March 2010 Archives

Everyone knows you should wait 24 hours before voicing your opinion if you are upset. In this case I waited 9 months to comment on perhaps the biggest municipal and regional council self indulgent taxpayer spending in recent memory. I am talking about the decision by 17 local councillors and mayors to attend a conference in Whistler, BC and spend over $50,000. of taxpayer money in June 2009.

The Record newspaper uncovered this spending spree. An editorial on the subject further exposed the callous disregard that some local politicians have for taxpayers money.

I just want to focus in on the City of Cambridge council where an unbelievable 5 of 7 municipal politicians went to Whistler. (Councillor Gary Price, Karl Kiefer, Linda Whetham, Pam Wolf and Mayor Doug Craig) That is for a city of around 100,000 people. Contrast that to Hamilton with a population of around 500,000, where only 4 of 16 councillors attended the same conference.

For Keifer and Price, their spending of taxpayers money is well documented. Go to http://www.hespelernews.com and click on Gary and Karl’s Fiasco for a quick history lesson of their over a decade at the trough.

Linda Whetham, who is running for Mayor of Cambridge, shows she knows where the trough is. Why would anyone vote for her? Most depressing for me is Pam Wolf’s attendance at Whistler. She is the newest councillor in Cambridge who many thought might make a difference. How quickly she turned out like all the rest of them.

For Mayor Craig who attended as regional representative, it would be okay if he was the only regional member of council who went but he was not. Four other regional councillors went spending over $15,000.00 of our money.

But what can we do about this crass act by the Whister 5 in Cambridge? My suggestion is simple, they should payback the taxpayer’s money they blew. Only one member should have went. Slim chance of that happening as some of these politicians have made a career out of this type of spending. It’s no wonder nobody votes and public apathy towards politicians is at an all time high. Honestly, after living in Cambridge for over 17 years I have come to expect the worst out of our elected officials and this is just one more example to illustrate the point.

There’s a lot of criticism of the Region’s rapid transit proposal. It’s a little disheartening, because when I was actually at the rapid transit open houses, it sounded like everyone was more or less on the same page. But then we get editorials like this one in the Record, wherein the author tempts poor people—the supposed beneficiaries of the rapid transit proposal—with free hybrid cars as an alternative to an expensive government infrastructure project.

It’s a straw man. Sorry, poor people, nobody’s going to give you cars.

But what’s disheartening here is that the criticism completely misses the point. Rapid transit, shockingly, isn’t about transit at all, really. Let’s back up a step.

Waterloo region has a fundamental (yet desirable) problem:

1. We’re growing. Fast.
2. There’s no place left to expand our default “urban sprawl” development strategy.

The region, at the behest of the province, is choosing to “grow up, not out”. Rapid transit is a key part of what makes that possible.

Continuing on more or less as we have been means we’ll need unrestrained urban sprawl to facilitate growth. It means Wellesley, Wilmot and Woolwich become giant, sprawling house fields, with all the roads and infrastructure needed to maintain such.

In order to avoid that, you need to build up urban areas. Urban areas people actually want to live and work in. Places where it’s going to be impossible to find a parking spot, much less a permanent garage.

We don’t have this yet. That’s the point. It’s going to take concerted political will to get us there. Lucky for us, there seems to be a bit of that, which is why the idea of an $800M rapid transit system wasn’t immediately laughed off the agenda when it was proposed to senior governments.

The LRT is part of a larger strategy called Transit-Oriented Development. It’s not a crazy theory—it’s been executed successfully elsewhere, and not just in Europe, but also in such non-exotic locales as Toronto or Calgary.

The author of the article is right in one sense: owning a car in this town is a necessity right now. I don’t think it should be. Rapid transit is part of a broader strategy to ensure that, twenty years from now, it isn’t.

I don’t want to have to own a car, even though I can well afford one. Do you?

A quick note to say that I discovered three comments sitting in the spam filter earlier today that weren’t spam comments at all. These have all been restored and are now publicly viewable. But I also notice that there has been a dearth of comments here since the beginning of February, which makes me wonder if the spam filter has been a little too hungry for its own good.

If you’ve posted a comment here and it hasn’t appeared, I apologize. At this point, any comments that haven’t appeared yet are probably vanished into the ether. But from this point on, if your comment doesn’t appear within a couple of hours of posting, please drop me a line and let me know, and I’ll look into the problem and fix it. Gradually, the spam filter will learn not to treat you so badly.

I got a note in my mailbox last week about an open house on Tuesday for the proposed Bearinger Road road diet.

Bearinger Road runs between the Lakeshore Village neighbourhood and UW’s north campus. It was originally meant as a major east-west route connecting Fischer-Hallman to Weber Street. Somewhere along the line, a subdivision got in the way, and now it ends at Albert. We’re left with a big, four-lane road with (east of Westmount, anyway) very little traffic.

I live in Lakeshore, so I use Bearinger a lot. I cross it walking to work every day. I drive on it nearly every day. I’ll be biking along it once the mud goes away. The city got some infratructure money last year and repaved it. Great, except that now instead of barreling down the empty road at 80, drivers are happy to hit 90 or 100 kph regularly. That makes it tough to cross a wide, four-lane road with enough hills and corners that you often can’t see what cars are coming until you’re in the middle of the road.

When they got the infrastructure money, planners didn’t have enough time to do a full study and figure out what the road should be in the long term. So they left their options open. Even though they painted four lanes, they also had a plan to repaint it as two lanes. That’s what the “road diet” proposal is all about.

The road diet is one of a bunch of techniques to change our streets to be more useful for a wide range of uses. Drivers will drive slower on a two-lane road with narrower lanes. Pedestrian islands make it less terrifying to cross these streets. Bike lanes and a multi-use trail serve cyclists of different levels.

The city has money left over from the original work, so they’re planning on implementing the road diet strategy, as well as adding a roundabout at Hagey Boulevard.

Check out the city’s site for a FAQ and diagrams of the proposed plans. The proposal goes to council on March 29th.

File this under Things That Are Awesome: Hilary Abel (of the RQ blog), Brock Hart (of Culture Camp and Ideas Transform), Bevan Lantz (of Kwartzlab) and Martin de Groot (of the Waterloo Regional Arts Council) have come together to start a new podcast about local events, politics, arts and culture:

The 100.

And it sounds fantastic. It was born out of an idea from the last Culture Camp, and I’m impressed they managed to get it off the ground so quickly. You owe it to yourself to give it a listen. They’re planning on getting a new episode out every Thursday. Hopefully they’ll get it up in iTunes soon so people can subscribe to updates.

Also, if you’re not following Hilary on her blog, you really ought to be.

Encouraging your children to take the bus is a good initiative. In our case we are fortunate to have the bus stop right across from our Queen Street East house and the bus drops off the kids at Jacob Hespeler Secondary School. The Grand River Transit (GRT) even encourages students to take transit by giving them the Reduced Monthly Pass for $50.00 instead of the normal rate of $60. Sounds too good to be true……….your right.

GRT has misleading advertising regarding the availability of Reduced Monthly Passes for students. Right across the street from Jacob Hespeler Secondary School is the Zehrs that sells the monthly passes. Two of the last three times we have tried to buy the pass we were told they are sold out of the Reduced Monthly Passes for $50.00 and only the Regular Priced Passes were available for $60.00. Both times people selling the passes stated that there are only limited quantities of the Reduced Monthly Passes available.

So we checked out the GRT website . It does not state anything about limited quantities of reduced monthly passes. Come on GRT get your act together and print enough passes to honour your commitment to the taxpayers of this region.

Image via Wikipedia

The good folks at TriTAG bring to my attention this letter to the Waterloo Region Record where reader Cheri-ann Chowan expresses frustration at the lack of adequate transit service to Breslau, not to mention the lack of sidewalks along Victoria that could get a resident of Breslau to transit:

I am not the only parent in this predicament in Breslau. I know of one family that bought a house in Breslau and less than a year later sold their house because of the lack of transit for their teens. What happens to families in Breslau that cannot afford a vehicle? How would they potentially get to a job, doctors, and other very vital everyday life events?

(link)

When public transit was moved from the local level to the regional council back in 2000 and Grand River Transit was created, one of the benefits cited was the possibility that the satellite towns and villages might finally get a public transit connection with the main cities. Since then, the GRT has established a successful route to St. Jacobs and Elmira, and is considering services to Baden, New Hamburg and Ayr. It seems strange to me that Breslau, which is just across the Grand River from Kitchener, along one of the busier corridors leading out of the city, should not receive attention. The Route 15 comes so close, with morning rush and late evening service extended out to Centennial Road, right on the banks of the Grand.

Also, looking at the map, a service proposal presents itself that not only gives Breslau residents access to the downtown, but serves other areas in eastern Kitchener that are currently some distance from transit service. If Grand River Transit were to set up a route operating from the Downtown Terminal to King and Victoria and from there to Breslau via Victoria, Lancaster, Wellington, Shirley, Bingeman’s Centre Drive and Victoria again, the new industries setting up shop on Shirley and Bingeman Centre would finally see transit service. And that’s just filling in the gaps. Grand River Transit could conceivably simplify the layout of current services by running a bus along Victoria from King to Breslau, running a bus along Wellington and Bingemans Centre to loop in the Victoria/Lackner area, and a bus up Queen North and Lancaster to loop in Bridgeport, potentially giving passengers at the far end of routes 6 and 15 a faster ride to Kitchener’s downtown.

It may be that Grand River Transit hasn’t implemented the service because nobody has suggested it. Well, consider the suggestion made. The success of the Elmira route shows that demand exists outside of Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge for transit service, and the GRT need only continue the bus down Woolwich and Fountain Streets to give the residents of the Region of Waterloo public transit access to the regional airport.

• Brian at At Home at Hespelar reminisces about the last time the Canadian national anthem was changed, notes how some things shift organically, and wonders what all the fuss is about.
• Like many other bloggers, Far and Wide sees the Conservatives’ proposed change to the anthem as a diversionary tactic.
• Yikes! Urbanity posts a Google Map showing marijuana grow-ops in London. No similar map exists for Waterloo Region, yet. Locally, he has better news about a digital hub being set up in the old Tannery in downtown Kitchener.
• Planet June has yarn salamanders climbing the walls.
• Wonderful Waterloo launches a debate on which university library has the clearer windows. What, and let all the light shine in on our… (gasp!)… books?!
• Still with the universities, Psystenance criticizes how the University of Waterloo serves its pedestrians.
• Take the Lane wonders what the best bike route is to get from Mill and Queen to Riverbend and Lancaster. His readers offer suggestions.
• Be sure to check out the many fascinating late winter pictures over at Blog Guelph.
• And, finally, remember that Doctor Who returns to Canadian screens on April 17!