A really thoughtful email came to me over the summer from Frank Ducote, a former Vancouver planner who now lives in a neighbourhood near the viadcuts, about the proposal to take down them down.

As I’ve said on CKNW in the past, this is a trendy idea that has spread from Seoul, Korea, and San Francisco, to every little burg with a highway on stilts. New York and Paris didn’t take theirs down, just transformed them into city walks. But there are consequences to removing part of the road system, as Frank details here.

He is not a believer, as are Peter Ladner and Gordon Price, that if you remove part of the road system that traffic will just disappear. (See Peter’s column here for more details on this.)

This is what Frank has to say:

I’m of two minds on this subject. First, as an urban designer, I’d like to see them removed completely, but there is a huge caveat involved. There has to be replacement vehicular capacity (i.e., streets) built to offset the loss. This is because there is absolutely no vehicular connectivity between the downtown “plateau” street grid and Northeast False Creek, between Pender and Smythe Streets. This forces surface traffic onto streets not intended for high volumes, like Keefer and my street, Abbott. (Carrall has been effectively removed from the network due to its conversion to a bike-oriented route.)

On the other hand, as a resident of the 500 block of Abbott Street, I witnessed what happened during the Olympics when the viaducts were closed and so were Pacific and Expo Boulevards. We had virtual gridlock 24:7 during that time. This is not a reasonable impact for residents of International Village and Chinatwon to suffer. So, again, if the viaducts were to be fully or partially eliminated, replacement streets (not just transit) will have to be created. Not an easy task given the grade issues noted above.

In additon, the elevted SkyTrain guideway should be reconsidered, since its low dip around Carrall Street is the sole reason Carrall Street had a “fishhook” curve put into its alignment in the 1980s. Ideally this street should be straight, which would require the guideway to be reconfigured somehow, presumably elevated a few feet, to provide clearance for the new (actually original) Carrall Street alignment. I don’t think TransLink will find this a compelling use of limited transit dollars, however.

So, unless something is also done with the guideway, there will continue to be a physical barrier betweeen those who, like me, live north of the viaducts and guideway and the False Creeek waterfront.

Relevantly, as a COV planner I collaborated with traffic engineer Lon LaClaire and fellow planner Richard Johnson to come up with the idea to reconfigure the Granville loops at Pacific. 10 or so years later that work hasn’t yet been achieved because it is to be paid for by recouped development income. I fear the same decision-making will occur with the viaducts – that there will be an unavoidable appetite for high density development to pay for all the infrastructure costs. The net result could be/would be simply be another major barrier (highrise condos) – perhaps even a more symbolically objectionable one – to False Creek for those communities north of the viaducts.

People identified as possible attack tweeters for the NPA are not too pleased about the email that went out recently from NPA campaign organizer Scott Harrison to them, as many of them had not agreed to do anything of the sort.

(This just in at 5 pm Wednesday from one on the list, Diamond Isinger: I have zero involvement whatsoever with the NPA. Currently, during this civic election, I’m not working on any campaign, with any candidate, or with any party. After working on campaigns literally every single day from late-November to mid-May, I think I’ll leave the 24/7 civic politicking to others.

If anything, the email blasts sent out have made me even less willing to get involved with the NPA… a sentiment shared by quite a few other recipients, too. It’s bothersome to have a political team assume my support – and ask for very-public online help – when they’ve not once communicated with me previously to ask about my interest in being involved. It’s also especially irresponsible (and, well, very ‘amateur hour’) to send out a sensitive email like that to a list of political folks without using a blind carbon copy, but that’s a whole other issue…

Sean Holman, who published the original email, also got copies of several emails from various parties on the list objecting to their names being included. That’s here, for those following this micro-drama.

For those concerned that Sean and I posted the names of people who got the emails, I assure you I will be happy to do the same for any revealing Vision missives that fall into my electronic hands. I’ll even happily accept information about the various callers to radio shows whom we’ll be hearing in the coming weeks who will be pretending to be “average citizens,” while defending their party of choice.

I’d point out, to those outraged, that the people identified in the emails are free to contact me and publicly declare that they have nothing to do with any of this. I’d love to hear from Shahin Behroyan myself, the head of the Vancouver office of Campaign Research Inc. reassuring me that he and his company not going to participate in any of these hijinks.

In the meantime, a few days behind Sean, I’ve had my only little brown envelope arrive with another message from Scott Harrison to the faithful, suggesting anti-Gregor/Vision media clips that could be used.

—–Original Message—–
From: Scott Harrison <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2011 19:39:15
To: (the same group of people who were emailed in the message Sean posted)

Subject: FW: web-site?

I know I promised not to send to many emails but these are great!  Feel free to post, share etc. Honest last one until Monday/Tuesday.  Have a great weekend.

—– Original Message —–

I didn’t know any details.” – Gregor Robertson on security planning for Stanley Cup Finals, June 2011
“Gregor Robertson didn’t read the report commissioned after the 1994 Stanley Cup riots.” – CKNW, June 2011
“Who’s running the city anyway?” – Gary Mason, Globe and Mail, June 2011
“I think (Robertson) has to wear this.” – Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer, Sept 2011

“We rock at this.” – Vision Vancouver Councillor Heather Deal hours before the Riot
“Planning was ad hoc” – Independent Review of 2011 Vancouver Riot, September 2011

“…it was (Gregor Robertson’s) responsibility. He should own up to it.” – Vancouver Sun, September 2011

One of the most persistent myths in Vancouver is that a driver of the high housing costs here is the illegal-drug market. What’s the science on this, I wondered.

My story in Vancouver magazine looks at whether the drug industry has the financial clout to wreak any more havoc than any other profitable sector of the economy, along with a peek at other distortions of normal economics.

Keep candidates out of the mud-slinging, let proxies do it, according to email passed on to Sean Holman at Public Eye.

Surely of interest to this crowd.

The disappointment in the room of reporters who faced John Furlong and Doug Keefe was almost palpable this afternoon when the report turned out to contain no searing indictments of anyone’s favourite target.

The big problems, they kept saying over and over, were 1. too much uncontrolled alcohol, which shutting downtown liquor stores did nothing to stem 2. the number of people who poured into downtown, propelled by the region’s excellent and efficient transit system and 3. police being overwhelmend by the unexpected levels of 1 and 2.

In spite of lots of questions from various people, the two stayed on track with a “let’s all learn from this” message, refusing to go after the city, the police, Rogers Arena and its beer-serving policies, TransLink, the bars, or anything else that reporters pressed them on. The only group not to get a pass were the “thugs and villains” who came down intending to make trouble.

There’s lots of reporting and analysis out there already in the various MSM reports, blogs and tweets, so I’ll simply post the report itself, along with statements by the police chief and mayor and await your comments.

The report

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The Non-Partisan Association, fighting to come from behind, has hired Campaign Research Inc. to help out with the crucial job of voter ID in this election. My Globe story here, but there is lots of interesting reading from back east about CR and its role in the Rob Ford campaign.

This Maclean’s article (which CR proudly links to on its own site) details the strategies of one of the company’s principals, Nick Kouvalis, in that campaign, including his role in the creation of a fictitious Twitter account that played a part in the campaign. Here’s another, from the Toronto Star, which had quite a fractious relationship with the Ford campaign and Kouvalis.

Sadly, the NPA here assures me that Mr. Kouvalis won’t be playing that kind of role in the local campaign. Too bad — it sounds like he’d inject a lot of life into the local battle, which is so far rather boring.

To this point: A news release a day from the NPA camp denouncing Gregor Robertson, with the same three sins (he’s responsible for the riot, he’s wasting money on growing wheat, he’s hiding things from you) recycled over and over. On the other side, blindingly cheery tweets from the mayor’s office about the kudos for some new initiative on open data or electric cars or green-job creation.

Great flapping about the fact that Vancouver has dropped from the No 1 spot in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s rankings of global cities for the first time in nine years.

Follow-up questions to the Economist have revealed that the reason for Vancouver’s .7 lower score is traffic problems on the Malahat Highway. Yes, that one, on Vancouver Island. Sadly for the NPA, sniffing around for a good election grenade, it wasn’t because of traffic congestion caused by the Hornby bike lane.

Personally, I’m relieved. I’m so tired of people constantly droning on about Vancouver being No. 1, as though that was the clincher for all arguments. The No. 1 tag doesn’t impress those who are struggling with some of the city’s most significant problems: high housing costs, the mess in the Downtown Eastside, and a regional economy that hasn’t found its way yet.

I’m not particularly impressed with the Economist’s ranking criteria, either, which acknowledges that it tends to favour medium-sized cities with “low densities.” As I said on NW this morning, presumably that means that as the city and region get more dense — something that is a goal in local plans — it will drop even further.

The Downtown Eastside has become a traditional battleground in Vancouver’s civic campaigns in recent years. Strategists from both sides know that city residents are deeply ashamed of the unsolved social problems in this part of the city and look to any political leader who appears willing to champion a solution.

This year’s round has kicked off with the NPA and its candidates, in mysteriously similar tweets, linking to a story by Mark Hasiuk in the Courier about a new, 14-room facility in the Downtown Eastside meant to house young girls who are vulnerable to exploitation but refuse to leave the area. (Mark’s article here and I am attaching the response below from Janice Abbott, whose Atira Women’s Resource Society is operating the building.)

Their lead-in to the topic?: Neighborhood of pimps, dealers, needles and violence – would you want your daughter here? NPA candidate Mike Klassen went a step further and said there was a neighbourhood backlash to a proposal to put “teens in containers,” apparently mixing up two different projects.

Vision’s Geoff Meggs then went on the counter-offensive and, in an interesting display of the way Twitter is becoming the new assignment desk, several media outlets reported that the NPA were being criticized for labelling the Downtown Eastside as a nieghbourhood of pimps, dealers and violence. Clearly a strategy aimed at reprising the successful tactic of the 2002 campaign, when then NPA mayoral candidate Jennifer Clarke got dumped on big-time for calling the DTES a ghetto.

This whole back and forth is dismaying on several levels. That the NPA would make part of its campaign strategy to go after a housing group (seems to be part of a general pattern lately, where they seem to be campaigning against police chief Jim Chu and the Vancouver Public Space Network as well, rather than against Vision Vancouver). That Vision would rally the troops by falling back on the old chestnut that the NPA doesn’t care about the DTES.

And finally, that we are in yet another tiresome round of bashing the latest housing group in the DTES that is perceived as too left or compromised or whatever.

There’s a media tradition of going after these groups. For a longtime, it was the Downtown Eastside Residents Association. Then it was the Portland Hotel Society. Now it’s Atira. Everyone loves to come out of the woodwork and call them poverty pimps who are exploiting the poor and perpetuating misery to protect their own jobs.

Funny, though, how no one ever goes after the other groups in the Downtown Eastside who are also down there providing similar services. (In fact, the same day that the NPA was tweeting out about the horrors of young girls being kept in the DTES, mayoral candidate Suzanne Anton sent out a tweet about her “good tour” of the no-rules-shelter at First United Church — a place where there have been complaints that girls as young as 13 are being allowed to stay overnight, in spite of concerns from neighbourhood groups about their safety, given some of the problems last winter with sexual assaults.)

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Here’s an unexpected bit of praise for Jack — from TransLink (their news release below).

More proof of my thesis that you can’t judge politicians by whether you personally find them appealing or not. You should judge them by what they got done for the good of everyone, not just themselves or their party or the groups who happened to support their party.

Without turning into Christie Blatchford, I have to say that Layton — in my experience of him while I was doing homelessness research in Toronto a decade ago — could be hard to take at times because of his tendency to showboat. Everything was a performance for him, as Globe columnist Jane Taber noted somewhat more tactfully than Blatchford did.

But he used his natural flamboyance, his unsquelchable optimism, in the service of making life better for various groups of people and he deserves credit for that, as TL is noting here.

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As our downtowns turn more and more into places for amusement, tourism, shopping and culture, we have a tendency to think that the whole city has changed. Mnufacturing has vanished to China and all that’s left here are condos, coffee shops, office towers and stadiums.

That’s not quite true, as I got to explore a little in my story here. Lots of industrial operations are sticking to the central city, operations that can’t be stuffed into office space. But the idea of what kind of industrial can survive the demands of inner-city living is changing.