LRT still the best choice for Victoria and the Capital Region

The media, in all its forms, in and around Victoria, has been buzzing with discussion on the LRT project that BC Transit is planning for Douglas and the Highway.  It's something I've supported as a councillor and lately as a transit commissioner.  Likewise, councils around the region gave it the thumbs up when Transit asked for their endorsements and it has the support of many of those same elected officials when they sit around the table as CRD board members.  It has the backing of the provincial crown corporation that runs transit operations here in Victoria and across the province, (except for the lower mainland around Vancouver, where they run their own system and get substantially more provincial tax room to do it with).

The endorsement from some local politicians has experienced some erosion as the issue of costs come up and well meaning but unworkable cheap fixes gather traction with individuals and organizations around the region.  None should have been surprised that a new transit model would come with costs and certainly all of them know that our current transit system comes with its own price tag.  The facts are getting out there, but the debate will continue.  Here's some of my perspectives.

Today, Green Party Leader Jane Sterk spoke up, and in the order that I read them, proposed the cheap fix of repairing the E&N and using that to meet our transit needs, then in the same release suggested we do no work without a regional transportation plan.  But also, we should save some money to "fix" the Admirals/Mckenzie - Highway intersection, because we know that's a problem.

Both the E&N upgrades and something better at Mckenzie are needed, but it's putting the cart before the horse to exclude those from the transportation plan Jane says is needed before we spend anywhere.

There is, not incidentally, many elements of a regional transportation plan already in place.  It's embodied in our regional growth strategy - something that aims to achieve small g "green"objectives in shifting trips to more sustainable modes, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and concentrating development to favour walking, cycling and transit.  LRT is still the best fit for all of these objectives and the alignments along the Highway and Douglas will always find their way to the top of the priority list for transit improvements in the region.

No argument with the Greens that the E&N is a valuable asset and one not to be dismissed, but it has limited utility for the LRT service Victoria needs.  It complements the rest of the transit system, but it's not a substitute.  Here are just some of the pros and cons.

The E&N can work for CFB Esquimalt and for their workforce particularly.  They have pretty much a set schedule that delivers a pulse of commuters in the morning and sends them home again the afternoon.  The base generates very little daytime traffic.  There are few other trip generators along the corridor, and the spacing between them is distant enough to allow for a heavy rail passenger service to be effective.  That's the foundation for an E&N commuter service, but for the rest of the day, investments in the line will better support more tourist oriented passenger travel and, more importantly for the economic survival of the railway, provide a very useful freight corridor that can help us get heavy loads and dangerous cargo off of the Malahat.

What it can't do is provide the all day, short headway, multi-destination service that will be delivered by LRT.  LRT will need a double track system for the length of the corridor, a real challenge along the E&N.  Rapid transit along the E&N would create other headaches that nobody is costing in their commentaries.  There are 25 level crossings between Langford and Victoria.  Few of them correspond to any existing or potential development opportunities that would make sense for a station location.  What you have instead is a series of now expensive, disruptive crossings that would radiate traffic congestion out from more locations along the corridor.  Some would be little more than a nuisance, others might be more problematic, but none would be exempt from creating other traffic problems.  Federal rail safety regulations demand a higher level of control at crossings than are provided at most of those along the E&N.  The trigger for those fixes are traffic volumes and numbers of trains.  The introduction of even a few additional trips a day along the railway will require already numbers of those expensive upgrades.

The LRT alignments already match high volume travel patterns in the Capital Region and both the highway and Douglas St. corridors are well suited to accommodate the conversion of right of way into a light rail line.  Stops and crossings correspond well with destinations and trip generators that make them sympathetic to traffic operations.  Current land use and opportunities for densification are also quite complementary to LRT, so much more so than the E&N.

Too much has been made of the apparent low cost of upgrading the E&N.  It seems like a bargain, but the current ask for $15 million is only a sliver of the costs.  Some of the capital and operational costs associated with that project aren't part of that figure.  Different stakeholders, including the same federal government we'll be asking for help on our LRT project from are already in for VIA service and some of the rolling stock. Different pots of money are being invested in other pieces of the system, so even the current accounting is incomplete.  The Island Corridor Foundation chose, wisely, to save the rail in pieces.  They'll work in distinct phases to upgrade a piece here and there, address bridge deficiencies, tackle more distant sections etc.  That, by the way, only gets us back, really, to the existing service plus a couple of extra commuter trains.  Adding more frequent and more rapid transportation service along the E&N was never contemplated in the business case analysis done by the province and pursued by the ICF.  That would cost considerably more than the hefty sum the province calculated was needed to rescue the line, and the full figure is orders of magnitude beyond the $15 million, and still doesn't complete what we need for our transit network.

There are other "green" elements missing from the buy now, plan later projects.  The E&N should reduce vehicle traffic by some measure, but still runs on diesel.  GHG emissions will come down, but won't make a big enough dent in our our carbon footprint.  It also can't meet the transit targets we set for ourselves in our own regional growth strategy, or mandated by the provincial transit plan.  LRT is still the only viable, long term solution to meet those objectives.  "Fixing" Mckenzie may be a useful, even necessary band-aid for those that suffer that intersection, but it's hardly green, and might not fare so well in a planning process that focused on sustainable transportation.

Housing for people, not cars
One of the other "solutions" driving around looking for a place to park is HOV lanes.  It may be a good way to start converting the road space we'll need to allocate soon to LRT.  Allowing some of our buses to queue jump heavy traffic and putting some of the significant number of cars already carrying extra passengers into those lanes could relieve some pressure while we assemble resources and do the design work needed to take LRT to the next step.  But it won't work for long and it's not something we can plan for beyond a few years.

Buses are good for some of our network, but 60% of our transit capacity is tied up on Douglas St. and our growth centres are headed to the west shore.  We can't redeploy until we've got a more efficient and effective people mover to serve that corridor. 

Just as an aside, because it's nearly always raised as a show stopper for Victoria, it's not about the population of our city and our region, it's about the concentration of travel demand on our target corridors and our lcoal attraction to transit.  By those measures, Victoria is already ahead of other bigger cities in our readiness for rail.  Our concentrated travel demand is well suited to LRT, much more so than larger cities with more diffuse settlement and land-use patterns.  And we have a high ridership per capita already, much better than most with bus only systems, and that's a good foundation for the better service and higher capacity only LRT can deliver.

Back to the buses.  They will move faster in dedicated lanes, but they still bunch up downtown and there's the capacity issue.  There's not a lot of growth to be expected in high-occupancy vehicles - most research runs counter to the overly optimistic projections of its supporters.  LRT by the way, can carry several times the number of people any HOV project can deliver.  What's more problematic is the long term future.  Any success of HOV lanes takes passengers out of buses and puts them into cars and brings those cars downtown (and are we ready to turn every second motorist into a transit driver and scheduling service?)  That's the intended consequence of the system in any event.  Current plans for LRT would convert about 150 on-street parking stalls into LRT lanes.  If HOV lanes generate additional vehicle travel demand in excess of that number, parking will get harder, not easier, for all those new multi-occupant vehicles.  That's expensive for developers, steals ever more road space from other users (delivery vehicles, taxis, bike lanes, wider sidewalks, etc.),  Worse, it forces every developer to add more parking, not less, into every commercial or multi-unit residential building.  Parking is expensive to provide and it makes housing less affordable and discourages higher value uses on commercial or other land.  Economically, HOV provides less value added opportunity for urban land and it means more space and more shelter for cars, fewer for people.

Other issues in the social media etc.

Blanshard St:  Doesn't subsitute for Douglas.  Destinations and trip generators need to be connected to LRT, not a block or so away.  Douglas St. confirmed over several studies and extensive public consultation.  Blanshard moves traffic, Douglas moves people.

Goose, the Lochside and Peninsula destinations:  Trails are not being compromised by LRT, despite the false alarms raised by some.  Peninsula destinations are more distant and can be served well enough by a little extra bus capacity (surplus vehicles from LRT project), and but for some local pressures getting a rough enough ride anyway, not where we have or are going to build density.  LRT to the peninsula would create development pressures contrary to our growth strategy, food security needs etc.  Even Tswwassen to Richmond is still a bus service, and it has more traffic than we do on this side of the pond.  Any additional LRT phases would likely head first towards UVic.

More than the left:  I've been talking to developers, not normally associated with the left, anxious to see LRT move forward.  They see it as good business - it gives them some certainty for building and developments that take advantage of LRT to reduce the cost of supplying expensive parking spots, while increasing residential and employment density.  It's good business sense and doesn't belong to one side of the political spectrum or another.  The BC Liberal Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure said we had a good plan and didn't want to see us back at the table asking for more money in five years.  He told us to plan and deliver transit services for the long term.  The federal minister said at FCM earlier this year that he wanted to work with local government to build transit infrastructure.  Neither the provinical or federal ministers are closet lefties as far as I know.

"Most will still use their cars" - given options, people do change their habits.  Less than half of commute trips in Victoria are by car (but more than 70% do in Langford).  Victoria is not so different from other cities.  Our transit share is already very good for a smaller city so the potential for growth is good, with good service.  Tracks on streets are nothing new and work well enough.  Most would be better on the highway and Douglas where crossings would be perpendicular.  Too many oblique crossings on the E&N are already a problem for design and safety issues.

Land values:  Business case on land value lifts produced for BC Transit were done by professional real estate consultants and used BC Assessment information.  The number crunching was based on other systems in North America.  All pretty good sources.  We're not the first city considering rapid transit; it has been done before.

"Transit isn't taking HOV lanes seriously":  Transit's initial analysis found HOV lanes wouldn't noticeably improve transit service (moving people) so a more extensive investigation wasn't pursued.  That's different than not doing the work, it's that HOV doesn't offer a solution and that's not what some critics wanted to hear.

An independent review is a good idea and will be needed to secure senior government funding.  Don't expect that review to find fatal flaws in the plan.  Transit is pretty successful at moving people and managing transit in the province.  It has competent staff working on development and analysis of the project, with help from the provincial ministry and outside consultants also with good credentials.  In Victoria we have some recent experience with peer reviewed projects and the work of the city and our consultants passed muster on that one.  Transit knows that LRT is a significant investment and have done their homework.  Writing fairy tales would be a career limiting move for those involved and harmful to Transit's business interests.  They compete with other crowns, public agencies and departments of government for budget and they know they are under taxpayer scrutiny.  The work is solid and a review will confirm its the right direction for us.

Happy to weigh in now and again.  Hope some of you will read beyond the headlines and the easy answers.

Rapid Transit - A Capital Idea

BC Transit is moving forward with plans for LRT (Light Rail Transit) to service the Capital Region.  We've endorsed it at the local level (I sit on the Regional Transit Commission) and the provincial Crown Corporation that governs Transit across the province has now also endorsed the plan.  We took the plan to the provincial Minister of Transportation, who is also supportive of longer term solutions rather than the short term fixes favoured by some.

Dissecting the issue, analyzing the plan and countering some of the misinformation promoted by critics should help us move the right decision forward.  We need to chase federal funding for the project to match what the province is planning for from their provincial transit plan fund - $14 billion province wide - so we can reduce the burden on local property taxpayers, a fair comment from the critics who are concerned about costs.

The alternatives to LRT - BRT (Bus Rapid Transit), HOV ( High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes or "business as usual" simply don't add up, whatever fantasies some critics want to dream up.  I'll turn first, though, to some of the limits of buses to attract the kind of ridership we will need to meet our targets for transit mode share or by any measure, our obligations under provincial legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Richard Layman is a U.S. transportation and urban revitalization consultant and advocate who has put together a nice, brief outline of challenges posed by bus oriented options in North America.  I'll add some of my own notes, but Richard's comments are a good counterpoint to some of the fascination particularly with Latin American BRT systems that have proven successful in helping to solve some of their transportation problems, most notably in Curitiba, Brazil.  We can learn much from their experience and buses do offer a lot of value as part of a more comprehensive and integrated system of mass public transit, but it won't be enough to meet the challenges we face here.

One scribe in particular noted the need to respond to customer preferences for mobility choices and his best solution is still the car, and the better that options replicate that service, the more likely it will attract those choice customers.  Buses won't do that.

Layman's list (and my notes):

1. Much less per capita ownership of cars, far greater transit dependence.

My reading of this says that in Latin America or other Third World countries, people don't have the choice, like they do here, to drive, so they already have to use the bus or whatever public transit is available.  It's a no brainer that if you provide a better bus system, it will fill up. 

Not necessarily so in North America.  You have to provide a level of service that makes transit as comfortable and attractive, at least for some trip purposes, to the car.  In most of North America, that solution has been the streetcar, the commuter train or the subway - they are more spacious than our buses, no matter how they are dressed up, and they are more comfortable.  "Choice" riders are not getting onto the bus, but they do often, in many cities, take rapid transit. (Cities with true rapid transit have twice the ridership of places like Victoria, even with a good working bus system).  Certainly our projections for ridership in the CRD suggest that the "mode share" (the percentage of people who will be riding LRT or getting on the bus), will be much better with LRT.

2. Lower wage structures so operating costs for buses are much lower than in North America.

This may not be well spelled out in the Transit cost analysis, but it is worth noting.  LRT vehicles carry about twice as many passengers as do even the most spacious buses, and they will need someome to operate them, (not to mention cleaning, repairs, maintenance etc.).  All of these are good, family supporting jobs and though I'm not one to go looking for ways to cut jobs, I am mindful of the cost efficiencies of a system that may grow those jobs more slowly.  Operators are on thing, but the lifecycle costs of buses vs LRT should also be cause for concern.  Buses are very labour intensive and not nearly as durable.  It may be one factor in the Transit analysis that finds the per passenger operating cost of LRT offers us the best return on our investments.

3. Willingness of patrons to stand much closer together, so that buses in Latin America carry 2 times the number of passengers/load compared to the U.S. (crush loads).

Try getting North Americans out of their SUVs to get up close and personal for longer trips - 30 minutes or more, jammed into even a bigger bus.  It's not in our DNA and although it may work in places (Tokyo, Mexico City etc.), it's unlikely to attract people here out of their cars.  Even during rush hours, Skytrain in Vancouver, for example, feels spacious enough (and I've often not been the only one also bringing a bike on board).  It is a much more attractive option for those that more often still have other choices.

4. Inability in the U.S. (maybe a challenge in Canada too) to create the kinds of separated busways and all the other conditions that define true BRT compared to what we might call "rapider transit".

Sure, our BRT option did look at an exclusive, separated right of way (remember how well that was received?).  It is essential to providing the time advantage necessary to out-compete the car.  It worked so well in Richmond (BC) that everyone ran in the opposite direction and the system was quickly replaced with the Canada Line (and the surplus buses are now your connection to the ferries).  Ottawa has had a more durable system, but they too are looking to convert to rail based systems.  The busways there are awful, sterile canyons that cut up neighbourhoods far more emphatically than streetcar systems like Portland's for example.  Those are good examples too of the shortcomings of BRT - buses can go anywhere, and when the system fails to meet expectations, development may well take them elsewhere, making them a much less effective community planning tool than more fixed systems like rail (even our current urban settlement patterns in many Victoria area neighbourhoods are the result of long gone streetcar systems).

5.  General unwillingness of choice riders to ride buses, regardless of the quality of service.

We are still very much attached to our cars, perhaps less so in Canada than in the U.S. where transit ridership is lower, but still a very sticky attachment.  We will need to do a lot to encourage people to make the switch from the private automobile to transit.  While we are experiencing some shifts in personal transportation choices (bicycling is growing dramatically as a percentage of traffic but the raw numbers are still small compared to European cities, by comparison), but for all the investments in the current model of transit, we are making very few gains in ridership and our transportation problems aren't getting perceptibly better. 

Some critics still insist that a few tweaks to the current system can solve all of our transportation challenges with penny wise investments that are too good to be true.  That they are, and I'll try and explore some of those issues in future blogs.  You can also follow more of the discussion on the LRT4DRD facebook page.

Pedestrians and the Bridge

There was lots of discussion on strategies for pedestrians and cyclists after the city closed the rail bridge a couple of weeks ago.  One of the non-starters was the suggestion that the "two lane" trial proposed last year by critics and repeated at council would somehow improve the situation for pedestrians.

The "two lane solution" doesn't work well for cyclists and will create serious enough problems for traffic management, but one of the things it can't do is provide any space for pedestrians.  They are sometimes shortcutting down the ramp access for the Ocean Pointe Hotel (and there's another issue - what happens to their access if that inside lane is closed).  Peds are chancing gaps in traffic to run across to the sidewalk on the south side of the bridge. 

The limited space that might be used for cyclists on a closed travel lane would create serious safety issues for pedestrians if it was assigned a multi-use status.  Without robust physical barriers (a real engineering challenge), pedestrians and cyclists could be wandering in and out of heavily used travel lanes to avoid one another, never ideal on the rail bridge or in congested sections of the Goose, but at least mis-steps there have not been into moving traffic.

More of the discussion and an illustration at my flickr photo page:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/luton/5650829987/in/photostream

Burrard Bridge comparisons part two

My last post talked about the traffic management issues that, at one level, illustrate why the Burrard St. Bridge is not a good model for critics promoting a "two lane solution" for our own Blue Bridge.  I've added a few more pics and some commentary at my flickr site to illustrate further some of the engineering challenges that should add another nail to that coffin.

Burrard has more width to work with and the separated bike lane has been installed using concrete barriers to provide some distance between cyclists and fast moving traffic.  The facility is designed to provide single direction bike lanes, with the east side sidewalk converted to bicycle only use and pedestrians assigned the west side sidewalk on the bridge.  This will prevent conflict in the confined space on the bridge, something that would be a serious problem if the bike lane was two-way or worse, multi-use, an idea that has been suggested by critics looking for "solutions" to save the Blue Bridge.  Some may profess an interest only in providing a substitute for the loss of acces to the now closed rail bridge for cyclists and pedestrians, but I believe that many are simply looking again to find some way to demonstrate that a "solution" exists that would allow the city to save the bridge while providing improvements for cyclists and pedestrians.

The photos should provide some food for thought on how much more constrained we would be on the Johnson St. Bridge, as compared to Burrard, where we have lanes that are narrower and the functional needs of a movable bridge can't accommodate the significant additional weight of an effective barrier system.

The need for robust separation would be particularly acute if a two-way or multi-use lane were to be contemplated.  While daylight is generous through spring and summer and into early fall, commute times across the bridge will be cloaked in darkness for many months of the year and bicycles in particular, riding against the flow of traffic on the bridge, would need some signficant separation from opposing traffic and blinding lights.  Engineering standards for multi-use or two way facilities adjacent to roadways demand more space than would be available on the Johnson St. Bridge where a standard dimension "jersey barrier" would rob at least two feet from the separated lane.

It's another example of where the math doesn't work.  The city's response so far has been to strengthen the visual cues for drivers to slow down and share the road across the bridge, and to encourage cyclists to "take the lane" to ensure safe passage.  It is a safer and more effective way of calming traffic and providing an adequate, if not ideal, level of service for everyone who will be using the bridge over the next 3 1/2 years while we work on our replacement structure.

http://www/flickr.com/photos/luton/

Back to basics on the bridge

Last week the rail span of the Johnson St. Bridge was closed for safety reasons.  The rail stopped using it a few weeks ago and service has been suspended, at least temporarily, while the Island Corridor Foundation that owns the rail line scrambles to find funding for track fixes well beyond the bridge.

While the bridge may have been safe for cyclists and pedestrians to use for awhile longer, perhaps a few weeks or a month, the prudent approach was to accept the advice of the engineers of record and close the bridge.  It's a cautious approach and ensures life safety issues are addressed, protecting our citizens (as well as reducing our exposure to liability issues should the bridge fail without warning).

We're ahead of the game here, not so much like Minneapolis where the I-35 bridge collapsed in 2007, killing 13 and injuring dozens more.  I've covered that one elsewhere in the blog or on my website.

What's got me back on the bridge is the rise again of what I believed to have been a dead issue.  More than one council colleague raised the prospect of closing one lane to provide some separation for cyclists and, I think for some, the idea that it could be shared with pedestrians.  More on some of the design challenges in some blogs in the days to come, but first I wanted to address one of the flippant comments made during our discussion of what to do.  So far, a lot has been done already, with signage and on-road improvements to remind everyone to slow down and share the road while we wait for the new bridge.  Most cyclists I've talked to are very enthusiastic about the rapid response and the effectiveness of the new treatments in making their commute a little more comfortable.

More than once though, I've heard, to my frustration (and expressed in most unparliamentary language), that "they can do it on the Burrard St. Bridge so we can do it here" for one, or  "we took a lane away on Fort St. and it works there so it can work on our bridge".  Neither comparison stands up, however and you can find some photo links here that illustrate some of the differences.  Traffic operations don't lend themselves to simplistic solutions and misplaced comparisons.

The volume, lane capacity and intersection dynamics, particularly on the downtown side of our Blue Bridge will break down if we close a lane, not to mention, yet, all the other design problems of viewing the bridge in isolation from the surrounding road and sidewalk network.

The Burrard St. Bridge, by way of comparison, has six lanes to our three, but more to the point, when the bike lane pilot was introduced, lane capacity was cut by a third (taking one of three outbound lanes is the important factor to understand), while proposals for the Blue Bridge would take away half the capacity available for outbound traffic - and in close proximity to nearby downtown intersections, and those feeding, steadily, five lanes of traffic into the bridge.  (The single inbound lane is the opposite - it feeds several lanes so has all the relief it needs from congestion pressures, not to mention a long approach where vehicles can store if traffic is busy or, what is another key to our crossing, when the bridge is up and all traffic is stopped).

Here's what Burrard used to look like - and you can count the lanes.  It's just not like our bridge and not a useful comparison.  The math doesn't add up.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/luton/5633272863/in/photostream

Fort St., another project used for comparison also doesn't add up for our bridge.  It's still 3 lanes, allowing for some traffic to be drained off to left turns during peak hours, and carrying about a quarter to a third less traffic than is using the blue bridge.  Again, the math doesn't work.  Here's a quiet moment on Fort.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/luton/301596464/

And here's where the traffic that uses the bridge fits into the road dynamics on the west side.  It's useful in understanding how and why traffic keeps moving over the bridge through Vic West and into Esquimalt in afternoon peak hours.  The math should be pretty clear.  It's not something that would fit on the bridge itself, let alone the nearby street grid on the downtown side.  Intersections are too close, and feeding too much traffic onto the bridge to make it work.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/luton/4733674188/in/photostream

More to come in blogs yet to be written, but I'll continue to argue, so far successfully enough, that our engineers shouldn't waste their time looking at two lane trials to solve a temporary problem while we wait for a new bridge.  For some, it's about clinging to an idea that the best research has already proven unworkable, but still looks like a pot of (fool's) gold at the end of the rainbow.

Latest on the Blue Bridge

While the chatter coming from various directions, promoted ad nauseum by some, that there are cheap and easy fixes that will save the old Blue Bridge, ongoing work by the city and its consultants continue to find evidence to the contrary.

With the new bridge project underway, though mostly on paper at this stage (design details), keeping the old bridge safe enough to serve for another three years remains a task at hand.  Rust never sleeps, of course, nowhere more so than on the wet coast, sitting astride a salt water harbour where the wind blows and the sea wash filter through the old structure.  Compromised rivets pop up like measles on a two year old.  Fixes will be more robust than band aids and bailing wire but the analogy is not too far from a harsh reality.

City staff and engineering consultants were out on the bridge Sunday, the 27th of March, chipping away at concrete to analyze rivet conditions along the steel members encased by the concrete counterweights - something no one has been able to look at for almost 90 years.

Starker still are unique points of failure that will be repeated throughout the superstructure.  Everwhere where there are rivets under stress, allowing salt water mositure to seep in between sandwich plates of cheap steel,  the integrity of bridge beams are increasingly being compromised.  Close examination of the interconnectedness of every part of the machine should dispel any notion of a complete and durable refurbishment without taking the entire structure apart.

Trying to do it on site would turn the Inner Harbour into a tailings pond.  A point of reference for marina opponents is the potential environmental impacts on the harbour from construction and operations, not to mention the disenfrachisement of people powered craft that enjoy the northwest shores of the harbour.  Those are very valid concerns.  By comparison, even repainting the bridge on site, a logistical nightmare on any movable bridge, and most problematic on bascule structures, would pose untold risks to the marine environment.  Look closely at what is already shedding and the concern should become apparent.

One recent letter to the editor promoted the fiction that we didn't do our homework on the bridge.  It's still a work in progress, but as the project moves forward we continue to confirm that the original findings of our condtion assessments have been followed by prudent and sustainable decisions.

Fresh pictures of our bridge in decline are newly posted in my flickr gallery at www.flickr.com/photos/luton/

Green and the economy

No surprise that the federal government is underperforming in the creation of jobs for the future.  While we continue to float above some of the rest of western economies on a sea of oil, building a more sustainable future at all levels, doesn't seem to be on the Harper agenda.

See the story in the Vancouver Sun:
http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Canada+green+creation+falling+behind+bureaucrats/4441324/story.html

We have locally taken some of the stimulus funding to create our own green infrastructure, so credit is due to the feds for the investment in our Johnson St. Bridge project.  The new bridge will improve conditions for cycling and walking dramatically, inviting people to shift their trips to more sustainable modes. 

Still there is more to the green economy that our transportation systems design, and we have other initiatives underway that should help us meet environmental objectives, particularly reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.  Elements of our sewage treatment options for the Capital Region include, potentially, recovering heat from waste and distributing it through a district energy system - one plant or heat source for many buildings and businesses.

If the energy centre comes to Victoria, we could link the system to yet to be developed brownfield sites at Rock Bay in the Upper Harbour area.  One of the directions we have been investigating might be to target the neighbourhood for a hi-tech park that would cluster knowledge and skills in a near downtown location and use the heat and energy from wastewater treatment to help support the industry.  The more central location would invite, as well, more sustainable travel choices and support greening of our local, light industrial sector.  At this point, it's an idea, not yet a plan, but something worth exploring further as various projects come into focus.

One of the initiatives the city has undertaken of late is to sign on with Mayor Gregor Robertson of Vancouver and Mike McGinn in a "Cascadia" sustainability initiative to try and attract complementary green business and industry to the northwest.  Kudos to Victoria Mayor Fortin for leading the charge on behalf of the city.

See:
http://www.victoria.ca/contentmanager/press/110208_mr.pdf

Hi-tech is already our biggest industry locally - it generates more dollars than tourism and other industries usually seen as staples of Victoria's economy.  Hi-tech is a fluid, mobile industry, and not just the clean energy supports will be important to attracting business.  The things we are doing to support active transportation - cycling and walking, and an active, outdoors lifestyle, are big attractions to businesses that can locate anywhere.  Building a better transit system will need to happen too.

The future of our region, economically and environmentally, will depend on how we respond to the climate change challenge and on the social ledger, creating a vibrant place to live, invest and work will also help us to address the other account on our triple bottom line.  It's something every level of government needs to tackle with us.