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Searching for Answers to Hamilton's Love of One-Way Streets

2012-05-16T12:00:00-05:00

Main Street: five-lane expressway through the core (RTH file photo)

When I find myself growing frustrated at the slow pace of change in this city (I'm admittedly restless), I start to think about the people who have been banging their heads against the wall well before I got here.

I calm down when I'm assured that the rate of progress has actually picked up in the last few years ("You should have seen this city 10 years ago!," I am constantly told), but I've come to admire the endurance, determination and hopeless optimism it takes to invest in this city.

Adrian Duyzer's account of the On the Cusp event last week at HWDSB (R.I.P.), however, reminded me that not too long ago, the City of Hamilton embarked upon a progressive initiative that today can only be considered an unmitigated success: the conversions of James and John from one-way to two-way streets.

The quote Adrian attributed to Terry Cooke piqued me the most:

In 2000/2001 we did an incremental pilot project of converting John and James to two-ways. It's been totally successful. Why we haven't seen our way through to getting rid of the five-lane expressways in our city defies comprehension.

And now I find my blood pressure rising again.

One of the most distinguishing features of this town is its one-way streets. Out-of-towners always comment on it - and usually with a sneer, because, as we all know, the thoroughfares do not present Hamilton at its best.

It's immediately obvious to any visitor that a long time ago, our civic leaders sacrificed quality of place to accommodate the automobile and facilitate its quick passage from one end of the city to the other.

The fact that our streets are still one-way shows that we cling to out-of-date ideologies. It shows, quite frankly, that we don't have the highest regard for our city.

There is certainly no sense in blaming our leaders of past eras - there was a contagion running through every municipal government in North America. Our parents' and grandparents' generations made a lot of bad decisions as they tinkered with society-building in the post-War era. Architecture from that era is ugly. Suburbs and highways killed cities and neighborhoods. Hell, rivers spontaneously combusted!

But I am interested in how, in the subsequent decades, Hamilton's city leaders came to experiment in reestablishing two-way traffic on James and John. Not being a Hamiltonian at that time, I don't have any knowledge of the genesis of the initiative and how it got approved and implemented.

What fault-lines in the community were revealed? I'm sure there must have been some controversy surrounding it and a lot of prognostications of how the sky would fall if we were to actually embrace change, but presumably a group of decision-makers actually provided some vision to change the status quo and then some leadership to make it happen.

It seems so out-of-character in comparison to today.

In the last few years I've come to call Hamilton home, I can't recall having heard one peep from City Hall about two-way traffic on Main, King and Cannon - despite the success of James Street.

Have any studies been undertaken pertaining to converting Main-King-Cannon back to two-way? Many people obviously supported the James-John conversion: where did they go and why did the experiment not go further?

If Terry Cooke is struggling for the answers to those questions, I presume that no one has actually been forced to defend the status quo.

Some context on this issue would help me going forward, as I try to make sense of why certain thoroughfares continue to blight our city without any discussion of whether we should at least talk about making those streets work better for the neighborhoods they bisect.

Editor's note: This article is meant to spur a discussion, not only in the comments but also in published responses. We encourage Hamiltonians to submit well-written, thoughtful and evidence-based essays that move the discussion forward. Please send submissions to editor@raisethehammer.org.

Socks

2012-05-16T12:00:00-05:00

I still have a pair of socks from my old school uniform. While I have great memories of my old high school, those uniform socks aren't in the bottom drawer for sentimental reasons.

They occupy a spot in the dresser because they are warm and still in excellent shape. I figure I'm keeping my ecological sock-print smaller not only by not throwing them out, but also by turning down the thermostat during the winter and wearing them to bed.

And it's clear they aren't there because they are beautiful (unless a Pinterest page for socks that have lasted thirty years would generate a lot of clicks).

Wait....

The rest of the socks in this house, being more recently purchased, do not last as long. I do my best to be frugal and eco-conscious, and mend them if they can be mended, but they don't often last too long after one mending.

I also have a large basket of unmatched socks. Apparently, making sure that each sock in a pair goes into the wash at the same time is rocket science. What about sock-eating dryers? No such thing.

The dryer we own used to belong to my parents, who bought it new 35 years ago. When Stephen and I bought our first house 20 years ago, Dad replaced the motor himself and gave the dryer to us to use.

One of the reasons it has lasted so long is we hang most of our clothes up to dry, and save the dryer for socks, underwear, sheets and towels. Still, the drive belt has been replaced a couple of times. Each time Stephen has taken the dryer apart he did not find a single sock.

Not. One.

Possibly something sinister is afoot (there are a couple of hair salons nearby), but it is more reasonable to blame our children and insist that they suffer the consequences: if they find they are low on socks, they have to raid the unmatched sock basket and put together two socks that look kind of okay together.

This means that, when they are in grade nine Geography class and fill out one of those quizzes about their personal ecological footprint, they can often answer "No" to the question: "Do your socks match?" This response, apparently, reduces the size of their ecological footprint. So, win-win.

Will we replace our old dryer before it dies its natural death? No. We will keep fixing it. When we use it, it does what we need it to do, even though it looks like hell. Could we replace it with a more energy efficient dryer? That's hard to tell, since Energy Star does not provide ratings for dryers.

It does, of course, provide ratings for washing machines. Washing machine Energy Star ratings are calculated in part by an estimation of how long it takes a dryer to remove the excess moisture left by the washer.

I'm not sure exactly where that leaves a household that uses a clothesline, but this discovery assisted us in the decision to replace our broken-down, electronic front-loader with an older top-loading model that we bought on Kijiji from someone who was replacing hers with an electronic front-loader.

The second-hand model we bought was one that we were familiar with and knew how to fix. It was the same model we had replaced with what had become our unusable front-loader. Stephen has fixed the top-loader since, for the cost of an $8 part that was easily picked up from the local appliance parts store - no $150 back-ordered non-returnable parts that turn out not to be the problem after all, when even a repairman can't help because the flashing error message could mean any of several different problems, each requiring its own expensive back-ordered part.

We save water and electricity by washing only full loads of clothing that is visibly soiled or actually smelly, using cold water as much as possible, and by using the clothesline and drying racks.

Consequently, our laundry room is not Pinterest-worthy. It looks like laundry rooms used to look when people my age were kids: just functional, and nothing to include on a tour of the house.

As for our socks, sometimes they are Pinterest-worthy, and sometimes they are not.

Ward Boundary Review Process Moves Forward

2012-05-14T12:00:00-05:00

To say the Ward Boundary Reform Work Group was surprised at the numeric result of the City's electoral roll comparison would be an understatement.

Rather than immediately run off and create a new petition, work group members Ken Sills and I decided to speak to Tony Fallis, Manager of Elections and Print and Mail, City Clerk's Office.

The problem, it seemed, was the addresses provided. They were required to be the address at the time of the last election in order to be verified, not the petitioner's current one.

Further, the petition also required the full legal name as it appears on the electoral roll. Mr. Fallis did instruct staff to allow differences between names like "Sandy" and "Sandra" if the address was correct.

The problem is the electoral roll itself. Potentially 50,000 electors are not regularly enrolled due to the voluntary return of MPAC requests for information. But there are further complications.

As per the Elections Manager, the City itself has already set in motion a legal request for changes to the Ontario Municipal Elections Act that requires them to destroy information 120 days after the last election.

In addition, the City has requested the province to change legislation, to allow for an earlier date to begin collection of information for the next election.

How can a petition be verified as per the Municipal Act if those records are not required to be maintained by the City? By the same token, how could the OMB disallow the petition based on inaccurate record keeping provided for by provincial legislation?

It can't, at least not at first glance.

This process has brought to light glaring discrepancies in our legislation. Yet the question remains: do we attempt to recreate the petition based on the new information?

If the aim of the work group was a perfect petition or we saw the need for one at the Ontario Municipal Board, we would be forced to prepare another - but this it is not the case.

Council, at the behest of the petitioners and the Ward Boundary Reform Work Group, has not only called for a GIC but has scheduled a Special General Issues Committee (GIC) meeting on June 25, 2012 to look at the issue, petition complications notwithstanding.

We remain true to our initial purpose, which is the process of ward boundary reform. As per the Supreme Court of Canada's Carter decision, "Relative parity of voting power is a prime condition of effective representation."

This relative parity of voting power is something we continue to see as lacking in Hamilton at present.

The work group and its members will be asking Council to direct staff to prepare a request for proposals (RFP) for a ward boundary review consultant; with thorough preparation of terms of reference including geography, community history, community interests and minority representation, to guide the review process.

Subsequently, that on January 15, 2015, a qualified and experienced consultant will be prepared to commence the ward boundary review process.

We believe this process has begun. Hamiltonians for Ward Boundary Reform continues in work in good faith with the City and Council.

Looking ahead to the GIC, we would like to reiterate to the public and Councillors that we are not proposing nor calling for any particular solution to ward boundaries but simply asking for a fair and necessary review to commence.

Update on B-Line LRT Planning

2012-05-10T12:00:00-05:00

this article has been updated

The City of Hamilton is taking a two-track approach to the planned Light Rail Transit (LRT) line along the east-west B-Line corridor. The Public Works department is undertaking the engineering, functional design and detail design of the line itself, while the Planning department is concurrently preparing a land use strategy for the transit corridor 400 metres to either side of the line.

Last month, the planning committee approved a corridor planning strategy [PDF] that leverages LRT to drive new economic development in the form of increased density and diversity of uses along the corridor, and in particular around specified growth nodes.

However, we haven't heard much about the design side of the project since last October, and I wanted to get a sense of how the work is progressing - especially after last summer's fiasco of mixed messaging and staffing turmoil.

This proved to be a bit of a challenge. Several emails to the Rapid Transit department's email address, rapidtransit@hamilton.ca went unanswered, and the City's Rapid Transit web page still listed Jill Stephen as the project manager, even though Stephen resigned from the city back in September 2011.

According to Kelly Anderson, public affairs coordinator for the Public Works department, Stephen's position was not filled. The Rapid Transit team now reports to transportation director Don Hull as part of a larger integrated transit organization.

Anderson explained that the City maintains current information on its dedicated Rapid Transit website, http://hamiltonrapidtransit.ca, though older pages on the City website were still coming up in web searches. I've since noticed that those pages now redirect to the new site.

Anderson also put me in touch with Justin Readman, a Rapid Transit manager, who provided further details about the city's efforts.

2012 Work Plan

Last October, 2011, Public Works staff presented an update to the General Issues Committee [PDF] on the status of the LRT planning, design and engineering process.

The report noted that Hamilton is "at least two years ahead of other projects, in terms of implementation readiness, including the Hurontario LRT project in Mississauga/Brampton."

It further affirmed Metrolinx's position that Hamilton is "not required to prioritize between LRT and GO service extension, as LRT is a local transit service whereas GO serves an inter-regional function."

Council approved a 2012 work plan that includes the following items:

A plan to locate a Maintenance Storage Facility (MSF) for the LRT vehicles;
An environmental assessment on the MSF (this needs to be separate from the environmental assessment on the LRT line itself);
A phasing study to determine the most effective construction plan (all at once or in phases);
Determine firm capital costs and a recommendation to ask Metrolinx for capital and net change in operating costs; and
Add the cost of not building LRT to the project cost-benefit analysis (and seek Metrolinx funding for any additional cost to do this).

Integrated Transportation Organization

Council also approved the following resolution:

That Senior Management Team develop an organizational structure and community engagement strategy to support, over the long term, an integrated public transportation program for the City that encompasses provincial, inter-regional, inter-city, rapid transit, public transit, active transportation and transportation demand management no later than Q1 2012.

As Readman explained, the new public transportation organization is called "Mobility Programs and Special Projects" and it integrates the Rapid Transit office with the HSR, DARTS, Active Transportation (cycling, walking and ride share) and Transportation Demand Management office, and coordinates links with provincial, inter-regional and inter-city transportation.

The organization has eight staff members, of which five are working on the 2012 Rapid Transit work plan. The team reports to Christine Lee-Morrison, manager of mobility programs and special projects, who in turn reports to Don Hull, the director of transportation.

Metrolinx

This work plan broadly corresponds with the list of outstanding work identified by Metrolinx. According to Malon Edwards at Metrolinx, with the completion of work funded under the $3 million Planning, Design and Engineering grant from Metrolinx, the subsequent items "require next steps decision making from the City of Hamilton." The list of projects includes:

Maintenance and Storage Facility site selection and Environmental Assessment amendment;
Phasing strategy and updated design and costs;
Continued planning and design work with McMaster University and GO Transit at the McMaster Terminus; and
A Value for Money (VFM) exercise to determine optimum method of project procurement.

Metrolinx will review Hamilton's bid for LRT funding once this work is complete.

Hamilton has also formally requested another grant from Metrolinx to offset $5.1 million in municipal spending on its planning work. According to Readman, "A response from Metrolinx is forthcoming."

Progress This Year

According to Readman, the City's Rapid Transit team in on track to completing its 2012 work plan on time.

Environmental Project Report

In January 2012, the city issued a Statement of Completion [PDF] on its Environmental Project Report - the streamlined class environmental assessment that applies to transit projects - for the B-Line alignment. The Statement of Completion means the EPR was completed, submitted and approved by the Ministry of the Environment.

A-Line Feasibility Study

A feasibility study for the proposed north-south A-Line LRT will be completed this month and posted on the Rapid Transit website by mid-to-late May.

Maintenance and Storage Facility

The location assessment and environmental assessment for the Maintenance and Storage Facility are underway. Staff should be able to provide more details on the location in June.

Phasing Strategy

Metrolinx requires every transit project to undertake a phasing strategy. The City will evaluate both the option to build the entire McMaster-to-Eastgate line at once and also the option to build the line in phases. The phasing study will determine which option is the more cost-effective.

Readman explains:

In the interest of due diligence and at the request of Metrolinx, the City is developing and evaluating phasing options for the B-Line. Hamilton will include the full B-Line route as outlined in the Environmental Project Report (McMaster to Eastgate). The evaluation is appropriate as there is more information about the project including refined costs and benefits.

The phasing evaluation will use Multiple Account Evaluation inputs to determine whether phasing is appropriate for this project. This item is in progress and expected to be complete by the end of 2012.

The Metrolinx King-Main Rapid Transit Benefits Case Analysis published in February 2010 determined that a phased LRT (with projected opening years of 2015 and 2030) would have a lower initial cost but would also have lower economic development potential.

It concluded, "the highest cost option (the full LRT along the Main Street-King Street corridor), with estimated capital and operating costs of $784 million in net present value terms, also generates the highest Transportation User Benefits."

Value for Money Exercise

Metrolinx also requires the completion of a Value for Money (VFM) exercise to determine the best method of project procurement. That effort will be led by Infrastructure Ontario (IO) in cooperation with the City of Hamilton and Metrolinx.

RTH has requested a timeline for the VFM from IO. We will update this article if and when we get a response.

Capital Funding

As part of its next-steps planning, the City will prepare an up-to-date cost estimate that includes the Maintenance and Storage Facility. Once the work is complete, Metrolinx will evaluate the city's proposal and decide how to proceed.

Metrolinx funding for Hamilton's LRT hinges on a comprehensive Investment Strategy, which the Province has asked the transit organization to prepare by June 2013.

The Regional Transportation Plan, titled The Big Move: Transforming Transportation in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area identified over $50 billion in transit projects over 25 years.

However, Metrolinx was founded with only an $18.5 billion capital endowment and needs to determine how to raise the other $32 billion to fund the rest of the projects.

According to Edwards at Metrolinx, "We're in the process of looking at different options to fund and sustain transit across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area."

Paul Bedford, the emeritus chief planner for Toronto and former Metrolinx Board member, argues the investment strategy will need to incorporate some combination of highway road pricing, a new sales tax, an employer tax, an income tax, commercial parking levies, a vehicle registration tax, and a gas tax levy.

Other jurisdictions in Canada, the USA and Europe have used various combinations of these means to raise enough money to invest in transformative higher-order transit projects, and the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area will need to do the same - even if a new tax or levy is politically unpalatable.

Bedford says the Province needs to "embark on an aggressive public campaign to inform and educate the public, GTHA politicians and stakeholders in 2012" about the benefits of a strong funding model and the costs and consequences of inaction.

No Funding Commitment Yet

Hamilton's B-Line LRT was identified in The Big Move as one of the top priority projects to be completed in the first ten years of the plan.

It was widely assumed that this meant some of the original Metrolinx endowment would be earmarked for the B-Line. However, Edwards clarifies that no Metrolinx funding has been committed to Hamilton's B-Line, and that any funding commitment will depend on the Metrolinx Investment Strategy.

No original endowment or $18.5 billion envelope has been set aside for the Hamilton LRT project. The Investment Strategy, to be delivered in June 2013, will recommend a sustainable funding and financing framework to advance the Hamilton LRT and other unfunded projects in our Regional Transportation Plan.

Last September, a frustrated Council voted overwhelmingly to call on the Province to confirm its commitment to LRT "to fully fund two LRT lines and use of Gas Tax for operating costs."

This call came in response to a pre-election claim by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty that All-Day GO Train service was the city's top priority and that "over time, we can enter into other discussions about things like the LRT."

This was in contrast to the Ontario Liberal Party's 2007 election campaign, in which the party warned that if the Liberals didn't win, "the Conservatives would put rapid transit projects through MoveOntario 2020 - including two light rail lines across Hamilton - at risk."

The province replied by insisting that it could not make a funding commitment until the necessary planning and design work was completed.

Update: Paragraph added to note that the city has requested more money from Metrolinx to help pay for its LRT planning. You can jump to the added paragraph.

Mirrors Into Our Past

2012-05-09T12:00:00-05:00

Lister Block: Built 1924, Restored 2011 (RTH file photo)

We are told throughout our lives not to dwell in the past, yet we study history and are fascinated by it. We can look at Lambeau Field in Green Bay or the newly restored Lister Building here in town, and you get an idea of how communities are recognizing not only the importance of the heritage value in their cities structures, but the monetary value in itself in attracting tourism.

We visit cities across the globe much in part with anticipation of taking our own physical and mental images of these things we've read about in our history books. Every city wants these artifacts to encourage world travel to their little space amongst this vast world surface.

We have saved part of the old Revenue Canada Building and even part of the old Harvest Burger seems in early construction, that it will be carried forward as a new building is built in its place.

The western wing of the old Revenue Canada building at Main and Caroline will be integrated into a new development

With Ivor Wynne Stadium, perhaps we already lost long ago what was structurally important and preservable about its past when we renovated the north stands and removed the old Civic Stadium entrance façade that lined Beechwood Avenue, but its history nonetheless is as storied as they come.

Both new structures will most certainly inject a hope and energy into the stale air that has sat stagnant over steel town for far too long. Likely they will both remember their predecessors past with photos or some other memorabilia amongst their interior spaces.

However, we may have to rely on places like HIStory + HERitage or the Hamilton Public Library to dig up these pieces to our past when the dust has settled at 75 Balsam Avenue North and 100 Main Street West.

My favorite aspect of the Board building is the round meeting space facing Main Street. I have always been fond of the entire structure, but now I value it even more through Matt Jelly's save campaign. It saddens me every day that I walk or drive by it, at the thought of it being gone and visually forgotten forever. I won't even go there with Ivor Wynne.

Gone to seed: Dandelions adorn the lawn of the doomed Board of Education building (RTH file photo)

If the entire Board structure must fall and what is built in its place is to be made of entirely glass, is there a way to create a holographic illusion that alludes to the old Board building still existing there? Like the old trading cards where you tilted them in a certain manner and they would appear to move.

Could we make it so that no matter which side of the board building you stand on, the glass portrays - through creativity more than structural physicality - what it was actually like to stand in that spot and admire what was there before.

This futuristic snapshot into the past is likely more possible on a boxy office tower, but the stadium might prove to be a different challenge in trying to portray a similar holographic look back into our past.

What if we erect vast semi-transparent sections of glass at key points around the stadium that offer a similar type of holographic illusion, yet the sections of glass would not only change as people walked by them, the historical snapshots of the old Ivor Wynne would transpose over top of the new structure to show the transformation form old to new.

Perhaps there is also a big yellow button that people could press to even offer a look back to the old Civic Stadium. I would actually love to see the Beechwood Civic Stadium façade incorporated in some fashion, into the design of the new stadium: in a physical sense. Not through an illusion.

By using the imaginations of citizens, fans, students and teachers, the community could guide us in our understanding of the historical importance of these and other structures, and they could help us decide as a city what we feel should be carried forward in some fashion. This could be relayed back to the architects who could assist us in determining what we could carry on in memory, while keeping within our budget.

The memories of these two important structures must live on in physical space, not just among a million other lost online snapshots and blurbs telling the tales of Hamilton's history.

The Lister Building is the perfect example of completely renewing history, and we can look right across the stadium and see how we can moderately remember our past with the reliefs from the original Prince of Whales school that have been placed at the front entrance of the school.

Not to downgrade the historical significance of Prince of Whales, but perhaps the old Board building and the stadium, are deserving of substantially more significant physical reminders of what once stood before and with the stadium, looking back many generations might be what makes the historical carryover from Ivor Wynne more poignant.

If history wasn't so important, it wouldn't be a required course throughout our education. Reflection is a way to remind future generations of how past experiences made us what we are today. The Board of Education building and Ivor Wynne Stadium are without a doubt, historically significant reminders of what has helped shaped Hamiltonians for the past 80+ years.

Let's not dwell, but let's not forget either.

By year's end, these two structures will likely both cease to exist. How can we ensure that their memories rise strong and proud from the ashes from where they both once stood?

Hamilton's Problem Is Not Ignorance

2012-05-07T12:00:00-05:00

Hamilton recently hosted yet another event where we heard about what we ought to be doing.

We're not doing it, and it's not because we don't know what to do.

Back in March, Ryan McGreal wrote a scathing article, 2012 Transportation Summit: More Experts for our Traffic Planners to Ignore, where he pointed out this precise phenomenon: no matter how many times we hear from experts, no matter how many pleas we hear from the people who actually live downtown, and no matter how many cities we observe engaging in successful processes of transformation, we don't change.

Two-way street conversion is a perfect example of this problem. In October 1956, business owners railed against the one-way conversion that had taken place downtown seven months previously. Their complaints are as relevant today as they were 56 years ago.

But 56 years later - more than half a century! - we've only managed to revert James and John back to two-way (York's passive-aggressive conversion has left it a Two-Way In Name Only (TWINO) - it doesn't count).

The conversions of James and John have clearly been successful. In fact, James St. N. has become the poster-child of the long-awaited transformation of downtown, which begs the question: now that we've proven that two-way conversion can indeed work in Hamilton, what are we waiting for? Convert the rest of the streets back to two-way too!

But for whatever reason, two-way street conversion is just not on the agenda right now. It doesn't seem to matter that one-way streets are more dangerous for children. It doesn't seem to matter that cities as geographically separated as St. Catharine's, London, England, and Vancouver, Washington have converted their one-ways to two-ways and enjoyed tremendous benefits as a result.

Just imagine someone saying this about Hamilton:

The merchants on Main Street had high hopes for this change. But none of them were prepared for what actually happened following the changeover on November 16, 2008. In the midst of a severe recession, Main Street in Vancouver seemed to come back to life almost overnight.

Within a few weeks, the entire business community was celebrating. "We have twice as many people going by as they did before," one of the employees at an antique store told a local reporter. The chairman of the Vancouver Downtown Association, Lee Coulthard, sounded more excited than almost anyone else. "It's like, wow," he exclaimed, "why did it take us so long to figure this out?"

A year later, the success of the project is even more apparent. Twice as many cars drive down Main Street every day, without traffic jams or serious congestion. The merchants are still happy. "One-way streets should not be allowed in prime downtown retail areas," says Rebecca Ocken, executive director of Vancouver's Downtown Association. "We've proven that."

It doesn't even seem to matter that our wide-open thoroughfares encourage drivers to drive at lethal speeds, or that our car-centric, sprawl-driven mode of development is creating lifestyles so inactive and unhealthy they're literally killing us.

This litany of facts is not sinking in where it needs to sink in, namely, in the minds of the people who are making day-to-decisions about how this city is governed and organized and what it prioritizes. Or, if it is sinking in, they just aren't doing much of anything about it for reasons I am currently at a loss to explain.

And it really can't be ignorance, because the message has been broadcast so many times. There are always politicians at the Hamilton Economic Summit, for example, and for two years running the keynote speakers rammed home the same message: walkability is critical, you must convert your one-way streets to two-way, you must encourage density and an active, vibrant street life, unsustainable sprawl cannot be your future.

Afterwards? Nothing.

Of course, there are exceptions, and they're worth noting. Councillor McHattie has been an effective and determined advocate for numerous walkability-related measures in Ward 1. It was thrilling to see Raise the Hammer's first-ever Walkability Win when Public Works agreed to install a pedestrian-activated stoplight on Aberdeen Street at Kent, and McHattie continues to oversee the installation of new bicycle paths throughout his ward.

But considering City Hall's institutional momentum and apparent council ambivalence toward walkability, it's a wonder McHattie is able to get anything done at all. It's clear he needs more allies. It's clear that the legions of people who read Raise the Hammer; who have supported various city-building initiatives like Our City, Our Future and Hamilton Light Rail; and who continue to flock downtown for urban events like Art Crawl also need more allies.

It really is time to move past the "what" and on to the "how" and "when". Past exhortations have failed. We need to do something different this time. But what?

Safe Streets in Hamilton's North End up to Ontario Municipal Board

2012-05-07T12:00:00-05:00

Last Wednesday evening, we heard once again about the importance of reducing the automobile's near-absolute domination of our downtown streets. This time the message was delivered by Ken Greenberg, globe trotting architect and planner, to an overflow house of Doors Open first-nighters at the Board of Education auditorium - a nicely detailed and seriously underused soft-seater entered from the Bay Street frontage.

(Aside: Except for a few glancing references, the fate of Joe Singer's marble and copper confection, currently anchoring the civic precinct of City Hall, Hamilton Place, Family Court, and the Art Gallery, was out of bounds for comment.)

Greenberg, the Toronto-based principal of a planning consultancy with a list of projects longer than the phone book gave a very well received presentation that riffed on his 1996 visit to Hamilton, during which he led a charrette on - what else? - downtown activation.

Conflicting Priorities

Long story short, Greenberg said that this old town has come a long way toward the light since 1996, but still has conflicting priorities. The conflict is impeding an essential transformation of urban form that is being dictated to cities everywhere by the inevitable upward trend in petro-pricing.

One aspect of the transformation has to do with making the city more walkable. To this end, a number of things must occur, including a reduction in the role of the automobile as a discomfiting presence in the lives of walkers, cyclists and battery chair jockeys.

Complete streets, i.e. those which accommodate all modes of transport comfortably, will improve walkability along with slower speeds, to take the dangerous edge off car traffic - and walkability has everywhere proven to be good for business.

OMB Hearings on Slow Streets

How the updating of the car culture might concretely occur in this particular city at this particular moment remains unclear - but part of the answer may arrive very soon.

Hamilton's North End and Harbour

While listening to Greenberg and his fellow panelists, I couldn't help reflecting again on an old puzzle, which is this: I still have no idea why the North End Neighbourhood Association (NEN) wound up at the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) over a traffic management plan.

We asked for a three-year pilot project, in a clearly defined corner of the city which is bound by water on two sides. Alternate routes exist for through traffic, in the case of those who refuse to drive at less then 50 km/h, which is the posted speed on James and Burlington in the North End - a speed that is frequently exceeded.

Visitors headed for the water's edge would need an extra couple of minutes to get there traveling at 30 km/h rather than 50. So what is the big deal? Why was a pilot project for a limited time such a huge obstacle for Council? We don't know.

At one point we thought we had a settlement, but on Decision Day, the councillors went in camera to discuss the matter, and then rejected it. At the OMB, we heard from the city's planner that James and Burlington are classified "arterial" and that speeds on an arterial must be arterial speeds, period. That is, once an arterial, forever an arterial.

After 16 days of hearings spread over ten months, followed by a six month silence, the parties in OMB PL050408 were told that the board chair - "Sir" as he is addressed during the proceedings - had begun to write his judgment.

That news came in February, which means that any day now we should learn the outcome of a very lengthy and detailed discussion on the merits of instituting a blanket 30K speed limit in the north end of Ward 2 on a trial basis.

Despite all the complications, the principal issue was this: is it desirable to slow the speed of vehicular traffic to 30 K not only on all the smaller streets, but also on James and Burlington over the several blocks of each that pass through the North End?

We Need to Take our Streets Back

Hopefully Sir will give this irrational position the treatment it deserves, and greenlight Hamilton's first all-over 30 km/h zone - at least for long enough to allow us to evaluate the effects.

If not, I don't know exactly what is next if we are to begin the necessary transformation toward walkability that Greenberg and others see occurring so rapidly in so many other cities.

But one thing is clear: Neither North End, nor Beasley, nor Central, can go on allowing themselves to be terrorized by large volumes of traffic traveling at high speeds on streets that were never meant to act as extensions of provincial highways.

The current situation is doing harm to the people who live there. Those pieces of James, Burlington, Cannon, Wilson and Bay that serve through-bound traffic are also our neighborhood streets, from the earliest days of the existence of this city. We need to take them back.

Hamilton: Succeeding And Failing At The Same Time

2012-05-06T12:00:00-05:00

On Thursday, May 3, the Hamilton-Burlington Society of Architects (HBSA) held an event called On The Cusp. Its theme: "We've been talking about the potential of downtown Hamilton for years. What do we need to do today to realize it?"

The event's keynote speaker was Ken Greenberg. Greenberg is an architect, urban designer, and author of Walking Home, a book about urban renewal that illuminates Greenberg's "passion and methods for rejuvenating neglected cities".

The event was held at the soon-to-be-demolished Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board at 100 Main St. W., and the house was packed.

Greenberg began his keynote address by tracing an arc from his childhood in the period after World War 2 to the present day. "The period after World War 2 was very influential," he said, describing what he called a fundamental "transformation". (Note: quotations in this article are based on my notes from the event and may not be word-for-word accurate.)

"People became infatuated with the automobile," he explained. "They wanted a separated work and home life, and they started living in auto-dependent communities. These cities were totally different from the cities we inhabited for millenia."

Cities are now undergoing a second transformation, which Greenberg dubbed a "hangover" from the first transformation. He believes this transformation is as profound as the one that took place during his childhood.

Before World War 2, cities were dense, active communities. Greenberg, who lives in Toronto, displayed a map of Toronto with a dotted line overlaid on it, describing the path of someone starting downtown and walking north up Bathurst Street. As this person walks, they travel through "concentric rings of time", starting with the original city of Toronto and then traveling through suburbs that were built in later decades.

At the beginning the street life is active, dense, and connected. Later, the environment becomes bare, inhospitable and car-dominated.

This journey is identical to the journey along James Street in Hamilton. You begin in a dense, urban, attractive environment. As you travel south the environment becomes increasingly more sparse and car-centric until you arrive in the parking-lot dominated landscape of Upper James near the Linc, a part of Hamilton with the vitality and charm of a moonscape.

James St. S, downtown Hamilton. Image Credit: Google Streetview.

Upper James St. between Fennel and Mohawk. Image Credit: Google Streetview.

Upper James St. near the Linc. Image Credit: Google Streetview.

Logically the next phase ought to be a form of urban environment where everything is paved - an endless expanse of asphalt dotted by buildings placed at great distances from one another. This would transcend the concept of roads and parking lots by merging the two into a single unified paradigm.

In other words, the new Centre Mall.

On The Cusp

In 1996 Greenberg participated in the Downtown Ideas Charette, which was also held by the HBSA. "A lot of the ideas that we discussed in that charette are many of the ones that we are still on the cusp of realizing," said Greenberg. "When I look back on the material that came out of that charette, there was a set of powerful integrated ideas that still make sense."

Hamilton still has its strengths, but it also still has many fundamental problems. For example, "the traffic issues, with huge arteries going through the city, are still there and need to be dealt with".

From Greenberg's viewpoint, Hamilton is succeeding and failing at the same time: "you are both sucking and blowing," he remarked to laughter. There are pockets of success like James Street North, but losses in other areas and continued problems on streets like Wilson.

Hamilton is still committed to low density sprawl, and this carries risks for downtown revitalization. "If you divert your potential into areas that feed the old paradigm as opposed to the new, you're really tying your hands behind your back."

I sensed that Greenberg felt many of the solutions to Hamilton's problems were rather obvious, and where they were not, had already been examined in detail. I kept expecting him to exclaim something along the lines of, "Come on Hamilton, it's really not that complicated!"

But perhaps that was just my own frustration bubbling to the surface, an emotion I felt doubly when he described the innovative approach to transformation that was undertaken in Saint Paul, Minnesota, which now proudly describes itself as "The most livable city in America".

As Saint Paul embarked on a deliberate process of transformation and revitalization, city staff were seconded from their offices and forced to work together in shared offices with other staff from many different departments. The process brought together people with varied specialties who were not normally used to working together.

The public was also invited to participate and contribute ideas during the process, which saw city staff become passionate about a shared vision for the city that they brought back to their offices to turn into reality.

It's the kind of radical and yet common-sense idea that could work wonders in Hamilton where too often the concerns of a single department (e.g. traffic) trump others. Simply put, it's about teamwork and balance, a concept neatly summed up by Greenberg when he said, "You don't want to optimize one thing at the expense of others. You want to sub-optimize everything in order to create an optimal whole."

As I drove down Upper James today, those words rang in my head. "Sub-optimize everything in order to create an optimal whole."

That's not happening in Hamilton.

Hard To Be Optimistic

After Greenberg's keynote four panelists were invited to join him on-stage for a discussion. They were Terry Cooke, president and CEO of the Hamilton Community Foundation; Jeff Paikin, president of New Horizon Homes; Mary Pocius, tireless downtown advocate and past executive director of the International Village BIA; and Lloyd Alter, professor of sustainable design at Ryerson University School of Interior Design and editor of the Design section at treehugger.com.

I won't dwell on what was discussed during the panel, partly because I stopped taking detailed notes, and partly because some of the commentary tended towards the optimistic boosterism that I'm concerned might be reducing some of the urgency Hamiltonians ought to feel about the current situation. Notable exceptions to this were Lloyd Alter (read his take on the event here) and Terry Cooke, who delivered an impassioned blast of the status quo.

"I'm not that optimistic," said Cooke. "Only once in a generation do you have an opportunity to do something like LRT." Lamenting the glacial pace of change, he pointed out that Hamilton is the "only post-amalgamation city that doesn't have an official plan, and that has a zoning bylaw in the lower city that dates back to my birth."

"In 2000/2001 we did an incremental pilot project of converting John and James to two-ways," said Cooke. "It's been totally successful. Why we haven't seen our way through to getting rid of the five-way expressways in our city defies comprehension."

His frustration was both evident and well-received. I could murmurs of assent throughout the auditorium.

My voice was among them. There is no question that things are improving in Hamilton, but we are like a race car driver who is steadily falling behind the pack that keeps pointing out that their overall speed is greater than before. They fail to notice that everyone else is accelerating faster than they are.

Gradually, cities are converging on the correct way of transforming themselves. Those transformations have unlocked thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in investment in places like the King and Spadina neighbourhood in Toronto. Those transformations are taking place in cities across the globe, even those who once had much in common with Hamilton.

People like Ken Greenberg have helped those transformations along. They know what Hamilton needs to do. Sadly, I still don't think we're really listening.