Month: January 2010

Where is the seventh Transit Commission member?

Why has the Victoria Regional Transit Commission only currently have six members on it? Since the 2008, the seventh seat has sat empty. According to the BC Transit Act, “A regional transit commission consists of not fewer than 7 members”, yet the commission currently only has six. The act then goes on to state:

The following persons must be appointed under subsection (4) as members of the regional transit commission for the greater Victoria metropolitan area:

(a) the Mayor of Victoria;
(b) a Victoria councillor;
(c) the Mayor of Esquimalt or Oak Bay;
(d) the Mayor of Saanich;
(e) a Saanich councillor;
(f) one of the following:
(i)  the Mayor of Sidney;
(ii)  the Mayor of North Saanich;
(iii)  the Mayor of Central Saanich;
(g) one of the following:
(i)  the Mayor of Colwood;
(ii)  the Mayor of Metchosin;
(iii)  the Mayor of View Royal;
(iv)  the Mayor of Langford;
(v)  the Mayor of the Highlands;
(vi)  the Mayor of Sooke;
(vii)  the electoral area director of the Juan de Fuca electoral area.

As the current commission consists of Oak Bay Mayor Chris Causton as Chair, Saanich Mayor Frank Leonard, Sooke Mayor Janet Evans, Central Saanich Mayor Jack Mar, Victoria Mayor Dean Fortin, and Saanich Councillor Susan Brice, by my reckoning we are merely missing from the list above (b) a Victoria Councillor.

According to the Sept 24th, 2009 Victoria Council meeting minutes, the following motion was carried:

It was moved by Councillor Coleman, seconded by Councillor Thornton-Joe, that Council rescind
Councillor Geoff Young’s nomination to the Victoria Regional Transit Commission and nominate
Councillor John Luton to the Commission.

Yet, there is no record that Geoff Young ever sat on the Transit Commission prior to this date. The 2008 annual report (PDF) makes no mention of any of the councillors sitting on the commission, only Mayor Fortin. I have emailed BC Transit a few weeks back but as of yet have not yet received a response.

Further thoughts from the Uplands sewage meeting

As I (and others) have reported, Oak Bay Council ultimately rejected the low-pressure gravity system, but unlike the Oak Bay News and Times Colonist inferred, many of the councillors didn’t so much reject the low-pressure system as defer the question until further consultation with the residents, both in and out of the Uplands, could be done.

Specifically Councillors Braithwaite, Copley and Ney never mentioned what system they preferred, with Ney saying they need to “lead by following” and Braithwaite having the lovely quote about gas lights being the gold standard once, which she followed with “to me the question is not if we abandon gravity systems but when.” She even noted that when electric lights came in, people protested the removal of the gas lights, despite the electric system being a clear improvement.

So where does that leave Oak Bay? On the books is still the approved plan for a 50-year phased roll-out of a new storm sewer (page 3 of this backgrounder – PDF). Beyond that, the giant unknown right now is the fate of the federal and provincial governments funding for the low-pressure system. Residents of Oak Bay need to keep asking council some hard questions about how the coming Uplands system is going to be funded and what sort of system it is going to be. As for whether or not we will get a referendum, as Councillor Jensen suggested in the a Times Colonist story, I suspect that depends on if we get a few champions of such a vote, much as the City of Victoria had with the johnsonstreetbridge.org people.

Want to help lead Oak Bay? New Chief Administrative Officer sought

With the pending retirement of Oak Bay’s Chief Administrative Officer William Cochrane, Oak Bay Council now has the task of finding somebody to fill his rather large shoes. Bill, who has worked for the municipality for 30 years, 18 of them as Chief Administrative Officer, has been a major factor in how the municipality has operated over those 18 years, given his longevity.

The posting on CivicJobs contains this interesting phrase:

Candidates must have demonstrated an exceptional ability to provide measured, well-considered advice under pressure in a public setting.

I think this sentence quite neatly sums up what is the likely the most challenging part of the job: providing advice to council at committee of the whole and council meetings. The number of times I have seen council ask Bill a tough question in the past year must number in the dozens and while I have been frustrated with the compromises he comes with, he never fails to give a reasoned answer.

So I wish the Mayor and Councillors Jensen and Herbert (Update: Braithwaite will be sitting on this committee, not Herbert) luck in finding somebody to fill Bill’s shoes. They don’t have much time, as these things are counted, as Bill plans to retire in May after the budget comes down.

Tinto rocks to stay for now

After a great deal of discussion today around the council table and with the members of public that showed up, including the Monterey Middle School Principal Brenda Simmons, council ultimately opted not to remove the rocks on Tinto. Nor did they opt for new parking bays.

During the questioning, a few things very quickly became clear; that the residents that wanted the rocks gone didn’t particularly care if the parking was there or not, just that the rocks were unsightly. Secondly the problem traffic at the Monterey Ave end was due to the entrance being there. Not unsurprisingly, the lone resident of Tinto St. who opposed the removal of the rocks lives at the corner of Tinto and Monterey. Lastly, the problem traffic was not school traffic anymore, it was now evening and weekend users of the fields, primarily sports teams. One of the residents pointed out that this isn’t exactly a new issue, demand was high back in 1990.

Principal Simmons provided some information that had been lacking from teh debate previously. Firstly, the school needs the Tinto Street entrance as that is where they marshal their students in case of evacuation from the school. Second, almost half of the students already walk, bike or take transit to school, which far exceeds the working populations 1/5. And lastly, the school has a very defined traffic pattern, one that discourages use of Tinto St. at all. Despite this discouragement, one resident reported traffic on Tinto St. being a problem around school pickup and drop-off times before the rocks were placed there.

One of the better quotes of the night came from the Mayor:

This looks easy compared to bicycle lanes on Henderson

Ultimately council opted to ask the school board for the following two items:

  1. A second entrance on Tinto St., on the Oliver end to help spread out the traffic.
  2. To let a community member have keys to the school parking lot, which is currently locked from 11pm Friday night until early Monday morning to prevent vandalism.

They hoped that then they wouldn’t have to spend large amounts of money on parking bays or stalls, estimated in the $20,000 to $60,000 range, depending on choice of surface. The Mayor was also asked by council to play mediator once again, talking with the local residents, the school and at the suggestion of a Tinto St. resident, a member of Oak Bay Parks and Rec to represent the various sports teams that use the Monterey fields on the weekends.

Finally, amusingly, I leave you with this quote:

It looked like East Berlin

A Tinto St. resident describing his reaction after seeing the rocks along the boulevard.

Unintended consequence: parking police cars on the shoulder

Police cars parked on the shoulder. Photo credit: Bruce Stotesbury, Times Colonist
Police cars parked on the shoulder. Photo credit: Bruce Stotesbury, Times Colonist

The Times Colonist has a great piece today about the Integrated Road Safety Unit using their empty cruisers to be phantom speed traps. Slowing down cars is all well and good; the problem is in the implementation. Specifically, the picture from the TC shows two cop cars parked on the shoulder. This is exactly where a bicycle would be, so these cars are actually making it less safe for everybody by forcing that bicycle into the traffic lane, endangering them and the cars coming up behind.

Bowker Creek Open House next week

On January 23rd, the Bowker Creek Initiative will be holding an open house (PDF) to discuss their new plan, the 100-year The Bowker Creek Blueprint. Interestingly, they are holding it in a mall, specifically the Hillside Mall, near the Zellers entrance, from 10am to 2pm. Hourly talks at 10am, 11, 12 and 1 will be held about the plan.

The blueprint itself, all 125 pages of it, can be viewed online (PDF) as can the executive summary (PDF) for those in a rush. I haven’t had a chance to dive into it myself, due to other pressing matters, like the 5th edition of the Official Ubuntu Book, which I co-author, and that little thing called university.

Rocking the boat on Tinto Street

The much discussed rocks on the Tinto St. boulevard are again coming before the committee of the whole this Monday (PDF), after staff was asked to prepare a report into the following options for the area and council opted to defer to allow more time to consult residents. The three options mentioned in the report were:

  1. Remove the rocks at a cost of $2,000
  2. 30 degree angle parking with 8 stalls (costing $70,000 with ‘turf stone’ or $21,000 using curb and gutter and asphalt.
  3. Parallel parking with 15 stalls (costing $65,000 using ‘turf stone’ or $27,000 using curb and gutter and asphalt)

The problem, ostensibly, is parking. The rocks were originally placed there to solve the problem of people parking on the grassy boulevard, something the Mayor raised at a September 2008 Council meeting.  Fast forward to a June 2009 Committee of the Whole meeting (PDF) , where a resident approached council about said rocks, wondering why they had been placed there “without consultation with the residents”, in his words. His request triggered the creation of the report, which was given to council at a November 2009 meeting.

However, the story isn’t over. A different group of residents has created a petition to preserve the rocks, as they help preserve limited green space in the municipality. As of last night, the signatures were just shy of thirty, although it isn’t clear how many of them are direct residents of Tinto St or parents of students at the nearby Monterey Middle School.

I personally am in favour of retaining the rocks there. As Shannon Drew, the creator of the petition, pointed out to me in an email, Monterey has designated drop off zones on Monterey and Oliver, the former of which has had quite a bit of work done on it in recent years. Whatever your stance on the issue is, I encourage you to come out Monday night at 7:30pm. The meeting will be held at the Municipal Hall as per usual and with a light agenda save this issue, it should be a short night.

Solutions for empty buses on the 15

Yesterday I talked about some of the teething challenges that the new UVic/Downtown express bus, the 15, nee Dogwood Line, was having. Thankfully a lot of these problems have fairly easy fixes:

  1. New-ness – This will only be solved by time and it will.
  2. Advertising – For BC Transit’s part, they could use some of that empty advertising space, both inside and out, to help promote the new line. Metro in Los Angeles has run some pretty good ads and increased choice ridership by a decent amount as a result. Express buses are loved by choice riders. UVic/Camosun and their respective student societies should work to get people on the ground to pamphlet their bus stops and let people know about the new buses, especially with the separated 15 stop at UVic.
  3. Stops – Most of these are fairly easy fixes as well.
  • UVic – As I mentioned, a lot of UVic students are opportunistic riders, so the riders of the 15 will come from the 4, 7, 11 and 14. As can be seen from the image to the right, there is a massive amount of space between the exchange and the SUB. Given there is no space in the exchange for the 15, kicking out another bus to make room would keep the downtown-bound routes together. A logical route would be the 26, which is one of the busier routes, so would benefit from the extra space in front of the SUB, and its route only overlaps with a short section of McKenzie St. with the 39. Moving an existing bus line with established ridership is hard, but is easier than building up a new ridership if nobody knows the bus exists or is hard to easily find.
    • Placement of bus route stops @ UVic
    Placement of bus route stops @ UVic
  • Fort @ Douglas – The City of Victoria is fairly transit friendly and is likely to be amenable to removal of parking spots to expand the bus stop here. As a bonus, the spots are in front of the Municipal Finance Authority building, who don’t have the same concerns as a storefront retail business with regards to parking.

    Potential expansion of Fort @ Douglas stop
    Potential expansion of Fort @ Douglas stop
  • Fort before Richmond – A much harder stop, because the stop is on an island bounded by two roads, so it can’t be easily expanded. One option would be to have the 11 not stop here, as it stops just after Richmond about 100 m away, where the 15 currently does as well. This would keep the 14 and 15 at the same stop.

    Stop on Fort before Richmond, with two double-deckers superimposed
    Stop on Fort before Richmond, with two double-deckers superimposed
  1. Mistaken schedules – I don’t even know if BC Transit is even aware of this issue up ’til now, but this is a fairly easy fix.

As a last note, I think BC Transit should break out its express routes, the new 15, the 28 Express, the 70, etc. and brand them differently, much like Translink did with the B-Lines.This kind of product differentiation is a great way to attract choice riders, people who could drive but choose to take a bus. Of course, it isn’t news that transit agencies are bad at marketing their own products, a fact which hurts their cause immensely.

(Aerial images are from the CRD Natural Areas atlas, with text and highlighting done with the GIMP and Inkscape)