I talked to Gerrard Mulhern, executive director of the Ontario Concrete Pipe Association, who says this is about the Ministry of Transportation’s (MTO) failures as much as it’s about infrastructure failure.

“MTO has highway maintenance contractors doing inspections and the culvert inspections are a joke and a waste of money,” says Mulhern. “I’ve seen some of the inspection reports. If you ask the MTO what qualifications and training are required for these inspectors, they can’t answer.”

“There’s no way that they’ll identify culverts like this one [with a visual inspection,” says Mulhern, who estimates that around 5-10 thousand culverts on MTO and municipal roads are in immediate need of rehabilitation or replacement.

“They came within minutes or hours of that highway completely collapsing,” he says. “That’s a problem. The solution is fix them.”

But based on Mulhern’s estimates, it could cost around $100-200 million just to fix those pipes in critical states. And that’s if they’re addressed before they fail—reacting to a disaster is far more costly than being proactive. In a year when the Province is running a deficit, extra funding for maintenance is not on the books.

What about the stimulus fund? Wouldn’t this have been exactly the kind of “shovels in the ground,” ready-to-go project the feds would have been happy to co-fund?

Funding is really only part of the problem. As Mulhern said, inspectors are under qualified. He suggests getting the consulting engineering community involved.

Of course, MTO isn’t saying any of this—yet. Mulhern believes if they found the $200 million needed to make these fixes, their spokeswoman would change her rhetoric.

Cars may be the #1 contributor to climate change, but did you know that drivers looking for parking represent up to 40 per cent of city traffic? And building more parking lots only makes the problem worse. A recent report on U.S. parking policies by the Institute of Transportation and Development Policy is a great resource on parking policy as a lever for sustainable urban transitions.

Parking policies have a huge impact on our urban spaces. How you regulate parking can be the difference between walkable and bike friendly downtowns or sprawling big-box retail islands surrounded by seas of asphalt.

Through six U.S. case studies including Portland, Chicago, San Francisco and New York, the report, U.S. Parking Policies: An Overview of Management Strategies, lays out both the problems and possibilities tied to parking.

Their key recommendations are to set parking maximums, not minimums; coordinate parking regulation with public transportation; replace free parking with metered spots that encourage turn over and reduce congestion; and use parking revenues to fund increased transit, parks and other local benefits.

A few highlights:

- “Historically the ‘parking problem’ has been identified as the problem of too little supply; increasingly the problem is now seen as the poor management of existing supply and, in cases where cities have instituted parking maximums, the problem is understood to be of too much supply.”

- “Minimum parking requirements have contributed to a cycle of automobile dependence that is especially damaging to city centers. More parking reduces the cost of car use, which leads to more car use and more demand for parking.” … “Minimum parking regulations reduce density, and increase distances between destinations. This reduces land values and increases traffic congestion, storm-water runoff pollution, air pollution, and construction costs, as well as discouraging walking, bicycling and public transit.”

- Since the 1972 Clean Air Act more and more U.S. cities have been setting maximum, not minimum, off-street parking regulations: “Their objectives include promotion of higher density development, walkable downtown areas, promotion of transit and other transportation modes (to increase choice and reduce congestion), as well as the original intent of reducing auto use and harmful emissions.”

- “Good access is easily impeded by abundant parking. Conservative parking requirements allow better accommodation for public transit, walking and bicycling.”

- “Metering is a response to the irrationality of the claim that ‘paying with your time’ is as
reasonable a rationing algorithm as paying with money. But this discounts two important facts. First, the motorists cruising for parking pays with his or her time, and the time of everyone stuck in traffic behind him. Second, neighborhood residents suffer from the additional air pollution, noise, danger and degraded quality of life caused by cruising and the additional traffic congestion it engenders.”

An example is the plethora of cities that rely on offering tax breaks and free land to potential employers. While such enticements can certainly be valuable tools and tactics, mistaking them for a strategy is like thinking one can build a house with nothing more than a hammer.

This column revealed the problems with that approach in the September/October 2009 issue of ReNew Canada. Here, I’ll get into some quick and easy ways to spot other unreliable approaches to community regeneration.

There are four primary indicators:

1. Is it based primarily on renewing your community’s existing assets?
2. Does it integrate the renewal 
of your natural, built, and 
socioeconomic environments?
3. Does it effectively engage all the stakeholders who should be involved 
in the revitalization, or who will be affected by it?
4. Does it build the community’s renewal capacity, and create an ongoing revitalization program?

The more of the above questions to which you answer no, the more likely the approach is snake oil. The following can be considered your snake oil checklist.

ASSET RENEWAL One can certainly grow an economy based on unsustainable sprawl and virgin resource extraction. But that approach eventually undermines quality of life and environmental health, and the definition of revitalization is “economic growth that increases both quality of life and environmental health.” So, sprawl-based growth that destroys green space, creates traffic and pollution, and devitalizes the heart of a place obviously can’t produce revitalization.

INTEGRATION People and organizations tend to focus on their existing passions and expertise. So, environmentalists tell us that community renewal is all about green space, energy efficiency, and the restoration of watersheds, fisheries, ecosystems and farmland. Planners tell us revitalization is all about planning. Architects say revitalization is all about design, and so on. Revitalization is about addressing all of those restorable assets. Relying on just one or a few of those silos, whether it’s civil engineers, businessmen or artists, isn’t a sure path to failure, but it’s a dangerous one. Prescribing the same subset of those factors for every community—despite each place’s differing dreams and challenges—is the purest form of snake oil.

ENGAGEMENT Top-down revitalization is fraught with failure, but it’s still widely practiced. Mayors and planners now “engage” the community in their plans via public hearings, but this is often just lip service. Some make honest attempts to engage, but do it badly, ending in analysis paralysis. A charrette may lock them into a bad design, scaring off redevelopers. Sometimes, the top-down approach works, such as the magnificent Cheonggyecheon stream restoration in downtown Seoul. But the typical outcome of top-down renewal is needless destruction of heritage (such as New Urbanist projects that take a clean-slate approach), preventable lawsuits, protests, and ejected politicians.

RENEWAL CAPACITY Renewal capacity is the community’s ability to initiate and perpetuate its revitalization, as opposed to the reactive mode of many communities: waiting for new federal or provincial funding, or for a private redeveloper. Even communities that plan effectively often put little effort into enhancing their ability to implement and fund those plans. They need an ongoing revitalization process, not a disconnected series of projects. Investment is attracted by confidence. If a public agency or a private redeveloper believes an area will soon revitalize, they will anticipate a safer and higher return on their investment (no matter whether the motivation is private profit or public good). The most reliable confidence producer is a permanent revitalization program that produces an ongoing flow of successful projects and the best way to create such rapid, resilient renewal is a community organization dubbed a “renewal engine” (see my past columns).

Politicians like simplistic approaches that can be communicated in sound bites. They also like initiatives that sound great, but are so hard to measure that their failure can never be documented. They also like doing what other cities do, such as spending money on a new—but never implemented—plan every five years, or announcing “green,” “innovative” and other trendy-but-hard-to-quantify strategies.

The above four-point checklist can be useful in saving your community from well-meaning professionals and institutions who are—usually unknowingly—peddling bottles of rejuvenating snake oil.

facebook.com/TheOnionRing asks people to vote...sort of.

This month, the Facebook group “Can this Onion Ring get more fans than Stephen Harper?” managed to gather 180,543 fans to Stephen Harper’s 30,000 or so, prompting outlets like the Hill Times to cover the story as proof that “social networking” is a factor in the outcome of our next national election.

The page inspired similar, if less political, fan pages, including one social experiment that asks: can a pickle get more fans than Canadian band Nickelback? The answer, apparently, is yes.

But does that mean Nickelback should pay more attention to social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook? More importantly, should the leading Canadian parties spend more time trolling Twitter for extra followers and Facebook for more fans? It’s hard to say. All I know is that the onion ring may be popular, but it’s still kilometres behind the 5,209,069 votes the Conservatives got back in 2008.

That’s if those group numbers even translate into votes. If there was a link on the group’s page members could follow to actually register as voters, then maybe I would be more impressed. The truth is, when your only goal is to get more Facebookers to add your group to their profile, you’re not making much of a mark on the political landscape.

Remember peak oil? Well, it remembers us.

The Conference Board of Canada defends the Oil Sands.

Our own recent coverage of Canada’s Oil Sands.

Water projects are prominently featured in our Top 100 list.

Nestle sends emergency water to Haiti.

According to Flaherty, funds are now “snowballing”–that’s how fast they’ve started rolling.

It’s worth reminding journalists, industry professionals and bloggers that while some projects (say, a road repaving) can get started right away, there are others (say, a new wastewater treatment plant) that take time to plan and design. While many have urged the federal and provincial governments to streamline the EA process so these projects can get rolling (sorry, I’ll stop) but the reality is, even with streamlined EAs, a complex project should take more than a month or so to reach the construction stage.

As for whether or not this latest announcement proves the Liberals were right all along–that almost no stimulus funding has been spent so far–that’s a subject for a different post.

The common theme that rung through the three presentations was the need to use more of the first two ‘R’s’ (reduce, reuse) before we look to more recycling. All three spoke about the need for levies on landfills to even the playing field between recycling and landfilling—it costs significantly more to recycle a product than to disposing of it. European countries and Australia have been able to increase diversion from landfills by equalizing the economic cost of disposal and recycling.

All three also spoke on the need for extended producer responsibility or product stewardship as part of the future for waste diversion. Product stewardship captures the environmental costs of goods throughout their life cycle, which are then incorporated into the total cost.

Seagrave talked about her work with government and industry towards developing cost sharing on the municipal blue bin recycling programs.

Carter-Whitney also talked about cost sharing in products and how the increased cost for diversion would be borne by the consumer—a cost the government wants to hide. She believes that if this cost was transparent, it would help consumers decide what products to buy. That’s assuming as a society we’re becoming more sensitive to the environmental costs and are letting that influence our purchasing choices.

Although there was limited time for much audience participation, the speaker’s presentations summed up the short-term future for Ontario’s Waste Diversion Act.

Follow this link to read a review of the 2002 Waste Diversion Act.

We’re now working on our Top 100 white paper with more information about job creation, economic impact of the Top 100 projects and an even more comprehensive list of key players (lawyers, get ready to be listed).

Stay tuned…

 The first is the impressive level of detailed information and beautiful illustrations that the book contains.  The second is the strength of Gore’s argument that beyond technology, this is a cultural movement on par with the great struggles of the twentieth century. Like the American civil rights movement of the 1960s this is, he argues convincingly, a struggle to shift both our values and our laws that can galvanize us as people to achieve something truly remarkable. 

 At first blush, urbanists may be disappointed with a book that focuses largely on the need for effective state level action (particularly to establish a price on carbon and reliable incentives for the shift to renewable energy sources).  Where cities and urbanization are mentioned, the focus is on the problem of attempting to steer rapid urban growth down more sustainable paths. The fact remains though, that cities have an important role to play in many aspects of Gore’s plan to solve the climate crisis. 

Sustainable Energy Transitions

At the core of Gore’s strategy is a shift to sustainable sources of energy.  “Even taking into account all of the technical difficulties in capturing and using solar energy, it would take only seven days’ worth of sunlight hitting the earth to meet the annual energy needs of the planet.” Wind and Geothermal also present abundant opportunities.  As we have seen with cities like Berkely, municipalities incentives effectively jump-start local sustainable energy transitions. 

 Gore also stresses to need for the construction of a smart grid of interconnected local energy generation, along with the drive to revamp our built spaces by retrofitting old buildings, developing new zero emissions standards, and correcting the perverse incentives that lead builders to offload the energy operating costs of inefficient buildings onto owners and tenants.  In all these areas, cities have also shown the effectiveness of municipal policy (Toronto’s TAF and Portland’s Clean Energy Works program being two great examples).  Cities, with the help of provincial or federal funding, often also hold the key to unlocking the many job opportunities that this energy shift has to offer.

 The Carbon Bubble

But if cities aren’t well represented in Our Choice, it doesn’t mean that the book won’t be of interest to municipalities looking for a more sustainable path.  The resources in the book offer a concentrated backgrounder on climate science, renewable energy technologies, and the types of policies that can catalyse rapid change.  It also delves into the corrupt multi-million dollar cover up orchestrated by American oil and automotive makers (with ExxonMobil, for example, at one point offering $10,000 a pop for any papers disputing the scientific consensus on climate change)  and the rapidly emerging potential of new information technologies to support widespread systems level change.

 He also provides a worrying argument that carbon emissions have fundamentally undermined the stability of our economies.  He draws an analogy here to the recent collapse of the subprime mortgage market:

“We now have several trillion dollars’ worth of subprime carbon assets owned by   individuals, pension funds, and other institutional investors in the form of companies whose  value is artificially inflated by dishonest misrepresentations concerning the need to sharply curtail the burning of carbon fuels …. [When] the appropriate actions are taken to curtail emissions have begun, the oil and coal ‘bubbles’ are likely to burst. The long we wait, the       bigger those bubbles will grow.” 

Most cities will find that large portions of their local economies are vulnerable to the bursting of the carbon bubble.  All the more reason to begin the shift now, and put incentives in place to build a local economy based on renewables, and all the social, economic and environmental benefits that that brings with it.

Portland has been a leading city on climate change policy since 1993, when it became the first city adopt a strategy to reduce carbon emissions. It is also the only North American city that has managed to reduce its emissions below 1990 levels (despite an 18 percent growth in population). Nonetheless, the plan opens with the sobering point that “perhaps the most important lesson learned from local climate protection work to date is the frank recognition that our good work…is not nearly enough.” (A familiar mia culpa, well in line with how serious things have gotten.)

What follows in the rest of the 70 page plan (pdf) is an example of what it might look like if cities truly take sustainability seriously. The plan is packed with useful information and strategy. You can find more complete review here.

The standout element is the way the city has positioned itself to facilitate a broad shift that extends well past what it controls directly. This is much more than leading by example. Through a combination of educational programs, public consultations, economic development planning and the coordination of financial incentives, the municipality is leading change across the city as a whole. To find out more, Alex Aylett caught up with Deputy Director of Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability Micheal Armstrong via e-mail.

Alex Aylett: Early municipal climate action plans, both in North America and in Europe, tended to focus on things that the municipal government controlled directly: street lighting, municipal buildings, landfill sites, etc. Portland’s new CAP, on the other hand, really is an action plan for the whole city. Tell me a bit about that more ambitious approach to municipal sustainability.

Micheal Armstrong: Since 1993 Portland’s climate-protection work has consistently included both its own operations and community-wide emissions. Our operations represent about one percent of total local emissions, so there’s a modest but real opportunity to achieve meaningful reductions. We clearly need to be making the same prudent investments in efficiency and renewables that others are making.

But our ability to set policy and to invest in infrastructure is a much more powerful lever in influencing local carbon emissions. We have an important role in shaping the overall form of the community — which is perhaps the single most significant factor in emissions, as well as in integrating transportation systems, enforcing the building code, and regulating garbage and recycling collection, among many other thing.

AA: All true. But this goes beyond good land-use planning. Renewable energy and efficiency gains in private homes and commercial buildings, for example, make up 29 percent of the city’s planned GHG reductions. “Food choice” (something significant that never makes it into municipal policy) accounts for another 10 percent.

Often cities avoid things that they can’t directly regulate. You’ve gone a very different route. How has the city approached targets that can’t be met solely through regulation?

MA: In the Climate Action Plan we prioritized actions the City of Portland or Multnomah County could either take ourselves or strongly influence, while at the same time trying to identify the full range of potential options for reducing emissions. If we do not put issues like food choice or how much stuff we consume on the list, it makes it that much more difficult — and expensive — to reduce emissions, since we’re limiting our options for where we can make reductions.

Food is a good example, too, where historically local governments have not had much of a direct role. We see that changing. Last year, for example, we provided gardening and food-related classes to more than 700 local residents, and we expect even more participants this year.

We’re also actively reviewing our code to address ways in which it makes it more difficult to grow, sell, or distribute locally produced foods. And we continue to identify parcels of land owned by the city that may be suited to urban gardening. We’re looking at options for expanding the number of community garden plots, and we now have several larger parcels of land that are being gardened by residents. We need to enable a much more active urban agriculture.

AA: Funding is also a big issue here. High up front costs are often cited by homeowners and property managers as a barrier for efficiency retrofits. What’s Portland’s approach to that part of the puzzle?

MA: With the help of federal stimulus funding, Portland has put together a program, “Clean Energy Works Portland,” that deals with this issue head on. The program pays for the cost of installing efficiency improvements, and the homeowner then repays the cost on his or her utility bill over time. The program puts contractors to work today, provides homeowners a more comfortable, more valuable home, and delivers energy savings and carbon reduction for decades to come.

We’ve also worked hard to ensure that the program provides quality jobs. We developed a “community workforce benefits agreement” that brought together contractors, unions, social equity organizations, and environmentalists to ensure that the jobs created through the program reach historically disadvantaged parts of the community.

This program is still in a pilot phase that will retrofit 500 homes by June 2010, but we’re optimistic that we’ll be able to scale it up from there.

AA: How important are the links between these projects and other local benefits like creating jobs or improving health?

Connections to other benefits are essential. But we view it more as choosing carbon-reduction actions that help create a future community that people want to live in.

In the Climate Action Plan we describe a “vision for 2050” that we hope is appealing, attractive, and desirable – not so much because it doesn’t depend on carbon emissions to succeed – but because it’s simply a place people want to be.

One of the things that gives me hope that we can achieve very large carbon reductions is that many people enjoy the exact things that make a low-carbon community possible: walking to the neighborhood business district; eating fresh, seasonal food; enjoying a cozy, well insulated home; and having affordable, convenient choices about how to get around town.