Another strange winter of tussling between the city and province over funding winter-shelter beds.

As my story here outlines, the province is going to open some winter-shelter beds, but not in the areas where city staff say they’re needed.

The last two years, the city has asked for — and eventually received, after some struggle — money to operate four temporary winter shelters in areas outside the downtown core: Mount Pleasant, Cardero near Stanley Park, Kitsilano, and Granville Slopes under the Granville bridge.

City and housing staff say those shelters helped encourage people to come into shelters who previously refused to go near the downtown or Downtown Eastside and wouldn’t use the province’s “extreme-weather” shelters because those shelters only open late at night and on nights when the temperature drops to freezing. (Most preferred to find their own nooks to curl up and be asleep long before the extreme-weather shelters opened.)

But Housing Minister Rich Coleman says those aren’t needed any more, since about 400 spaces have been provided in social-housing projects that have opened up in the past few months.

City staff say the problem is

1. Current shelters are still full to the brim and there are people out on the streets.

2. Those housing projects are only taking in small numbers of the people who are the long-term homeless in the city.

3. The shelters outside downtown help staff establish contact with a whole group of people who won’t go out of their existing neighbourhoods, helping break the “culture of homelessness.”

Stay tuned for more on this. There is a major struggle going on, as the city and province struggle over, not just these shelters, but who is getting the precious rooms in the new social-housing projects.

CORRECTION: I’ve had a couple of phone calls this morning about the information that Surrey is asking for the temperature criterion to be changed for opening the extreme-weather shelter beds. To be clear, it’s not BC Housing that decides on that, it’s the council in conjunction with its local housing partners.

The city’s news release was a bit ambiguous on that.

This is an idea that Adriane Carr talked about during the election campaign, saying she had heard from bus drivers (or at least one bus driver) that it made it harder for them to keep to schedules and manoeuvre when they had to deal with bike-riders on major streets like Broadway.

I also saw this suggestion pop up in the city’s transportation-plan forums.

And I’m sure many of us have had the experience (I know I have, multiple times) of watching traffic jam up behind a cyclist who has decided to take up a lane on 12th or Hastings or Granville during rush hour, as people are too scared to swing around because of heavy traffic in the lane to their left and also too scared to try to squeeze past the cyclist in their own lane.

I can’t figure out why those cyclists do it. The one I saw yesterday on Broadway was a 50-something woman (wearing a straw hat) pedalling between a B-line rapid bus and me — something I’ve always heard all but the most testosterone-laden cyclists try to avoid.

And all she had to do was go one block over to 10th Avenue, where she could have been on far quieter and safer street that is so dominated by cyclists that cars now avoid it. But no, there she was, causing cars to swerve around her on a busy arterial. The question: Should she be banned? Or simply encouraged to move to a proper bike route?

While everyone is distracted by the visions of being able to swim to the downtown along viaducts converted to pool lanes, courtesy of the re:CONNECT design competition, city planners and a consulting team have been working on potential real land-use plans for the area under and around the viaducts.

There’s an area about half the size of the Olympic Village, mostly owned by the city, that could be used for all kinds of interesting things.

The architecture/urban design firm of Perkins + Will plus the engineering firm Bunt & Co have been working with the city on what that could possibly be.

But it sounds like, from what I heard over the past few days from Councillor Geoff Meggs and city planner Brent Toderian, that it has to be something the public thinks is a benefit. (See details in my story.)

There’s a new thought for everyone. Until now, people have been darkly suspicious about the talk of doing something different with the viaducts.

One suspicion has been that it’s all about giving Concord Pacific, which owns a small chunk of land around the viaducts and then much more to the south in Northeast False Creek proper, some kind of windfall.

Dark Suspicion #2: It’s all part of the radical greenie plot to get rid of roads altogether in the city, starting with the viaducts and eventually continuing on to all pavement.

Few, except for a few residents in small Crosstown cluster, have seen that there could possibly be a benefit.

But the idea of using that land to create something with public value could turn the conversation. (I personally am intrigued by the idea of putting housing back in the couple of blocks where it was taken away, when the viaducts were built in the 1960s, right next to Chinatown. That’s where former councillor George Chow’s family lived when they first moved here.) Or perhaps not, in this paranoid town.

BTW: I was completely unable, in researching this story, to get any firm idea when the city’s planning work would come to fruition. Originally, Brent Toderian told me that the aim was to try to provide clear options in time to mesh with the city’s Transportation 2040 plan. Then later he said that, while the city would aim for that, it’s important to get the options right and that he wouldn’t rush the planning department into coming up with anything prematurely.

Just because I know this will set off a big argument. And that’s fun + instructive.

Here you go, Bob Penner’s analysis.

A reader — “Rick” — sent me this breakdown, which I like because it gives a sense of how councillors ranked in different parts of the city. It seems to show that the NE votes straight Vision/COPE slate, the SW votes straight NPA slate, and it’s the other three quadrants of the city that mix things up.

Ok, I’m a geek.  But I’ve wondered about that whole E/W and N of 16/S of 16 divide for a while and wanted to see what the poll results said about what kind of council 5 areas of the city would elect.

My 5 were: the Downtown pen (West End, Coal Harbour, Yaletown) NE of Main & 16 (Strathcona, DTES, Granview, etc) NW of Main & 16 (Kits, Pt Grey, Fairview, etc), SW of Main & 16 (Kerrisdale, Shaughnessay, Dunbar, etc) and SE of Main and 16 (Sunset, Langara, Collingwood, etc)

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There are so many tea leaves to read in the election results and many of you have been busy at doing that through this blog and many other outlets.

Here are two of the stories I wrote in the last couple of days. One is about Vision supporters seeing this solid second win for the new party as a sign that there has been a permanent shift in the city.

The other is about the unpleasant side of that win for Vision’s ally, the Coalition of Progressive Electors, which now has to assess what went wrong and what to do about it in the next election. That’s not going to be easy, because there are so many explanations of why they trailed their Vision partners by enough of a margin that NPA candidates got in ahead of them.

As I note in my story, there’s the Tim Louis explanation: COPE didn’t sound independent enough.

There’s the David Cadman and Bob Penner explanation: Knocking off David and replacing him with Tim gave many people the impression the whole party had turned left and made more centrist Vision voters less likely to vote COPE. Cadman was like COPE’s mayor, with tails that could bring others along.

And there’s the Ellen Woodsworth and Nathan Allen explanation: COPE couldn’t compete with the Vision and NPA spending. (But they both spent like crazy last time too. So the corollary here is that the Occupy Vancouver circus took up so much of the media’s attention that none of the parties could get any attention for their announcements. But the NPA and Vision could compensate by spending on advertising. COPE, with a budget of only $341,000, couldn’t.)

A few bits and pieces that I didn’t manage to squeeze into these two stories but have been thinking about or had observed.

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Many of us feel today as though we’ve stopped pounding our heads against the wall, with the cessation of crazy emails in our inboxes and hysterical ads on the radio containing increasingly bitter accusations from the NPA about Gregor Robertson and Vision Vancouver.

Sounds as though we weren’t the only ones feeling that way, to judge by this farewell-to-politics letter from NPA candidate Sean Bickerton. I wondered how he felt about the campaign, given what a civil person he was in the years I knew him. Now I know.

In case you didn’t know the news from last night.

More of my thoughts to come in this blog post, but I have to run off briefly and wanted something up for the commenters to start on.

That’s what it could come down to, folks — the 5,000 votes that make the difference for the bottom five spots on council. More here.