A 1936 travelogue by the ‘Voice of the Globe,’  James Fitzpatrick.

After a tour of that most-cliched little town Victoria, enjoy Vancouver’s beautiful parks and gardens, the pollution of False Creek, and a highlight of the trip – the Harding Memorial. 

(Thanks to Don Buchanan.)

City Planner Brent Toderian was on a panel in San Francisco this week, along with other American city planners – covered here – as they engaged in a little mea culpa.

“Because of the failure of the planning profession in the past, we’ve gotten quiet, we’ve gotten a little too meek,” said Brent Toderian, Vancouver’s planning director. “We serve at the will of politicians, and are often unwilling to speak truth to power loudly and persuasively and in public. I think that’s really been an absolving of our leadership responsibilities in the profession.”

In Vancouver, planning directors do not serve at the will of the mayor, and are appointed through a selection committee process and approved by the city council. As a result, said Toderian, the discussion about planning is much more vigorous and productive.

“In the absence of that willingness to have those kinds of tough, tense conversations, sometimes the best answers, the best options, are never put on the table,” he said. “If Planning’s not putting those options and issues on the table, then it’s our fault that politicians aren’t making better decisions.”

“While the directors didn’t lack for bold visions, some lamented the planning field’s fixation on avoiding undesirable consequences. ‘I’d have to say, especially in California, unfortunately, the field has evolved into focusing on preventing bad things from happening instead of making good things happen,’ said Bill Anderson, San Diego’s planning head.”

From The Guardian:

Now the “peak oil” theory is gaining support at the heart of the global energy establishment. “The IEA (International Energy Agency) in 2005 was predicting oil supplies could rise as high as 120m barrels a day by 2030 although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116m and then 105m last year,” said the IEA source, who was unwilling to be identified for fear of reprisals inside the industry. “The 120m figure always was nonsense but even today’s number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this.

“Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources,” he added.

A second senior IEA source, who has now left but was also unwilling to give his name, said a key rule at the organisation was that it was “imperative not to anger the Americans” but the fact was that there was not as much oil in the world as had been admitted. “We have [already] entered the ‘peak oil’ zone. I think that the situation is really bad,” he added.

“If you have been following debates over new freeways,” notes Peter Ladner in his blog, “you will be familiar with a well-known ‘fact’, most recently repeated by Premier Gordon Campbell and former premier Mike Harcourt: congestion is costing us $1.5 billion a year in the Lower Mainland.”

And so it is in Seattle.  Congestion is reported as costing $1.5 billion.  And in Denver.  And Boston.  And Philadeplphia.  All of ‘em: congestion costs $1.5 billion.

Peter turned to Google:

I searched for “traffic, congestion, costs, $1.5 billion.” I ran into a roadblock of cities. ]

The Xinhua News Agency, in a November, 2006 article, reports that  “ the Guangzhou Academy of Social Sciences says traffic jams cost the southern city up to 12 billion yuan (US$1.5 billion) a year….”

It’s everywhere. In a 1998 New York Daily News article, we learn that “extra transportation costs, such as overtime paid to drivers stuck in traffic, costs Brooklyn $1.5 billion a year.”

In Chicago, the good news was that transit saves the region, which, according to the Chicago Transit Authority has the second worst traffic congestion in the U.S. “over $1.5 billion in congestion costs”.

Peter’s conclusion: the number is a hoax.  Congestion may cost us, but we don’t really know how much.

Benny Chan’s pics of LA freeways have been mounted for a show at, appropriately,  the Pasadena Museum of California.

Rush hour in Los Angeles is synonymous with gridlock, but the sheer enormity of the situation can be tough to grasp. Fortunately, there is the architecture photographer Benny Chan, whose Traffic! series depicts the scale of overcrowded lanes of rush hour traffic from high overhead.

Shot over a few years during various helicopter trips, the photographs now stand eight feet high and six feet wide, and convey, quite effectively, the enormity of the problem—as well as the need to get things moving.

Ah yes, “the need to get things moving” – the road builders’ mantra.  That’s always worked.

More very-high-resolution images here.

Credit due: Michael Geller came up with the idea.  And though there are a lot of those with NPA ties (including me), this is not going to be so much a partisan event as a chance to assess the current political climate at the local level from different points of view.  

The pundit panel now includes civicscene.ca blogger Jonathan Ross, replacing Alex Tsakumis, who has had to bow out due to another commitment.

Last night on the Charlie Rose show, Gore speaking on the challenge of climate change:

Never before have we faced a challenge that brings the potential for ending human civilization as know it.  And the time frame within which we have to act is shockingly short. 

If we were to decide in the present generation to take all of the sacrifices and labours of the generations before us and exploit them fully for ourselves and give the back of our hand to the generations coming after us, it would be the most immoral act of any generation of humans in history.

It is a challenge to our moral imagination to recognize the magnitude of this challenge and the urgency with which we have to act.  It is not a political issue; it is a moral issue ….

Transcript here.

The indispensable Jeff Nagel, who covers transportation issues for the Surrey Leader (and should be doing it for a larger audience), quotes me in bclocalnews on the departure of TransLink CEO Tom Prendergast:

SFU City Program director Gordon Price says the funding standoff with Victoria and now Prendergast’s departure signals a “tragic” turning point for the region.

“As of this moment, our future is going to be auto-dependent,” Price said. “The truckers have won.”

He said he has no hope the province will now seriously come to the table.

Metro Vancouver appears destined to have transit services capped, he added, while roads and bridges expand to carry cargo and livability deteriorates.

“We’re being hung out to dry on the future of the region,” Price said. “All the sustainable region initiatives, all the transit-oriented communities – all the stuff we talk about – we have to be honest about it. At best, it’s on hold. At worst, it has no future.”

Price predicts the province will push the Evergreen Line construction through, but without sufficient funding, forcing other transit cutbacks coupled with steep property tax hikes.

Other proposed rapid transit extensions will likely falter.

“Prendergast is the best judge of this,” Price said. “He looked at the situation, saw this wasn’t going anywhere and said ‘What am I doing here?’”

No quibbles with the quotes.  But the headline says “Departure of TransLink’s CEO ‘tragic’ turn for region.”

Not quite.  The CEO of  TransLink doesn’t make the decisions; he implements the direction of his board - and whether Tom stays or goes doesn’t determine the future of the region. 

But the decision by the Mayor’s Council late last month, supported by the appointed board, to choose “Funding Stabilization” as the choice for the 2010 ten-year plan, even at another $130 million, is effectively a cap on transit expansion.  No way will we be shaping the region’s growth with a sustainable transportation strategy.   The growth south of the Fraser and east of North Road will be shaped by the expansion of the roads and bridges now underway.

This is what their future is going to look like:

An autocad image of the north end of the new Port Mann Bridge.

In that sense, the truckers won.  Paul Landry, writing for the B.C. Trucking Association in the Sun this week, called for maintaining the status quo on transit while striking “a balance” – i.e. more roads and bridges.  And that’s what we’re getting: roads and bridges.

Sea to Sky, finished.  Golden Ears Bridge, up and running.  Pitt River Bridge, just opened.  Port Mann Bridge, under construction.  Highway 1 expansion, underway.  South and North Fraser Perimeter Roads, in process.  Interchanges, arterials, the Fraser Highway, the Lougheed Highway, the border access roads – the list is staggering and hardly complete.  And, given the current political realities – the refusal to provide TransLink with new funding options - there won’t  be many more buses running on all those new roads.

Simply: our transportation infrastructure for the next decade has already been determined.  The options for the next generation have been chosen.  We’re going full speed ahead, backwards.  To the world of the 1950s and 60s, when we assumed that we would be driving everywhere for everything, and went out and built it that way.   Now, in most of the region, we’re doing it again.

And that’s tragic.

Like the summer that preceded it, this autumn has been gorgeous.

But can anyone tell me what colour this is:

A reddy orange, an organey red, sort of a salmon - surely it must have its own name.  But what is it?