixth Avenue on the south side to Drake on the north side.

There seem to be rendered images floating around here and there, which I’m guessing are from the city but somehow not attached to their Transportation 2040 information page. Here’s one.

Anyway, I’m wondering what everyone thinks of this. Is it actually useful to have people jog over to the middle of Granville for part of their journey and then jog out again? Or is this something that’s more in the nature of a big advertisement for a green Vancouver that doesn’t really add much to the cycling network?

I truly have no idea what the opinions are out there. I’m still recovering from the sudden discovery that the cycling lobby is opposed to mandatory bike-helmet laws, saying they discourage cycling — a debate I hadn’t heard a word of in the last five years of cycling arguments until this whole issue of mandatory helmet laws and the bikeshare system arose recently. So now I feel as though I don’t know how anyone feels about anything.

About 60 per cent of trips in Vancouver are now made by car. By 2040, the city wants that to be 40 per cent.

In spite of the never-ending debates about cycling, cycling represents the smallest portion of the various modes of locomotion that exist now and that will exist even in the foreseeable future.

Transit and walking are the big leaders, after the car, and will continue to grow by all accounts, especially if the city’s engineers and planners get their way.

For those of you who don’t mainline the city’s website info, there is actually a giant Transportation 2040 plan in the works, due to be finalized, after public input up to July 13. I realize this is a hopeless plea, but some of you might want to look at it and comment now, rather than phoning me up screaming two years from now, saying: “Did you know the city is planning to do X or Y?” Because I will have to say, “Yes, I did. It was recommendation #113. Weren’t you paying attention?”

Of course, with 187 separate recommendations, it is hard to pay attention to all of it. Therefore, as part of the “making things simpler” function that journalists are legally mandated to carry out, here are the things in the plan that caught my interest.

– A pilot “scramble” intersection somewhere on Robson, with more to come if that works. (A scramble stops all traffic and allows pedestrians to cross in every direction. Works best when there is an exceptionally high volume of pedestrians and not a huge number of cars on a major arterial.)

– Improvements to laneways to make them more pedestrian attractive

– Removal of rush-hour parking bans in curb lanes so they can be used more flexibly, i.e. for pedestrians

– More public restrooms, so walkers have places to, um, go while they’re hiking across town

– More rain-friendly designs for sidewalks and public spaces — awnings, canopies, shelters, etc.

– The creation of some pedestrian-priority street sections: Robson Square, Robson, Granville, Hamilton, Mainland mentioned as possibilities

– A “cycling comfort index” to rate streets

– A ciclovia — a big bike festival with streets shut down so people can ride around freely on them. (Went on one in Los Angeles recently — SO fun, but they needed more space. Streets were jammed.)

– Underground rapid transit along Broadway

– Rapid-bus routes along Hastings, 41/49th, Commercial/Victoria, Main/Fraser

– Bus stops further apart on local routes to encourage more transit use. (??? Seems counter-intuitive to me. I take local buses, not expresses, because it drops me half a block from my house.)

– An Arbutus/False Creek/downtown streetcar

– Elimination of minimum parking requirements for buildings downtown, close to transit or that are purpose-built rental

– Encourage developers to separate out parking and housing costs when selling condos in projects

– “Adjust” residential parking permits to discourage too much street parking.

I’m sure you all have noticed others.

For those who care about such things, in the agenda for tomorrow’s Metro Vancouver intergovernmental committee meeting:

That the Board authorize the Chair to appoint Metro Vancouver Directors to participate in
the following 2012 international conferences in accordance with the approved 2012 budget
and current travel policy:
· ICLEI/Metropolis Thriving Neighbourhoods Conference
Melbourne, Australia, November 12-14, 2012
· United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) Meeting of the World Council
Dakar, Senegal, December 1-3 or December 9-11 (tbc)
· 2012 World Urban Forum
Naples, Italy, September 2-6, 2012
· INTA36 World Urban Development Congress
New York City, November 11-15, 2012

And this somewhat more modest trip

Recommendation:
That the Board authorize Director Gayle Martin’s attendance at the Future of Libraries and
Cities Conference being held October 2, 2012 in Langley, BC at the estimated costs outlined in
the report dated May 28, 2012 titled Attendance at the Future of Libraries and Cities
Conference, October 23, 2012.

For at least the last year, every time I call up a commercial broker to talk about office leasing, I’ve been hearing the same story — tenants want buildings on transit.

It’s been anecdotal until now, but one company decided to do a more thorough analysis about those preferences and found that it’s more than anecdotal. My story here looks at some of the patterns that Jones Lang Lasalle found. As well, I talked to employers like Fluor Canada and Horizon Distributors about their decisions on where to locate.

(I also called Nokia, and got this strange message back from them, which I didn’t understand until today’s announcement about layoffs: “What I can tell you, is that our R&D operations in Burnaby is an important part of Nokia’s R&D network with some unique skills and responsibilities especially for 3^rd party application development and Nokia Store.”)

This also bolsters the argument that I got recently from a Vancouver land analyst, who said people resisting paying additional taxes to invest in new TransLink rapid-transit projects are cutting off their own noses. Those investments will get paid back many times over by the increase in land value around them, he said, as well as reducing some of the development pressure in the parts of the city that are currently transit rich.

Andrea Reimer’s been having a rough go healthwise. She was off for several weeks earlier this year with an infection, but seemed to be back and her usual energetic, tweeting self. Now she’s out again for several more weeks, I see from this Mike Magee note circulating around city hall.

As word will get out shortly I wanted to let everyone know that Andrea went back into hospital this week to deal with complications that arose from her earlier illness.   As you may recall she was in the hospital a few weeks back with a serious infection. She underwent very successful surgery last night and is feeling much better as of an hour ago when I last saw her (plucky actually).  She will be taking time off to get back to 100% and is looking forward to getting back to work after some weeks of recovery.

Rowhouses are a feature of most European and eastern North American cities. But they’re oddly missing in Vancouver — Vancouver, the city, that is.

As it turned out when I started doing the research for this story, there are lots of rowhouses — or a facsimile of them — being built in many of the suburbs around Vancouver.

Surrey, for example, saw 27 per cent of all the new housing build there in a rowhouse form. (So much for all those cranky types who think that every census showing people are moving to the suburbs is some kind of confirmation that it’s a single-family, white-picket-feence, triple-car-garage life they’re moving to.)

But Vancouver somehow skipped over them and, even though they’re clearly a popular form (7,000 built in the last four years in the region overall), the city still lags behind in latching on to this mini-single-family house that serves those who don’t want to be in an apartment but don’t want the big honking single-family yard and house.

As my story makes clear, plenty of people would like to build or buy more. But one thing that came through loud and clear to me, as I talked to most of the developers who do them, was that there’s not going to be a big rush right away. There are a lot of municipal rules in the way — no specific zoning for them, parking HAS to go underground in some municipalities — and, as well, developers have gotten very used to selling rowhouses as parts of stratas.

Many of them said they think that strata is the only form that allows them to build at densities that make the units affordable. Others said buyers actually prefer stratas in many cases, because then an unknown pool of people in the neighbourhood are forced to keep to some basic standard of maintenance. That’s not true with thee freehold rowhouses, where owners are free to maintain, landscape and paint garish colours as they wish.

Is Vancouver really such a strata-minded city as they think? I wonder.

The first open house for the viaducts (4-7 Tuesday in the Woodward’s atrium) was packed. Another one today and then Saturday.

Here’s what the proponents are saying that taking down the viaducts will do: create one great street instead of two half-used semi-highways, improve the park space, bring a grand ceremonial street (Georgia) down to the waterfront, provide two more blocks of (city-owned) land around Main to reconstitute housing that was once part of Chinatown, and not block any views.

I know not everyone agrees with that. I heard there were some rumblings of discontent at the open house. The floor is yours.

In case you missed it elsewhere, the report that recommends keeping the current separated lanes downtown.

No surprise. I couldn’t imagine anyone ripping out bike lanes anywhere without being branded a Rob Ford-loving troglodyte. The power of momentum. Plus, in spite of complaints from all and sundry that the lanes are frequently “empty,” they are not any emptier than many roads and sidewalks in the city.

The report also includes the rationale for why it’s impractical to re-introduce right-hand turn lanes off Dunsmuir to Seymour and Hornby even though 1. right-hand turns ARE allowed at Beatty and Homer 2. The bike traffic is lower at the Seymour/Hornby end of the street than at the Beatty/Homer end, which is closer to the viaduct. Not that I’m annoyed.

They cost $20,000 to $45,000 apiece. They’re built on some of the most valuable real estate in the continent. What are they? Parking stalls, of course, which a Metro Vancouver study examined in depth. (And I wrote about here.)

Some of my acquaintances have mocked me for writing what they claim is the most boring story ever, but I know that you, dear bulablogsters, will not see it that way. For people without a car who are forced to pay an extra $20,000 or so for a parking spot they don’t want or need, it’s not that boring.

However, as intuitive as it seems to reduce parking spots or at least tailor them to what actual residents want, I found people in the development community somewhat hesitant about any wholesale new set of rules. The biggest obstacle, at this point, is that municipalities say that developers have to nail down the number of parking stalls early, long before pre-sales marketing starts.

If developers were to try to amend that later, not only would it mean having to apply for a variance, but it could constitute a “material change” and possibly allow any buyer to cancel a contract. So a few bugs to work out here before we can all go on that parking-stall diet.

City Plumber was out of commission for a few months, for personal reasons that I think many of you reading this blog are aware of.

But the Plumber is back and panting to answer questions! The latest Q and A has just been posted. I’ve answered a few other questions the last several weeks either privately or in other blog posts. (Why is a streetlight being installed at this intersection, what is happening with the posting for a director of planning, etc.)

I still have a list of questions from the first rush but do welcome more. A hint: It’s nice for all concerned, but the Plumber especially, if you post an actual question rather than a political rant or a grumble disguised as a question.

Final word of advice: Commenters should consolidate their answers in one place. Got very confusing during the Wall Centre glass discussion, with people posting both under City Plumber and the main blog.