Warning: If you’re a single woman having a bitter Valentine’s Day, this post will make you more bitter.

Everybody in Victoria knows there are way more single women than men. I’ve heard as high as 200%. Girls often tell me “it must be so easy being a single guy in Victoria – you have so many girls to choose from!” Well it doesn’t feel very easy!

I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that this statistic is over all age groups, including all the old widows (only a tiny percentage of which are GILFs). The other day the statistic came up in conversation and my friend Dan whispered, in his best Deep Throat impersonation, “check the Census”. So I did*:

Probably thanks to UVic, there are almost as many women under 25 as men, but right after graduation things get tough for men; women don’t become a majority until 40 and not a big one until men start dying of natural causes, but even then not enough to explain to myth.

I think part of the reason the myth gets repeated is that some girls in Victoria like to use it as a crutch: “it’s not my fault I can’t get a man, the statistics are against me”. Here’s the harsh truth: if you’re a woman who has had trouble getting a date in your 20s, when the numbers are on your side, it’s just going to get worse. You need to do one of twothree things:

• Raise your value
• Lower your standards
• Go gay

Men, resist getting desperate and marrying the first girl you can get: dating’s going to get better every year…and then you die!

* The numbers are from a Census analysis tool that merges non-commonlaw, non-married, separated, divorced and widowed into a “historical non-married equivalent”, so they may be slightly different than if you painstakingly scrape numbers off the StatsCan site. But they’re close enough that the myth is obviously false.

Greater Victoria (formally: the Capital Regional District) is running some kind of CO2-reducing pyramid scheme (formally: a Ponzi scheme) or multi-level marketing. The idea is to get people to make small steps to stop raping the climate. First, they just ran a bunch of workshops to create contagious meme-zombies. Second, you can get yourself brainwashed online. Third, you can take pledges – here are mine:

• I will drive my friends around in car-share co-op cars to show them how nice they are.
• I will use Google Maps Transit to make the bus even more awesome!
• I will convert my fixie to a free-wheel so it isn’t such a pain to stop.
• I will strut more when I walk near traffic so drivers get jealous.
• I will let my brother try to teach me how to longboard again.

I like that they recognized longboards as a sustainable transportation option – too bad the people writing the Greater Victoria bylaws don’t. Personally, I’d like to see the cops handing out a dozen idling tickets (have they ever handed out one?!) for every skateboarder or cyclist-without-a-helmet they harass.

BC Transit has quietly rolled out a schedule feed that Google Maps is consuming to provide directions by transit for Victoria. For example, here are directions from Victoria city hall to UVic:

Transit directions are extremely useful for tourists and locals going to unfamiliar locations. When I’m travelling, I find Google Maps way easier to use than trying to figure out another city’s bus system. I know a lot of tourists are afraid of leaving simple mass transit networks for the complex bus systems, so they end up only seeing narrow corridors of a city. In Victoria, I assume tourists are reluctant to leave the downtown core or rely on taxis – spending less money in stores and restaurants. If transit is easier to use, locals will be slightly more likely not to use a car.

In Vancouver I pull up Google Maps on my smart phone, often while already on transit (SkyTrain goes where?!). In the US I find an open wifi connection and leave the directions open on my phone. Before I had a smart phone I would print them out or take notes. I will probably never use the Victoria Transit website again.

Congratulations to the tech team at BC Transit! It’s been painful waiting for BC Transit to implement this when Vancouver has had it for so long, but I’m really excited that it’s here now. Victoria hasn’t been added to Google’s list of open transit data feeds, but I assume the feed will be open if anyone has transit mash-ups.

PS: I hadn’t even noticed until checking out the transit directions, but Google Maps has biking directions up for Victoria too!

The Festival has replaced their bad HTML guide with a Flash guide (how 2008!) that I can’t get to work, so I’m using the PDF guide. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a HTML page including showtimes, a description and a trailer I could link to for each of these films? Instead you get links to pages in the PDF (which won’t work if you’re using Chrome):

Two Indians Talking

“On the eve of a blockade” sounds like a great setting for a film about First Nations in BC.

The Shrine

You had me at “Lovecraftian”. I’ve really enjoyed some of the low-budget terror films played at past years in the film festival. Nothing is more Canadian than a movie about an American in Poland shot in Ontario.

Qimmit

A documentary about the decline of dog sleds in northern Canada: are snowmobiles better or did the RCMP kill all the dogs? It uses a bunch of footage from truth and reconciliation commissions about the issue.

You Are Here

When I hear that a movie features the Chinese room philosophical thought experiment I pray that it’s amusingly surreal rather than heavy-handed gibberish like Waking Life.

Fall of Womenland and Black Hands

The first documentary is about a traditional polyandry in China: an extremely rare form of society. The second documentary is a reminder that New France had slaves and they were treated just as badly as in the American South.

Bang Women Art Revolution

This is a documentary made up of interviews about the feminist art movement, which as we know, many people still don’t take seriously.

The People vs George Lucas

I’m more of a Trekkie than a Jedi, but I know enough about Star Wars fandom (Han shot first) that I think this would be entertaining.

No Fun City

Anybody who likes culture should be aware how bureaucracy stifles the nightlife in British Columbian towns compared (usually) to Portland. But I’m more interested in zoning and liquor licensing than the focus on indie rock that this documentary appears to take.

I have a heavy volunteer schedule, so I won’t make it to all of these, but I’ll review those that I do.

There’s currently a debate in Victoria over whether BC Transit’s mass transit plans should be implemented as bus rapid transit or light rail. There are two reasons given:

Epic mass transit will encourage development around transit sites and scale up to future demand.

My response is to imagine this conversation with a real estate agent:

You: I need a place to live by myself.
Agent: Do you plan on having a family someday?
You: Yes, but I’m single right now.
Agent: Well, how about we find you a three-bedroom house to encourage that future expansion. The mortgage will probably bankrupt you, but we’ve got to think long term…

The municipalities in Greater Victoria have shown little affinity with urban planning so far. Zoning and tax subsidies are the correct way to dabble in strategic development, not billion-dollar railway tracks to nowhere.

Buses are icky so people won’t give up their cars for them.

My response: Seriously?! People will only take steps to reduce carbon, congestion and spending on gas if they’re offered beautiful, sleek bullet trains? Fine, then this chrome-plated mass transit should be paid for entirely by increases in the gas tax. The government should be helping with collective action for people who are currently transit-friendly, not trying social engineering experiments. If the majority are really that unwilling to give up their cars, we should all just kill ourselves.

The choice of mass transit type is a technical one that should be left to the experts at BC Transit. We all know how well it went last time a government decided what platform public transit should run on. (The same goes for you too, Toronto.)

I often vote strategically. For example, if only two candidates in an election have a chance of winning, I’ll vote for which of the two I prefer rather than making some principled choice for the candidate I wish would win. I believe I am a relatively sophisticated voter.

I generally support electoral reform because most proposed electoral systems would give me an opportunity to express a more complex preference. For example, with single transferrable vote I could explicitly say “I like Carol most of all, but I like Alice better than Bob”.

The City of Victoria is currently holding a referendum to borrow money to replace the Johnson Street Bridge simultaneously with a by-election to fill a vacant council seat. Given that the Bridge is the major municipal issue, most candidates are making their position a key plank in their campaign. However, only Councillor Geoff Young voted against replacing the bridge, so one more Refurbisher on council won’t make a difference. The only thing that matters for the Bridge is the referendum vote.

It’s assumed that ever voter who votes Yes on the referendum will also vote for a Replacer candidate (quadrant IV on the chart below) and every voter who votes No will also vote for a Refurbisher candidate (quadrant II). I wonder what it means to vote for either of the other combinations (I or III):

I think there’s a certain percentage of the electorate who have a message they want to send to council but it’s not clear how to send it with these two ballots.

The Victoria Police had a very quiet Halloween:

Before Halloween 2009, a number of municipalities in Greater Victoria banned fireworks: 2009 was definitely quieter than 2008. Having Halloween on Friday or Saturday compresses partying into one night: look at 2008, 2003 and 2009. (I went to bed early on Sunday and I swear I wasn’t causing trouble on Saturday, officer.) Is the combination of these two factors enough to explain the huge drop for 2010 or is this a sign of a larger trend? I find it ironic that children are doing less and less trick-or-treating as Halloween becomes increasingly safer.

The next time Halloween will be on a weekend is 2014: start planning your costume now.

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.

Via Vibrant Victoria, the Victoria Police Department is running a blog. The posts are mostly interesting incidents that police have been involved with. The tone is just-the-facts cute, bang-on for improving public relations.

Unfortunately, they don’t identify individual police officers. Still, I think it will have the intended affect of humanizing the VicPD force as a whole. The Canada Day post is particularly amusing.