http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680831/why-better-transportation-options-keep-you-healthy?utm_campaign=Feed%3A%20fastcompany%2Fheadlines%20%28Fast%20Company%29&utm_source=twitter

The link above provides a great infographic on the myriad health benefits of decreased car dependency and increased walking and transit use. This is a great primer for anyone who questions the assumption on this blog that car dependent land use and transportation planning decisions are the worst way to run a human settlement.

Off Topic But Interesting: A Risk Evaluation of the Enbridge Pipeline

This one is a little off the topic of this blog, but the proposed Enbridge pipeline is too big of an issue to really ignore. Its nice to see an issue that sees so much emotion from both sides evaluated logically. For those who aren’t aware, the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline is a proposed oil pipeline that would carry oil from Alberta’s oil sands to Kitimat. While it would doubtless increase profit to the oil sands sector, it is also strongly opposed by many for the risk of a spill from the pipeline or from tanker ships.

http://www.digitalityworks.com/Viewers/ViewIssue.aspx?IssueID=58&PageNo=1#.UJ2s_kR8lI0

I found this recent study published in Innovation Magazine: three professional engineers, two of whom are Professors Emeritus at UBC with specialties in risk assessment and probabalistic decision making, evaluate the risks associated with tanker traffic associated with the Enbridge Pipeline. Using Enbridge’s own study, they evaluate the probability of a tanker spill during the project’s 50 year lifetime. The odds of a spill of any size is 47%, and 9% for a spill greater than 5000 cubic metres.  

They compare these probabilities to standard allowable probabilities for other incidents in BC. The difference is striking. For instance, the design target probability for bridge collapse due to ship collision is .0001%. The authors make it clear that Enbridge’s application asks BC to accept a risk that is orders of magnitude higher than what we accept in other fields.

Innovation Magazine is the official publication of the engineers professional association for British Columbia. It reports on industry and association news in addition to technical papers.

The Connection Between Transportation and Retail

NYC’s Department of Finance recently found that after improvements to transit and pedestrian infrastructure, local retail revenues jumped by 73 percent. The project included a package of improvements, including dedicated bus lanes, reduction of parking space, and added parking meters. As is usual with these types of street improvements, local merchants opposed the improvements in the planning stage, and claimed it hurt their revenues after it was implemented. 

The evidence gathered by NYC speaks to the contrary. This shows evidence for what should be obvious: that transit riders, cyclists, and pedestrians spend money too. In fact, the NY Post has found that many of New York’s innovative streetscaping, which includes pedestrian plazas and bike lanes, have precipitated a rise in retail revenues in their areas.

What does this mean for our city? We have had many of the same improvements in Vancouver, from street closures on Granville and Robson to bus lanes to those headline-grabbing bike lanes. We also get similar push back from businesses that claim that ready car access and free parking is the only option for bringing in customers. The results in New York suggest that this economy vs. livability dilemma may be an illusion. Complete streets, when done well, can in fact be good for business. The perplexing part, however, is that improving the lot of businesses and convincing them that their revenues have increased has not proved to be the same thing. 

Narrow Streets and Housing Affordability

Earlier this month, the City of Vancouver released the final report from the Mayor’s Task Force on Affordable Housing, with the lofty goals of increasing affordable housing choices for all Vancouverites, and (get this) ending street homelessness by 2015. While it is good to set time lines for concrete goals, I think that ending Vancouver’s street homelessness may be a generation’s work, not just three years. Nonetheless, I hope that this fairly unrealistic goal indicates a focused approach to ending street homelessness.

A full recap on this plan is definitely due, but for the time being, I want to focus on the report’s thin streets proposal, as it has received the most attention so far. The plan for thin streets is to take a standard 66 foot road allowance, chop it in half, and allow a developer to build townhouses on one half, leaving a thinner street (hence the name) on the other half. The concept is designed to basically pull space for new housing virtually out of thin air. 

I think the idea has some merit, as it is a great way to use existing road allowance for housing. The long term trends in Vancouver show demand for roads declining while demand for housing increasing, so conceptually there is a certain symmetry to it. As a municipal engineer, I feel obliged to recognize that there tend to be utilities under roads that would need to be relocated to make room for the new housing. However, the fact that new housing projects often go hand-in-hand with utility upgrades suggests that costs associated with this need not be insurmountable. 

The largest backlash from this initiative has come from (who else?) homeowners. Complaints run from typical NIMBY cries against density to a much more reasonable concern that homeowners who paid more for a corner lot may see their property price decrease as it ceases to be one. Apparently no one told them that if this plan succeeds, the overall value of property in this city will decrease or at least slow its climb, so we’ll set that aside for now.

Its clear that the proposed thin streets pilot projects would need a certain amount of neighborhood buy-in. I think that for corner lot owners, this would essentially mean a buy-off. It has been proposed that the city could clear upzoning for affected corner lots. This would allow them to be upgraded to contain additional suites that could be rented for income. Even if the current owner doesn’t act on the new allowances, this would increase the resale value of the property, which could counteract the negative impact from thin streets development. Other options include cash compensation to the owner or buying the property outright, upzoning, and reselling. The first option is an obvious cost to the city; the second, while it contains an element of risk, could be revenue neutral or even net a profit. 

Gary Mason brings up an interesting point about new townhouses in his Globe and Mail article. He puts forth that townhouses are not really all that affordable in this city, and therefore that building more would not help with housing affordability. It is true that the townhouses themselves will likely be expensive when sold, but that misses the point. New housing will likely never be easily affordable for low-income households in Vancouver. However, an increase in total housing brings the whole market down. Part of the reason for Vancouver’s million-dollar-tear-down houses is that you can’t really get new houses in Vancouver for any price. They just aren’t there. However, if we can increase the supply of good $800k-$1M housing, no one is going to pay a million for a shack.

Its important to point out that I’m not advocating for trickle-down economics in Vancouver’s housing. Increasing the supply at the $800k-$1M level targets a large part of the real estate market, and can help to stop the migration of middle-income families to the suburbs by adding downward pressure on the prices of homes currently in this price range. While the lowering of townhouse prices may indirectly affect low-income rental prices, it is unlikely that there will be enough effect on its own to provide substantial help to low-income Vancouverites. This portion of the Task Force’s plan is targeted towards middle-income Vancouverites. Ironically, this group is not unlike the group of homeowners who oppose this measure the most.

The Proliferation of Density in the Metro Vancouver Region

Last week, the Vancouver Sun highlighted the growing trend in Metro Vancouver for in high rises outside of Vancouver proper, particularly in Burnaby, Surrey, and Coquitlam. This isn’t necessarily earth-shattering news, as several cities in the region have had small but dense areas of development for quite some time. In fact, many of these developments meet the goals of longstanding community and regional plans. 

 The main guiding plan in this trend is the Metro Vancouver Regional Growth Strategy. The document, ratified by representatives from the region’s municipalities, sees development in the region being focused into several regional centers with smaller ‘town centres’ playing a supporting role. There is a lot in there, so I won’t try to do a full breakdown, but essentially the plan is to have dense regions scattered throughout the region. This breaks down the central business district/suburbs dichotomy that is all to common in North American cities.Distributing the dense centers around the region helps to alleviate traffic and shorten trip times, and having dense urban areas in several locations helps alleviate the infrastructural inefficiencies associated with large low-density suburban areas. The Regional Growth Strategy provides the philosophy for land use in the region, but leaves the application and enforcement to individual municipalities.

Burnaby in particular has been working on the regional/town centre pattern of growth for quite some time now, and has been acting on community plans to concentrate density in Metrotown (since 1977) and the Brentwood area (since 1996). Even before the arrival of the skytrains, these were areas set up to be dense neighborhoods and commercial centres. I always find it tempting to believe that little pockets of density had sprung up in response to transit development, when skytrain lines likely were made to pass through these areas because they were pockets of development.

Richmond has also been working on creating a city centre. The Richmond City Centre Plan, originally conceived in 1995, sets the goal of attracting 50% of Richmond’s growth in population to the City Center area from 1995 until the plan’s horizon, 2021, and is on track to meet that goal.  Again, this is a dense area that that had been in the works for many years before it gained skytrain service.

When you look at the regional and town centres above, it is clear that the idea of a region with distributed nodes of density is did not happen suddenly or recently. For several decades now, regional and municipal authorities have been pushing for a distributed network of urban centres across the region. The Vancouver Sun article should not be seen as a sign of a recent trend, but as a marker of progress in decades of land-use planning in the region.

The Reckless Cyclist Fallacy

The debate surrounding allocation of transportation resources is a lively one, and for good reasons. Decisions surrounding personal transportation affect everyone. Unfortunately, one debate tactic that surfaces in the bikes vs. cars subset of this debate is the idea that cyclists are reckless, lawless, and unsafe. This idea is often used to justify calls for greater regulation of cyclists or the restriction of cyclist-friendly infrastructure

There are several problems with this idea. For one, it assumes that infrastructure or regulatory decisions should be punitive. There is an inherent assumption that for their misbehaviour, cyclists don’t ‘deserve’ infrastructure that protects their safety or makes their lives easier. The idea of restricting safety measures to only deserving people makes is at odds with the idea of promoting public safety.

 For example, before the recent upgrades to the Sea-to-Sky highway, Provincial highway officials did not castigate motorists for causing a high number of crashes on the highway, they made the highway safer. The smoother curves, ample passing opportunities, and concrete barriers were not seen as perverse rewards for unsafe drivers, but an effective tool to reduce fatalities. The problem is that cycle infrastructure is often politicized to the point where adding safety features is equated with rewarding unsafe behaviour in public debate.

 The other issue with using accusations that cyclists as a group are unsafe is that they are largely unfounded. Cyclists do break laws, and in Vancouver, police do patrol bike routes and issue tickets. However, the fact is that transportation users of all stripes break laws. Pedestrians jaywalk (which is not always an offence) or wander into vehicle paths. Motorists have an almost uncountable number of ways to break the law behind the wheel. To aim criticism at any one group of road users while ignoring the rest is to give them a free pass.

Since definitively proving fault in a cyclist/car crash is hard (or at least finding at-fault statistics is), some proponents of this argument turn to the specter of fatal pedestrian/cyclist crashes to illustrate cyclists’ danger. I did some research to find out how many fatal pedestrian/cyclist collisions occur in Vancouver each year. The only problem is that I could only find one. The Globe and Mail showed one incident in 2010. The article shows that about ten pedestrians a year are hospitalized by cyclists in BC, but that this is the only death since BC Injury Research and Prevention Unit started keeping records in 2012. This rate, one fatality in 11 years, is invisible compared to the 3,096 traffic fatalities in BC from 2001 to 2007 (the latest year that ICBC crash statistics are available).

 Unfortunately, there is no easy way to put this argument down for good. Motorists are the majority of road users, and the gut reaction to perceived unsafe actions is can be fierce. There is a certain amount of confirmation bias in that motorists don’t remember all the courteous, law-abiding cyclists they encounter, but remember only the dangerous near-misses. When these stories are presented uncritically in the media, motorists’ misplaced anger is only reinforced.  

Cycling in Winnipeg

I am visiting family in Winnipeg for the next two weeks, so I wanted to profile the Winnipeg transportation system while I am here. This week, I start with my first impressions of cycling in Winnipeg.

Despite having lived in Winnipeg as a teenager, I have never seriously biked for transportation purposes. On this visit, however, I wanted to try it out. So far, I have only cycled somewhat suburban areas. I don’t feel like this is too large of an omission, however, because Winnipeg’s downtown is quite small and infrequently used. Historically, each neighborhood in what is now known as Winnipegwas its own municipality. This contributes to a spread out land-use, with sometimes with potential infill area in between the former towns.

In conjunction with the land-use pattern, cycling in Winnipeg is also defined by the city’s geography. The first thing that this Vancouver cyclist notices is the lack of hills. When taken with the long, wide, straight roads and bike paths, this creates some stretches that are hypnotically straight, flat, and uneventful. In this way, the riding more resembles the Tour de France than an alleycat.

There were a surprising number of off-street trails and bike lanes. Looking at the city’s cycle map, it looks like a lot of these are existing recreational trails that, with a few links, have been strung together into a pop-up cycle network. This is a great way to use existing bike infrastructure for new purposes. However, some of the windier trails may be frustrating for cyclists not looking to joyride, but just wanting to get somewhere.

The newer off-street bike routes that I tried were all extra wide sidewalks (about 6 meters) that were shared between pedestrians and cyclists. While this would create conflicts at higher volumes, the ones I tried had few cyclists or pedestrians, making an easy ride. 

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised at the cycle network of the city that I typically associate with sprawl and car dependence. There seems to be somewhat of a  cultural shift towards cycling as well; more people that I know are biking for personal transportation, and there are definitely more cyclists on the road. 

This Victoria Times Colonist Article is Written to Make You Afraid Of Cycling

Derek Spalding reports that cycle crashes are up 21% in four years. What he doesn’t tell you anything about is the change in cyclists on the road, or the rate of crashes per cycle trip. If growth in cycle trips is increasing faster than total number of crashes, the crash rate is going down and cycling in Victoria is getting safer.

The scaremongering infographic does show that cycling across the Selkirk Trestle on something called the Galloping Goose is up from 2010 to 2011 by about 8%. If we assume this is representative of the region’s cycling growth over the last four years, we can estimate that cycling is up 36% in that period and, therefore, that cycling has gotten safer. Those are some big assumptions, but that’s all this article gives its readers to go on.

This is a good example of the misleading and shoddy reporting that cycling often receives in the media. Mr. Spalding took one stat and didn’t place it in proper context. He later goes on to use this poorly presented information to contest the claim that more riders are good for cyclist safety even though the stats he presented suggest that there are more riders in Victoria and that bike riding has become safer.

E-Bike Classification in BC

Last week, a BC supreme court ruled that when you take the pedals off an electric bike, it ceases to be a bike. The court case involved a Chilliwack man who took the pedals off his electric bike and was ticketed for riding a motor vehicle without insurance or registration.

He was riding an emerging style of ebike that is essentially an underpowered scooter with vestigial pedals attached at an angle that makes them impractical for pedaling. The reason for the pedals is purely legal: if it has pedals, it can be classed as an ebike. This means that the rider doesn’t need a drivers license or registration (ICBC rules here). Riders of ebikes are treated the same as ordinary cyclists, with the exception that they must be 16.

When the pedals come off, however, things get more complicated. Since it is no longer a motor-assisted vehicle, it is a motor vehicle. This motor vehicle, however, isn’t built to the same standards as a street-legal moped or scooter and so does not fit into any category of registrable vehicle. An ebike with the pedals removed cannot be driven on public roads.

I agree with the distinction between a human-powered and a motor vehicle. For one thing, human-powered vehicles have natural limits on their mass and speed, limiting the damage possible in a collision. It makes sense that drivers of all but the puniest of motor vehicles be required to prove their ability to drive safely. Part of the appeal of ebikes is that they require no license.

For mopeds and scooters, drivers must have a full license or a learner’s permit. This means that drivers must learn how to drive a car (tests cannot be taken on a moped) first. If I only wanted to drive a moped, I could get my learner’s permit, but would have to retest every 2 years. It may make sense to create a separate license class, with similar requirements to a learner’s permit, that can be held permanently.