Posts from — July 2009

A mid-level Vancouver Police Department official sparked a storm in the taxi industry May 4.

His  off-the-cuff e-mail invitation to suburban taxi firms to pick up fares in Vancouver’s Granville Entertainment District (GED) on Friday and Saturday nights triggered outrage from Vancouver cabbies, who were involved in several altercations in the downtown core as local drivers, already hurting from the recession, saw out-of-town cabs snatch fares from under their noses.

To rub salt in the wounds, outside firms took the e-mail as a signal that they were welcome to “poach” in Vancouver at any time.

It was a unilateral shift in policy that reflected problems experienced in 2007 when VPD needed extra service to move late-night bar patrons out of the city.

At my urging, Mayor Gregor Robertson took up the issue with Chief Constable Jim Chu, who had already heard from Vancouver’s taxi industry, particularly Yellow Cab’s John Palis.

Thanks to those interventions, VPD is initiating a major change in policy. In a to letter Robertson June 30, VPD Superintendent Warren Lemcke avised that “the four local companies operating in the City now believe they have the capacity to service the GED on weeekend evenings and have asked to be able to prove this.”

As a result, Lemcke has written to all Lower Mainland tax companies “stating that they are no longer allowed to pick up in the GED on weekend evenings, nor at any other time or location in the City unless they are in compliance with City bylaws and Provincial legislation.”

The three-week trial period is a major win for Vancouver’s taxi firms — and a challenge to prove that they can provide good service when GED bars empty out in the early hours of the morning. Stay tuned.

Despite dropping home prices, home ownership remains out of reach for most Canadians.

The latest semi-annual review of ownership affordability in Canada by RBC Economics reports that lower prices and cheap mortgages are helping a little, but two-thirds of Canadian households still earn less than the qualifying income for a styandard two-story home.

To buy a standard condo in Canada — read the report to see what that means — requires an annual household income of $46,200. Abhout 41 percent of Canadian households are below that level. More than half of Canadian families could not afford a standard townhome.

The report says BC’s affordability index had the steepest drop — good news — but sales are picking up,  so the bottom may have been reached. Thanks to Tom Durning at TRAC for pointing out this report.

Today’s Province update on the controversy over the quality of pipe installation at Millennium’s Olympic Village site confirms some important facts that I have learned in the past six months:

• both Millennium and the unions representing workers on the site share a very deep commitment to quality, despite the periodic communications breakdowns. (Not all the workers on the site are unionized. Their union status varies depending on the contractor employing them.) It’s fair to say Millennium is almost obsessive about quality, to a degree some of its subcontractors and employees may find excessive.
• Meetings between Millennium and the unions during the past few days have reassured the union  that Millennium is requiring best practices on the site. New lines of communication are in place to identify and resolve problems.
• Millennium places a high priority on good workplace relations, as evidenced by the hour-long pause in operations April 28 to mark the Day of Mourning, an international event commemorating the sacrifice of workers who suffer work-related sickness, injury or death;
• Quality control is not simply a Millennium concern — several independent quality assurance processes are in place and have been since the project began.
• The city is confident, as Gregor Robertson makes clear in today’s story, that when problems arise — as they will in such a massive and complex project — they are being identified and fixed.
• The fundamental concern of the building trades unions — in this case the Heat and Frost Insulators and Allied Workers Union Local 118 — is low-bid and shoddy tendering practices in the construction industry, an issue that has not yet been mentioned by the Province. It will be interesting to see if media interest is as intense in fully private projects where the same problems arise.

There’s one aspect of the Province story I take issue with. There was no stalling by the city at any time. From the moment the Province splashed the union’s statements on page one, City of Vancouver officials, elected and unelected, as well as Millennium, made it clear they took the union’s concerns very seriously and pledged to ensure they were dealt with. There was no stalling.

On the evening before the Burrard Bridge opens to cyclists — creating what some motorists believe will be hell in a very small space — these two photos from a recent trip to Italy seek to explain in graphic form why experts favour separation of pedestrians, cyclists and cars:

RECOMMENDED APPROACH: separate lanes for cars, cyclists and pedestrians as seen last week in Torino, host city for the 2006 Winter Olympic Games. Orderly, calm, fun for all. Much of the old downtown core is car-free.

NOT RECOMMENDED: Shared sidewalk on Via Della Greca, near the Aventine Hills in Rome, requires curve around sign post while missing nun. Remember: cars do not yield to anyone or anything. Cyclists seen in 12-hour period? Fewer than 10.