Posts from — January 2011

100% Vancouver, the remarkable PUSH festival play that closes tonight, does the seemingly impossible: explore Vancouver through the eyes and voices of 100 first-time performers selected to match the city’s demographic reality as determined by the long-form census.

It’s instant, real-time civic engagement, using an accurate cross section of the community.

The premise is simpler than it sounds and is derived from similar experiments in Vienna and Berlin, spearheaded by Berlin’s Rimini Protokoll. Using five criteria from the census (gender, age, ethnicity, marital status and neighbourhood), the directors find first-time performers, each of whom will represent one percent of the roughly 646,000 Vancouver residents.

The Vancouver crew, recruited by word of mouth, family connections, business ties and even on Craigslist, ranged from four to 88 years old, had a median age of 38 and represented every neighbourhood but Shaughnessy, Oakridge and Arbutus Ridge. After two private rehearsals and a public dress rehearsal, they premiered earlier this week to a sold-out crown at Woodwards’.

Once on stage, the performers organize themselves in response to a series of questions. Who is in a same sex relationship? Who was born in Vancouver? Who smokes marijuana. Who is male and who is female? (One performer stayed firmly centre stage on that one and received a warm round of applause.)

The result is a shifting and moving kaleidoscope of our city in real time. Director Amiel Gladstone likens it to “opening the top of a Skytrain car and putting the people on stage.” [Read more →]

The alluring subhead on Andrew Coyne’s “Stuck in Traffic,” in the latest issue of Maclean’s, declares: “We now spend the equivalent of 32 working days a year stuck in traffic. Our rush hours rank with the world’s worst. Here’s how to fix it.”

But his solution would create one transit system for the well-to-do and leave the rest of us still staring at the licence plate in front of us — if we’re not jammed on the B-Line.

This is a debate that is coming to Metro Vancouver soon. Without new sources of revenue, Translink will be unable to make new transportation investments.

Transport Canada calculates that congestion is costing the economy $6.6 billion a year in direct costs and Metro Vancouver has the highest congestion costs per vehicle. The number of cars is up, the number of trips is up, the length of trips is up  and the average Metro Vancouver commuter spends 67 minutes a day in traffic. (In Toronto and Montreal, set aside 80 minutes.)

For public transit users, it’s worse: up to 106 minutes. Invest in more public transit? Nope, says Coyne, “you’d have to convince a lot of those drivers to give up the comfort and convenience of their cars.” Forget it. Not happening.

The solution? Charge for road use, Coyne says. Impose tolls, put on congestion charges and weed out the people “who place so little value on their time that they are willing to spend years of their lives, literally, sitting in traffic.” This will eliminate the “tragedy of the commons,” when failure to charge for access to a resource leads to overuse. [Read more →]

My Business in Vancouver column on the working conditions of Vancouver’s VFX workers, the people who produce digital special effects for the film industry, struck a nerve with many industry veterans.

As is always the case in a controversy like this, there are many sides to every story. I used much of the feedback, from an employer perspective, for a second column on this important and emerging economic success story, available in the current issue of BIV:

The news that VFX artists — the people producing the digital special affects for BC’s film industry — are being courted by organizers for Local 891 of the International Association of Theatre Stage Employees struck a raw nerve when I reported on the campaign in last month’s column.
No one, myself included, doubts the value of the emerging VFX sector, its importance to the future of BC’s digital entertainment sector, or the integrity of the vast majority of its employers. [Read more →]

Mike Howell’s report in the latest Courier highlights ICBC statistics showing Second and Main was the worst location in the city for crashes involving cyclists (22) between 2005 and 2009.

But six of the top 10 most dangers intersections were on Burrard: at Davie (18 crashes), Pacific St. (15 including both on and off ramps), Chestnut and Cornwall at the south end (15), Robson (10), Fourth Ave., (9) and Smithe (9).

Each end of the Burrard Bridge will undergo a complete redesign as a result of the upcoming remediation. That should go a long way to resolve festering problems there.

All the other locations, with the exception of Fourth Ave., are on the alignment selected for the Hornby bike lane, which was judged the best route to link the Burrard Bridge with the Dunsmuir bike lane. These numbers suggest that Hornby lane will do important service as a safer route downtown.

Anyone who has attempted Burrard on the current painted lanes on Burrard — as I have — can attest to the fact that riding downtown between buses on the right and speeding cars on the left is not for the faint of heart.

But safety is only one of the measures for the bike lane evaluation. City staff will also be considering the number of trips, traffic impacts and business impacts.