Speed Limits

I think the City of Vancouver's proposal to lower speed limits to 40km/h on side streets is a great idea. It's not really that complicated, either:

The new limit would apply to most local side streets while most major streets would keep their current speeds. As a general rule, if the street has a yellow line down the middle, it would stay at 50 km/h. If it doesn't have a yellow line, it would likely become 40 km/h. Those areas that are currently 30 km/h, such as playground and school zones, would remain at 30km/h.

Actually, that is probably too complicated for your average Vancouver driver to figure out.

Olympic Legacy

From The Tyee: Vancouver's Bedbug Plague

In January of 2007, British bedbug exterminator David Cane told the BBC that the 2000 Sydney Olympics was the single event most responsible for the global bedbug blight currently plaguing urban centres across Europe and North America.

The explosion of the [global bedbug] population began around the time of the Sydney Games... by the end of the games, about 98 per cent of the hotels in Sydney had at least one infected room, and because it wasn't detected early enough, it spread to other rooms in the hotels, and people transmitted them from location to location.

Whenever I read an article about bedbugs I'm always curious to see if the author has included my favourite bedbug fact:

All bedbugs mate via a process termed traumatic insemination. Instead of inserting their genitalia into the female's reproductive tract as is typical in copulation, males instead pierce females with hypodermic genitalia and ejaculate into the body cavity.

This Tyee article does not mention traumatic insemination or hypodermic genetalia, though.

Anyway, it's good to know that there will be at least one long lasting legacy from the 2010 Olympics that will affect the lives of all Vancouverites.

Revenue Sharing

Crackdown on transit crime.

KFalc visited Europe and soiled his pants when he saw turnstiles at transit stations. After returning to British Columbia and changing his pants, he started talking about it. He's also jazzed about SmartCards. They're like regular cards, except they're smart, so they're much better and they create efficiencies.

Turnstiles have been priced at $100 million plus, but Falcon hopes to find a private partner to build and operate the system on a revenue-sharing basis.

I'm confused; why does this have to be some kind of revenue-sharing agreement with a private partner? Ignoring for the moment the fact that the stations were not designed with turnstiles in mind (which makes retro-fitting them difficult?), can't we just buy the turnstiles from somebody, and pay them to install them, and maybe buy a service contract? Somehow we managed to install fare machines and ticket validators without having to enter into a long term revenue-sharing agreement with the manufacturers. If that's not true, please correct me. Maybe some company in Ohio or Manitoba gets two tenths of a penny every time I stick a two-zone ticket into one of those blue boxes (one tenth for one-zone, three-tenths for three-zone?).

Falcon said turnstiles weed out the hang-arounds and reduce the chance of an act of terrorism.

I included that quote because I wanted to tag this post with terrorism. Also, I'm amused by the thought of terrorists whose plans are thwarted because they're too cheap to cough up $2.25 for a skytrain ticket.