February 2009 – Corey Burger

Kill person with car, get $1500 fine

There was another great example of how little our society values the lives of the non-car driving public. A woman with extensive speeding tickets and “moving violations” has been fined $1500 and given a 4-month suspension of her license for killing a motorcyclist while passing on a double yellow. The Times Colonist has the full story.

Also in today’s paper was a story about a man running over a pedestrian twice in Port Alberni is what looks like a road rage incident. At least in this case the RCMP officer said:

“The only difference between this one and a homicide is that the guy’s living,”

Hopefully the driver, who is apparently known, will be charged with attempted manslaughter or assault with a deadly weapon. I am not holding my breath, however.

Further afield, the DA in New York city has decided not to charge the driver of a van which, while running and unattended, jumped the curb and killed two children. The families of the two dead as well as pedestrian and safety advocates held a rally recently to demand action.

These kinds of stories are all too common. Often the driver is not blamed and the incident is called a “tragic accident” or “an act of god”. What will it take for society to consider cars to be the dangerous weapons they are? If the driver who killed that motorcyclist had pulled out a gun and shot the man, it would have been considered manslaughter. There would have been a huge outcry, just as has happened recently with all the apparently gang related shootings. Just because they used car doesn’t mean that we should treat it any differently.

New Safer Cycling Oak Bay website goes live

Lesley Ewing and I have been working on a new Safer Cycling Oak Bay website for the past few weeks to correspond with the launch of a new project we, amongst others, have been working on. Rather than being stuck at the old Telus.net webspace, we have finally launched the new website at scob.ca, a nice short and easy to remember url. Expect to see more on the SCOB website in the next few weeks.

Metrocascade: a new website of Victoria blogs

A new one-stop shop for all of the blogs about Victoria, including the Times Colonist, was launched recently at Metrocascade.com. Alongside a whole bunch of blogs I didn’t know about, Metrocascade includes Michelle Kirby, Sean Holman’s Public Eye Online and Bernard van Schulmann, all fairly well known. The site itself has a blog, which apparently puts the start as early February, probably why I only saw the first visitors to my site yesterday. It is great to see more websites devoted to our little part of the world and I will be following this one quite closely.

Jaywalking and pedestrian space

There is a minor little stink going on in downtown Victoria over a recent crackdown on jaywalking. The Downtown Victoria Business Association is quite annoyed, feeling it will drive people out of downtown. Jack Knox quite correctly points out that ICBC, who funds this work, and the writing of tickets themselves makes lots of money for the municipalities. Jaywalking, as defined by Wikipedia is:

an informal term used to refer to illegal or reckless pedestrian crossing of a roadway

The core concept behind jaywalking as a crime is that there needs to be separate spaces for cars, pedestrians, bikes, etc. All well and good, until you realize that one of the areas they targeted for enforcement was Government Street. For reference, a picture of Gov’t St:

It didn’t always used to look like this. Until a reconstruction in the 20th century, Government St. was a four lane road like Douglas St.:

The Government Street of today is about as close to a pedestrianized street as you can get without actually closing it to cars. If they lowered the speed limit to 7km/h, it would easily classify as a woonerf, or living street. The whole point of these types of streets is that various travel modes, especially pedestrians, are supposed to mix.

But beyond Government Street, I disagree with ticking for jaywalking in general. The term was only invented by auto-owners, tired of people walking all over the streets and blocking their cars. So they decided that if only they could confine pedestrians to the sidewalks. It has worked well, as can be seen on Oak Bay Avenue: From a pedestrians perspective, most of the road is unusable, coloured red. Only the narrow strips of the sidewalks are clear green, with crosswalks in yellow: Yet from the car’s perspective, the world is very very green: car

(Aerial photo from CRD’s Natural Areas Atlas, colour added by me)

It all boils down to what sort of city we want to live in. If we want one where cars keep pedestrians penned up on sidewalks, by all means, enforcing the rules around jaywalking is a great idea. But if we want a city that celebrates walking, we need to tame the car, not punish pedestrians for daring to try and take back space which should be theirs.

A few thoughts on tonight’s town hall meeting

Mayor and council held a poorly-publicized open house tonight at Windsor Pavillion. Despite that fact, the attendance wasn’t too bad, as about 20 people attended the two hour event. As an open forum, the topics wandered, from tree preservation to secondary suites to improving the website. I did note a few things:

Oak Bay’s tree preservation bylaw “scares” a lot of arborists, as it is apparently quite strict. Given how endangered the Garry Oak is, this is probably a good thing. However, whether or not the bylaw going to become a major challenge as our urban forest ages and needs replacement in the next 10 to 20 years is an unknown. The science of tree removal is also not well understood, so some education is going to be needed to help people understand why apparently healthy looking trees are being cut down.
The secondary suites committee is finally meeting. This can only be a good thing. Notice of the secondary suite committee will be sent out via property tax notices, which misses renters. However, when I pointed this out, both council and I agreed that there is no good method to reach renters, especially those in existing illegal secondary suites.
The website was raised a lot. Yes, I still owe Chris Causton a short page or so about how to improve the website.
The room’s layout was very much like a council meeting, with the mayor and council at tables at the front and the public sitting in seats facing them. While it helped focus the meeting, it made it hard for various members of the public to sometimes see and hear the other members of the public were speaking. Alan Cassidy should be praised for choosing not to sit behind a table and Tara and Pam for following suit.
The covered bike racks that are likely to go in on the Avenue were mentioned, specifically council was praised for driving that initiative. It does illustrate the woeful lack of bike parking in the municipality and the fact that we don’t even really know where all those racks are and what state they are in.

There is probably a great deal I am forgetting, but all in all, it was a good meeting. I have no idea when the next one is going to be or what sort of format it will follow. I hope we can have a more mingling style social event, maybe with a like/dislike wall and some maps of the municipality. Refreshments would have been nice, even if just a few cookies, drinks, etc. But kudos to the mayor and council for taking the step to be out there in a more informal but planned gathering. I look forward to announcement of the next town hall meeting.

Bike parking on the Avenue

At tonight’s Committee of the Whole meeting, the council discussed the addition of covered bicycle parking to the avenue. Apparently instigated by the Mayor, this is long overdue recognition that bike parking on the Avenue is sub-par. Currently there are no covered spots anywhere on the Avenue and even the few racks that do exist are substandard, such as the ancient metal rack at the corner of Fairway Market closest to the Municipal Hall.

The plan presented at tonights meeting initially called for the removal of two parking spots on Wilmot on the eastern side closest to the Avenue. Councillor Herbert mentioned that there is a lack of handicapped parking on the Avenue and these two spots might make a good location for them and the bike parking could be moved to the north end of Wilmot right by Theatre Lane. Thankfully Tara Ney suggested that rather than moving them further away from the Avenue, the lawn of the Municipal Hall might make a better place, between the small information stand and the building itself.

As for what they will look like, there were two examples given, one from in front of the MEC building downtown:

This is quite a modern design. There is also this much older design seen around UVic:

(Both photos credit John Luton of Capital Bike and Walk and more recently a Victoria City Councillor. He has an excellent set about Best Practices and another, Bike Parking 101.)

Estimated at around $20,000 for purchase and installation, the question of where the money will come from came up. A recent change to the Local Government Act allows municipal governments to take money out of their parking funds and put it into funding alternative forms of travel: walking, biking and transit. As such, Oak Bay is apparently going to be setting up an Alternative Transportation Infrastructure Fund, although no money has yet been moved around.

As the money will likely come out of the parking fund, Council decided that the Business Improvement Area who represent businesses on the Avenue, should be consulted on any spending of the parking fund on things other than parking. I am a little worried we’ll get some classic old-school 20th century thinking from them, but we will see.

Overall, I am hopeful that the bicycling community here in Oak Bay may not have to fight tooth and nail for every scrap of bicycle infrastructure. I was also heartened that during the nearly hour long discussion of the the traffic problem at the corner of Cadboro Bay and Bowker, several residents mentioned that bike lanes in the area is something they would like to see, even at the expense of parking. All in all, 2009 should be a good year for biking here in Oak Bay.