Some months ago, there was talk in Vancouver about opening up the city’s data. As of yesterday, that data is now widely accessible in open formats at data.vancouver.ca. One such data layer is the bike routes in the city. There’s a lot more and it’ll be fun to see where it leads.
Exhibit A: The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Fundamental Freedoms section
2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
(d) freedom of association.
Exhibit B: Bill 13 — Miscellaneous Statutes Amendment Act, 2009
“specified municipality” means any of the following:
(a) the City of Richmond;
(b) the City of Vancouver;
(c) the Resort Municipality of Whistler.
32 (1) Subject to this section and section 34, an officer or employee of a specified municipality or a person authorized by the council of a specified municipality has the authority to enter on property, and to enter into property, without the consent of the owner or occupier for the purpose of enforcing, in accordance with subsection (4), the specified municipality’s bylaws in relation to signs.
(1) Subject to subsection (2), the Council may make by-laws for the purposes of enforcing its by-laws, including establishing one or more of the following penalties to which a person convicted of an offence in a prosecution under the Offence Act is liable:
(a) a minimum fine;
(b) a maximum fine of up to $10 000;
(c) in the case of a continuing offence, for each day that the offence continues either or both of
(i) a minimum fine under paragraph (a), or
(ii) a maximum fine under paragraph (b);
(d) imprisonment for not more than 6 months.
The timing of this and the location constraint suggest that this is motivated by the coming Olympics. The short of it is if you have a sign they don’t like, they can fine you $10,000 and put you in jail for 6 months. I’d think that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms would trump this. How is it even being discussed then?
If this concerns you, please contact your MLA. If you don’t know who your MLA is, find out.
Some months ago, a co-worker pointed me towards VanMap, an online tool that provides fine detail on the City of Vancouver: property lines, zoning information, sewer mains, etc. The down-side to this site is that it only functions in Windows and that the underlying data isn’t directly available.
Fortunately, there’s talk of opening the city’s data in a permissive licensing model like the Creative Commons. Andrea Reimer’s talk this evening about the progress towards that goal was informative, considering I wasn’t aware the problem was being worked on.
Brought up during this talk was the September 16th Hackathon. I’m not 100% clear yet on what the focus will be, but it’s there for the curious. One of their previous projects is VanTrash, which is a neat tool that can remind you when your trash pickup is. Pretty sweet, eh?
Looks like Vancouver’s Open Data Catalogue is up in beta form. Go take a look for it is super.
Here’s the presentation on electoral reform I’m going to try to give to Vancouver’s city council. The two key ideas are reducing the scope to the municipal level and replacing STV with Ranked Pairs, which is arguably easier to explain. I feel like a small fish in a big pond getting involved in city politics like this, but I believe that this is a change in the right direction.
The most convincing argument I’ve heard against this is that Ranked Pairs isn’t a proportional system. Its PR extension, CPO-STV, is obviously too complex. On the other hand, STV falls apart when electing one candidate (in the case of the mayor). Two systems isn’t an option, so what then? For now, I’ll just hold off and talk with others before taking this further.
One of the arguments I heard against BC-STV was that the proposed electoral districts would take away voting power from smaller communities. With a small example, I think we can illustrate how that additional power is sometimes horribly unfair. Take the following ridings and their associated population sizes as an example:
Because of how riding borders are drawn and population sizes change, Surrey-Tynehead has a greater population than North Coast and Peace River South combined, but half the number of representatives. Each person in the smaller ridings effectively has twice the voting power of those in the larger riding.
To take the example to an extreme, suppose each city in BC had its own riding with a single representative each. Would that be fair considering Vancouver has a disproportionate population in comparison to the rest of the cities?
One of solutions to this problem is to amalgamate smaller ridings with single representatives into larger ones with multiple representatives. The number of representatives could then change yearly as the population grows or shrinks (possible with BC-STV, but not under our current system). That seems fair to me, but I suppose 61% of British Columbians disagree.
It’s been a strange week here in Vancouver. A cloud’s come and settled down on the city, coating it in a thin mist. It’s surprising to stand on Kits beach at night and see nothing but black. No West Van. No downtown loglo. Nothing. Just the low groans of fog horns from somewhere out in the darkness.