What would make more sense to me is if rather than a "pollution surcharge" which is so incredibly wishy washy and I agree outside of what should be the realm of a municipality to govern, they instead issued the surcharge based on size/length/weight of vehicle. You have a bigger car, or truck you're using more parking space. Simple.

They could even make this retroactive, because they could avoid the whole "earlier than 2023" bullshit. A vehicle's age has no relationship to it's size.

the ones that also display their chinese license plate? KEKW

Actually, if you read the first source I provided it specifically calls out the costs of walking and biking which includes time and accidents. In their specific example it actually calls out that walking cost more than driving for the individual.

See above. And citing an individual, anecdotal story doesn't make fact untrue. It's like saying you know someone who had no side effects from COVID therefore vaccines aren't necessary. Externalities occur both on short and long term dimensions - short term such as life changing accidents, long term in terms of pollution that kills and poor health outcomes for individuals. In the aggregate, cars are FAR worse for society than alternative forms of transportation even if they are better for the individual.

The money goes to paying for civilization.

To dig a little more into this, do you know what accident costs are rolled in there and how far down the line it goes?

When someone gets injured on a bike and has life-changing injuries, how far down the line are they going with these costs? IE: The lawyers, payout, rehab, loss of income, loss of potential income, ongoing physio, mental health etc.

It reminds me of the story about recycling. We just forget about the huge trucks that have to pick it up, the employees, the processing plant, the gas, the electricity etc.

Look if you let them change it, they'll later change it to include all cars from all years. Then everyone's fucked. Once they taste the milk from this one change, they'll want more milk.

I do not and the article calls out that their accounting isn't a complete picture BUT it uses that standard of full cost accounting which is what's done as the norm in Europe for accounting of costs. This is also a commonly accepted method used by environmental agencies like the EPA (which puts a price on a life when calculating the impact of CO2 for example).

If your question is to ask if this is voodoo accounting the answer is that it's not - while incomplete it's meets the standard to be a standard and is increasingly used because, while incomplete, it's significantly more accurate than other methods of accounting for these situations.

You can read about full cost accounting at some of these sites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enviro...ost_accounting
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/full-costing.asp

(there's a lot more out there)

The underlying point stands - cars are MASSIVELY subsided by gov't (and taxpayers) and car owners don't pay anywhere near their fair share of the costs of operating a car. $45 for a parking permit (much less fuel taxes) is trivial in terms of trying to get car owners to pay fairly.

I was pretty angry when I first saw this as it seemed like a major tax on the poor which is obviously the exact opposite of what we should be doing, but knowing its on 2022 vehicles and newer it's less ridiculous than I thought. Still bullshit though.

Why am I paying property taxes that go to schools? I'm not in school?
Thats how taxes work.

Westopher, if I am understanding things correctly, there are 2 permit / charges that are being proposed here:

1) There is a "pollution charge / permit" that only applies to vehicle model year 2023 or newer. The charge is tiered based on CO2/km footprint for the car. $500/yr for a vehicle producing 200 - 225g CO2/km, and $1k for those producing 225g+ CO2/km.

For what it is worth, a 2.0L base Cayman seems to produce 193 - 197g CO2/km, while a 2.5L Cayman S produces 207 - 222g CO2/km.

2) There is an overnight residential parking permit that is mandatory for all cars that part on the street "overnight" (from 10pm - 7am). $45 per car per year.

To me, #1 seems like BS proposal because if I have a new "polluting" vehicle, I'll more likely be able to park it in the garage and just avoid the permit fees. For #2, it is hitting everyone who parks on the street. In East Van, that would include a lot of basement renters who are probably in a weaker financial situation than someone who can afford to park in the garage.

the $1000 is probably subsidizing the $45
which is worth what, half a tank of gas? a dozen times at the meter?

Most neighbourhoods already have the yearly permits. $45 a year beats roaming the streets looking for the 10 feet per block that you can fight with 50 other cars for to avoid the restrictions of hourly/permit parking. At that point the permit will probably save you that in gas you spend circling the block and moving your car before the hourly restrictions start at 7am.
I get it costs money, but if $45/year is a game changer, you can't afford a car.
$1000-2000 is a totally different ball game.

Jokes on them, my S2000 is a hybrid... that burns gas AND oil

I am not aware that most neighbourhoods already have year parking permits, and in my experience, I'd say most residential neighbourhoods in CoV has no such permit requirements right now. In the places that are close to busy commercial / business areas, then yes -- first there are parking meters next to the main streets, and a little further away, there are areas that require parking permit so that business patrons won't take up all the parking spaces from the residents.

The $45 permit is also for overnight parking. If the area is already flooded with street parked cars for that kind of use, I don't see how the permit will improve that sort of situation, but it will bring in a sizable amount of revenue for City Hall.

I've had yearly permits in 4 different neighbourhoods spanning the 6 years I lived in Vancouver from 2010-2016.
All of the west end, kits, Kerrisdale, fairview, etc have had the permit system in place for as long as I've lived here, and the difference of being able to park in permit only, and 2hr except for permit holders made a massive difference compared to the first 3 months of me trying to hunt for spots that didn't have those signs.

Straight from the horse's mouth -- ie. City Hall's parking permit survey:

I actually wasn't expecting such a low percentage -- I was more or less expecting something closer to the 33% range for the current figure, but this is what CoV says themselves.

Most of Vancouver isn't permitted. Only downtown, some parts of the kits, and areas that are within 2-3 blocks of busy commercial areas.

Yeah I guess I’m only used to living in/driving into busier areas. I just knew most of the places I parked for home, or visiting businesses had it but makes sense the quieter places don’t have it.
I still think $45 is negligible, but I’d rather the people with homes over 2 million dollars and garages were paying for it.

$45/year isn't going to make my parent's street any better. Each house has approx 2-3 cars street parked due to rental suitse. One guy has 5 pick up trucks on that street too!

It's definitely a cash grab, but maybe the City needs the money?

dont get me started about multiple brand new full-size pick up trucks from tenants living in 33ft frontage houses DansGame

https://cityhallwatch.wordpress.com/...g-plan-survey/

TL;DR

- CoV received 19k responses in the online public survey that the City conducted in regards to the implementation of a vehicle pollution charge + overnight parking permit, the most ever for any city public survey.

- 72% of the respondents opposed the pollution charge as proposed by CoV
- 80% of the respondents opposed CoV's overnight parking permit proposal

But what do you know? CoV staff is still recommending City Council to implement both the pollution charge as well as the overnight parking permit proposals.

At this point, I am not even furious about the absurdity of this farce -- even though I absolutely should be. Instead, I really need to ask -- what is the goddamn point of conducting the survey if both City staff and City Hall were dead set on implementing both "proposals" regardless of what the results were? Did they really think the public would embrace a $500 or $1k annual pollution charge when tons of vehicle owners have no alternatives other than parking on the street??? More importantly, what is the point of municipal democracy when City Hall operates as a fascist dictator?

Even back in Gregor Robertson's days, I knew municipal democracy was at least kind of fake. But this pollution charge + overnight parking permit BS is literally the most shameless act ever put on by CoV City Council. :flamemad:

Doesn't it just set them up to fail for the next municipal election?

CoV is such a banana republic on stuff like this... I can just picture this in a Simpsons episode:

Mayor Quimby: "So on the topic of unreasonable extra taxes for parking can we hear the nay's?"

Whole room: "Nay!"

"and the yay's?"

Hans Moleman: "Yayyyyyyyy"

Quimby: "Well then the Yay's have it" *bangs gavel on podium, walks off to pick up suitcase full of money from company chosen for pass system*

The current city council is pretty balkanized - there's little cliques everywhere and the Mayor isn't a part of any major party so he has little to no power. The collapse of Vision Vancouver has made things worse than ever whether you loved or hated Robertson he got stuff done and there was direction when he was running things. There's just some super loathsome councillors right now - Hardwick, Swanson, and De Genova to name a few.

It's just been a mess since the last election and no one is stepping up as a leader who can bring people together and get us to take our bad medicine (like fixing housing by upzoning the entire city).

Kirk LaPointe not going to run again?
I think he'd have a good shot at winning.

He's said a few times since he ran that politics takes too much of a toll on a person and he doesn't want to do it again.

Personally, his conservative politics wouldn't solve the biggest problems this city has (namely housing, livability, transportation, homelessness, DTES). Anyone on the conservative spectrum only has bad solutions to those problems.