Cascadia Report

Loonie = greenback: Who wins and loses

Longing for the happy days of bargain meals, rooms and ski slopes in British Columbia? Get over it.

Today the U.S. and Canadian dollars reached parity for the first time since 1976. The greenback has slid more than 60 percent against the loonie in the last five years and there's every reason to think the trend will continue.

It's already clear that the situation is tricky for anyone who is easily confused by U.S. and Canadian coins. I remember using Queen Elizabeth quarters and bills at Safeway in south Seattle as late as the early '80s. Those days may be back.

So who wins? Businesses in the U.S. that cater to Canadian customers. With their increased buying power, more Canadians will be traveling around Cascadia. The Victoria Clipper says traffic from Canada is up 25 percent this year. Things are surely looking up for discount shops and Costco stores just south of the U.S. border.

Potential losers come to mind more easily:

-- Anyone in Canada who depends on U.S. tourists. On Wednesday organizers of the 2010 Olympics unpersuasively insisted they won't be hurt because they've hedged their budget against currency changes. Too bad U.S. tourists haven't.

-- Anyone who depends on sales of Canadian lumber -- a huge slice of the B.C. economy, in other words. The current slump in demand from U.S. housing combined with the strong loonie will do what years of softwood tariffs couldn't: protect uncompetitive U.S. lumber producers.

The decisions that made a great city

Vancouver, often named one of the world's most livable cities, didn't get that way by accident. It took a series of not-so-obvious decisions.

A former British Columbia premier and a longtime urban planner just released a book describing their list of nine key turning points. Apparently their point is that currently planned transportation and development projects in Vancouver now threaten to undo many of those successes.

There's little in the book about Vancouver's "irritating and potentially dangerous sense of self-satisfaction," according to The Tyee. But the list is still fascinating:

-- Creation of a regional planning board after a 1948 flood forced officials to prepare for potential disasters.

-- The battle in the 1960s against plans to tear down urban neighborhoods and build in-city freeways.

-- Creation in the 1970s of an a regional reserve of agricultural land.

-- Regional planning based on neighborhood "livability" starting in the 1970s.

-- Remaking of the False Creek area after Expo 86.

-- A series of laws in the 1980s and 1990s mandating regional planning.

-- Creation of a regional transportation agency.

-- Shifting power and responsibilities to local government, away from the province.

Some of the elements of regional planning were also implemented in Portland. Seattle's list is much shorter, including regional water service decades ago, the package of 1960s reforms that created bus-transit system and cleaned up sewage, and the beginnings of regional transit in the 1990s.

Across Cascadia, the combining regional planning for infrastructure and local buy-in for neighborhood decisions still seems the best bet for coordinating new growth. It's worth considering this list of mistakes the book's authors came up with when asked by the Vancouver Sun:

1. Lack of authority in the regional government to enforce development near transit.

2. Slum clearance in the 1950s and 1960s.

3. Keeping the rural grid pattern south of the Fraser River, which makes density and transit difficult.

4. Allowing business-park sprawl.

5. Allowing the proliferation of underground malls that robbed streets of pedestrians.

6. Getting rid of the region's interurban rail and streetcars, which destroyed a comprehensive transit system and promoted more car use. The last interurban stopped in 1958.

7. Not containing the sprawl into farmland sooner.

8. Failing to consider sooner whether the region needed a vast rail system.

How to fix Seattle Center (and help Bumbershoot)

Pumping some new life into the Bumbershoot festival should be incentive for fixing the outmoded Seattle Center, the main park in the middle of the city.

Yes, some of this year's shows were great. On Saturday I loved The Gourds at Mural Amphitheater ("Starbucks Stage") and The Moth at Bagley Wright Theater. But The Shins' show suffered from awful sound in Memorial Stadium -- not to mention a lack of drinking water and super-strict airport-style crowd control.

At risk of sounding like a geezer, I have to say it used to be better. For $5 you could spend the day chancing across new music and art, plus maybe catch a great headliner. I'll always remember hearing Miles Davis at the old Opera House in 1987.

This year the walk-up tickets were $35, which kept the crowds in check. While fighting the economics of the music business is probably a lost cause, we can rejuvenate the place by remodeling the Seattle Center. (There's a simple summary of the options on this story.)

What can be done? Replace Memorial Stadium with a real amphitheater, replace the Fun Forest with usable green space, retool Key Arena and modernize the Center House. But don't stop there. Let's make the place accessible by running the new streetcar from South Lake Union past the Seattle Center to the existing line on the waterfront.

Extra open space, some better facilities and more efficient access would go a long way toward restoring the Seattle Center and Bumbershoot. That might even make them better than ever.

Longer delays at the border

There are reports that delays to cross the Canada-U.S. border are longer than ever, jeopardizing trade and tourism.

It's unclear if the waits are due to wise security measures, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's "gut feeling" that a terrorist attack is on the way, or just bureaucracy. (Traffic is likely to back up on I-5 for the next two years thanks to construction at the Peace Arch.)

It would be nice to streamline the border-control procedures, not just postpone imposition of prohibitive rules -- especially before Olympics crowds arrive.

Another "most livable" ranking

Vancouver residents might be frustrated with traffic and high rent but don't tell The Economist, which just named the city as the most livable in the world.

Such an accolade for Vancouver isn't really news. But it's curious because it's based on a weighted index of 40 factors such as congestion, crime and cultural assets. Reportedly Melbourne fell to No. 2 because of congestion. The top U.S. cities were Cleveland and Pittsburgh.