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Photos have come out, gracias to the Canada Line Photos blog, that show the City of Richmond have begun rebuilding No. 3 Road - which includes the region’s first (AFAIK) raised bike lane.

The concept is quite simple: to provide physical separation between cyclists and drivers. It’s what every would-be cyclist dreams of having and it’s quite exciting to see it finally being built.

Of course, in the region, we do have greenways, but these are always quite far away from any moving car. There’s never been physically separated bike lanes that are attached to a road. While the Carrall St. retrofit is quite the project in and of itself, it resembles more closely to a greenway than a traditional bike lane.

The raised bike lane is supposed to increase the safety for cyclists from motorists and help keep the lane clean from rocks and other debris typically pushed to the side of the road (where the traditional bike lane is).

It’s a terrific experiment. While I personally have always envisioned bollards, a small boulevard, or even a low level cement separator to separate the bike lane from the road, the concept of a “raised” bike lane may prove to be the key to providing a safer cycling network. Most certainly, it’s a huge leap in the right direction.

Three cheers to staff and council in Richmond. I’ll be watching this experiment closely. Those of us who support physically separated lanes will certainly have a more local example to point towards if this proves successful.

I don’t seem to recall this news hitting the Van-blogsophere, although it seems as though it’s rather old now. Maybe we Vancouver bloggers don’t visit Pacific Centre very much ;)

We all know the endless questioning of why Vancouver has been gipped by Apple for years with the lack of an official store. At one time, it seemed as though the company was planning to redeem our patient waiting with a flagship store, similar to the one in San Francisco. Apparently, it’s going to be *that* cool, but we are getting more than just a typical mini mall store.

We’ve known for a bit now that Pacific Centre had been chosen as the site. The rumour was that it would be in the space formerly occupied by Holt Renfrew. Now, finally, the walls have been put up with the lovely white Apple logo and a link to the Canadian site.

This of course means that construction is officially underway! The walls went up at the beginning of this month. According to the reports, the store will take over two levels!

Now, if the timeline follows that of previous Apple stores in Canada, Vancouver’s could very well be ready in time for summer!

This is all corroborated by Pacific Centre’s website:

We expect the exterior portion of the project to be complete by March 2008 and the interior portion including new store openings by Summer 2008.

We are pleased to share with you that, Apple, Browns Shoes, H&M and Teenflo will be joining the Centre and will reside in the old Holt Renfrew location on the upper level. We expect to announce the other new tenants in the coming weeks.  On the lower level Geox and Jacob are now open.

There’s a story in The Province today about Surrey continuing it’s so-called “made in Surrey” approach to regional growth, although this time the city has a leg to stand on.

There’s a strong possibility that following the LRSP update, Metro Vancouver will gain stronger powers to enforce cities in the region to play along properly with the regional growth strategy - something Surrey has a reputation for “derailing” due to it’s sprawled development.

One of the current large problems in the region is a growing lack of industrial land. As most should be aware, Vancouver and Burnaby are actually making the situation worse by rezoning industrial land for high density condos. Just take a look downtown: False Creek North and South, Yaletown, Coal Harbour - all former industrial lands. Burnaby is playing a similar game, building condos along the SkyTrain lines, usually on land that is or was industrial.

Now, it’s perfectly debateable whether or not these rezonings were justified and are actually improving quality of life. Certainly, it’s a very complex debate, ranging from the Province building rapid transit along industrial corridors in the first place (in an attempt to avoid NIMBYs), to Vancouver pursuing a word renowed smart growth strategy for the Downtown Penninsula.

The fact remains though, that industrial land is disappearing quickly and cities north of the Fraser are doing nothing to replace the lost plots of industrial lands.

This leaves Surrey is a difficult situation. Jean Lamontagne, General Manager of the City of Surrey’s planning department:

“Many municipalities have converted large areas of industrial land to higher uses, such as residential,” Lamontagne said in a report to council.

“Surrey is now being expected to make up for the shortcomings of others.

“It is expected to provide storage, distribution and truck storage for the region. It is clearly not acceptable . . . as they do little for the tax base of the city,” he said.

In the article, Dianne Watts, Mayor of Surrey, outright dismisses the option that Metro Vancouver will be able to overrule the City’s land use authority:

“The pressure to convert industrial land to residential is very high in Surrey, but we’re saying no,” she said.

“The region is looking at other communities to pick up the slack. It wants to fix mistakes of the past, but one community can’t supply industrial land for the region.”

Then, Vancouver Councillor Suzanne Anton steps in and completely misreads the whole situation with this statement:

“Surrey wants to be able to upgrade industrial land to commercial land [and produce more tax revenue]. Surrey is saying more loudly than others that they don’t want to be told what to do,” said Anton, who sits on the Metro planning committee.

Surrey has never wanted to replace industrial with commercial. Frankly, industrial lands provide better jobs in the long term for residents. In fact, Surrey has pursued a very intense strategy of protecting or expanding industrial lands in the city.

But it gets better. Anton then goes in for the knockout:

She admitted Vancouver recently converted industrial land in Southeast False Creek for a future residential community of 15,000. But she said Surrey shouldn’t point fingers.

“Do we want to get into who shoots up on the Downtown Eastside and where they come from?” she asked.

BAM!

How dare Anton try and claim that all the homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicted in Vancouver are somehow Surrey’s problem?! How dare she reinforce a negative persona on both Surrey as a city and claim to define it’s type of residents?!

That type of verbal attack on a neighbouring community should not be occuring by any mayor or councillor in the region.

In fact, it’s quite debateable, but if it wasn’t for the SkyTrain, Whalley wouldn’t have even gotten half the problems it did in the 90’s. And where do you think those people were coming from - oh, right, VANCOUVER!

Is there a worse possible headline a party could get? It’s a blatant showing that politicians are “better” than the general public, and have to “go to the streets” to get the public’s “real thoughts”.

WTF?

Shouldn’t they already know what the real problems are? That’s what their job is! And if they are in fact going to start knocking on doors, or riding SkyTrains, then why do they need a friggin press release? Have the NDP sunk so low that not only do they not realize what transit riders go through everyday, but they have to get some type of attention for trying to understand what the issues are?

And why the hell is the transportation critic from Esquimalt anyways? Doesn’t Carole James have any sense of organization or leadership to know that she should put someone from the Lower Mainland on such a high profile ministry? Why isn’t Adrian Dix covering transportation - I’m sure it would raise his profile much more so than beating the dead horse that is the health ministry.

F**k politicians who don’t even have the capacity to understand what the public goes through. And f**k policitical parties that are such cowards that they can’t even find one problem to hound the Campbell government one - of which, they are *tons*.

I hate BC politics.

Just as the media has been speculating for months, Carole Taylor has introduced a revenue neutral carbon tax for BC. We are the second province in Canada, following Quebec, to introduce the tax as an method of curbing climate change.

Here’s the deets:

Carbon Tax

A carbon tax will be introduced on all fossil fuels starting July 1st. It will increase over time. The rate begins at $10 per tonne of carbon emissions. It will generate $1.85 billion over three years.

For example, the cost works out to be 2.41 cents per litre of gas, and 2.2 cents per litre of diesel.

Legislation will be developed requiring the government to show how the carbon tax funds are being used to fight climate change.

Revenue Neutrality

Every BC resident will receive a $100 dividend in June aimed at helping them to adopt greener lifestyles before the carbon tax is introduced.

Low income households will receive a new Climate Action Credit quarterly, amounting to $100 per adult and $30 per child.

Furthermore, the bottom two personal income tax rates, the general corporate income tax rate, and the small business tax rate will all be reduced to offset the carbon tax revenues.

General Spending

• Health care spending is up $2.9 billion over three years
• K-12 education spending is up $144 million over three years
• $104 million over four years will go towards reducing homelessness
• $78 million over four years will go towards keeping emergency shelters open 24 hours

Surplus?

The forecasted surplus for this year is $50 million, a far cry from last year’s $2 billion.

Video game events at public libraries are drawing crowds of teens, including about 100 competing monthly at “Guitar Hero” at the Rochester Hills Public Library.

“Getting teens to come to the library is right up there with getting them to go to church: It’s not exactly the first place they want to go,” Christine Lind Hage, library director, told the Detroit Free Press for a story Sunday.

[via ABC News]

Now here’s some innovation from a dying industry - the library. It’s great to see them making progressive steps to attract back people. The fact of the matter is that library can no longer rely on simply being an information repository - the internet has taken over that responsibility.

Libraries need to be social spaces for a community. They need uses beyond the “book rental shop” and the “study space”. Libraries need to merge with other attractive community spaces, such as community halls, coffee shops, and rec centres. Just imagine how much busier a library would be if it had the only Starbucks in town attached to it.

It’s interesting how this library in the States went beyond just stocking video games - a big step in it’s own right and certainly something that should be tried out here. They transformed a space in the library into something that you would typically call a youth center. They had a video game party and competition night. Tremendous idea no?!

I think it’s collaboration and incorporation that community services need now more than ever. They need to capitalize on their own individual successes and situate in a relatively close space to create what one would typically call a civic square. If services were all close together, you would create a focal point for the community. Of course, this is hard to do with sprawled cities, but steps should be taken today to fix this problem.

First step: create community spaces that are attractive for everyone. Just like these innovative libraries are doing.

For a while I felt as though my blog was steering too far into posts on Surrey. I mean, obviously it’s something I feel is important to write about as it is my home city. However, I know not everyone is interested in such posts.

On that front, I’ve launched a Surrey specific blog: civicSurrey. It will cover important future developments and major news stories in the city. I may crosspost a few interesting articles, but generally from now on, most Surrey posts will be on civicSurrey. So, go check it out and I hope you stick around!

As one of Surrey’s initiatives under the Cultural Capital of Canada designation, the City has funded a digital art project named “Glocal: Your World in Motion“. Here’s the synopsis from the project’s site:

Glocal is an interactive screen and online artwork now in production by a team of local artists: Sylvia Grace Borda, M Simon Levin, and Jer Thorp. They have envisioned building a massive community media experience that will challenge perceptions about the city of Surrey, Canada’s fastest growing metropolis.

With the use of digital cameras and motion capture, audiences will witness how speed, size, density and diversity have enabled Surrey to exist in local and global (Glocal) consciousness.

All the content produced under the banner of the Glocal project will form a large relational artwork in which ‘moving’ images of Surrey will become a central point of exploration. This interaction will then be repeated internationally through community workshops and public exhibitions. When realized, audiences will be able to compare, contrast and examine the world from all points of the globe – and experience how we all share the same horizons … and how we have a lot in common with others, wherever you are!

So how can YOU become part of Glocal and Think again about what’s cool where you live.
The Glocal team of artists will be residing online and at the Surrey Art Gallery TechLab to guide you on your way. Surrey youth and residents can become partnering artists through a series of mentoring workshops developed by the team. The team will also be producing low-tech toolkits to help you record your world in lots of new and amazing ways….

The project already has a Facebook page and a Flickr pool.

It sounds interesting enough, but I fear “Glocal” will be just another waste of time and money. I found it quite surprising that, as of yet, I didn’t even know this project was even in progress. For such an interactive and multimedia project, it hasn’t seemed to reach out to the local web community at all. Is this just another case of artists sharing their art with no one else but other artists?

Furthermore, the pictures that are currently posted on Flickr are nothing more than a series of boring, webcam shots. It’s like this group of artists is being paid to sit at a computer, make faces, and take pictures of themselves. I want that job!

We’ll see where this goes, but as of yet, I am not at all impressed.

Speaking of flashmobs…

[via Open Thinking and Digital Pedogagy]

Combining two of my favourite loves - “Thriller” and rail transit. Sure, we may have SkyTrain parties, but nothing can beat this flashmob.

[via SpacingToronto]