Frances Bula wrote a follow-up piece on the contentious council meetings over the Point Grey corridor: Vancouver’s bike lanes: Gordon Price on when to ignore the opposition.
Frances’s quotes are right:
Former city councillor Gordon Price maintains that, if about a third of the people who come out to council support your idea, that is a strong enough sign.
“In a very emotional and often hostile environment, if 30 per cent of the speakers have made the effort to come out in spite of the opposition, that means the community support is probably there,” said Mr. Price, who was a councillor with the city’s once-dominant centre-right party and is now a vocal cycling and transit advocate.
But I assume she didn’t write the headline.
Elected leaders don’t ‘ignore the opposition’; they try to assess how much it truly represents of community opinion. And in the heat of a public meeting, it can seem overwhelming.
At the same time, you try to figure out what legitimate concerns can be addressed, how the project can be tweaked, what mitigation might be helpful, while still approving the motion.
Example: the Granville B-Line hearings, when the fastbus proposal resulted in three perfectly awful evenings of public comment. Some of the vitriol was uncalled for, but my memory suggests that, nonetheless, about 70 to 80 percent of those present were opposed. They represented those most immediately affected, but not the entire constituency who would be served – the people who would never show up to speak at meetings like those.
The project had to go ahead, of course, if transit was indeed the priority we said it was. Nonetheless, changes were made – in particular the retention of some parking in the commercial villages of South Granville and Marpole, even though that added to the inefficiency of the route, along with the retention of some left-hand turns. Not sufficient for those convinced the project would destroy their neighbourhood or lower their property values, but at least an attempt at a response without negating the initiative.
So there’s a difference between “ignoring” and “assessing”.
And as Councillor Heather Deals said in the article: “you look at city policies and the things you ran on – like being the greenest city, like the Transportation 2040 plan – and you rely on that.”
If not, then why did you run for office?
Not only was it a different council in those days, it was a very different transportation department. The City Engineers were vehemently opposed to bus priority measures, and did everything they could to undermine the project. This became very noticeable to everyone once the 98 B-Line started running. Priority in Richmond – almost none in Vancouver. Which was very odd indeed since the most immediate beneficiaries were bus users from Marpole, no longer forced to use the slow Granville trolleybus, but able to fill up all the Richmond “express” services. Adjustments to Richmond services had to made within 3 months of opening day.