San Franciso is experimenting with market-based for parking. Parking prices will be set on a block-by-hour basis. A fragment of the market for a given month might look like this:

Prices are set such that the difference from hour-to-hour for a given block may only vary by $0.50 (so if Main St 200-block left-side was $2.50 at 9:00, it can’t go higher than $3.00 at 10:00). Prices will be adjusted once per month by a maximum of $0.50 (so if Main St 300-block right-side is $3.75 in August, it can’t go lower than $3.25 in September.)

The stated goal of the project is to reduce environmental and social cost of drivers wandering around looking for parking. Because price will control demand for parking, parking time limits will be significantly relaxed. As a result, less parking tickets will be issued and San Franciso expects the project to be roughly revenue-neutral.

This is a much more delicate tool for controlling whether people drive downtown than the alternatives:

• congestion pricing
• reducing parking supply (such as converting car to bike parking)
• incentives to use sustainable transportation

I think it’d be a great use for the City of Victoria’s new digital parking metres. Note that parking provides 8% of the City of Victoria’s revenue (taxes provide 52%), which means the City is a bit addicted to providing parking downtown: street parking cannot be substantially reduced and parkades cannot be redeveloped into more productive space.

My bitching about BC Transit’s plan for Victoria got me an invitation to participate in an (open) survey about plan priorities. Similar to the City of Victoria’s prioritizing survey, BC Transit is running a “planning game”. I guess HTML forms weren’t up to the task, because it’s a on a Web 2.0 website as locked down as a Flash app: the back button is broken and there’s no way to see data without stepping through it. That being said, it does show you the average opinion after each step.

I believe that I should express what would personally benefit me and allow BC Transit’s planners to find the maximal utility for the population. Living and working downtown, I don’t use transit very often but I appreciate a good system waiting for me when I do.

The survey works by dragging options into an ordering. Some of the options do not have intuitive names (“economic growth” = jobs created by running transit operations) and the descriptions appear in an easily ignorable right pane.

Step 2 involves prioritizing the major edges in BC Transit’s planned network for Victoria. For each edge, you can specify whether you prefer frequent bus or mass transit. I neglected to “add a custom” options for better coverage of James Bay, Cook Street Village and Ross Bay Village. I did appreciate that the network edge enhancements were competing with whole-network options:

• Increased frequency
• Increased coverage
• Extend service day

The coolest section was Step 4: “How do we pay for this?”. I’d love to have a debate about all of these options:

• Passenger Fares
• Property Taxes
• Local Gas Tax
• Advertising
• Provincial Funding
• Road Tolls
• Parking Tax
• Community Pass (bus passes given to every household in exchange for property tax increases)
• Vehicle Levy

Municipal councils in the Capital Regional District generally allow developers to get away with extremely bad designs. From what I can tell, they’re happy to meddle in issues like building height and number of parking spaces, but they throw their hands up and let developers run wild when it comes to actual urban planning.

A particularly ugly example is Tuscany Village in Saanich. In exchange for allowing the horrible shopping centre, Council were promised a number of affordable housing units. Then once things were underway, the developer decided that they would not in fact be including affordable housing. Council had neglected to make the promise binding.

Almost all of those Council members got reelected in 2008, despite basically admitting in public campaign apprearances that they were not competent to do the job. Now it appears they’ve done it again with Uptown Centre. I’ve only looked at the ugly walls of Uptown driving by in a car, but Bernard of Victoria Vision has been blogging its many design flaws:

• Urban design
• A review of Wal-Mart
• Traffic planning

BC Transit is planning to run mass transit right through this development, essentially approving what can only be classified suburban blight.

The Victoria Foundation is a charity aggregator (meta-charity?) in Victoria. Every year, they evaluate the city on different factors. This helps their fundraising pitch and I’d like to think it determines which local charities get their grants, although I have no idea if it does.

There’s an online survey asking which measures the Foundation should be using. It’s a good opportunity to tell them that perception of crime or police officers per capita are not worth basing decisions off of. It’s interesting to think about how things should be measured:

Arts and Culture

I suggested they measure the import/export of art. eg: How many foreign artists participate in our cultural festivals? (Fringe and Film Fest are the two I’m involved in.) To what extent are our local artists exhibited in other cities?

Belonging and Leadership

I liked their idea of measuring the economic value of volunteer contributions much better than counting volunteers or donations. They suggest measuring women in municipal politics, but obviously it would be better to look at the extent to which local politicians at all levels reflect the demographic makeup of the community on many Census dimensions.

Economy

Some interesting suggestions were business start-ups and failures, jobs by sector (economic diversity), and percent of people making a living wage. The latter is much more useful than looking at underemployment or minimum wage or whatever – can people get with however they’re able and opting to work?

Environment

They suggested measuring amount of land with regional ecological significance, which is way more useful than land in the Agricultural Land Reserve, which includes golf courses.

Getting Started

Since Victoria’s population is aging, total childcare spaces isn’t important: I’d rather see them measure the ratio of spaces to children. Similarly, the number of children in government care reflects government policies rather than the actual child poverty rate. And student debt doesn’t matter if graduates can find awesome jobs, so I’d like recent graduate income measured.

Standard of Living

They suggested the change of consumer price index compared to average wage increase, that’s an awesome way of measuring real income change controlling for inflation and supply.

None of the options that I like were in last year’s report, so go vote for what I say!

Tori has asked me to expand on my hatred of food security…

Say you really like farming but you live in a city, even an apartment building. You note that there is not that much opportunity for you to do farming around you. So you think, “is there any way I can convince policy makers and influential residents to support my hobby?” You decide that farming is the solution and start looking for problems it can fix:

Emergency management

In the event of an apocalyptic disaster, we should be stockpiling oil or grain, not growing plants that could be months away from harvest.

Carbon emissions

If you want to reduce the carbon footprint of food, the most savings are in the transportation chain from boat to grocery store to fridge. Growing ultralight lettuce won’t make any difference.

Feeding the homeless

There’s plentiful free food in Victoria, whether from soup kitchens or dumpsters. I’ll never forget what a homeless guy told me when I offered him half a dozen eggs while cleaning out my fridge: homeless people need homes.

Educating children

Farming on school grounds is a great idea. But since children are not allowed to wander around unsupervised, they’ll never be exposed to any farming that’s off school grounds.

By offering itself up as a solution to all these issues, food security distracts from real solutions.

I think farming is a great hobby. Allotment gardens are a legitimate recreational use of green space. Everyone should have the right to keep bees or raise chickens on their private property. Roofs and boulevards covered by indigenous plants have many benefits. But don’t try to pretend that your hobby is going to save the world and demand the community subsidizes it.

After all, I like climbing things but I don’t think buildering should be in the plan. Although now that you mention it…

In the latest issue of Boulevard (fragile link), Ross Crockford talks about leading the initiative to put replacing the Johnson Street Bridge to a referendum. This stood out to me:

Downtown turned out to be one of the hardest places to canvass, because many pedestrians there suffered from panhandler fatigue and refused all solicitations.

The canvassers were wearing blue smocks with a logo on the front and holding a clipboard with petition sheets. Crockford can’t mean that they were mistaken for panhandling street people? No, the canvassers looked like street fundraisers, known in Britain as charity-muggers = chuggers.

Chuggers are paid, sometimes on commission, to solicit donations to private corporations. After the corporation’s shareholders have been paid, any money left over goes to the charity.

Panhandlers use a direct opening: “spare a little change?” “sorry”. Chuggers usually use an indirect opening, which requires more effort to deflect: “how are you today?” “fine” “got time to talk about…” “no”. I find chuggers significantly more annoying than street people, but just because I haven’t resorted to telling them to “fuck off”.

Occasionally I approach people on the street to compliment their clothes or or to ask for assistance or whatever. Since chuggers came to Victoria, I’ve actually been asked if I’m selling something in response to a compliment. Chuggers are poisoning our public spaces.

But Crockford points out something even worse: chuggers are poisoning democracy. Provincial initiatives and the local government alternate approval process rely on volunteer citizens being able to approach others on the street. Representatives of politicians and parties should be able to make a pitch on the street, against apathy if not for their candidates.

I’d like to see an amendment to the Safe Streets Act to ban chuggers or at least a local bylaw.

Very few people care about municipal issues. Local governments have a real problem just getting a mandate from an election, never mind consulting their residents on ongoing issues. Sure, the vocal minority is happy to give the mayor a piece of their mind, but that’s not a representative sample.

The planning department for the City of Victoria has a micro survey with just two questions, in the hopes of getting as many responses as possible. They’ve identified twelve issues, from affordable housing to heritage protection. For each issue, you specify how well it’s currently being addressed. Then you get 10 points to allocate between the issues to advise them how to spread their attention. It’s quick, elegant and it gets my stamp of approval as a voting system.

Dan, who is apparently an honorary member of the planning department, has come up with another micro survey tool. On Twitter, post a tweet how you imagine Victoria in 30 years (add the #VicOCP hashtag). If you don’t have a Twitter account, add a comment to this post with few enough characters and I’ll retweet it (eg: “RT Jack:[125 characters]#VicOCP”). Here’s mine:

Distinct. Dense: 200,000 people. Bike & pedestrian oriented. Diverse industries; most of CRD’s jobs. Amalgamated. #VicOCP

Prove Yule Heibel wrong that we have no vision for our city.

Transporting groceries from the store to households is a huge portion of food’s carbon footprint. Grocery stores make neighbourhoods feel like communities because they get people walking around and bumping into their neighbours. I’d say if you need to plan to pick-up groceries or get them delivered, then you don’t have food security – never mind how far the food took to get to the store.

500 metres is commonly used in urban planning because it’s the distance the average person walks in 5 minutes (I’ve previously used 400). For groceries, it’s the distance that old people can transport a few days worth of food on foot and young people are willing to “run out” to. Beyond 500 metres people start taking a car.

Alison recently asked me to comment on the viability of a permanent food market in Victoria. I say that’s putting the cart before the horse: many people in Victoria can’t even get to a regular grocery store! Council should figure out how to solve that key environmental, social and security issue before they start worrying about fancy markets.

Here are the 500-metre radii around full-service grocery stores in the municipality of Victoria:

There are food stores that are less than full service. They don’t have butchers, so carnivores who like fresh meat will have to shop somewhere else frequently. They have uneven produce quality and selection. I believe most people who live by these stores will regularly make a trip to a full-service grocery store. You can select the checkbox to display each store on the map:

BC local government is made up of municipalities, regional districts, the Islands Trust, the Vancouver Park Board and school districts (the UBC Endowment Lands committees are advisory, not governing; First Nations governments represent off-reserve members so they’re not considered local).

[Redacted]

The Local Government Elections Task Force is developing a new model [for local government elections] and started soliticing feedback today.

[Redacted]

Karen tells me that some consulting firm in Wisconsin calculated rankings of Canadian cities for professionals under 40. Along with a Creative Class-like Index, they used the following fuzzy measures:

• weighted cost of living
• night life (I think they just counted bars per capita)
• transportation including walkability, public transit and commute times
• health and environmental quality
• earning potential
• education and public information

Surprising to me, Victoria came out #1! Infuriatingly, the point of the ranking was to advertise consulting services, so the full results and methodology are secret.