Great flapping about the fact that Vancouver has dropped from the No 1 spot in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s rankings of global cities for the first time in nine years. Follow-up questions to the Economist have revealed that the reason for Vancouver’s .7 lower score is traffic problems on the Malahat Highway. Yes, that one, [...]

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The Downtown Eastside has become a traditional battleground in Vancouver’s civic campaigns in recent years. Strategists from both sides know that city residents are deeply ashamed of the unsolved social problems in this part of the city and look to any political leader who appears willing to champion a solution. This year’s round has kicked [...]

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Here’s an unexpected bit of praise for Jack — from TransLink (their news release below). More proof of my thesis that you can’t judge politicians by whether you personally find them appealing or not. You should judge them by what they got done for the good of everyone, not just themselves or their party or [...]

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As our downtowns turn more and more into places for amusement, tourism, shopping and culture, we have a tendency to think that the whole city has changed. Mnufacturing has vanished to China and all that’s left here are condos, coffee shops, office towers and stadiums. That’s not quite true, as I got to explore a [...]

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Anyone reading this blog likely loves words. Many of you, I know from personal emails, particularly love words in books. So the transformation of libraries in the last decade (pushed by the information flood available from Google, pulled by the cool book-marketing ideas of places like Chapters) has not gone unnoticed: more space for computers, [...]

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This out today from the NPA, an announcement about two more park-board candidates. Now, the party needs to find more school-board candidates. At the moment, it doesn’t have enough to form a majority there, even if every one of its candidates was elected. Vancouver — NPA Mayoral Candidate Suzanne Anton and the rest of the [...]

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After listening to screaming debates for a year about Vancouver’s separated bike lanes, I was intrigued when a news release crossed my screen recently announcing the opening of two lovely new bike bridges in Surrey. Made me remember that it’s not just the green fanatics in Vancouver who are promoting cycling but other municipalities elsewhere. [...]

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Love this kind of stats analysis that tells us how the city really works. Chad Skelton at the Vancouver Sun looked at transit use, broken down by census tract, to find out which neighbourhoods use transit the most. I’m sure that he, like all of us, can hardly wait til 2011 numbers start coming out [...]

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Everyone thought that it would be a simple solution for conflicts over dogs in parks: Off-leash areas. Then, when it seemed like that wasn’t quite enough, some fenced dog parks. But no one’s happy with that either, as I discovered when I got assigned to research this story. The Vancouver park board, Metro Vancouver, and [...]

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Good column by Vaughn Palmer about the back and forth that’s been happening between the Christy Clark government and the group of people who represent the thousands of municipal politicians in the province. You can understand why city councillors might be feeling a bit wary of the province weighing in on how they run their [...]

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