311 for fixing potholes

Just missed crashing from a pothole? Then you're probably like a lot of cyclists in Toronto. But now you can help make a bit of difference by calling 311! The city has launched the 311 service to better help residents access City services. If you're like me you've thought many times that you should report a pothole but forget by the time you get to work. Now you can stop your bike, and report the pothole right away! The City will issue a work ticket and will fix the pothole within four days of it being reported. It only costs the City $25 to fix the pothole which is much cheaper than hospital expenses.

Do you like the poster I made? Please use it and if you're artistic feel free to improve it (source and poster size attached).

From Councillor Joe Mihevc, September 24, 2009:

Dear Residents,

I am pleased to announce that Toronto's new "311" service was launched today. The new service, available by telephone by dialing direct to 311 or on line at Toronto.ca/311 will provide a "one stop" phone number for residents to access City services and report problems. 311 operators are trained to answer thousands of questions and can request service for potholes, broken watermains, and solid waste issues, among others. Residents will be given a service request tracking number and can easily follow-up on the progress of an issue. The service is available in 170 languages and through TTY for the hearing impaired. The 311 call centre is open 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.

As always, my staff are here as your advocates at City Hall. Staff in my Community Office (416 392 7460) are knowledgeable in a wide variety of areas and are able to escalate issues and deal with complex problems. They provide a personal touch and are able to listen and provide advice on all manner of questions. Please feel free to contact my Community Office or City Hall Office (416 392 0208) with any questions or concerns that arise.

311 services, which have been successfully implemented in many cities across North America, are designed to make local government more accessible and accountable by making it easier for residents to get information and report issues. As your City Councillor, my staff and I strive to be as accessible as possible and do everything we can to make Ward 21 a clean, green and prosperous place to live. By phone, through my e-newsletter, on www.joemihevc.com or through my facebook and twitter pages, I am here to connect, engage new relationships and build better neighbourhoods in Ward 21.

For more information on 311, visit www.toronto.ca/311

Sincerely,

Councillor Joe Mihevc

Ward 21, St. Paul's West

herb : 15 years 9 months ago
Tags: advocacy, commuting, potholes

Bike parking is expensive? Is this journalism?

Tess Kalinowski of The Toronto Star claims that providing bike infrastructure through transit is expensive. GO Transit is putting in secured and sheltered parking throughout the system. The TTC is putting in bus bike racks on its entire fleet. The price comes out in the range of a couple thousand per spot. Tess gives some "shocking" numbers, but fails to put them in the context of the alternative - the cost of parking a bulky car:

$1,800 per cyclist using GO Transit's new secure bike lock-ups in Hamilton and Burlington, $3,700 per cyclist using GO's new bike shelters, and $1.44 million to put bike racks on about 1,600 TTC buses.

So all we know is that there is a long-term infrastructure cost of thousands of dollars. This a cost that is spread out over the lifetime of the parking. That comes to around $100 a year for some secure bike lock-ups that will surely last at least 15 years. So put in perspective it's not that much.

A GO customer can choose to arrive by car or by bike. Which mode do you think costs GO more? A car parking spot equals one GO customer as much as one bike parking spot does. Almost all Go parking is surface parking. It's impossible to come up with a definite cost of surface parking because it includes the land prices. If GO needs to expand its parking it will either have to purchase expensive land surrounding the prime real estate of its stations or it will have to build parking structures. Surface parking varies quite a bit, but we do know that the cost of structured parking can cost somewhere between $10,000 and $25,000 (according to the High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup). Let's just say the cost of additional parking for GO could end up being as high as $25,000 per spot.

In this respect having a GO customer arrive by bike instead of by car represents big savings for GO. So do GO a favour and ignore unbalanced reporting like Tess'. Biking is cheap and saves everybody money when more of us shift our travel mode.

herb : 15 years 9 months ago
Tags: bike infrastructure, bike parking, GO Transit, TTC

Car-free condo: a novel idea for downtown Toronto

A proposed downtown condo will have absolutely no parking for private motor vehicles, if City Council approves it. Instead it will only have spots for car-sharing vehicles and 315 bike parking spots. The innovative project, which will be built on University Avenue at the site of the Royal Canadian Military Institute, is going one up on the new draft parking by-law which will reduce the number of required parking spots for residences, stores and offices.

The East-York / Toronto Community Council overruled City staff, which insisted that the project goes against expertise and experience. It's uncertain what kind of expertise they are drawing on when downtown developers insist that the majority of condos downtown sell without parking:

"If you look at the evidence of what sells downtown, the majority of units under 750 square feet in the downtown core sell without parking,'' said Stephen Deveaux, a vice-president with the developer, Tribute Communities. Parking spots typically add $20,000 or more to the cost of a downtown condo.

It will be interesting to see if the market is strong for no car parking or if the staff are correct that it is still a necessity. The staff's position:

Normally, building plans follow a formula for how much parking space should be allowed; current standards, if applied to the building, would provide approximately 140 parking spaces for residents.

"To assume a residential development of the project's scale might be totally car-free runs counter to expert study and experience," the staff report stated. "Although there are many households in the downtown (area) without cars, it would be highly unlikely to find 315 of them permanently concentrated in one building."

It also stated that, "exempting the project from the city's parking standards would create a negative precedent that undermines the integrity of the parking provisions of the zoning bylaw."

herb : 15 years 9 months ago
Tags: car-free, parking