But it’s a two cents a litre lift in fuel tax which is the key to funding transit expansion, including construction of the Evergreen Line. Will fuel tax deliver the cash, or will drivers shift to cheaper and greener alternatives — like moving downtown — that don’t produce tax revenues to build transit?

Victoria transit analyst Todd Littman argues that assumptions about fuel tax, tolls and the like  need to be challenged. As incomes stagnate and demographics shift, small increases in fuel tax can produce larger shifts in consumption.

So a new tax may be very effective in reducing congestion, he argues, but not produce sufficient income to fund new roads . . . or transit.

But when the panel of eminent judges released its decisions last night to a packed auditorium at SFU Woodwards, there was only one point of agreement. This proposal received both an honorable mention and a win in the “people’s choice” category.

When the proponents’ names were unveiled — neither judges nor online voters knew who developed the proposals — the team included a remarkable group including Norm Hotson, Larry Beasley, Jim Green, Margot Long and many more.

Here’s the city’s summary of the entire contest:

December 2, 2011

Viaducts competition winners announced

Vancouver’s viaducts were the centre of attention last night as 15 concepts, ranging from the practical to the highly imaginative, were recognized at the finale to the re:CONNECT ideas competition. Designs were as diverse as creating wide boulevards, monuments and museums to building recreational canals and adding new parks.

More than 100 entries were received in the competition offering creative possibilities for the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts and the Eastern Core, an area that stretches from Northeast False Creek to Clark Drive

A design jury, made up of renowned international and local urban experts, selected winners in three categories for the two competition entry streams – free and fee: Connecting the Core, Visualizing the Viaducts, and Wild Card.

The free stream (no cash prize) was a low- barrier stream directed toward people from any background who could enter without a fee. The fee stream, which required an entry fee and awarded cash prizes, was directed more at design professionals such as architects, engineers, as well as urban planners and their skill sets.

The jury was made up of five industry professionals: Allan Jacobs, globally-renowned urbanist and planning consultant (Berkeley, California); Rob Bennett, Executive Director, Portland Sustainability Initiative (Portland, Oregon); Joe Hruda, Member of the Architectural Institute of British Columbia (MAIBC), architect and founding partner at CIVITAS (Vancouver, BC); Tom Hutton, professor at the Centre for Human Settlements and School of Community and Regional Planning, UBC (Vancouver, B.C.); and Patricia Patkau, MAIBC, architect and founding partner of Patkau Architects (Vancouver, B.C.).

The People’s Choice award winners were also announced last night, chosen by the public who were invited to pick their favourites in each category by voting online. The competition attracted entries from across Canada and 13 other countries. More than 15,000 votes were received online, along with over 1,500 comments.

For details on the winning entries, visit vancouver.ca/reconnect

While no decisions on the viaducts are being made through re:CONNECT, the ideas the competition generated are intended to spark dialogue and help inform and inspire planning for this part of Vancouver.

The viaducts options will feed into the public consultation for the Transportation Plan update in spring 2012. Planning work to develop policy directions for the Eastern Core will continue in the New Year, with a report to Council anticipated in summer 2012.

Uncovered by salmon campaigner Don Staniford, the report discloses the discovery of infectious salmon anemia, a disease never before found in BC that is associated with salmon farming, with many samples taken as far back as 2002. The new information will no doubt dominate a special two-day final hearing scheduled by Cohen later this month.

How serious is it? John Werring, of the David Suzuki Foundation, says someone should go to jail for the cover-up.

But I heard little about:

1. The crisis for renters

Although half the city rents, few meetings had the intensity we experienced in 2008 with “renovictions” soaring and vacancy rates near zero. The situation for renters has not improved, but the very significant launch of  a new rental housing coalition got little coverage last week. Only Vision Vancouver is making specific commitments to help renters and has generated significant new rental housing construction since the last election.

2. The crisis in the global economy

Although Greece’s economy imploded since nominations closed and Italy has gone to the brink, the economy almost never arose. Meetings generally stayed close to local issues like zoning and housing prices. (Many discussions centred on the impact, if any, of mysterious “foreign” investors.)

But Vision’s platform does lay out specific proposals to support job creation and innovation in Vancouver. I spoke hopefully, in an early-campaign news release, of “economic recovery,” a prospect that seems to be fading in light of the latest news.

3. Climate change and global warming

Perhaps because support and engagement around the Greenest City Action Plan is so broad, there were few arguments about the need to work harder to make Vancouver green.  But the decision to delay approval of the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline means that the push to export bitumen from Metro Port Vancouver will intensify. Vision is the only party with a comprehensive environmental program and convened a special council meeting last year to shine a light on growing oil exports from our port.

Without a strong Vision team at all three levels — council, school and parks — Mayor Gregor Robertson will be hard-pressed to deliver on these commitments, despite their obvious importance.

Wasn’t there an extra zero there?

No. In China, where community consultation is an empty category and money is plentiful, things move quickly.

The lines were done by 2010 and Guangzhou keeps on building. Here in Metro, meanwhile, we’ve finally just greenlighted another 11 kilometres on the Evergreen Line, which won’t roll for another four years at the earliest.

I was staffing Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell on a tour of Guangzhou’s gleaming  German-built underground system. Vancouver’s sister city was vaulting, along with the rest of the country, from a city of bicycles in the 1980s to an automobile gridlock zone in the 1990s and then a rapid transit city 10 years later.

In 2005, Vancouver had just ground out the decision to complete the Canada Line, a fractious regional debate that itself took many years. Still to come: a decision on new funding sources for Translink, without which some rrapid transit relief for riders on the Broadway Corridor is impossible.

The staff reports (see Section E 2.3 on the consent agenda here) are a response to the province’s Becoming Carbon Neutral — A Guidebook for Local Governments in BC, the latest version of which was released in May. Although local governments have been told they won’t be penalized for missing carbon neutrality if they are “making progress,” the reports to Metro make it clear that some fundamental problems remain, including:

• the requirement that municipalities purchase offsets from the private sector, if necessary, to become neutral, instead of investing the money directly in greenhouse gas reductions in their own communities;
• the lack of a clear written commitment to eliminate penalties for communities that are “making progress” but are not carbon neutral; and
• lack of clarity on calculation of benefits from organic waste diversion.

In a related report, Metro staff warn that the region could face delays in procurement of a proposed waste to energy plant and up to $3 million in new costs for the existing plant under the province’s cap and trade plans.

Just growing pains? Or a sign that the Climate Action Plan is coming unravelled?

As the editor of The Fisherman, the publication of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers, I did extensive coverage during the 1980s about the disease risk posed by farmed salmon, particularly non-native stocks like Atlantic salmon.

I also had the opportunity to visit the Owikeno watershed, the vast wilderness nursery in the central coast — now dubbed the Great Bear Rainforest — where the Rivers Inlet runs spawned.

Rivers Inlet became a testbed for theories, now discredited, that suggested absolute fishing closures would produce bigger spawning populations and much larger runs. In fact, the opposite occurred in Rivers Inlet and elsewhere.

But time and money were found to capture and rear chinook and coho from this and other watersheds for use by the burgeoning salmon farming industry. (The “collapse” of wild stocks was a key factor in opening markets to farmed salmon.)

When both species proved difficult and costly to domesticate, BC farmers were permitted to import Norwegian Atlantic salmon, which were already accustomed to fish pen life and pellet food. These imports undoubtedly brought ISA with them.

Farmed salmon stocks hit by disease die in droves — ISA nearly wiped out the industry in Chile, which had no wild salmon — but the pens are soon replenished. No one can replace eradicated wild stocks.

That’s the threat we see before us now, a threat that could have been eliminated by the simple expedient of making protection of our wild salmon a provincial and national priority.

Freeway removal is becoming so commonplace in the United States that the Urban Land Institute has created a “top 10 list” of Metro Highway Removal Projects.

It’s increasingly clear that elimination of one or both of Vancouver’s viaducts is not only possible, it’s consistent with what many cities have done with great success. This Seattle study of a range of removals concluded traffic can be absorbed and city benefits can be significant, provided careful planning comes first.

That’s the premise of Vancouver’s Viaducts and Eastern Core Strategy.

While local communities, First Nations and environmentalists appear poised to stall a proposed oil sands pipeline to Kitimat across northern BC, Kinder Morgan and Trans Mountain have been working quietly to expand capacity to the Westridge Terminal in Burnaby to increase exports from there six-fold.

UBCM delegates voted Friday to deman a full review of that proposal, a demand so far rejected by the National Energy Board.

The UBCM motion, proposed by the Cities of Victoria and Burnaby, passsed easily once delegates put it on the floor for debate. It called for full environmental review of the Kinder Morgan project, which would require deepening of the Second Narrows to admit Suezmax tankers.

The debate on tar sands oil exports is now shifting south. If more evidence of that fact is needed,  just look at the latest issue of BC Shipping News, which features a freighter using a kite to reduce fuel consumption.

Inside: an environmentalist’s perspective on Crude Oil Tankers in Georgia Strait, written by the Georgia Strait Alliance’s Mike Richardson.

The CCPA analysis is the first to look carefully at the social justice side of energy pricing to create a program that could reduce poverty and global warming at the same time.

It’s entirely consistent with Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Greenest City Action Plan and a challenge to make such a plan province-wide in scope.