Time To Grow Up

Saskatoon’s out of short pants, so we need better election rules

I bet a lot of people in Saskatoon think that civic elections are nice, quaint affairs where some guy stands in the ditch and waves at traffic every few years. But lately municipal politics and politicians have been grabbing the headlines across Canada for all the wrong reasons — and there are some lessons to be learned, even for a smaller city like Saskatoon.

In Calgary, a secretly recorded video outed a cabal of developers plotting to undermine election rules in an attempt to oust city councillors who didn’t do their bidding.  In Toronto, mayor Rob Ford clearly missed some of the gravy he’s obsessed with when he exceeded the election spending limits by over $40,000.  Ford’s on-again, off-again ally, councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, is in similar hot water, and faces possible removal from office for spending thousands above Toronto’s election spending limit.

Oh, and Montréal? Well, there are too many elected officials implicated in the growing scandal engulfing politicians in and around there to even start naming names, so let’s just mention organized crime and envelopes of money, and leave it at that for now.

You might think those kinds of election wrong-doings only happen in big cities that control large amounts of money, not in a smaller burg like Saskatoon — and you would’ve been right, a few years back. Until recently our election rules were a good fit for our small and barely growing city. But today, the stakes are considerably higher than the guy waving from the ditch would want you to believe.

Continue reading HERE…

Last week the OurYXE hosting crew (Jordon, DeeAnn, Hilary, and myself) sat down with Ward 9 Councillor Tiffany Paulsen.

Over the course of an hour we discussed topics ranging from Tiffany’s first campaign to the cost of a growing city to roads and infrastructure.

One of my favourite topics was dissecting with the Councillor her approach to City Council meetings and why she is typically one of the more selective speakers to any given issue before Council.

So, when you have a few spare moments start giving this podcast a listen. You can get it HERE or from our iTunes page HERE.

New York City’s Department of Transportation says redesigned streets have been very, very good to small businesses.

A new report says that retail sales are up along city streets that have bike paths, pedestrian plazas, slow zones, or select bus service.

In some cases, the increase is dramatic: on Brooklyn’s Pearl Street, where the DOT maintains retail sales have increased by 172 percent since a parking triangle was turned into a pedestrian plaza.

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“For the first time, we have years of retail sales that were reported to the Department of Finance, and we were able to look at that data and apply it directly to the SBS corridors, the bike lane projects, etc.,” said DOT commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.

Sadik-Khan ticked off a list of streets that she said economically benefited from being overhauled.

“On Fordham Road [in the Bronx], we saw the growth in the retail sales by local businesses — and these are not chain stores — grow 71 percent following the introduction of the SBS route there in 2008, which is three times the borough-wide growth rate.”

The report says that along Ninth Avenue, retail sales are up 49 percent — sixteen times the borough growth rate — three years after that street’s protected bike lane went in. Manhattan’s Union Square, which was revamped in 2010, reports a lower commercial vacancy rate.

Sadik-Khan said the reason for increased sales is straightforward: if you build it, the people will come.

And presumably those people have wallets.

“We’ve seen anywhere between a 10 to 15 percent increase in ridership on all the SBS bus routes,” Sadik-Khan said, “amid a citywide decline of 5 percent on bus routes.”  She said more riders along a route means more people getting on and off the bus, which means more foot traffic.

The DOT looked at sales tax records reported to the city’s Department of Finance. The data excludes large chain stores and non-retail businesses.

Through their report – Measuring the Street: New Metrics for 21st Century Streets (links to a PDF) - NYC hopes to regiment how complete streets are planned, executed, and their success/failure tracked:

Communities implementing Complete Streets policies must adopt new performance measures for transportation projects and the networks of streets as a whole. Such measures should provide clarity on how those projects are meeting community needs and goals for the transportation network. Success can be measured in a number of ways, including improved safety for all users; physical changes to the built environment; number of people walking, riding bikes, taking transit, or riding in cars; and improving travel conditions and access for all.

New York City has focused on three overarching goals: designing for safety, designing for all users of the street, and designing for great public spaces. To meet these goals, the City’s Department of Transporation uses five key strategies: designing safer streets, building great public spaces, improving bus service, reducing delay and speeding, and efficiency in parking and loading. New approaches to street design reflect a “blending [of] new technologies with time-tested tools to create 21st Century Streets for all users,” and have resulted in safer streets, more efficient travel, and big boosts for local businesses.

From the report, one example of what NYC was able to learn about their redesign of 8th and 9th Avenues in Manhattan:

Saskatoon’s newest bridge project is getting bigger and more expensive.

New estimates released by the city peg the cost of a six-lane north commuter bridge and improvements to the adjoining roadway network at $194 million.
A four-lane bridge connecting Marquis Drive to McOrmond Drive was originally estimated to cost $86 million. A proposed expansion to six lanes means the estimated price tag has now jumped to $130.9 million. The adjoining road network makes up the remaining $63.6 million.

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In case you were wondering how this move would be rationalized and sold to the public, look no further:

“We are making sure the bridge is not only going to be the right size now, but in the future,” said Coun. Zach Jeffries, who has been a proponent of the north bridge since he was elected last year.

Now dubbed the “north parkway,” the project includes a commuter bridge intended to relieve traffic congestion on Circle Drive. Included in the cost is construction of the road network connecting to the bridge and roadway improvements at Attridge Drive and Central Avenue.

Jeffries says the new bridge is needed to get people from the growing suburbs in the city’s northeast to the business district in the north.

Its the same viscous cycle of rationalization that other cities have gone through many, many, times before Saskatoon.  But here is what will happen. By building more capacity for traffic in the northeast corner of the city it will only encourage more growth/sprawl because there will be no immediate consequences to choosing to live in that area.  However, as more and more people move to the northeast and commute to work either downtown or in the northwest industrial section more people will crowd onto the shiny new bridge, eventually exceeding its capacity.  Then whomever our politicians are in 10 years will be pushing to spend hundreds of millions more to alleviate the congestion.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Nobody has put it better or more succinctly then Gordon Price, former Vancouver City Councillor and now Director of the SFU’s Cities Program:

Politicians are faced with a paradox: the pursuit of self-interest leads to unfortunate collective consequences that threaten the individual benefits achieved.

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Simply put: As more people want to drive the open road, less likely is the road to be open.

The freely moving car on the open road is one of our society’s most hallowed images, synonymous with success, reinforced over many generations, marketed to the world – and yet increasingly frustrated at every turn. Cars and trucks are getting bigger and more powerful, engineered to be capable of speeds well beyond any legal limit, even as the roads become more clogged and average speeds decrease. This disconnect between promise and reality has produced responses of both rage and passivity, with an underlying sense of betrayal.This is not the way it was supposed to be.

People have always assumed that as we buy more cars, we will build more roads. Each purchaser takes for granted that there will always be room for one more. Always room for one more – an assumption that there will be essentially unlimited capacity.  That is what traffic engineers have been trained for: to provide enough capacity to meet demand, which, if there is always room for one more, must be theoretically infinite. Their job is to translate infinity into reality.

In fact, engineers are never asked to determine what the upper limit on capacity should be -and how we could maintain that limit – so that the vehicles which do use a properly managed system could function efficiently. To do so would imply a limit on the number of cars that can be served, and hence destroy the illusion on which the car industry and our planning is based.

What are the consequences of this mindset:

From the individual’s point of view, driving more and driving longer continues to make sense.  Why?  Because the roadway is seen to be ‘free’ – and so, typically, is the next trip.  The marginal cost of the car is practically zero, at least when measured by the amount of money taken out of pocket.  Except for the occasional cost of parking (over 90 percent of parking is free for most people), everything else has been covered – purchase price, insurance, gas – regardless of how much may be owed.  The next trip appears to cost nothing … and we tend to use a lot of something that seems to be free.

Because the price of highway space is so low, we pay by other means.  Just as cheap land leads to sprawl and cheap energy to pollution, cheap road space has led to congestion.  Congestion is the means by which we price the value of the space.  It works, but we hate it.

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We are confronted with a dilemma of our own making: limited resources, infinite demand.  The only realistic tool we have – congestion – is seen as the problem, not as a necessary consequence.  Those who benefit don’t proportionately pay, and don’t want to.  We look for rational solutions for a problem largely emotional in character.  We talk limits but we avoid action.

So what’s the solution then?

This is tough to say.  There’s little gain in spending money just to solve congestion problems by building more road space.  Going into debt and raising taxes won’t help much in the long run.

Building more roads has had virtually no impact on the growth of traffic congestion in major urban areas in the U.S. in the last 15 years.  Data from the Texas Transportation Institute revealed that urban areas which added more lanes spent roughly $30.8 billion more than those that didn’t.  Yet the average of  TTI’s Roadway Congestion Index for the two groups is almost identical, at .93 and .92.  As the saying goes, widening roads to ease traffic congestion is like trying to cure obesity by loosening your belt.

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Once it’s accepted that capacity will be limited, the question immediately arises: how much is enough? What level of traffic do we want to achieve?

Engineers can determine the level of service for any particular road: Level of service ‘A’, for example, is where the volume of traffic is so low that the design of the highway actually dictates the maximum safe speed for the vehicles. Level of service ‘F’ is capacity failure: a very long parking lot with only occasional movement. The assumption, of course, is that in an ideal world the ‘F’s should be ‘A’s, even if in reality things are heading the other way.

It would be more helpful to know what the ‘desirable’ capacity should be, given the need for freely moving traffic with the least negative effects, controlled by ‘metering’ points that allow the rest of the system to function. Metering is already used at many freeway on-ramps to prevent saturation of the roadway. Bridges, likewise, provide points where flows can be regulated. Traffic should be stopped or slowed at certain places so the system as a whole can function, with feedback mechanisms that both explain and reassure the driver that short-term delay will provide eventual benefit.

Once we decide what we want and why we want it (which is a political decision, not a technical one), we can then ask engineers and planners, in co-operation with the communities affected, to design a system which has a reasonable chance of providing it. We have to accept that this a subjective process, art as much as science. These are issues of quality, not quantity. We may wish, in some instances, slower moving traffic because it’s quieter and safer. Hence the “desirable” in MDC.

We also need to know what the most desirable combination of vehicles is: how many buses, trucks, cars and bikes generate the best results, given the stated desires of the community. Those will vary, of course, and so should the nature of the traffic.

We have to make a decision in Saskatoon, and we need to make it soon.  We are either going to be the city outlined in plans like Saskatoon Speaks, North Downtown Master Plan, College Quarter Master Plan, and the South Caswell Plan – a walkable, more dense, people oriented city – or we can be a car-oriented city.

We can try to be both, but that’s an expensive and counter-productive option.

Recorded last Sunday at the TwoTwenty, you will have to forgive us as we had just returned from a two-hour Jane’s Walk of the North Downtown Masterplan.  While it was a really well done walk – hosted by Jenna South of the City of Saskatoon – it was also one of the first warm/sunny days our nordic bodies had experienced in many, many months.  I’m pretty sure we were all heat-stroked and dehydrated, so if the conversation goes off the rails I’m blaming it on that.

This week we discussed, among other topics, the North Downtown Master Plan, more bridges, the boring City Council agenda, and cycling funding.

Have a listen HERE or subscribe and download the podcast from our iTunes page HERE.

Sounds like the making of a chaotic and hazardous intersection that motorists, pedestrians, and cyclists alike would probably want to avoid.

Yet, there are several examples – mostly from Europe – where this very idea has been put into place. It’s called Shared Space:

Shared space is an urban design approach which seeks to minimise demarcations between vehicle traffic and pedestrians, often by removing features such as curbs, road surface markings, traffic signs, and regulations. Typically used on narrower streets within the urban core and as part of living streets within residential areas, the approach has also been applied to busier roads, including Exhibition Road in Kensington, London.

Schemes are often motivated by a desire to reduce the dominance of vehicles, vehicle speeds, and road casualty rates. First proposed in 1991, the term is now strongly associated to the work of Hans Monderman who suggested that by creating a greater sense of uncertainty and making it unclear who had right of way, drivers reduce their speed, and everyone reduces their level of risk compensation.

The town of Poynton, UK, has taken the bold step to try and improve it’s main town square (which is the junction for two highways) by converting a heavily traveled signaled intersection into a very large Shared Space project.  An advocate of this change produced a video detailing the before and after effects and opinions of townspeople (do take it with a grain of salt, as it isn’t necessarily objective, but it does highlight the changes nicely):

Of course, like any roadway design scheme, the concept of Shared Spaces is not without it’s detractors – including cyclists, disabled and blind persons – who have, in specific cases where Shared Spaces have been applied, voiced concerns with the level of safety not being high enough for particular users.  However, it doesn’t mean the entire concept should be put on the shelf.

After watching this video, I realized that, to an extent, we have experimented with the concept of Shared Spaces right here in Saskatoon.  Think about the intersection of Spadina and 21st St W, right in front of the Bessborough Hotel:

To an extent, the principles applied in Poynton (assuming you watched the video) have been applied here; i) the curbs have mostly be removed, ii) a division of the space is indicated through different textures/colour of paving material, and iii) the pedestrian space has been increased significantly compared to other intersections.

Next time you are at this intersection, take note how motorists approach it – usually at a much lower speed then most intersections and you usually see pedestrians freely crossing in several directions, all without the aide of a traffic light.

While it could be argued that the automobile is still given preference at this intersection, it certainly isn’t as predominant as at other intersections throughout the downtown.  However, this intersection has served to bring pedestrians and cyclist to a more equal footing with drivers.

Can you think of other examples of Shared Spaces in Saskatoon? If so, drop a note in the comments section and I’ll try to look at them in more detail in a future blog post.

Curtis and Shift Developments are on the cutting edge of property developing in Saskatoon, from the Shift Home, to the CHURCH, to Mosaic, and the TwoTwenty.

Over our hour long chat we discussed urban infill, laneway housing, property taxes, how the city can make life easier for developers and the revitalization of 20th St as a destination place in Saskatoon.

During our chat on property taxes Curtis completely freezes me up on his contention that businesses should be paying last property taxes – of course I came up with a great rebuttal at about 2am the next morning.

So set aside some time over the next few days to listen to this chat from start to finish, you won’t be disappointed.

You can listen to it HERE or download the entire podcast from our iTunes page HERE.

The program is just getting started and has launched a trial program in New York City:

So far the program has launched or is planning to launch in 11 international cities, including Toronto, London, Chicago, and Madrid.

An article from a few months ago explaining the launch of the Toronto version of the app:

While not the first to come to market with a taxi-focused app in Canada, Hailo is perhaps the most open. It’s also the first smartphone-based taxi company in North America to obtain a license after the City of Toronto approved it. London, England, and Dublin, Ireland, are the only two other cities where Hailo operates, though New York, Boston and Chicago are next.

Essentially, passengers in Toronto using an iOS and Android device (BlackBerry and Windows Phone are coming) can hail the closest taxi, regardless of what company or route sign it has. The closest driver, using the same app, is alerted and has 20 seconds to confirm the pickup. Passengers know how long the driver will take, their name, phone number and even a rating out of five. They can view the cab’s location and also decide on the tip and payment method in advance.

As of the launch a few weeks ago, there are more than 500 drivers in the city on board, with at least another 1,000 coming in. The company has a storefront in Toronto’s east end to train smartphone-wielding drivers in as little as 30 minutes. There are no membership or brokerage fees, other than the undisclosed cut Hailo gets from the fares participating drivers earn.

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Like any other technology advancement, the use of smartphones to replace traditional taxi dispatching methods has not been without it’s opposition:

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…the drivers were ecstatic about the service because it’s another source of customers and it provides a good deal of certainty. Not only is it safer for drivers because they have more information on their fares, customers who order the taxi but then ditch it are also charged an inconvenience fee. For fare seekers, it’s also a great service because it’s fast, friendly and there’s no need for payment at the end—the amount goes directly on your credit card and you’re emailed a receipt.

 

Drivers and customers can also rate each other. Our experiences were so pleasurable in both directions that everyone involved got five stars.

 

Existing taxi companies, however, aren’t rating Hailo very well. Not surprisingly, some are taking issue with the upstart providing an alternative dispatch service to drivers. Hailo and Beck, one of the biggest taxi companies in Toronto, are currently in something of a war where the app upstart is accusing its bigger competitor of bullying drivers. Beck is threatening to discipline its drivers, Hailo says, while the larger company admits that it doesn’t like its employees using the service.

 

“When you’re in a Beck Taxi, the service being offered through the Beck Taxi radios are for Beck taxis.… You work for one company or you work for another,” a spokesperson told the Toronto Star.

 

The drivers we spoke to considered themselves to be independent contractors who are free to use whatever means available to get customers. They also expressed displeasure with existing dispatch services, as well as their general treatment by large cab companies over the years. Hailo represents to them an opportunity to take some of the power back. “We’re getting revenge,” said one of our drivers.

 

The company, meanwhile, makes its money by taking a cut of the fares. Drivers pay 15%, versus 30% to 40% with regular taxi companies, Hailo says. If that’s so, it’s no wonder drivers prefer the upstart and that traditional companies are upset. If two dispatch calls come in at the same time—one from Hailo and one from the old guard—it’s no secret which one the driver will go for. The dilemma for traditional taxi companies sounds very much like the one for book publishers, which are seeing authors defect to self-publishing through the likes of Amazon, where royalties are much higher.

 

The dispute seems like a losing battle for Beck and any other traditional taxi companies that try to hold Hailo back. Even if they are successful in arguing that drivers are contractually bound to use only one dispatch service, how exactly would they enforce such a scenario, short of banning drivers from having smartphones?

 

As such, we can add taxi companies to the long list of traditional businesses that are trying—ineffectively—to hold back the sweeping changes being ushered in by digital networking. The Internet revolution for cabs looks like it’s here to stay. As with every other business touched by this technology, the old guard is going to have to innovate—and possibly distribute its pie better—if it is to survive.

I wonder when Saskatoon’s cab industry will make the leap into the 21st century? Perhaps just getting more cabs and more reliable service should be my first wish, then perhaps we can focus on making it more convenient…

While several posts could be dedicated to the work being done in Abu Dhabi (it’s amazing what can be done in such a sort time with the absents of a democratic process), where my focus for this post lies is with a city being built from the ground up just outside of Abu Dhabi, a city called Masdar City:

A place where businesses can thrive and innovation can flourish, Masdar City is a modern Arabian city that, like its forerunners, is in tune with its surroundings. As such, it is a model for sustainable urban development regionally and globally, seeking to be a commercially viable development that delivers the highest quality living and working environment with the lowest possible ecological footprint.

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It is a community where cutting-edge cleantech research and development, pilot projects, technology testing, and construction on some of the world’s most sustainable buildings are all ongoing.

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Significantly, Masdar City serves as an open technology platform that gives partner companies an unmatched opportunity to develop, test and validate their technologies in a large scale, real-world environment – and in particular, with consideration to the region’s climate conditions and consumption patterns.

Billed as the world’s most sustainable city, Masdar City has been designed and outfitted with some of the latest and most innovative technologies available, it’s a living laboratory of the cities of the future.  Gone are highways and roads for cars, replaced with a network of underground roads traveled only by driver-less electric cars. In it’s place is a pedestrian friendly street environment with ample shade from the desert sun. It’s quite a site to behold, you can take a visual tour HERE, or watch HERE, HERE or HERE.