Congestion costs of $1.5 billion are an urban myth

October 9th, 2009

If you have been following debates over new freeways, you will be familiar with a well-known “fact”, most recently repeated by Premier Gordon Campbell and former premier Mike Harcourt: congestion is costing us $1.5 billion a year in the Lower Mainland. Sorry folks, that number is a hoax.

Congestion here, as in all other cities in the world, is a major problem. It costs us a lot. It is immensely frustrating; it wastes years of people’s lives, and it blocks the flow of vital goods and limits our future as a freight gateway to Asia.

But where does the $1.5 billion estimate come from? I only began to ask this question when I noticed a report from Seattle, prepared by the Puget Sound Regional Council. “Many transportation facilities experience considerable traffic congestion during peak travel periods,” said the report. “Annually, traffic congestion costs the region in excess of $1.5 billion in wasted time and other resources.”

It seemed odd to me that Seattle, with twice our population and one of the worst congestion problems on the continent, comes up with exactly the same cost (not counting for $US) as the Metro Vancouver.

Then, reading about the Denver region in an article called Regional Thinking, in the Sept. 2006 issue of Urban Land Magazine, I came across almost the same number: “The (Denver metropolitan) region has some big issues to address. Traffic congestion was ranked the nation’s third worst, causing an annual loss of $1.4 billion in time and gasoline costs, according to a 2003 report by the Texas Transportation Institute.” How curious that these three metropolitan areas, with widely variable transportation infrastructures, all had virtually the same congestion costs.

Then I read a Conference Board of Canada report that estimated the total cost of congestion across the nine biggest cities in Canada as between $2.3 billion and $3.7 billion a year. Hold that thought while noting Toronto Board of Trade estimates that “$2 billion is lost annually from gridlock in the Greater Toronto area alone,” according to Toronto Mayor David Miller. Taking the outside estimate of $3.7 billion nationwide, that means that with Toronto using up $2 billion (for a region with three times our population), and Metro Vancouver using up $1.5 billion, congestion costs in Canada’s seven other largest cities– including Montreal– add up to only $200. Highly unlikely.

Are we really doing that badly in our region, almost at a par with Toronto? Can we be suffering seven times the congestion costs of the other seven largest cities in Canada combined?
Well, maybe not. I traced one original estimate of our “$1.5 billion” mantra to the Vancouver Board of Trade’s Sounding Board newspaper: Under the heading “Transportation congestion costs hit $1.5 billion”, the January, 2006 article actually said: “Transport Canada has estimated that the cost of congestion in the region already costs residents and businesses between $700 million and $1.2 billion annually, with more recent estimates suggesting that the figure has increased to $1.5 billion.”

It’s almost as though the number was pulled out of the air. Maybe congestion costs everywhere (except Toronto) mysteriously add up to $1.5 billion by some magic estimating by highway planners. So I tuned into Google and searched for “traffic, congestion, costs, $1.5 billion.”
I ran into a roadblock of cities. The Xinhua News Agency, in a November, 2006 article, notes that Beijing Mayor Wang Quishan told the Hong Kong media that his top priority was to “borrow experiences” in mass transit management to alleviate traffic congestion in time for the 2008 Olympics. “A report from the Guangzhou Academy of Social Sciences says traffic jams cost the southern city up to 12 billion yuan (US$1.5 billion) a year, about seven per cent of its gross domestic product.”

It’s everywhere. In a 1998 New York Daily News article, we learn that “extra transportation costs, such as overtime paid to drivers stuck in traffic, costs Brooklyn $1.5 billion a year.”
In Chicago, the good news was that transit saves the region, which, according to the Chicago Transit Authority has the second worst traffic congestion in the U.S. “over $1.5 billion in congestion costs”.

But that’s a different way of looking at it. Let’s get back to basics.
No less an authority than the Washington D.C. Road Information Trip Program discovered, according to an October 2004 report, that “Traffic congestion in Virginia costs licenced drivers $1.5 billion annually in delays and wasted fuel.” Note to drivers stuck on the Port Mann Bridge: don’t go to Virginia either.

Or Philadelphia. An October, 1 2003 article in the Philadephia Inquirer (The Traffic Commute? Hey, It Could Be Worse) takes the trouble to spell out the methodology behind the magic $1.5 billion number: “Figured at about $19 an hour for both time and fuel, congestion costs our region $1.5 billion annually.”

And steer clear of Boston. According to the I-95 Corridor Coalition, “the Boston, MA region ranks 10th at an annual congestion cost of over $1.5 billion. The economic cost accrues not only to local residents, but also to long distance travellers and to those moving freight through the region.”

The good news is you can escape this number by flying off to Australia, but not for long. The Southern Australian Bureau of Transport and Regional Economics has estimated the cost of congestion on Adelaide roads in 1995 was $0.8 billion and will grow to $1.5 billion by 2015.
Careful if you rent a car in Sydney. The Department of Environment and Conservation of New South Wales estimates the cost of traffic congestion in that city is between– you guessed it– $1.5 billion and $2.04 billion.

I hope the construction estimates on new highways are measured a little more rigourously.

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And when the Olympics are over, then what?

February 17th, 2010

As I write this, there’s an erie calm in the air in Whistler before the storm of Feb. 12. Everything is ready, more than ready. Manned snow plows wait, idling, with their lights on, in pulloffs along the clear, balmy Sea to Sky highway, with no snow in the forecast for the foreseeable future. RCMP vehicles poke out of side roads all along the highway, keeping the thin stream of traffic safe from terrorists.

Uniformed volunteers outnumber guests on the streets and in the buses. We were the only guests in a huge restaurant Sunday night. On Monday, chairlifts ran with mostly empty chairs. Whistler is in a deep, empty calm, poised for the onslaught.

Then, in a few weeks, the huge Olympic jolt will be over, and the word “hangover” will be everywhere, not least when the provincial budget comes down two day later.

My BIV colleague Bob Mackin, who has been following these Games for years, thinks the era of mega-events in our city is over. I’m not so sure: remember the Calgary bid for the 2010 Games after hosting them in 1988? What if the darkest rumours out of Sochi, Russia are true- that there’s no chance their venues will be built in time for the 2012 Games, and in two years the IOC is looking around for a replacement venue? Never say never.

Olympic dreams may fade away, but dreaming never dies, and one cure for a hangover (other than another party) is to move the mind to other things– even smaller things. So now what, Vancouver?

First, let’s pledge to follow up contacting all those people whose business cards we collected during the Games because they said they just might want to invest in our city– or come back for another visit. Boring, yes, but without consummating the deals, the Olympics will have been a wasted opportunity and the analyst’s reports showing no measurable economic impact from the Olympics will certainly come true.

Also boring but beautiful is the city’s new multi-million-dollar 311 all-request service, the new standard for citizen-friendly cities. It gives citizens a simple number to call and a commitment to answer every enquiry or problem. It’s been working for months, but for some reason the city won’t tell people about it. Let’s take the wraps off it.

As for spectacle, 2011 is the city’s 125th birthday, an occasion for celebrating. Unfortunately there’s no funding commitment so far, so it may already be destined for “cake-in-the-office” status.

Becoming the Greenest City is a powerful beacon. Leading ecologists remind us we have to reduce our ecological impact by 80% for greening measures to do more than just make our world more efficiently unsustainable. Vancouver and B.C. could vigorously embrace a massive building retrofit program that would create thousands of construction jobs and pay back in future energy savings. All it takes is a financing mechanism that could be modelled on those in many other cities. We could follow Seattle’s lead and declare 2010 The Year of Urban Agriculture, to increase community access to locally-grown food.

One city dream that’s been staring us in the face for years is a pedestrian-bike-(future) streetcar greenway along a redeveloped Arbutus corridor, financed by mixed-use development at major intersections. To do the deal with CP, the owners of the abandoned railway right of way, the city could offer increased development rights downtown around Granville Square. This would also generate impetus for a redesigned Waterfront Station precinct, drawing Granville St. pedestrians into a waterfront complex that opens all the ferries, trains, SkyTrains, buses and pedestrians into a common space rivalling the great stations of European cities.

And, finally, let’s make some decisions about job-creating land uses on False Creek Flats.

The magic of the departed Olympic circus will turn us on our axis. Then we too have to move on.

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Climate change misinformation feeds our short-term self-destructive interests

November 26th, 2009

Next month the world awaits the outcome of the UN climate summit in Copenhagen. Many in the business community and in our federal cabinet are eager to doubt not just on the human impact on global warming, but whether it makes economic sense to fight it, or whether we should “wait and see” and maybe focus on mitigating possible effects.

Hey, we’ll get warmer wheatfields and more agricultural produce, goes the thinking, so what’s the problem? The Club of Rome was wrong in the 1970s—why should I listen to all this doom and gloom now?

The key to a lot of this thinking is the cost of the economic backlash against carbon emitters—the loss of jobs, business and tax income. A lot of us benefit directly or indirectly from the extracting and selling tar sands oil, from mining coal or from driving and selling cars with big engines and can’t see anything comparable in immediate economic impact from the green side of the ledger.

As Armstrong, B.C. resident Bill Rahn wrote in a letter to National Geographic after its article on the tar/oil sands, “I worked in the oil sands…for the past eight years. I do have concerns with the way the environment is raped and pillaged up here. I also have concerns as to how I will feed my family.”

With the weight of those economic concerns on our shoulders, anyone who can challenge the prevailing thinking on climate change is embraced in certain circles as a saviour.

Unfortunately for the long-term economic stability for humans on our planet, the vast majority of climate change deniers are misinformed, misleading, and financed by those who will do anything to stir up uncertainty and stop real action to slow down carbon emissions.

“The Crusade to Deny Global Warming” has now been meticulously exposed in Hoggan and Associates president Jim Hoggan’s new book, Climate Cover-Up.

Based on journalist Richard Littlemore’s sleuthing on DeSmogBlog.com, the book explains that most of the faux scientists purporting to know better than the Nobel-prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are financed by oil companies like ExxonMobil for the express purpose of sowing doubt about real scientists’ claims. This is the same tactic that was used to delay action on curbing tobacco use.

Take for example, the recent visit to Vancouver by Lord Christopher Monckton, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, sponsored by the Fraser Institute. (Nowhere on its website does the Fraser Institute name the “thousands of individuals, organizations, and foundations” that fund it, but www.exxonsecrets.com, a website described in Hoggan’s book, claims it has received $120,000 from ExxonMobil). Brenchley has a background in classics and journalism and can in no way be described as a scientist, yet he gets paraded around Vancouver as some kind of expert.


To combat the plethora of truth-twisting campaigns and phony petitions served up as legitimate debate, Hoggan challenges us to ask three questions of anyone denying the human impact on climate change:

1. Does this “expert” have scientific training connected to climatology or atmospheric physics?

2. Is this “expert” a practicing scientist publishing in peer-reviewed journals?

3. Is this “expert” taking money from vested interests, including think tanks beholden to their major funders?


According to a study cited by Hoggan and published in the journal Science, University of California professor Naomi Oreskes analyzed every refereed scientific journal article on climate change published between 1993 and 2003 and found that all 928 articles agreed with the consensus that human release of greenhouse gases was causing climate change.

If I had to go with non-scientists, I’d be listening to the Institute for Environmental Security, made up of 10 high-ranking military officials from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the US.

They’re calling on governments to produce an “ambitious and equitable” international agreement at the Copenhagen climate talks in December. Without such an agreement, they say that “preserving security and stability even at current levels will become increasingly difficult”.


Canadians should be ashamed of our federal government’s foot-dragging on this issue. Hoggan’s book is yet another reason to get moving on real change and shake off the misinformation that stubbornly feeds our short-term, self-destructive self interests.

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City weakened by losing managerial muscle

October 24th, 2009

Doubts about the city’s managerial capabilities have been exacerbated by the growing list of unexplained departures from the top levels of the city’s management. Park Board General Manager Susan Mundick was the latest to go. Her departure isn’t a complete surprise to those who have watched her iron grip on the park board tiller, sometimes regardless of the elected board’s “temporary” wishes.


All the same, the loss of heavy hitters and corporate memory on the corporate management team has seriously hollowed out the city’s management capacity over the past year.

As city watcher Frances Bula reported on her insiders blog, “The count is now: “Replaced”: 1; Retirements: 4; Quitting to Go Somewhere Else: 4 for the first nine months of the new Vision Vancouver administration.”

The pending arrival of Chicago’s whiz kid green boss Sadhu Aufochs Johnston, 35, as the new deputy city manager, fills only a small part of that gap.


Bula’s and other city-watching blogs are abuzz with counts of departed managers in the past nine months compared with departures during the previous council’s three-year tenure. Some are making the case that turnover is to be expected with so many baby boomers falling off the retirement cliff, so what’s the big deal.


The difference is that the most significant departures in the past nine months—City Manager Judy Rogers, Olympic coordinator and former chief engineer Dave Rudberg, deputy city managers James Ridge and Jody Andrews, HR manager Kevin Ramsay, Fire Chief Ray Holdgate and now Susan Mundick—were not planned retirements, as were almost all the departures under the previous council. Yes, Rudberg was approaching retirement age, but there’s no way he was planning to leave before completing his 2010 assignment. Holdgate, albeit in his final years, has long been the nemesis of the Fire Fighters’ Union, who had a frank meeting with the Mayor shortly after the election.

Change can be rejuvenating: new city manager Penny Ballem’s ferocious micro-management style obviously suits her employers. The big question facing the city is whether it has the managerial muscle to keep running smoothly in strained economic times. A pending service review is about to reveal how $50-60 million is going to be squeezed out of existing services to make up for plunging revenues.

Losing talented rising managers like Ramsay, Andrews and (especially) Ridge and seasoned pros like <!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –> Rudberg and Mundick makes those challenges a lot more difficult.

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Remembering John Caspar, 1960-2009

October 24th, 2009

I first met John Caspar when a young employee at my first business publication raved about this funny, wise, crazy young guy in his 20s who lectured at the Canadian Securities course while pacing a desk in his stocking feet.

He went on to become a regular personal finance columnist in Business in Vancouver for 20 years. Consistently our top-rated columnist, he had that rare ability to throw a genuinely humourous zinger into ever column.

That’s one of the reasons he got so much airtime on BCTV News, CBC Newsworld, Global TV News, CKNW Radio and CBC Radio, and online as a columnist on Microsoft’s MSN Money Web site. He even did a financial horoscope online, amusing himself immensely with the notion that people would actually base investment decisions on astrological wisdom he made up as a personal joke.

His peak of irreverence was a series of columns debunking the experts who lined up every year to predict the market. As former BIV editor Maurice Bridge remembers it, “His stock-picking puppy was being house-trained with the use of newspaper pages on the floor. John would lay out the stock pages, and follow the stocks the dog pissed on. Then he would compare the results with the TSE composite index at the end of the year. He claimed a better return than the TSE 500, and documented it.”

John became a personal friend, exposing me to someone who was a devout Christian, great guitar and bass player, a diver, puritanical about smoking and drinking and a workout fanatic. At one point he took up yoga. “I came into the yoga studio, looked around, and couldn’t help asking myself—how do I win at yoga?”

He won a lot of money taking bets on underwater swimming contests. “My secret was simple,” he explained. “When other people started feeling panic and pain, they surfaced. I kept going.”

John took that same competitive drive to his motorcycle riding.

“I decided one June that I wanted to break a land speed record on a motorcycle at the World Finals at the Bonneville Salt Flats… No experience, no bike, blah blah blah. Four months later, we made a world record qualifying pass at Bonneville at nearly 210 MPH. It took two years until a gasoline-powered motorcycle went faster.”

That was a quote from a memorable FAQ email John sent to his friends last April, after he had just discovered a devastating terminal cancer had taken over his body.

Here’s more:

As you can imagine, this is the sort of news that tends to focus the mind and cause one to rather quickly review plans. Love and fun and family and friends? Check! Long lines, shopping early for Christmas, and buying green bananas? Ah, not so much.

Q: Wow. I don’t know what to say.

A: Yeah, I get it. My favourite so far comes from [stepson] Grant, age 13: “Just stay as long as you can.” Acceptance, acknowledgement, trust - it’s all there.

Q: What about alternative therapy? I heard that the urine of the Peruvian Long-Nosed Bat can kill cancer, but doctors and big pharmaceutical companies don’t want you to know!
A: Thanks. I’m loading up the blender right now, and sticking it to The Man.

Q: You seem awfully calm about all this. What’s with that?
A: Well, I am calm. If I thought wailing and the rending of garments would help, I’d be all over that. But it seems quite clear to me that while this is profoundly sad news, my life is not a sad life. It’s an amazing, happy, empowered life. And it doesn’t require logging a certain number of years in order to make it so. I don’t feel disentitled about a projected future - I feel grateful for every day.

We are grateful for every day John was with us.

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How the city can find $61 million

October 8th, 2009

The City of Vancouver, like cities around North America, is tied up in financial knots. Revenues are down, expenses are up, taxpayers are fed up, something’s gotta give. In Vancouver’s case, the city manager recently announced the daunting challenge of cutting, saving or raising $61 million in the budget to be approved in December.

Moments like this give rise to financial opportunities not normally available due to institutional inertia and political resistance.

To date, city manager Penny Ballem has identified a combination of “one-time savings”, hiring freezes, internal efficiencies, layoffs and new fees that cover about half of the $61 million gap. The other half will have to come from further cuts and fee increases, or else a tax increase in the 7% range (assuming a continuation of the tax shift from businesses to residents).

If some councillors’ talk about a tax freeze is to be taken seriously, where will the next $30 million come from? Here are some ideas.

The simplest is to persuade ICBC to refuse drivers licence renewals to people who have unpaid bylaw fines on the books. The last time I checked there was $30 million owing on this account.

This council will (wisely) continue to embrace what Gordon Price is calling “post motordom”—replacing car use with walking, cycling, transit and cyber-visiting. So take the $7 million a year that is generated by city-owned EasyPark for new parking garages and use it to offset pedestrian and cycling infrastructure costs. Switch to pay-and-display stations for new paid street parking and eventually convert coin meters into pay-by-phone. The city could save $2.5 million a year it currently spends collecting coins and repairing hacked-off meters.

Looking at the usually sacrosanct public safety costs (a third of the total $937 million budget), let’s rethink job descriptions for staff who are paid to sleep and chisel their abs. Firefighters get 10 per cent of the city’s budget but only use a tenth of that on fire calls. In the new age of sprinklers, the average firefighter apparently only fights live fires for six minutes a year. It is a huge waste of city resources to have these talented, fit, skilled, well-rested people polishing trucks, attending heart attack calls at twice the pay of paramedics (provincial jurisdiction) and doing their home business spreadsheets all day.

On the police side, we could stop adding to the force which already consumes a quarter of the total budget. We have the highest number of police per capita in Canada and crime rates are dropping (bravo Bait Car program!).

If all the city’s managers agreed on no salary increases next year, there’s another $1.5 million.

Persuade the unions to do the same– in return for no layoffs?– and save another $20 million. On the topic of salaries and benefits, the city has to stop accumulating sick pay and vacations. All new employees should be on a use-it-or-lose it program. The accumulated liabilities for in the sick pay/vacation pay bank are horrendous.

Speaking of unions, it’s time to do some contracting out. Vancouver is one of the only municipalities to have its own unionized janitorial workforce, print shop, and lots of skilled trades people who could all be replaced by lower-cost decently-paid private sector workers. The city spends $2 million a year for the additional costs of unionized janitors.

To be fair, put those services up for tender and help existing employees regroup and compete as independent contractors.

Reducing garbage pickup to once every two weeks with a private provider would not only save money but take away the massive bargaining weapon of garbage accumulation that resulted in the 17% salary increase after the 2007 “garbage” strike.

Finally, the city has to be brave enough to resist picking up more provincial downloads—as in adding a mental health advocate.

None of these suggestions would result in noticeable cuts to services or increases in taxes.

None would be easy.

All are possible.

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Posted in Peter's Blog

My new life- everyone has to eat

September 25th, 2009

A lot of people have asked me what I’m up to since my departure from municipal politics. Besides writing a weekly column in Business in Vancouver. I’ve also been working on some other projects which are now starting to take shape.

On September 1, I was named a Fellow at the SFU Centre for Dialogue. I’ll be teaching an undergraduate semester there starting in the spring, around the theme of Finding Space, Understanding Place: Redesigning our Region for Resiliency. On top of that, I’m putting together a series of conferences—and a book– on Planning Cities as if Food Matters. Kicking it off will be a panel discussion on Metro Vancouver’s food security plans at the Gaining Ground Summit at the Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre (under the sails) on Wed. afternoon, Oct. 21.

As anyone who has seen the movie Food Inc., or read Michael Pollan’s best-seller In Defence of Food knows, having access to enough healthy food is no longer a given– even for those of us at the top of the world food chain. Farmers are going broke and retiring without successors; farmland is being paved over, water is drying up, climate change is wreaking havoc on traditional fertile basins, and fish are disappearing everywhere. The world’s supply of available food has shrunk from a year’s supply a couple of decades ago to five weeks today. Not only that, but what most of us eat is literally killing us—one in three American children born since 1990 will get diabetes. Those young people will be the first generation in centuries to have a shorter lifespan than their parents. Unsustainable health care costs are being driven by the 75% of disease related to bad eating habits.

Rising awareness of this crisis has triggered an explosion of interest in healthier eating, organic food, urban agriculture and the overrated 100-mile diet. Check out the lineup for plots in your local community garden. Look at the story in Sept. 8 BIV about Yves Potvin’s growing company selling vegetarian products. Ask Arran Stephens to tell you about unfaltering sales growth of his Nature’s Path organic cereal products. Get Richmond rancher and Councillor Harold Steves to tell you about selling out all his organic beef, not even being able to fill an order for organic steaks requested by the Emperor of Japan. Count the 675 people who paid to stand in a field at the UBC Farm and hear Michael Pollan talk in August. Listen to Galen Weston’s plans for highlighting local food in all his Loblaw brand supermarkets. He has even talked publicly about using his thousands of acres of flat roofs across the country for rooftop vegetable gardens.

Building on a lifelong interest in growing food (if anyone wants some Concord grapes or prune plums, give me a call!), I became intrigued with the potential of Metro Vancouver to become a world leader in local food production. We have good soil, lots of water, a moderate climate, protected farmland and easy access to urban markets.

What we don’t have are land use policies, zoning and local bylaws designed with the goal of producing more food. That is going to have to change. The good news is that a number of developers, policy-makers, politicians, academics, farmers, community groups and NGOs are working hard to come up with innovative solutions in places like the Southlands development in Tsawwassen, Fantasy Gardens and Terra Nova lands in Richmond, the UBC Farm, and Colony Farm in Coquitlam.

The B.C. Innovation Council is getting on board with the Roundtable on Innovation in Agriculture, Food and Ag-bioproducts it hosted in late September.

Put this on your list of topics that can no longer be ignored. If we haven’t got enough to eat, nothing else is important.

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Metro Van waste saga: trash or cash?

September 16th, 2009

As Metro Vancouver struggles to find the best home for the 400,000 to 600,000 tonnes of garbage now being trucked to the maxed-out Cache Creek landfill, cynical observers are starting to conclude that this is really about cash, not trash.

Why?

Because the years of economic, environmental and engineering planning by Metro Vancouver keep getting upended by abrupt policy changes coming out of Victoria. Plan A was to send the Cache Creek loads to the Ashcroft Ranch, but that was nixed by the province because of unyielding opposition from Bobby Pasco, chief of the Oregon Jack Indian Band and chairman of the Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal Council. So Metro Vancouver directors passed a motion saying they wouldn’t pursue an Interior landfill.

Now a regional manager in the Environment Ministry has ruled that a seven-hectare “annex” to Cache Creek, with an additional 18 to 24 months’ capacity, meets all the necessary environmental standards, even though Pasco’s opposition is as strong as ever.

To further jam Metro Vancouver, the province announced in the throne speech that it “will act to outlaw the international export of British Columbia’s garbage and landfill waste,” snubbing the desires of Metro Vancouver and four other regional districts for a flexible option on the road to a made-in-B.C. solution.

So much for Metro Vancouver’s application to temporarily ship the Cache Creek waste to the Rebanco landfill on the Columbia River while it works out a way to build waste-to-energy burners in the Lower Mainland.

Boxed in by these two announcements, Metro Vancouver is now forced to choose between:

•reversing its decision not to ship to an Interior landfill;

•reversing its decision not to ship to the proposed Green Island waste-to-energy plant in Gold River (too expensive, impractical);

•loading the extra garbage into the Vancouver-Delta landfill; or

•succumbing to zero-waste advocates’ dream of miraculously recycling the 500,000 tonnes down to zero in two years.

Tough call. Behind all these options are some big companies with big lobbyists eyeing the big prize: 500,000 or so tonnes of garbage a year at around $50 a tonne for a 20-year contract in the region of half a billion dollars. And that doesn’t include the value of electricity and heat that can be generated if it’s burned.

Wastech, a Vancouver-based Belcorp subsidiary, desperately wants to keep the garbage flowing to the Cache Creek landfill, a site it manages. With the help of Cache Creek Mayor John Ranta, it has miraculously melted away the province’s concerns about First Nations’ opposition with the approval for the “annex.” Hiring former finance minister Gary Collins as a senior VP and former deputy minister to the premier Ken Dobell as a lobbyist is part of the plan to get a further 40-hectare extension to Cache Creek through all the arduous approvals.

Meanwhile, across Georgia Strait, former deputy minister and president of the BC Liberal Party Andrew Wilkinson has been retained by the New Jersey owners of Green Island, publicly-listed Covanta Energy (NYSE:CVA). He’s lobbying to get those Cache Creek jobs over to Gold River to feed the Vancouver Island grid with locally-generated electricity. Green Island has conveniently managed to sidestep the requirement for environmental approvals for its proposed power plant.

Adding muscle to its local presence, Covanta has just taken over the Burnaby incinerator from French multinational Veolia, giving it a potential vice grip over Metro Vancouver garbage if it gets the Cache Creek trash, too. So although Metro Vancouver is legally in charge of dealing with its waste, the stakes are big enough and the outside lobbying powerful enough that decisions keep getting yanked out of its hands by abrupt changes of provincial policy.

On September 15 and 16 it will gamely continue its noble attempt to educate the public about waste-to-energy burning, hands tied and head down, wondering why it bothers. •

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Posted in Peter's Blog

Metro’s garbage dilemma: bury, burn or rethink?

September 16th, 2009

On June 27, the Metro Vancouver Council of Councils, the summit meeting of all the local municipal politicians, heard a report from the Metro Vancouver directors who recently went to Sweden with one big question: should we bury or burn our garbage?

They all came back with one bigger answer: “garbage” is a valuable resource in our energy, environmental and economic systems. Being smart about garbage goes way beyond the burn-vs-bury debate.

Raising the level of public debate on this topic will be the hardest part of making the decision about what to do when the Cache Creek landfill reaches its limit early next year. Where are those 500,000 tonnes of Lower Mainland waste, 40 daily truckloads of garbage, going to go?

Metro Vancouver directors have voted “no” to any interior landfill because of First Nations opposition and provincial flip-flopping. They have asked provincial permission for short-term rail shipments to Washington State, where landfills want our business. They’re unlikely to get it—even though Whistler is now temporarily shipping its garbage to the banks of the Columbia River.

Landfills are banned in the European Union (EU), with only two left in Sweden, taking a mere 4% of their waste. Sweden levies a big tax on landfills, sweetening the economic case for alternatives, which include a dense network of neighbourhood recycling depots with 14 categories of waste.

As one Metro Vancouver administrator said: “They’re pragmatic. They make recycling easy.”

A heated email exchange in January between Metro Valley Board Chair Lois Jackson and Fraser Valley Board Chair Patricia Ross gives some idea of how narrow and intense the burn-vs-bury discussion has become:
Lois Jackson: “You seem to be not hearing me. Or perhaps you hear but you do not choose to listen, when I tell you that the futuristic alternatives for dealing with the garbage from our area will encompass science of all types.
“Landfilling will not be one of the options if I have any influence whatsoever. Landfilling is an archaic method of dealing with garbage and trucking it 500 km to do so, is ridiculous…
“Please, Patricia, get into the updated version of this century and accept what is happening.”

Patricia Ross: “You have a lot of nerve saying I am not listening to you. Metro Vancouver reps have made ridiculous statements such as ‘Don’t worry, there will be zero emissions’ that had no basis in fact… It has been proven that there will be significant emissions [from additional Lower Mainland incinerators]… Clearly it is you that is not listening… We have already done the studies to show the negative impacts to our airshed, health and agricultural industry that a new significant point source of pollution such as this will have and wish you would show interest in seeing it…. Burning garbage is actually a very primitive, backward way of dealing with waste, even with today’s technology.”

Really? One of the Swedish towns the Metro Vancouver delegation visited fuelled 1,000 buses on the gas recovered from a sewage treatment plant. How much would air quality in Abbotsford be improved by switching 1,000 diesel buses to biogas?

Delta Councillor Scott Hamilton, one of the delegates, says that 20 incinerators in one area generated less than half a gram of dioxins, well below the EU emission standards, which are stricter than Canada’s.

Before the Council of Councils meeting, Metro Vancouver directors saw a consultants’ report on eight scenarios for what to do with our garbage—ranging from overloading the Vancouver-Delta landfill, to building waste-to-energy incinerators in the Fraser Valley, Howe Sound or Port Alberni, to using it to displace rubber tires and coal being burned to make cement in Delta.

What they really need to see is a systems overview that includes the number one goal of Sweden’s garbage-handling plan: energy self-sufficiency.

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Posted in Peter's Blog

Council reneges on deal with Shaughnessy developer

August 29th, 2009

It shouldn’t be a surprise that a Vancouver council dominated by people whose supporters released in-camera information regarding the city’s negotiations over the Athletes Village development would spit in the face of respectable business practices on another project.

In one of the last council meetings before the summer break, council ordered the developer of a contentious condo project at 16th and Granville to go back into the labyrinth of city process after he had already received approval for his project, had his rezoning enacted, and had met all the conditions set out by the development permit board.

The move was described by the city’s chief planner Brent Toderian as “very irregular…extremely unusual”. Another veteran planner told council he had never seen anything like this happen in his 20 years at the city. Brian Bell, the developer being put through the ringer, vows he would never take on a project like this after what he’s been through.

“I have no trust level with the city whatsoever,” he said after council voted to send his project back to the Development Permit Board Advisory Panel “to provide advice to council”. That vote, on a motion by Clr. George Chow, opposed only by Clr. Suzanne Anton, rebuffed a staff report confirming Bell had met the three and a half pages of terms and conditions required by the original zoning bylaw. “If I acted like the city did, as a private developer, I’d be run out of town,” he said. He will now have to wait an extra 60 days at least, still uncertain if council will finally approve the project. “If you get a rezoning and approval for development permit, how much more can you get before you feel like you’re home free?”

The McRae Avenue project was undoubtedly contentious. The spring 2008 rezoning, approved by a 5-3 vote by the previous NPA council, went on for four nights of public hearing, with more than 60 speakers and 450 letters of opposition.

The main issue was whether allowing a condo development somewhere in the Shaughnessy district would open the doors to new density that would ruin the leafy, large-lot, single family mansion estate look and feel of Shaughnessy that everyone agrees should be protected.

Council, including me, voted 5-3 in favour of the project because it made a lot of sense. The condos were allowed in compensation for preserving the pre-1940s Nichol house up the hill on The Crescent. It’s a Maclure mansion with rose garden that Clr. Anton describes as “the most important and most beautiful historic house in the city.” The Shaughnessy design guidelines call it “English Picturesque Aesthetic”. The alternative to the condos, allowable with no zoning changes, would have been to demolish the heritage house and fill the two large lots with three sprawling mansions. The net density with the condos is no more than the three mansions would have had, and the much-loved trees at the corner were doomed by either plan. The condos will be invisible from The Crescent, and they’re in keeping with the apartments, condos and commercial buildings at other corners at 16th, McRae and Granville. They will have no traffic impact on any quiet Shaughnessy streets.

The Vision council’s decision completely wasted the time of the development permit advisory board (with some members saying as much publicly when they approved it August 10), misled neighbourhood opponents into thinking this was another chance to stop the project, and continues to drag the developer through 60-plus days of unnecessary uncertainty.

Council is going to have to do a lot better than this if it ever intends to make the (overdue) difficult decisions around development of the highly serviced intersections along the SkyTrain and Canada Line routes. It’s not that hard: when a decision has been made, honour it.

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