Anyone reading this blog likely loves words. Many of you, I know from personal emails, particularly love words in books.

So the transformation of libraries in the last decade (pushed by the information flood available from Google, pulled by the cool book-marketing ideas of places like Chapters) has not gone unnoticed: more space for computers, more money spent on ebooks and videos and video games. And, as the about-to-open Surrey central library makes clear, more space for people just to hang out.

Here’s my story on that, which is just the beginning of a much longer conversation I know is out there about the place of books and the place of people in libraries.

For me (and I suspect many like me), the transformation of the book world has been both painful and wonderful. I love physical books. My house is filled with them: stacked on the floor, in a room that was supposed to be a spare bedroom and now looks like a small Amazon warehouse, in the living room, stuck in nooks I had built in to the kitchen. I once read that the final stage of obsessive book-collecting is buying books in languages you know you will never learn. I haven’t quite reached that stage yet, but I do still have my copy of “Beginner Swedish” that I bought after spending a couple of weeks on a beach with my temporary Swedish boyfriend.

On the other hand, I bought an iPad and I am adolescently, irrationally in love with it and the way the New Yorker looks EVEN BETTER on the screen than in print, the way I can download a book anywhere (key, when you’re the kind of person who reads a book a day on vacation), the way I can read late into the night without disturbing my princess-and-the-pea husband by flipping pages or, god forbid, keeping the light on.

My rational mind says, Celebrate all reading. My emotional mind loves the physical feel I had in old-fashioned libraries, where I felt surrounded by knowledge in its physical form and a community of people drinking it in. As he said in my story, architect Bing Thom has tried to preserve that feeling in Surrey. I await the results.

This out today from the NPA, an announcement about two more park-board candidates. Now, the party needs to find more school-board candidates. At the moment, it doesn’t have enough to form a majority there, even if every one of its candidates was elected.

Vancouver — NPA Mayoral Candidate Suzanne Anton and the rest of the NPA team are welcoming two additional candidates to the NPA campaign: Gabby Kalaw and Jason Upton. Both are candidates for the Vancouver Park Board. Gabby Kalaw, a first generation Filipino-Canadian, has spent most of his life dedicated to community and recreation. In university, he volunteered and worked in a variety of roles with the City of Richmond Parks and Recreation. After university, he worked on development in Ghana and while there raised money to provide soccer balls for over 300 kids. Kalaw is a Business Development Manager for a local software firm. On his off time, he can be found training for the Vancouver Sun Run on the seawall, paddling in False Creek with one of the Dragon Boat teams or playing basketball or volleyball at one of the local Community Centres.  “I am excited to be joining the NPA team and look forward to channeling my experience into smart, resourceful management of the Vancouver Park Board,” said Kalaw. “We need to build an independent, accessible and enjoyable park system that everyone can be happy with.” Jason Upton is a lifetime resident of Vancouver and has worked in the Real Estate industry for over 18 years. His small business successfully weathered the 2008/09 economic crisis and he wants to bring this prudent financial management to the Park Board. The mismanagement of the Bloedel Conservatory and Stanley Park petting zoo highlighted the need for people who were passionate about preserving Vancouver’s park system. “Vision Vancouver has presided over the largest cuts in the Park Board’s history,” says Upton. “It’s time for change. The Park Board needs passionate, creative people so citizens and visitors can continue to enjoy our parks for generations to come.” The NPA Board of Directors unanimously approved both candidates.

After listening to screaming debates for a year about Vancouver’s separated bike lanes, I was intrigued when a news release crossed my screen recently announcing the opening of two lovely new bike bridges in Surrey.

Made me remember that it’s not just the green fanatics in Vancouver who are promoting cycling but other municipalities elsewhere. So I made some calls to find out what’s going on. Here’s my story.

The TransLink report that I refer to in the story is here.

Love this kind of stats analysis that tells us how the city really works. Chad Skelton at the Vancouver Sun looked at transit use, broken down by census tract, to find out which neighbourhoods use transit the most.

I’m sure that he, like all of us, can hardly wait til 2011 numbers start coming out to give us new info. (But I suspect it won’t be for at least a year yet. I just filled out my long-form census a couple of weeks ago and I’m fairly certain others are behind me. Then they have to crunch all those numbers and decipher all the conflicting answers and politely badger the laggards to get their forms in.)

Everyone thought that it would be a simple solution for conflicts over dogs in parks: Off-leash areas.

Then, when it seemed like that wasn’t quite enough, some fenced dog parks.

But no one’s happy with that either, as I discovered when I got assigned to research this story.

The Vancouver park board, Metro Vancouver, and various municipalities are all trying to figure out solutions to what is turning into an ever-more-complicated tussle among competing groups who all want to use the parks: large-dog owners, small-dog owners, non-dog-owners, horse-riders, cyclists, advocacy groups on all sides.

The dial is going to get turned up on this talk with the Vancouver park board’s move to come up with something beyond the current situation, which appears to be in the direction of more fenced parks. The city’s animal-control department also says it has tried education and it’s got them only so far. Now they’re moving to zero tolerance.

Good column by Vaughn Palmer about the back and forth that’s been happening between the Christy Clark government and the group of people who represent the thousands of municipal politicians in the province.

You can understand why city councillors might be feeling a bit wary of the province weighing in on how they run their business through the office of a municipal auditor-general. The only two times that the province has done something resembling an “audit” of local governments in recent years — once with TransLink, once with the Vancouver school board — it felt less like an impartial audit and more like a vehicle to scold those organizations, block them from getting any public support for changes to financing, and whip them back into silent compliance.

My information from informed sources is that a municipal auditor-general would be more neutral than the comptroller-general who was sent out previously by the province.

It would be useful if voters could actually get some neutral information about municipal spending, something that’s beyond the baying of particular interest groups about “out of control” municipal spending and the defensive response from municipal politicians that they are excellent money managers.

It’s hard for many of us to tell what’s the right amount for a city to spend and whether anything could be cut.

I know that I personally don’t feel that hard done by on the topic of municipal taxes when my husband’s relatives in small-town Ontario tell me that they pay almost as much tax as I do in my Vancouver house. And all they get, pretty much, is garbage, water and roads and, recently, a new library, whereas for my taxes, I’m providing support for (and benefitting from) local theatres and festivals, housing programs, a great library system , pools and golf courses and incredible community centres, seawalls and new parks all the time, public art, people who work on economic development, and dozens of other things that make the city so livable.

But could they provide all that for less? Is there really some trimming in the system that could be done? Impossible for us to really know in a system that spends $1 billion, without something besides occasional criticisms over an expensive lunch or an out-of-town training program or an individual salary that someone has decided is an outrage.

Every new news bulletin from England seems more unbelievable — not to mention the news flashes from Philadelphia and Chicago about curfews being imposed there to prevent rioting.

As I read the latest comprehensive story, I can’t help thinking of comparisons with Vancouver: the media fascination with the Twitter/Blackberry-led revolutions; the immediate jump to all kinds of theorizing about the whys (alienated youth, demoralized police, etc.) and the consequences (political, Olympics); the search for someone to blame.

All the flip side of the optimism from Western media pundits about the Twitter-propelled protests of the Arab spring (and now summer).

The city’s 35-page housing plan is rich with tantalizing one-liners about new things that are going to be tried to create affordable housing for working people squeezed out of the market and homeless people just squeezed.

I’m working my way through, line by line, and came across one on page 31 that said five neighbourhoods would be identified for more homeless services in the first phase of the plan. My story here explains that that one line meant.

The New Yorker has a good round-up review of the latest spurt of books about cities, a popular topic these days as more and more writers weight on how cities should work in the future, are working now, didn’t work in the past and so on.

One of the constant themes I’m struck by when people write about the modern city is the way the majority of them bemoan the terrible modernist planning ideas that led to social-housing high rises, the dominance of the car-filled road, the destruction of integrated neighbourhoods and the like.

Everyone seems to see the flawed thinking of the past that led to creating new additions to cities that were flawed and anti-human. But I’ve yet to read anyone who has been able to spot the possible herd-thinking fallacies of today’s planners as they constantly talk about how to create walkable neighbourhoods where people can “live, shop, play and work.”

Although the thinking about urban planning has undoubtedly improved as it’s taken a different direction since the 30s, 40s an 50s, I can’t believe that there isn’t SOMETHING about today’s planning beliefs that will come to be seen as a fatal mistake by future generations: the dedicated belief in the workability of mixed-use projects? the drive to preserve industrial land against all odds? the focus on trying to recreate the feel of villages or urban downtowns in suburban developments?

We the media tend to focus on pedestrians killed or injured in Vancouver, except for rare, dramatic cases.

But the reality is that, year after year, more pedestrians are killed and injured outside Vancouver proper, a point that I made in looking at the region’s record in a Globe feature on the weekend.

I also took a look at the different strategies police and engineers are trying in various places as well.

(Sorry, I thought I had posted this earlier but just realized I didn’t, so apologize for the lateness.)