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Metro Vancouverites on the move: Walking more, taking more car trips to shop, car-pooling more

October 10th, 2019 · No Comments

Like many reporters, I just love census data and census-like data. So it was Christmas Day when TransLink released its big set of data from its 2017 “trip diary,” a massive study the agency does every five years to monitor how people are getting around in the region. Lots of great info to ponder. Their […]

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Metro looks at tax changes to encourage agriculture, discourage lifestyle farming on ALR land

May 8th, 2016 · 2 Comments

Metro Vancouver is unique among North American cities when it comes to farmland. It has more farm-designated land in its boundaries than any other North American city. And that land, when it is farmed, is very productive. Metro Vancouver farms have the highest “farmgate” revenue of anywhere in the province, due in part to their […]

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As Vancouver’s old industries leave “Mount Pixel,” city struggles to define new meaning of industrial

April 6th, 2016 · 11 Comments

Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant industrial area is undergoing a profound transformation. For years, the old steel-plating, gadget-manufacturing, and garment-producing businesses had been leaving slowly. But that speeded up three years ago when two things happened. Hootsuite, the city’s bigfoot digital company, moved into a building in the area. (It was a building zoned for office use, […]

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Metro Vancouver moves to Stage 3 water restrictions: What creative strategies are you using to save water?

July 21st, 2015 · 132 Comments

I worked on commercial fishing boats for six seasons, in my 20s, where water was a precious thing. We sometimes went out for two or more weeks, knowing we had to survive on the water in the tank. We turned off the tap when brushing our teeth, except for the brief wetting between scrubs, re-used […]

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Aircare-free vehicles start to pop up in Vancouver Craigslist

January 12th, 2015 · 2 Comments

I really related to this story, since my old clunker of a ’98 Chevy Venture did not pass its last AirCare test last year, forcing me to spend a few hundred dollars to get that dashboard light to go off. So, as the story says, (for those of you for whom clicking on a link […]

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Where to put that coffee cup amid the row of recycling bins? High-powered researchers are here to help

January 6th, 2015 · 7 Comments

I am losing hours of my life these days, standing perplexed in front of rows of recycling bins, trying to figure out where to put the component parts of my garbage. To make it more confusing, every place I go to seems to have a slightly different system. Just dumped off a bunch of papers […]

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Neighbourhood group moves from protesting one project or one area plan to entire vision for Port Moody

November 26th, 2013 · 70 Comments

Interesting to see what’s happening out in Port Moody, where a newly constituted neighbourhood group is now raising questions about the city’s entire Official Community Plan. I was wondering if there might be some of this starting when I went out to Metro Vancouver a few weeks ago and listened to presentations about “regional context […]

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Garbage, garbage, garbage: Private collectors tussle with Metro Van over control of garbage flow

May 3rd, 2013 · 35 Comments

You are going to be reading SO much about garbage in the next few years. Why? Because Metro Vancouver, like many other metro regions, is trying to move to new ways of dealing with it: More recycling, reusing. Fewer landfills. Possibly more incinerators or other strategies for disposing of the last bits that can’t be […]

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Are we all ready to enter the brave new world of intensive garbage sorting? I’m not so sure I am

April 16th, 2013 · 39 Comments

Every time my niece comes over for a family dinner, she watches in some disbelief as I scrape food scraps into a bucket, peel the labels off tin cans and drop the component parts into the paper recycling bag and the tin/glass/plastics box respectively, and generally act like I’m at a sorting centre. She thinks […]

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It’s not clothing or nudity at Wreck Beach that’s the debate, but swimmers versus boaters that the park staff are having to balance

February 20th, 2013 · 12 Comments

A change of topic that we all need: story here.

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