Vancouver City Councillor

Harbhajan Mann and the Quantum Bhangra Feb. 27 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre promises a hot Punjabi ending to a Cultural Olympiad that began with the cool Taiwan dance classic Moon Water.

While not the first event of the Cultural Olympiad, Moon Water by Taiwan’s Cloud Garden dance company Feb. 5 was an extraordinary evening, not least because of the quiet pool of water that literally flooded the stage as the hypnotic performance unfolded.

Cultural Olympiad director Robert Kerr said the near sellout crowd at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre made it perhaps the largest-ever single audience for modern dance in the city.

If so, it is a tribute to the Taiwanese company and its community supporters, but also a sign of the transformation the cultural program may be working on Vancouver audiences.

For a few weeks, Vancouver will host a series of world-class events normally available only global cultural capitals.

An example, in complete contrast to the cool yet intense Moon Water, is Quantum Bhangra with Harbhajan Mann, an evening of the world’s top bhangra performers on one stage, that will close out the Games program. It is as big a gift to the city from India as Cloud Gate was from Taiwan. At the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Feb. 27, 7 p.m.

The Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts: part of Vancouver's future or relics of a project the city rejected?

In honour of the today’s shutdown of the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts, for the first time since their construction in 1971, I have created this small archive of background information and history on the lower mainland’s shortest freeway.

More contributions are welcome.

The most recent reorganization of Translink, triggered in 2007 by former Highways Minister Kevin Falcon, arguably cost the system $150 million.

That’s how much of its accumulated surplus Translink burned through waiting for the new governance model to gather steam and produce new sources of revenue, which it finally did last September.

That’s when the Translink Mayor’s Council finally approved a package of revenue measures worth $130 million annually to cover costs without increasing service. Today, the Mayor’s Council heard Translink Commissioner outline his reasons why he has signed off on the fare increase portion of the new plan, as he must by law.

However, Crilly declined to approve Translink’s applications for fare increases for 10 years, limiting the current decision to three years.

Of 270 submissions on the fare increase, almost none were in favour.

The main news at today’s meeting: Translink will not be proceeding with another supplement application to increase revenue and service until next year at the earliest, ensuring at least another year of drift at the corporation while Victoria considers yet another legislative intervention.

Just as interest in the proposal to provide a two-way separated bike lane on the Dunsmuir Viaduct hit fever pitch, former Bicycle Advisory Committee chair Bonnie Fenton, now resident in Germany, sent along the excerpt below from a new documentary that explains the need for bicycle infrastructure.

Called Beauty and the Bike, it compares the experiences of young women cyclists in Darlington, in the United Kingdom, and Bremen, Germany.

“In the preview,” Fenton writes, “you see the stark difference between the attitudes of the politicians in Bremen (take road space for cyclists) and in Darlington (put cyclists out of the way of cars), and in the full film, one of the most telling lines I found was when one of the Bremen girls (who rides her bike all the time) says she’s not sure she’d do that if she lived in Darlington (where the facilities are rare to non-existent).”

How to combine beauty and bikes? Fenton says the “the conclusion they arrive at is (and I quote) ‘it’s the infrastructure, stupid!’”

You can read more about the entire 55-minute film here.