Victoria’s Community Plan is a strategic plan. Risk management is a big part of organizational strategic plans, but I was surprised to see it so explicitly in the climate change session.

Risk management says there are four ways to respond to a threat that may occur:

• Accept: do nothing
• Transfer: make it someone else’s problem (insurance is the most straightforward example)
• Avoid: change your plan to reduce the impact (called “Adaptation” in a climate change context)
• Mitigate: reduce the probability that the threat occurs

Most emissions happen in urban areas, but the City of Victoria is just one municipality in the region and just one city in the world, so mitigation is more about setting a good example and doing our part. Victoria’s emissions are divided about 50-50 between building heating & cooling and transportation (solid waste is insignificant and reducing it is a distraction from the real problems).

For heating & cooling, it’s more important to retrofit old buildings than set standards for new ones (most of Victoria’s buildings that will be standing in 30 years have already been built). I didn’t get a chance to ask if we have a potential for deep water cooling, but there are a few geothermal heritage-retrofit projects in Victoria.

The Capital Region per capita transportation emissions are 0.6 tonnes higher than the City’s per capita emissions, so the most important thing is supporting regional transportation plans (like keeping rail on the Johnson Street Bridge, hmm?). It turns out that not that many people are commuting directly downtown, so sticks like reducing parking may not be as effective as carrots. But there’s also lots of opportunity to reduce transportation emissions within the City.

Given that some climate change is inevitable, we also have to avoid the impacts. Victoria is well above sea level. We need emergency management to deal with increasingly weird weather. Our biggest problem is water security:

• water supply
• water-borne disease
• handling wastewater

The Galloping Goose trail in Victoria is built on an old railbed. That means it’s pretty flat but not necessarily in the optimal location. I used to commute to Royal Roads University by bike using the Goose, so I know it quite well.

Some people have misread this article as suggesting that the Galloping Goose trail would be “turned into a road” in the Colwood Corners area. I actually read the fucking article, so this blog post is to set the record straight.

Every morning I’d pop out of the trail here, dodging around the construction sign:

There’s a sign telling you to walk your bike down to the intersection at Nob Hill Road and wait for the light – but I hate breaking flow, especially when it means leaving for work 5 minutes earlier. So instead, I’d dash across the highway (to those three rocks) like Frogger:

Turner Lane Development is proposing to exchange the trail and highway, swapping the blue and green lines turn the green trail into a road and give bikes some of the blue road:

Unlike all townward municipalities, Colwood hasn’t paid to have their portion of the Goose paved, so I guess it’s reasonable to jump to the conclusion that council hates it. I think there’s a big potential for Colwood Corners to be a bicycle tourism destination, since it’s the only commercial cluster the Goose passes directly through. It has a Pig and a Serious Coffee, so it’s already a good place to stop, but paving the trail and dealing with the highway crossing would make cyclists feel welcome.

I went to the kick-off event for the City of Victoria’s community planning process. It turns out the community plan has a theme of “sustainability” (I didn’t see this in any of the lead-up material, maybe it goes without saying these days?). It started off with pep-talks from speakers telling us we could be the greenest city with the greenest businesses and the best culture and the best urban design. Then we broke into tables to discuss a topic of the table’s choosing.

We chose food security, as in: we need to grow our own food; not as in: we need to feed the homeless or decrease our food’s carbon footprint. I hate food security. I think it’s a self-indulgent fantasy and a distraction from real issues. But I went along with the discussion because I’m nice.

It’s environmentally irresponsible and totally unrealistic. Dan, our table’s moderator, cited the food system discussion paper prepared by city staff: it would take 20 times the land mass of the City of Victoria to feed all its current residents. This lead one of our table members to have the insight that we’d be better off supporting outer municipalities to keep the agricultural land they currently have rather than put hog farms on the roofs of office buildings.

Our table, like most of the others, produced a fluffy statement (“we’d like our city covered in bees“). The one exception was Gene Miller’s table. Miller is the founder of Victoria’s alternative weekly and an ex-real-estate-developer. He currently writes a killer column for Focus magazine on urban planning and was nearly drafted to be mayor last election. His table came up with three very specific zoning proposals – gee, I wonder who at the table thought those up?

Jared pointed me to this Times Colonist letter, which suggests that Victoria needs to critically examine our zoning policies with respect to parking. In the letter, they talk a lot about urban sprawl, and various other, relatively boring outcomes of strong parking requirements for new development in urban centers. I think a much simpler comparison might have more impact: LA has similar policies to Victoria, San Francisco and NYC do not.

Freakonomics did a big series on misconceptions about LA, and why downtown LA has a reputation for sprawling, whereas downtown San Francisco is considered “vibrant”. The most interesting thing they linked to was this study on the true costs of parking in LA.