Tag: John Luton

Johnson St. Bridge closes to rail

Although the City of Victoria hasn’t yet released the press release, John Luton announced this morning via Facebook update that the recent inspection of the bridge revealed that it is no longer safe to carry rail traffic. Given the recent pictures John posted on his flickr stream (one of which you can see below), this doesn’t surprise me.

Steel peeling like a flower on the Johnson St. Bridge. Photo credit: John Luton
Steel peeling like a flower on the Johnson St. Bridge. Photo credit John Luton

John’s full Facebook update:

It’s official. The Johnson Street Bridge is no longer safe to carry rail. Until the Island Corridor Foundation took over the railway, the bridge was maintained (or not), by CP Rail. It will remain open for cyclists and pedestrians but other arrangements will have to be made for rail until January when the structure comes down. The city’s road bridge has been better maintained and remains safe, for the time being.

John Luton joins the blogging ranks

As I have lamented in the past, few councillors are using this shiny information superhighway thingy to tell us, their constituents, about what goes on in city hall. Until recently, Cairine Green, District of North Saanich Councillor,  remained the only one to harness this power.

But she is no longer alone, as John Luton has decided to join the blogging ranks, with The Sustainable City. As he puts it in his own words:

As a Victoria City Councillor, I’ll use the blog to share ideas and profile work I am doing down at City Hall. I hope it will be of some value in providing some accountability to the citizens of Victoria and the many thousands of you who lent me their votes last year.

I am glad my list of blogging councillors has doubled in size. Let’s hope 2010 can double that list again.

Notes from yesterday’s CRD bike/ped plan launch

The CRD is building a new bike and pedestrian master plan and to get the ball rolling, they hosted a launch & lunch party yesterday and they were kind enough to invite myself, Lesley Ewing and Gerald Smeltzer, all of us on the core team of the Oak Bay bike master plan. The event was well attended, with staff from every municipality save Colwood there, lots of CRD staff, and community activists from the Greater Victoria Cycling Coalition, the Saanich Bike/Ped Committee, the sadly non-defunct Parent Advisory Committee for the Safer School Travel Plan as well as us. (Update: Michael Baxter, the engineer from Colwood on the comm., was out of town)

We started off with an excellent lunch in the 6th floor boardroom of the CRD building. You can quite literally see for miles up there. To kick off the presentation portion, Tracey Corbett of CRD’s Regional Planning and View Royal Mayor Graham Hill both spoke briefly. Tracey spoke about how this grew out of the CRD’s Travel Choices work a few years back and Graham gave an excellent overview of the challenges we face, with the “perfect storm” of peak oil, climate change and growing health issues).

After Tracey and Graham, Mira Birk and the Alta Planning + Design team out of Portland, OR, Urban Systems from Vancouver and John Luton, their local advisor, got up to talk about what they were going to do and what tools they brought to the table. They spoke about some of the GIS tools they have developed over the years to look at quality of bike and pedestrian infrastructure and make it easier to plan a complete street. For more information about these tools, Birk gave a talk on the cycle portion at the 2008 ProWalk/ProBike conference.

She went on to make some interesting points of the challenges of planning for bikes and pedestrians, in that most models of transportation don’t yet account for how new bike lanes or sidewalks change travel habits or factor in the health and societal benefits to more people walking and biking. This makes it hard to “sell” these improvements to people educated in the old school of planning for cars and single family homes. She also pointed that until recently few universities in their planning depts had people that could teach the next generation about how to plan for bikes, walking or mixed use development.

So where do we go from here? Hopefully the website will be appearing online shortly, so that most people can learn about the project. There will also be a citizen’s advisory committee and a planners/engineers from each municipality committee. Alta is hoping to finish the 1st phase by the Fall of 2009, with the 2nd and 3rd phases late spring/early summer 2010.