Wet Coast Journals

Fireworks

Last night the West End was invaded.

From the hotels on Robson, from the suburbs, from the SkyTrain and the buses, they came through here in their thousands, on their way down to English Bay to find the best spot from which to watch the first evening of the annual Celebration of Light fireworks.

The City tries to mitigate the impact on the West End by blocking the streets to all but local traffic and by increasing the number of police. But there's still a huge impact on the neighbourhood. Gardens are trampled, litter is strewn everywhere, yahoos continue shouting and fighting long after the last firework has gone off. And in the morning we come out to assess the damage, try to rescue the flowers, clean up the litter.

It happens every year. Four nights of chaos and confusion, and 30 minutes of actual fireworks.

It's amazing to see so many people gathered together - to me that's more awe-inspiring than the fireworks which, begin to look the same after a while.

It was a good night for it. Warm, clear and calm. There were an estimated 350,000 people out, according to the Vancouver Sun. The show was over by about 10:30 and everybody had finally gone home by about 2:00 a.m., leaving the West End quiet again.

The Wireless Home Gets Closer

A few weeks ago I wrote about wireless networks and the benefits of having different devices, such as stereos, computers, televisions, etc., connecting through the ether, rather than by wire. Now, it seems that it's about to happen. The Register reports that Linksys, a major manufacturer of wireless cards, is developing a new line of "Wireless Home" products.

It'll be nice to get rid of all those wires. Of course there are implications - will others be able to intercept the signals? Will a plethora of wireless networks in a crowded community - or even a single apartment building - conflict with each other? Do those waves affect our brains?

As Gilda Radner used to say, "There's always something!"

Ward Politics to Come to Vancouver

The cynics said it wouldn't happen. It was one campaign promise that the Coalition of Progressive Electors would break. After all, COPE did quite well out of the at-large system in Vancouver's civic election last November, why would they want to get rid of that system?

But they're doing it. Today, Vancouver City Council passed a motion to establish an electoral reform commision to "change the method of local elections from at large to neighbourhood constituencies under section 138 of the Vancouver Charter, in time for the next general civic election" (emphasis added). The motion also establishes a Commission on Neighbourhood Constituencies and Local Democracy to investigate other measures to improve civic democracy and receive input from the public about how best to improve local democracy. One highlight: "The boundaries of the Neighbourhood Constituencies should be designed to ensure as much as possible that each of the diverse components of our City sees itself represented on City Council and the Parks Board" (emphasis added).

It'll be interesting to see how "diverse components" is interpreted. Does that mean strictly communities (it would be great if the Downtown East Side got its own councillor and parks board representative. Or does it also mean ethnic, gender, age, income diversity? If so, there's a potential for some really radical innovations here. Vancouver politics could get quite exciting over the next few years.

Vancouver has had an at-large system for years. And until recently that system benefitted the affluent neighbourhoods of the west side. They were the ones who had the financial and other resources to mount city-wide campaigns. They were the ones who would turn out in disproportionate numbers to vote, knowing that their voices would be heard at City Hall. In contrast, the East Side, and especially the Downtown East Side, tended not to vote. The result was years of domination by the ironically named "Non-Partisan Association", which tended to favour development, automobile traffic, and minimal social services. Through a combination of various circumstances (a popular mayoralty candidate and a cohesive platform for COPE; complacency, fatigue and nasty infighting on the part of the NPA, and a sense among the citizenry that it was time for a change), COPE swept the board last time around, electing every candidate that they ran. One of their promises was to introduce electoral reform, including, perhaps, a ward system to make local government more responsive to the people.

One of the reasons party politics have thrived in Vancouver is because of the at-large system. You need a strong, well-funded organization to run a city-wide campaign. Independents don't stand much of a chance, so people interested in civic politics would naturally gravitate towards one of the major parties - in recent years, COPE and the NPA. With a ward system, independents have a better chance - someone with popular support in a particular community has a chance of winning an election, without having to accommodate her or his views to that of one of the major parties.

Ward systems do have their problems - they can strengthen the role of parochial politics, pitting neighbourhoods against each other, but on balance, I believe they're better for local democracy. At least it'll ensure that less affluent neighbourhoods, such as the Downtown East Side, Fairview Slopes, Marpole, etc., will have a voice. It'll be interesting to see how the boundaries are drawn.

Note that the two remaining NPA councillors, Sam Sullivan and Peter Ladner, voted against the motion.

It's going to be interesting.

Plone, Zope, Zwiki, Nucleus, Greymatter, Movable Type, Blogger - What's the Meaning of This?

I'm setting up an intranet at work; one that everybody - faculty, staff, students - can use. It will be for news, for messages, discussions, posting and retrieving documents, events, etc. We currently have something in place, but it's just an html subsection of the public site, and is strictly one-way, top-down communication.

So, I've been researching the best cms (content management system) to use to create the intranet. Laura Trippi recommends Plone. She herself currently uses a combination of Zope, Zwiki (short for Zope Wiki) and Blogger Professional. Wiki is difficult to describe, but anyone interested can find the details at http://www.wiki.org/.

Wetcoast is now powered by Moveable Type, which, like Zope and Plone, is General Public Licence software. I used to use Nucleus, but I didn't find it either powerful or versatile enough.

Plone seems quite powerful and versatile. However, there's a bit of a learning curve associated with it, and because it's so powerful and adaptable, a lot of work has to be undertaken at the start to set it up. I'm slowly getting there. It's fun, but exhausting.

It's interesting to be spending so much time on the form, rather than the content. I usually prefer the other way around, but once it's set up, the content will be provided by everybody, not just me. And that's the beauty of it.

A Garden is Born

Today we broke ground at the Stanley Park Community Flower Garden and Native Plant Demonstration Garden.

Quite a mouthful, but the title reflects the reality of the garden. Part of it is broken into private plots that can only be used for flowers (no vegetables). And part of it will be devoted to native plants. This part will be run by the Stanley Park Ecology Society. The private plots will be administered by the West End Residents Association. There's a blog for anyone interested in the progress of the garden.

The garden is occupying a swarth of grass on the eastern edge of the park, between the road and some public tennis courts. You would think it would be welcomed by the community - the sight of beautiful flowers instead of boring grass - and for the most part, it is. But the residents of one neighbouring building are bitterly opposed to the garden and some of them have even threatened to vandalize it. WERA and SPES have tried to respond to some of their concerns (excess traffic, litter, untidyness) even though some of those concerns are, frankly, ludicrous. They're worried about excess traffic when they already overlook one of the most popular tourist destinations in Vancouver?

The reaction of these neighbours is a classic example of NIMBYism and it's rather disheartening to see. WERA has sent a letter to the Parks Board and to the council of the building in question, raising the vandalism issue and putting them on notice that such actions will not be tolerated.

I hope that as the garden progresses, the residents of this building will come to realize that it is adding value to their views, and to their property. Maybe some of them will even want to get on the waiting list for plots.

Passing Notes in the 21st-Century Classroom

The New York Times had an article last week about the implications of the proliferation of wireless networks in academic settings such as classrooms and conferences. Students are using these networks for instant messaging, for browsing the web, and checking and writing email.

For example, two or more students could instant message each other (on their PDAs, cell phones or laptops) about what a professor was saying - commenting on his or her content, delivery, or attire. (Or they could just be making plans for getting together for a beer). Someone else could be doing an internet search on something the prof said and then post a message in a class chatboard contesting the prof's point of view or providing support material.

Some professors are embracing this technology. Others are fighting it. But the technology itself is neutral, and really, it's just an extension of what's being going on in lecture halls for centuries. Students have always communicated with each other, by whispering -- or talking loudly or by passing notes, or through gestures. And they've flipped through reference books to gain background or alternative points of view on what the prof has been saying. And they've stood up to comment on his or her lecture or to challenge the prof's point of view.

So it's not what's going on that's changed. It's just how it's done. And really, the modern way is more efficient. To be able to instantly challenge an incorrect statement by a professor; to be able to initiate a background discussion about the forefront presentation. It should ultimately add to the experience.

A Step Backward

A few days ago I quoted approvingly from a U.S. Federal Highways Administration document about pedestrians and bicyclists. In that document it mentions that the U.S. Congress had mandated that the FHA consider pedestrians and cyclists in its planning.

Now, according to Salon that self-same Congress is taking an opposite tack:

Congress to bikers: Get a car A house subcommittee has voted to cut all funding for bike paths and other pollution-free transportation programs.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Katharine Mieszkowski

July 22, 2003  |  For every bike commuter who proudly pedals to work under the mantra "one less car," Congress has a message for you: Get back on the highway where you belong, burning fossil fuel like a real American. That goes for you, too, you traffic-hazard pedestrians.

Fresh out of subcommittee, a new congressional transportation appropriations bill will entirely eliminate some $600 million worth of annual federal funding for bike paths, walkways and other such transportation niceties in fiscal year 2004.

Never mind the political fallout of U.S. oil dependency on the Middle East, or the fact that the average mileage per gallon for new cars and trucks in the U.S. is at its lowest level in 20 years. Members of the House's Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Treasury and Independent Agencies know that what America needs now is fewer bike paths and walkways -- but more highways.

Defenders of the bill argue that, in light of huge federal deficits, something has to go, but for bike activists and environmentalists who have been pushing for decades for alternatives to driving, the cuts are a giant step backward.

"The irony of trying to make it easier for people to drive when we're clearly running up against major roadblocks on providing oil for driving is just too much," says Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, a nonprofit that promotes bikes for transportation.

Under the new bill, which the full Committee on Appropriations is likely to consider this week, before it goes to the House floor for a vote, highways would receive $34.1 billion in fiscal year 2004, which is $2.5 billion more than this year, while the Transportation Enhancements program that funds bike paths and walkways would get nothing. The bill would also significantly reduce funding for everything from Amtrak to reverse-commute transportation programs that connect low-income urban workers to jobs in the suburbs.

"It's saying: 'We're not really that interested in community restoration or improvement. We just want the money going toward highway development,'" says Susan Prolman, government relations counsel for Defenders of Wildlife. She points out that the bill puts $4.8 billion more into highway projects than President Bush asked for in his 2004 budget.

"Draconian,""cynical,""nonsensical,""grave" are some of the words that congressional lobbyists for environmental, conservation and historical preservation groups had for the legislation, which will cut funding specifically aimed at supporting pollution-free modes of transportation.

"They essentially gutted funding for sensible alternatives in favor of more road building," says Eric Olson, who works for the Sierra Club's Challenge to Sprawl campaign in Washington.

After 40 years of funding highways, in 1991 the Department of Transportation started the Transportation Enhancements program to develop a more "modally balanced transportation system by encouraging projects that are more than asphalt, concrete and steel." Environmentalists and historical preservationist groups viewed its creation as a watershed in federal transportation policy -- an acknowledgement that the U.S.'s vast federal highway system can do more than just seamlessly move cars and trucks.

"So much of the devastation to the historic fabric of our cities and communities was due to the barreling through of highways in our neighborhoods," says Susan West Montgomery, president of Preservation Action, a group that's among those fighting the cuts. The creation of the enhancements program countered that with "symbolic meaning, as well as practical money."

From 1992 to 2002, the program invested more than $2.4 billion in some 12,000 projects, with about half of that money going directly to benefit cyclists and pedestrians. It has provided funding for bike paths, pedestrian bridges, sidewalks, as well as scenic overlooks on highways and wildlife underpasses under roads. The program has helped pay for rehabilitating historic train stations, removing illegal billboards and mitigating pollution runoffs from highways.

In San Francisco, the birthplace of the global bike activist movement Critical Mass, urban cycling has doubled over the last decade. And like many other local governments, the city has won federal funds to keep up with the increase in bike transportation.

"To lose these federal transportation dollars would be a huge blow to San Francisco's growing bicycle infrastructure," says the San Francisco Bike Coalition's Shahum. "We've seen tremendous change in the last 10 years from striped bike lanes to better signage to bike access to transit and safety promotional campaigns that wouldn't have been possible without the funding." On July 24, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown will unveil a new educational campaign, underwritten by the currently threatened funds, that aims to encourage cyclists and motorists to "coexist" better.

"What we've got now in San Francisco and many cities across the country is the beginning of a good system," says Shahum. "But we're really kind of on a precipice of making a sea change in the city, because what we're close to building is a complete connected network of bike lanes and passages, a chance to ride in dedicated space."

It's not just the pedaling urbanites in San Francisco who have benefited from the monies under the program. Elementary school students who ride on the Shannon Park-Ladd School Bike Path in Fairbanks, Alaska, and bird-watchers in Texas on the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail, also enjoy the fruits of the program.

Among the thousands of projects the program has supported are Denver's Bike-and-Ride Project, which retrofitted buses with bike racks and provided bike parking at bus stations. It also contributed $815,000 for the creation of a new pedestrian plaza as part of the revitalization of Journal Square in Jersey City, N.J. (To look up what the program has helped finance in your state, go here and click on the "projects" link.)

Micah Swafford, press secretary for Rep. Ernest J. Istook, R.-Okla., who chairs the subcommittee that wrote the bill, argues that, with the prospect of a $455 billion federal budget deficit and anticipating declining revenues in the highway taxes that fund transportation programs, the committee had to cut something.

"It's more important to provide the basic funding for roads, before you provide money for enhancements whenever you're facing a shortfall," Swafford says, citing Department of Transportation statistics that there are 6,476 structurally deficient bridges on the national highway system as one of the reasons that highways were the subcommittee's priority.

But Rep. Istook put out a press release on Friday, July 11, the day the bill made it out of the subcommittee, bragging that "$518 million is headed to Oklahoma!" leading one environmental lobbyist to attribute the whole issue to "parochial Oklahoma politics.""Actually, it's kind of sad. He's basically eviscerating these programs that are important to a lot of other states for the sake of benefiting Oklahoma," says Deron Lovaas, a lobbyist for the Natural Resources Defense Council, another group fighting the cuts.

The move by the transportation appropriations subcommittee also represents a turf war between the congressional appropriators and authorizers. The current law governing all U.S. Department of Transportation funding expires Sept. 30. But the congressional authorizers, in charge of setting the agenda that the appropriators then enact, have yet to decide if they will extend the previous authorization for another year, or revamp it entirely for the next six-year term. In the ensuing vacuum, Rep. Istook and crew have just gone ahead and set the transportation agenda for fiscal 2004.

Groups opposed to the measure are lobbying members of the larger Appropriations Committee, as well as other members of Congress. But they think they'll have better luck making the case in the Senate for spending a fraction of highway dollars on bike paths.

It's not a done deal yet - it's only the report of a committee and the full House may not go along with its recommendations, but it's disturbing news nevertheless.

Starbucks: The Empire Strikes on Robson Street

Yet another Starbucks is opening on Robson Street, on Jervis Street, just two blocks away from the two Starbucks that sit facing each other at the corner of Robson and Thurlow.

This particular Starbucks is replacing the idiosyncratic Cow's Vancouver ice cream shop; for many years a tourist magnet because of the large statue of a cow outside.

It's sad, but it's typical of what's been slowly happening to Robson Street over the past 20 years. I can remember when Robson was funky - a slightly more sedate version of Commercial Drive, with bookstores (Duthies used to be on Robson, before financial troubles forced it to retreat to a single store), small restaurants, record shops and the wonderfully-smelling Galloway's Spices. Then slowly the chains started to move in. Virgin Records was the largest, taking over the old library. But there was also La Senza, Buffalo Jeans, Aveda, the Body Shop, and of course, Starbucks. And now Robson is lifeless, sterile. Oh yes, the sidewalks are crowded, especially on hot summer days like this; but there's no life to the street. A few of the old stores grimly hang on - such as Murchies - but most of them have gone. The stores that remain are not for locals; they're for the tourists. But even the idiosyncratic tourist places - such as Moose Magnets and Cows are in turn succumbing to the blander franchises such as Starbucks and Steamrollers.

I do wonder sometimes. Can there be that much demand for expensive coffee? Or will this new Starbucks merely cannabalize the sales of its sister stores and of the Blenz (a local franchise) on the next corner?

You can watch the slow march of the international chains down Robson from east to west. Now it's reached as far as Jervis. West of Jervis there are still many small businesses; an Asian grocery store, a funky kitchenware place, a greasy spoon, a non-Starbucks coffee shop, a used bookstore. This is the interesting part of Robson; where there's still life on the street. But for how much longer?

Sidewalks and Streets

While walking through the West End today I reflected on the fact that that whenever a sidewalk meets a street or a laneway, the sidewalk dips down to meet the level of the road. Why can't the road rise to meet the level of the sidewalk? That would make it easier for people with mobility problems or parents with strollers to navigate. It would also force vehicle drivers to slow down or -- failing that -- to at least subconsciously recognize that other people, employing other modes of transportation, exist.

I did a search on the internet but found little discussion of this idea, except for Portland, Oregon, which is actively pursuing this alternative. Raised crossings, Portland estimates, cost only about $2000 U.S. each.. There are many sites devoted to sidewalk construction, but all of them assume that whenever a sidewalk and a road intersect, the sidewalk will have to slope down to meet the roadway. Even the U.S. Federal Highway Administration's thoughtful Bicycle and Pedestrian Program website makes this assumption.

Currently, it's difficult for someone in a wheelchair or on a scooter, or someone pushing a stroller, to navigate through our streets. At many corners there are no cutaways, or, if there are, they are only on one side of the corner, forcing the person in the wheelchair or pushing the stroller to take an even more hazardous path to the sidewalk on the other side (where, again, the cutaway may be on the wrong side of the corner).

There is hope though. A Vancouver City engineer told a recent meeting of the West End Residents Association that when sidewalks are rebuilt in the future they will stay at grade whenever they meet laneways, instead of sloping down to meet the laneways. This will be safer for pedestrians, as many drivers in laneways do not come to a stop before the sidewalk as is required by law. Considering the limited visibility for drivers at the intersection of sidewalks and laneways, this is a very unsafe condition. Confronting a built-up sidewalk will at least force drivers to slow down and perhaps make them more considerate and careful.

And while we're reconsidering the sidewalk-road interface, why not reconsider the notion of traffic synchronization? Currently, in Vancouver, traffic lights are synchronized so that drivers observing the speed limit will, under normal circumstances, encounter synchronized lights (i.e, if the light is green at one intersection when they approach it, the light will be green at the next intersection, providing they are driving the speed limit). What this means, however, is that the lights are not synchronized for pedestrians. While walking in downtown Vancouver I have observed that there is always a wait at every intersection. Why not increase the amount of time given for pedestrians to cross instead of forcing them to endure uncomfortable and frustrating waits at every corner? Considering the convenience of the pedestrian might encouragte more people to walk rather than drive.

We have made progress, nevertheless. As the U.S FHA site mentioned above notes:

For most of the second half of the 20th Century, the transportation, traffic engineering and highway professions in the United States were synonymous. They shared a singular purpose: building a transportation system that promoted the safety, convenience and comfort of motor vehicles. The post-war boom in car and home ownership, the growth of suburban America, the challenge of completing the Interstate System, and the continued availability of cheap gasoline all fueled the development of a transportation infrastructure focused almost exclusively on the private motor car and commercial truck.

Initially, there were few constraints on the traffic engineer and highway designer. Starting at the centerline, highways were developed according to the number of motor vehicle travel lanes that were needed well into the future, as well as providing space for breakdowns. Beyond that, facilities for bicyclists and pedestrians, environmental mitigation, accessibility, community preservation, and aesthetics were at best an afterthought, often simply overlooked, and, at worst, rejected as unnecessary, costly, and regressive. Many States passed laws preventing the use of State gas tax funds on anything other than motor vehicle lanes and facilities. The resulting highway environment discourages bicycling and walking and has made the two modes more dangerous. Further, the ability of pedestrians with disabilities to travel independently and safely has been compromised, especially for those with vision impairments.

This has changed in the United States, where Congress mandated the Department of Transportation to intergrate pedestrian and bicycle traffic into the transportation system. And the City of Vancouver in its Downtown Transportation Plan notes that the mmost popular mode of transportation downtown is by foot and puts pedestrian traffic as its number one priority. (See the City's 2001-2002 Pedestrian Study for some interesting statistics on pedestrian traffic.)

So there is hope. But we have to keep pushing in order to turn words into reality. Too many traffic engineers still see their mission as keeping vehicular traffic moving smoothly. In this respect, we lag behind the Europeans. Many European cities have whole streets and neighbourhoods blocked off to motor vehicles. In Vancouver, the closest we come is Granville Mall, which is restricted to taxis and buses. We still have a long way to go.

Web Design and Accessibility

The Guardian Online has a good column today on web design and accessibility. Their columnist, Jack Schofield, contends that:

Very few government and commercial websites are adequately usable by the partially sighted and blind, or offer an equivalent service to disabled users. That is simply not acceptable on social grounds. It is also, as a matter of fact, a betrayal of the principles of the web.

Schofield blames this on what he calls "designers with keyboards" - people who come out of the graphics and arts fields with no training in or feeling for the internet. He suggests that some of them should be thrown in jail, but the U.K.'s Royal National institute of the Blind is taking a more realistic approach by backing individuals who are taking legal action against websites that they claim violate England's accessibility legislation. Schofield goes on:

Universal access is not a happy accident: it is what the web is for. Unfortunately, we have hired a generation of web designers who don't know anything about computing, or the principles on which the web is based, or the reasons for its success. In fact, most of them are not web designers at all: they are graphic designers, or print designers, who have strayed into an area they don't understand. They are just painters and decorators with keyboards.

While I agree with his argument, I think he goes too far here. It is my experience working with web designers that very many of them do understand the web. There's a new generation of web designers who have received their education in web design, who have been brought up on the web, and are seriously committed to the principles of accessibility, good design and usability. They are rapidly replacing the designers who caused such eye-candy blight in the gold rush days of the late 1990s. There's hope for the web yet. W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative is a good place for background on this issue.

A Good News Day

Some good news from south of the border today: the US Senate in a surprising show of backbone, voted to cut off funding for the Pentagon's Terrorism Information Awareness Program (formerly known as the Total Information Awareness Program), despite the urging of the White House. (See, for example, the Washington Post .) The Post gives a good summary of the program:

The $54 million initiative seeks to develop a database of public and private records that could be combed for patterns that may reveal terrorist activity. Authorities could search credit card bills and airline records, as well as health, education and other personal information, the Pentagon told Congress in May. Other elements of the proposed program included developing long-distance surveillance technology that could identify people by their gaits, or, from closer in, by the irises of their eyes.

Why should this concern Canadians? First, anything that happens in the United States affects us because of its proximity, its size and its influence. Any Canadians travelling there would be affected. In fact, anyone in the world surfing the net or sending email would be affected as so much of the internet is either located in or routed through the U.S. Second, there is an element in Canadian society that feels that anything the United States does we should do to. This particular feeling has grown stronger since the election of George W. Bush. Whether it's born out of a feeling of inferiority or just a wish that our society was as right-wing as America's, this belief is especially found in the National Post, the Alliance Party, and the governments of British Columbia and Alberta. Were the United States actually to start the Terrorism Information Awareness Program, you can count on this group to start demanding that Canada do the same. Third, it's easier to take away rights than it is to restore them. Once you develop such a database and allow officials to sift through it, it would be difficult to reverse the decision. So, thank you, U.S. Senate for your common sense and courage.

Other good news, this time local: Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell has an almost 80 percent approval rating, according to a recent poll quoted in the Vancouver Sun. That's quite astounding, considering the lack of action on safe injection sites and his push to hold a referendum on the Olympics (which he then campaigned in favour of). Perhaps it's because people feel he's doing his best. There have been grumblings that he is much more centrist in power than he was as a candidate and there have been rumours -- especially in the community papers -- that he bullies councillors from his own party who disagree with his positions. Certainly, I don't agree with every position he takes (I think he's been far too tolerant of the police crackdown in the Downtown East Side for one thing), but overall, he's done a good job. And there's certainly a different atmosphere at City Hall. The people there seem much more receptive to new ideas and to listening to local citizens instead of just the business groups. Campbell and his fellow COPE council members have my support, in the main.

Ironically, the poll was commissioned by a coalition that's pressing for expanded gambling in Vancouver. They argue that the mayor is so popular that he can accede to their demands and it won't hurt him very much because of his high approval rating. In other words, he should open the floodgates to vlt's and other forms of gambling, in spite of the people of Vancouver not wanting it, because the casino owners want him to. I hope the mayor and council stand firm on this (though I am not optimistic - the provincial NDP opened the doors to legalized gambling when they were in power in the 1990s, despite the feeling of many on the left -- including me -- that gambling is a regressive, punative tax on the poor. Gambling revenues - and the poor gamble in disproportionate numbers - go to fund social services and allow governments to cut the taxes of the middle and upper classes.) The CitizenLink website has a good summary of studies done on this issue. See the Casino Gambling Reports website for a Canadian perspective.

Keeping Off the Grass

I planted some more annuals in our curbside garden today. It's looking quite well, with the plantings and the flowers that have grown from seed and those that have come up naturally. The combination of colours (blue, white, red, green, scarlet) and the variety of shapes and sizes makes for a pleasing contrast with the mundane strips of lawn along the rest of the boulevard.

There are places in the West End (though nothing compared to Vancouver's Strathcona neighbourhood where grassy swards are in a distinct minority and the front of almost every house is a delightful riot of wildflowers, shrubs, ground cover, lavender, etc., etc.) where people are fighting against lawn order. Grass has been dug up and replaced with flowers, perennials, trees, and shrubs. Not only is it aesthetically pleasing, but it's better for the environnment. The North American obsession with lawns is a major environmental problem. According to David Quammen in Outside Magazine ("Turf Warfare in the American Suburbs", 1994, quoted on the East Dillon Water District (Colorado) webpage):

Americans spend $25 billion a year on the planting and maintenance of turf grass, including municipal and corporate lawns as well as residential ones. The residential component alone amounts to $7 billion in retail trade – that’s $7 billion spent for mowers and weed whackers and leaf blowers and other powered machinery, for fertilizer and seed, for pesticides and hoses and sprinklers and rakes and clippers. Bermuda shorts and plastic flamingos are tallied separately.

The grassy yards of American homeowners cover a total of 20 million acres, roughly the same area as the entire island of Ireland. Unlike Ireland, though, a great portion of the American lawn acreage is arid, or semiarid, or otherwise climatically inhospitable to those species (mostly exotics from Europe) considered seemly for a well-manicured yard. One consequence is a need for intensive watering. Roughly 30 percent of urban water use on the East Coast, by one estimate, goes to lawn irrigation. On the West Coast, with its dry chaparral zone and its desert golf courses, the estimate is 60 percent. No doubt the preternaturally green lawns in Texas and New Mexico and Arizona, in Utah and Nevada, on the dry plains of eastern Montana and the Dakotas, are sucking away a similar share. Almost $800 million worth of grass seed is sold each year. The annual take by professional lawn-care businesses is about $3 billion.

Substitute "Canadians" for "Americans" and roughly divide by 10 and you have an idea of how Canada is affected as well. Walking down the street the other day in the heat of the afternoon, we twice had to dodge sprinklers that were uselessly wetting the top of the grass; the water running off down the sidewalk and the street and flushing down into the storm sewers. And this at a time when Vancouver's water supply is lower than normal after a dry winter and spring.

Native plants are best. They are adapted for our climate. They are hardy and don't need fertilizers, pesticides, or irrigation. And, in a few weeks, we (the West End Residents Association in partnership with the Stanley Park Ecology Society) will be breaking ground at a native plant demonstration garden on the outskirts of Stanley Park. The common areas of the garden will be devoted to native plants, while individuals will garden in their own plots -- only flowers allowed for now, alas. We're hoping it will serve as an example of what can be done with native plants which, after all, have had millions of years to adapt to our local conditions - unlike Kentucky Blue Grass.

Anyone interested in replacing their expensive, high-maintenance lawn with native plants should start by going to the website for the North American Native Plant Society.

More About Thursday

Jasper Fforde, author of the marvellous series of novels (three so far) about Thursday Next, the literary detective, has a marvellous eponymous website, chock full of fascinating detail about Thursday, SpecOps, Goliath Corp. and the other rich and varied elements that exist in his twisted world. Even if you haven't read any of the books, the site is well worth checking out.

My favourite scene from the first book, The Eyre Affair, is when Thursday and her ex-boyfriend attend a performance of Richard III where the audience behaves as an audience in our reality would behave at a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (screaming out "when is the winter of our discontent?", taking sides in the Battle of Bosworth Field, coming out dressed as a pantomine horse when Richard cries out "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!")

And the dodos. I just love the way the dodos bunch together and inquisitively examine what's going on. Like avian, sociable cats.

I can't recommend these books highly enough.

People and Cars in the West End

One issue that comes up time and again at West End Residents Association meetings is traffic.

The West End of Vancouver gets a lot of traffic. Foot traffic. Bike traffic. Automobile traffic. A lot of this is internally generated (after all, about 40,000 people live here in a small area) but an inordinate amount is through traffic. People going to the beach. People going to Stanley Park. Most offensively, people using the West End as a shortcut to get to other parts of the Lower Mainland.

In the 1970s a previous incarnation of the West End Residents Association fought for and succeeded in gaining some traffic calming measures. Traffic circles were built at some intersections. Roads were blocked off or diverted. Streets were strategically made one way at major entrances, meaning traffic could exit, but not enter, the West End at these locations.

It worked, and it still works, somewhat. However, humans being ingenious and adaptive, people have found ways around these. Drivers go through the diverters, or speed through the traffic circles. They use the laneways as shortcuts, and they blithely ignore the stop signs. So the new version of WERA (the previous incarnation atrophied due to burn-out) has traffic as one of its major concerns. How can we preserve our community as a vital, pedestrian-friendly area? How can we discourage commuters using our streets as short cuts while maintaining the vitality of our neighbourhood?

We're working on several fronts. One group is looking at laneways - how can we calm traffic and discourage drivers from using laneways for shortcuts? Others are concentrating on crosswalks. How can we make them safer for pedestrians and assert the priority of people on foot over those in automobiles? Others are thinking about how to discourage the short-cutters and reclaim the streets for multi-use purposes, not just automobiles.

We are asking questions such as:

• Why shouldn't motorists have to share the streets with cyclists, bladers, pedestrians, children playing?
  
• Why should sidewalks dip down to the level of the road at crosswalks and the intersection of sidewalks and laneways? Why can't the sidewalk stay the same height and the automobiles have to ascend to the level of the sidewalk to go through?
  
• Why can't laneways accommodate various uses? Why not trees and other plants, benches, public art, etc. in our laneways? Why must they be so utilitarian - suitable only for garbage containers and vehicular traffic?
  

We are actively engaging City Council and staff on some of these issues. The City's Downtown Transportation Plan puts the priority on pedestrians first, followed by cyclists, transit users and lastly automobiles. We are determined to ensure they follow through on this. Thus we are engaged in active and sometimes spirited discussion regarding such things as a traffic light at the intersection of Denman (a commercial street that is always busy with both pedestrian and vehicular traffic, linking as it does the Seawall and English Bay to the south with Georgia Street and the route to the North Shore to the North) and Comox, a residential street that runs east-west through the West End. To the surprise of many, WERA came out against the City's plans for a pedestrian-activated traffic light. We opposed it because we think there are better solutions - raised crosswalks, curb bulges, diagonal crosswalks - that could be considered. Traffic lights actually encourage traffic to speed and to act aggressively. Sometimes the best solutions are not the most obvious ones.

More information can be found on the WERA website at http://www.vcn.bc.ca/wera. For a more general discussion of street reclaiming (and the difference between it and traffic calming), check out the Victoria Transport Policy Institute's TDM Encyclopedia.

A drop of water

Beauty in small things - a drop of water on a leaf (photo taken July 13, 2003, Vancouver, BC)

Cruise Ships and the Environment

There's a story in the Vancouver Sun today gushing over the fact that a new cruise ship had its christening in Vancouver and extolling the tourist dollars the ship and its brethren bring in to the local economy.

Not surprisingly, there was no mention of the environmental destruction these SUVs of the ocean cause - both in terms of fuel in the water, sewage and garbage dumping and emissions. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives had a good article on this recently. It also analyzed the labour practices on board cruise ships - for most of those below decks, life on board is like a sweatshop, not a holiday.

The modern cruise ship looks ugly - a huge ungainly floating hotel. I can't see what the attraction is, but they obviously are attractive to many people.

Web Polls

I took part in another web poll today. This one was on the Vancouver Sun website and asked whether I thought the Olympics 2010 organizing committee was playing fair by buying up anti-Olympic domain names.

I find these polls difficult to resist. One click and you've had your say. But do they serve any useful purpose? They're hardly scientific, there's almost never any follow-up (tomorrow, the Sun will have a different poll and no-one will ever know the final results of today's poll - or care) and they're open to manipulation - I've often received "urgent" emails from people telling me to go to a particular site and vote on an issue. But why? Voting will have no impact and the results will disappear into the ether. And every time you submit, you get at least one more cookie, and maybe more, put on your hard drive.

But just like potato chips, you can't resist having just one more...

Our Wireless World

It's a cliché now that the paperless office is anything but. And it's rapidly becoming a cliché that our wireless world is also anything but.

My cordless mouse has a cord. It connects the mouse's base station to the computer - otherwise the mouse couldn't communicate with the laptop. There's another cord connecting the base station to the AC adaptor, so it has power.

My cell phone has both an AC adaptor and a USB cord to connect it to the laptop.

The digital camera has a cord to connect to the AC adaptor/battery charger and a USB cord to connect it to the computer. Ditto for the Clie PDA.

My headphones have a cord to connect them to the computer and to the mp3 player.

The AirPort wi-fi hub has a cord to connect it to the AC adaptor and a cable connecting it to the adsl modem.

That's a lot of cords and cables, and sometimes they get very tangled.

A lot of them could be eliminated through the adoption of Bluetooth technology. Bluetooth allows devices to automatically recognize each other and connect at short distance. Imagine a digital camera equipped with Bluetooth - it could send images directly to the computer, to a printer, to a cellphone or a PDA. Bluetooth-equipped headphones could pick up audio signals from an mp3 player, from a computer, even from a stereo receiver. A Bluetooth enabled PDA would be able to synchronize contacts and appointments with a computer and browse the web and send and receive emails through a wi-fi hub.

All this is very possible and achievable. Many of these devices already have Bluetooth enabled. I don't know about headphones, but the others certainly do. It would be nice to get rid of that tangle of cables.

Sending electricity without cords is another matter. But who knows. Maybe someday...

Accessibility on the Web

We finally launched the new website, after several people worked hundreds of hours to get it prepared. The reaction has been mixed at best. Most of those who have bothered to comment hate it, a few like it, many complain about the look or about the navigation. Some people even say they will boycott it. That's their privilege but I can't see how anyone could get so impassioned about a website.

One complaint that surfaces over and over again is that the former roll-over menus have disappeared. These were handy because you could see what information was on secondary pages without having to actually go to those pages. What the complainers perhaps don't realize is that those rollovers were rendering the site inaccessible for other users. The rollovers added convenience for some, at the expense of access for others - people with disabilities who rely on speech readers or other assistive technology.

The web should be accessible to all. That's how it started in 1992-1993 when Tim Berners-Lee first came up with the concept. It was a way to share information among people who might be using wildy different computers and operating systems. As the web developed, the artists, the geeks and the business people took over. Eye candy became the new religion. The latest flash technology, frames, animated gifs, wild backgrounds and crazy font colours were in. Browsers vied with one another for the latest gimmicks and usability, universality and most importantly, accessibility, fell by the wayside.

Inevitably reaction set in. People naturally gravitated towards sites that loaded quickly, that had useful information and were easy to navigate. Sites devoted to accessibility issues sprung up, and, with the assistance of legislation and regulations mandating accessibility for government-related sites, more attention is now paid to accessibility issues.

As the web becomes an increasingly important tool -- for finding information, for purchasing, for voting, for whatever, we have to keep in mind that the more we come to rely on it, the more important it is that we don't leave some people behind, whether because of disabilities, low bandwidth, reliance on public internet connections, or whatever.

So I'm happy to sacrifice a bit of convenience if it means greater accessibility for others. Gone are the days when a webmaster could get away with a message like this: "This website is designed to work best with Megacorp Browser 9.3 or greater. If you can't see the flashing doodads, then get a better browser."

News Sources

I stumbled across another alternative news site - the Dominion. According to its website, "The Dominion is a not for profit free newspaper covering topics of interest to Canadians. We aim to provide a progressive counterpoint to the mainstream papers, direct attention to quality work published on the internet, and create a venue where alternative forms of journalism can be practiced."

The stories seem up-to-date and well-written. It deserves to be better known.

Straight Goods Delivers the Straight Goods

One of the best alternative news sites, especially for Canadians, is Straight Goods, run out of a small Eastern Ontario town by Ish Theilheimer, whom I remember best as a former NDP candidate in the federal Renfrew North riding many years ago.

Straight Goods is a mixture of original stories, columns and links to like-minded columnists and stories. Linda McQuaig is a regular contributor, which alone makes it worth the weekly visit.

This week, McQuaig takes on the Olympics (Olympian hype obscures downsides of hosting games). The piece is definitely worth reading as a reality check against the hysteria that has resulted from the IOC decision to award the 2010 Winter Olympics to Vancouver-Whistler (Maclean's Magazine even has a special "commemorative edition" in honour of Vancouver being awarded the Games for God's sake!). McQuaig notes:

The real downside of hosting the Olympics is simply that a great deal of public money and energy will be invested in creating things like facilities for bobsleigh, luge and skeleton competitions.

It's probably good for a city to have such facilities. But is it better to have them than to have, say, great universities, schools, libraries, parks, museums, hospitals?

With the Campbell government in the process of slashing B.C.'s public sector by 30 per cent - a campaign that will only intensify as deficits grow -- it may well come down to this sort of choice.

But please, read it for yourself. And send Straight Goods a contribution - they deserve it.

Not So Wild About Harry

Salon had a piece about Harry Potter this week, A.S. Byatt and the Goblet of Ire. It was an attack on a recent opinion piece by Byatt in the New York Times that tries to analyze why the Potter books are so popular with adults.

What surprises me is the vehemence of the attack on Byatt. Why is it that the normal standards of literary criticism aren't allowed to apply to the Potter phenomenon? Standard book reviews are not allowed, only reports on the success of the cult. Criticism of the canon is especially forbidden and critics are singled out for merciless attack, as shown by the above piece by Charles Taylor.

Members of the HP cult can brook no criticism of their object of worship. I find this rather disturbing. Surely Byatt, a prominent novelist with several successful, well written and entertaining works to her credit, is entitled to her opinion, even if it's critical of HP?

The same thing happened in the Sixties when the Tolkien cult was beginning to take off. Now, I'm a fan of J.R. Tolkien, and have read the Lord of the Rings seven times so far. But when Edmund Wilson wrote an article criticizing LOTR ("Oooh, Those Awful Orcs!") he was excorciated by members of the Tolkien cult.

It's possible that some readers of genre literature such as HP and LOTR feel insecure about their taste and thus are unusually defensive of it. But to launch a personal attack on A.S. Byatt because she dared to express a negative opinion of HP strikes me as going too far.

Thursday Next

I'm reading a very enjoyable novel called The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. It's hard to describe its genre - partly science fiction, partly fantasy, partly mystery thriller. The heroine is a woman with the unlikely name of Thursday Next. (The names in the novel alone make it worth the read - Thursday's fellow operatives in the literary detection police include a Paige, a Boswell, a Mycroft and a Victor Analogy. It's light-hearted but serious at the same time. Best of all, it was published in 2001 and two sequels, Lost in a Good Book and Well of Lost Plots, have been published.

One of the best things about it is that it takes literature seriously. In this alternate world, disputes about "who really wrote Shakespeare" rage openly; original manuscripts by famous authors are highly prized (and often stolen and then sold for huge sums of money). Quite delightful.

Unfortunately, it might have received the kiss of death - a reviewer has called it "Harry Potter for grown-ups." It's not. It stands in its own right as a witty, literate alternate world mystery and doesn't need to be compared to the overhyped Harry Potter series, with which it has nothing in common.

Costco Comes Downtown

There's a report in the Vancouver Sun today that the city has approved a plan for a new Costco store (to be topped by the usual condo towers) on the edge of downtown. City planning staff are quoted as saying that unlike traditional big box stores, this one will actually ease traffic congestion because Costco is a wholesale store and most of its clients are retailers. Therefore (their logic goes), downtown retailers will order from the downtown Costco store as opposed to ordering from stores out in the suburbs, easing traffic congestion.

Simple, isn't it?

But Costco is not a traditional wholesaler. It markets to consumers and encourages consumers to buy memberships and then buy stuff in bulk. I would think it likely that current and future Costco members who live in Vancouver (say East Van, South Vancouver, the West Side) will drive their cars to the new downtown location, thereby increasing traffic congestion downtown.

The 900 residential units will be designed in a Mondrian style, according to the Sun article. If so, it will make a nice change from the boring glass towers so prevalent on that side of downtown.

News on the Wet Coast

Vancouver is not well served by its media. Canada's two so-called "national" newspapers, the Globe and Mail and the National Post, ignore our stories (though other parts of the country certainly have more cause to complain in this regard). They seem to feel the nation extends as far as the Toronto city limits. The two local dailies, the Sun and the Province, don't do much better. Since their takeover by the CanWest Global chain, they have cut back severely on local news, preferring to centralize operations out of their Winnipeg head office. They've also cut back on their coverage of the provincial legislature in Victoria, despite the fact that the provincial Liberal government, in the absence of effective opposition, has no real check on its authority.

The radio and television stations are worse. News departments are underfunded and understaffed and sensational and entertainment news are the main items.

You have to depend on the weeklies - the Straight, the Westender, and to a lesser extent, the Courier, to find out what's happening in Vancouver. It takes effort, but it's worth it.

What's worrying is that the majority of people don't take the effort and instead rely on the Sun, Province, BCTV and CKNW for their information.

Life Without the Globe

I stopped my subscription to the Globe and Mail the other day, and this is the first day without it. I was finding increasingly fewer articles worth reading. The Toronto-centric news just doesn't seem relevant out here on the wet coast and the increasing number of stories about reality television, celebrities and movie tie-ins were crowding out more serious pieces.

I went to the Globe website this morning to see what I missed - not much apparently - Paul Martin and Jean Chretien are still feuding, Nova Scotia is having an election, Canada's UN rating has dropped (though Canadians still are infinitely better off than people in most of the world.

It's curious, our fascination with news. Human beings absolutely have to know what's going on in the world - in our neighbourhoods, in our cities, our country and elsewhere in the world. News about wars, news about elections, about celebrities, about sports. Scandals, gossip, quirky tales of human nature, anthropocentric stories about cute animals; we lap it all up. Perhaps it's evolutionary; a combination of being social animals that live in groups and needing information about food sources, predators, etc.

I get my information about food sources, predators and the pecking order from the community papers (especially the Georgia Straight and the Westender - I find the Courier [a creature of CanWest Global] doesn't have much to say) and from the net (my chief sources are listed in the sidebar).

Different Views

What a contrast. This morning the Globe and Mail included a diatribe by Norman Spector (former B.C. Social Credit svengail, former Brian Mulroney advisor and later ambassador to Israel) that I had a hard time figuring out. It was partly an apologia for George Bush lying about weapons of mass destruction ("all politicians lie"), partly an attack on those people who were upset about the fact that Bush lied about WMD (Spector apparently feels that we are upset about these lies because we feel that if we focus enough on the lying we can focus attention away from the "good" things that Bush accomplished in Iraq -- we don't want to acknowledge that Saddam Hussein was an mass murderer etc., so instead we scream loudly about George W. Bush in the pathetic hope that by so doing we can make the world ignore our hero, Saddam.

At least that's what Norman Spector says.

The fact is that the invasion of Iraq was undertaken because supposedly Iraq was harbouring WMD and had violated UN Security Council resolutions that called for them to be dismantled. If Bush and Blair were to be beileved, Iraq was capable of unleashing horrendous destruction on its neighbours and even further afield and therefore had to be stopped through a preventive war. That was the justification for the war. Saddam's oppression of his own people was not the justification, though that has become the apres-war justification. If the argument that Iraq had to be invaded in order to save the Iraqi people from an oppressive dictatorship is to be taken to its logical conclusion, then the United States should even now be preparing to invade Myanamar, China, Cuba and many other countries. But that argument leads down a slippery slope - what is oppression? How arbitrary and butal does a regime have to be before the mighty United States feels it has to step in and take over? Is Cuba, a one-party state that has elections and social equaility, an oppressive regime? If so, why isn't the United States invading? After all, they invaded Iraq. What about North Korea which is inarguably repressive and without doubt has weapons of mass destruction? Or Pakistan; also authoritarian and possessing nuclear weapons?

The arguments for the invasion of Iraq do not hold water. Once taken to their logical conclusion they dissolve in a mess of contradictions and hypocricy. The United States and Britain invaded Iraq for three reasons: oil, vengeance for George Bush Senior and to gain political advantage come the next election (though it looks like that will backfire for Blair.)

Spector's column also contained a curious attack on the Toronto Star's media columnist Antonia Zerbisias. I don't know what the point of this attack was, besides the fact that Zerbisias is sceptical towards the prevailing wisdom of neo-conservatism that otherwise infests Canadian journalism and that the Star itself breaks ranks with other news outlets by espousing a liberal point of view (albeit a moderate, not a left wing one). I think the gist of Spector's argument was that the left complains about the National Post and the Asper empire and their bias while ignoring the equal, but opposite bias of the Toronto Star.

I soon discovered the perfect antidote to Spector's wooly-headedness in a book called The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, by Greg Palast, which I began reading while on the way to work on the SkyTrain. Palast is an American who writes for the Guardian and the Observer and the BBC. His book, written last year but updated in 2003 to include information on the invasion of Iraq, is largely a collection of work he's done for those outlets. The first article, for example, is about how Jeb Bush and his Florida administration helped his brother steal the 2000 presidential election in the United States by arbitrarily and incorrectly wiping thousands of legitmate voters from the voters' list. The second article, which I've just begun, is a fascinating piece about the World Bank and the IMF and the World Trade Organization and how globalization has failed the Third World. Palast argues that developing nations have fallen significantly behind since the adoption of neo-conservative principles in the early 1980s, after making significant strides before then through high tariffs and governnment investment in social programs and infrastructure. Quite an eye-opener, and highly recommended.

Community Art and Community Gardens

Mitigating the news about the Olympics today was a piece of local news - our community art project has been awarded a $20,000 grant from the Vancouver Foundation.

We live in the West End of Vancouver; one of the most densely populated communities in the western world. Despite its density, the West End is very liveable, and has a very diverse population, with a range of incomes, ages, ethnic groups, and a large gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered population. It's a vibrant neighbourhood and because it's accessible to the beaches, to Stanley Park, and to downtown, you don't need a car to live here.

For the past two years we've been involved with the new Mole Hill Community Garden. The garden was created one cool rainy day last January in a laneway in the middle of the Mole Hill community housing project. This project consists of several turn-of-the-century heritage houses which have been renovated and restored as community housing. For a while it looked like the houses would be destroyed and high-rises built in their place (as happened in much of the West End), but a coalition of community acivitists, housing activists, heritage groups and others lobbied for their preservation.

As part of the Mole Hill project, part of the laneway between the houses was to be turned into a community garden. We helped build that garden last year; converting parking spaces into garden plots (see the photos above - there are more on the West End Residents Association website - better yet, pay a visit if you're in the Vancouver area) and this year the individual plots and the communal plots are lush with greenery.

Now we want to build on our past achievements and create a piece of community art that will tie together the housing project, the garden and the traffic calming that is slated to happen in the laneway (which badly needs it - the lane is used as a shortcut by far too many motor vehicles. As home to a daycare, and as the backyard of the Mole Hill residents and the site of the community gardens, this traffic is very inappropriate.) We applied for, and received, a grant from the City of Vancouver, and have now received a grant from the Vancouver Foundation.

Over the next month we will choose an artist and begin consultations with the Mole Hill and West End community to decide what would be appropriate as an art piece for this project.