Posts from — January 2012

Vancouver taxi customers should experience quicker, cheaper trips on congested routes, says the Vancouver Taxi Association, now that city council has approved a one-year trial to allow taxis to travel in bus lanes.

The pilot program  was an election commitment by Mayor Gregor Robertson, who was responding to a long-standing call for such action from taxi owners, who point out that similar rules are in place all over the world.

Here in Vancouver, however, riders would sit fuming in traffic while the bus lane next to them sat empty. Robertson secured a green light from provincial transport minister Blair Lekstrom and Translink is on board.

With more than 700,000 taxi trips a year in Vancouver, the impact could be significant. Where congestion is heavy, particularly downtown, taxis will be able to move into bus lanes, reducing travel times and trip costs.

Vancouver Police Department officers are still spending hundreds of hours a year waiting at Vancouver hospitals to “hand off” mental health patients they have apprehended, according to a VPD memo to city council, but the average wait is going down.

Thanks to new measures introduced by the hospitals, police officers are waiting an average 60 minutes to hand off a patient, down from 71 minutes before the new program.

Nonetheless, this memo from VPD Inspector Ralph Pauw, prepared for council at the request of Councillor Kerry Jang, makes it clear that city taxpayers are still paying a high policing cost to fill gaps in the province’s patchwork mental health system. VPD pays police officers for hundreds of hours a year to stand waiting at the hospital for the hand-off.

Pauw advocates a simple change to regulations to allow qualified nurses, not just busy physicians, to determine that admission to hospital is required. Once that decision is made, police officers could go back to their real jobs — and much faster.

Ever since Vancouver’s low barrier shelters opened in the wake of Gregor Robertson’s 2008 election victory, the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association has carefully monitored aggressive panhandling, open drug use and numbers of street homeless in its 96-block district.

The latest summary, circulated last week by the BIA’s Charles Gauthier, shows that the benefits continue for downtown businesses, with incidents of street disorder trending down as shelters open.

Increasing housing costs and stagnant earnings  are putting young families on an economic treadmill, according to new research by UBC professor Paul Kerhsaw. They can’t get ahead no matter how hard they work.

The problem is nation-wide, but the worst right here in BC, Kershaw says, which until recently was proclaimed The Best Place on Earth. His solution: provincial childcare programs to reduce the cost of raising a family. Will business leaders heed his call? In this recent column for Business in Vancouver, I express my doubts. [Read more →]