Regulating cars

Byoliveridley

Before I begin, I use the word “car” to describe all passenger-first vehicles regardless of their design and so-called market segment. Whether it’s a sedan, hatchback, or an SUV, or one of those ridiculous two rows of seats “pickup” truck designs with a short and almost useless flatbed, they are primarily used to transport people and so they are all cars to be regulated as passenger vehicles. Also, electric or fossil, these issues don’t change.

While mass auto violence makes the headlines and is horrific, routine auto violence kills and injures thousands every year. I want to take a safety and harm reduction focused look at how we can stop this. So, what are the variables?

  1. Access to deadly devices. I see a car as a deadly device, a gun we use to travel around in, which kills unless operated almost perfectly. Who can access a car? How do we control access to a car?
  2. Speed and Proximity. Any speed greater than 50 kph leads to almost certain death. So how do we control speed? The closer cars and drivers get to vulnerable people, the more likely they are to hurt them. Cities, downtowns and other dense spaces have many people walking and biking about, and cars pose much more danger than on a freeway. 
  3. Design. The heavier and taller a vehicle, the more likely it is to kill. If a subcompact car is a pistol, a large passenger “truck” car is an AK47. So how do we control car design?
  4. Human skill and attitude. Driverless car hype aside, cars are operated by humans. The more unskilled, distracted, angry they are, the more likely they are to kill
  5. Necessity and frequency of use. The more people are forced to use killing devices for transport, the more likely they are to kill people. 
  6. The system. We currently assume that use of killing devices by untrained amateurs as transportation is normative. This is the default way to be, and any changes to the default are catastrophic. People call this motonormativity, car brain, you pick the term. 

If you were not motonormative, how would you tackle this issue of car violence?

Access

Right now, car access works as follows. You pass a one-time driving test in a country in your teens. That gives you access to drive most passenger vehicles anywhere in the country for the rest of your life (and in many cases, other countries too). Yes, your license can be suspended for various reasons. But that does not prevent you from driving a car, it only prevents you from driving one legally. So, we have hundreds of instances every year of people who are not allowed to drive hurting others with their cars. This is not an actual restriction of access, it’s administrative. 

Solution: Take the next logical step. Tie car access to a functioning license. The technological solution is as simple as installing one more security system that does not allow a car to start/move unless a valid license is tapped or inserted. This way, people with suspended licenses will not be able to drive unless they take extreme measures.  If someone is in a mental health crisis, then instead of jailing them on suspicion, you simply restrict access to deadly devices just like you would restrict access to a gun, or sharp knives. This is not a 100% stop as there will be exceptions (steal a license, hack the car, get an enabler), but it will stop most access issues. You could get more nuanced and tie certain cars to certain licenses as well, that way if you don’t want your car to be driven by anyone else than yourself, you implement strict access control. This way, you give people with mental health issues, or substance issues the time it takes for them to get help while restricting their access to dangerous devices, not their entire freedom. 

Speed

Right now, cars are designed to go 3-4 times faster than kill speed with no physical restrictions (armed and dangerous). Once again, restrictions like speed limits are just administrative. Most humans don’t comply, and inappropriate speed is a major factor in auto violence. Cars are also almost always allowed in very crowded spaces where they are operated near vulnerable people. 

Solutions: These solutions sound draconian if you are in car culture. Remember, in addition to being a transport device, the car is also a killing device. You’re driving around in a gun! Speed restrictions are linked to proximity. The closer you are to people on bikes and on foot, the slower the top-speed on your vehicle needs to be. And this is a technological speed limit, not an administrative one. We have the technology to tie speed limiters in cars to GPS. Why, we even restrict ebikes to 32 kmph currently. Even though imperfect, this could be a starting point. I would go a step further. All cars are, by default, in “city” mode. That means their speeds are capped to a max of 25-50 kmph depending on location. I would start with a 30 kmph default maximum and have GPS-linked increases up to 50 in places where there are fewer people walking. Then, when you are on a highway you press the highway or speed button to allow the car to go faster in places where it is less likely to encounter vulnerable people. Highway speeds are hard-capped at 10 kmph above the maximum speed limit in the country in addition to being limited by GPS. We will need a way to light up a car very prominently to display its highway/speed status, and ways to disable back to city mode if activated in the city. If a vehicle is seen in a city on speed/highway mode, the assumption is that it’s armed and dangerous. The status quo, remember, is all cars are armed and dangerous! Tie this to robust and affair utomated enforcement with speed cameras, radar etc. so the police can’t choose not to enforce traffic laws (like they are currently doing in Victoria BC)

Proximity

The more people walking/biking in an area, the greater your access restriction to cars and the tighter the speed control. Whether it is creating car-free streets, adding congestion tolls to cities and busy neighbourhoods, or putting up real barriers to prevent access during a festival/gathering, the goal is to greatly reduce the interactions between killing devices and unarmed people. There is so much work going on in this space, the 15 minute city for example is one such framework to think about design that minimizes deadly car interactions.

Car design 

This one is simple. Cars cannot be allowed for sale if they are too tall, or too heavy. Cars are not cellphones, they have to be regulated with safety as the overwhelming priority. The safety approval process must take equal care of people outside the car, not just inside. There’s overwhelming evidence (and physics) that shows large cars like “trucks” or “SUVs” cause disproportionate harm. If you need to carry more people, design appropriately to bring the harm levels back to baseline car. There is also the disturbing trend of touchscreen menu-based interfaces for cars that is terribly unsafe. All of these need changing. 

Driver skill and attitude

This is tied to access and design. If you think of the car as a gun, then it should horrify you that amateurs with one-time testing and no continuing professional development are allowed unlimited access to cars. Driving  a car is a cognitively demanding task, and research shows that any level of distraction away from simply driving on a highway with no people and no distraction increases risk.  Given that, it’s quite amazing more people are not hurt more often. It is proof that most people are working hard to do the right thing and concentrating on driving most of the time. It is clearly not enough. People have suggested more frequent retesting may help, continuing education as well. But ensuring driver licenses aren’t just pieces of plastic would go a long way. Same with driver attitude. When you’re performing a cognitively demanding task, you must stay calm. Unfortunately, the act of driving in proximity to hundreds of other drivers you don’t know and can’t communicate with increases stress in an already distrustful and dangerous environment, hence the common road rage issues. Add in the unpredictability and extra difficulty level of negotiating crowded urban streets, it’s all so demanding. Some of this can be handled through access restriction, some through speed control. However, the underlying issue is that driving is stressful and causes stress. Even with all the tools of so called “self-driving”, anything other than complete attention is dangerous. So you have to address necessity and frequency

Necessity and frequency, and the system.

Many books have been written on this topic. So I won’t go into much detail. For example, Life After Cars, or Car Free Cities, and so many more. The overarching point here is to reduce the necessity and frequency of private driving by designing our living and working systems appropriately. For example, I have a car, but I use it maybe once a week on a longer office drive (which I would not need to if we had a better transit system), or for getting into nature quickly. The rest of the time, most of what I need is within a 10 minute sweat free ebike ride: Groceries, medical appointments, kids school etc.

Needless to say, each of these interventions major and minor face a motonormative culture and entrenched opposition. So expect none of them except possibly the system design (which is happening in many places).

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    Break the link between employment and healthcare!

    Byoliveridley

    Cross-posted from Interrobang:

    The US Supreme Court ruled along political lines on the 30th of June, 2014 that “closely held corporations”, over 90% of all US businesses, are now free to discriminate against women (and it was specifically women and birth control) if their religion leads them to believe birth control kills babies, or that women who use birth control are Satan’s spawn (the belief does not have to be factual).

    The Supreme Court says corporations can hold religious objections that allow them to opt out of the new health law requirement that they cover contraceptives for women.

    The justices’ 5-4 decision Monday is the first time that the high court has ruled that profit-seeking businesses can hold religious views under federal law. And it means the Obama administration must search for a different way of providing free contraception to women who are covered under objecting companies’ health insurance plans.

    Salon AP coverage

    I am not going to debate the wrongness of this decision, the notion that businesses can have religious beliefs, and can use them to discriminate against certain types of people is not up for debate. And, the discrimination is very specific and targeted…

    The other, more ubiquitous discrimination is in the notion that the health care you get has anything to do with the work-for-pay arrangement you have with the organization you work for. I am probably the millionth person to mention this, and whole books have been written on the subject, but, the link between healthcare and your employer is wrong because it anchors discrimination. This particular egregious case goes one step further and discriminates based on gender as well, not just work status.

    The US had a chance to sever health benefits from employment when they had a three-year debate on expanding health insurance coverage. Thanks to the ability of small political minorities to filibuster and block action, and a corporate-funded reluctance for change, the US kept their employer-based health insurance system in place, and with it, all the discrimination that entails. Uwe Reinhardt reiterated a number of these points recently in the New York Times.

    Back Home

    Is BC any better? Yes and no. Thanks to Canada’s Medicare, parts of our health care system are universal and not subject to employment ties. But, there are several exceptions making us a two-tier health care system:

    1. The health insurance tax or MSP (what our government cutely calls a “fee” in order to not call the yearly increase in this fee a tax increase): Many employers will pick up part/all of this tax for their employees, whereas one that doesn’t can pay more than 1000 dollars a year for a family. While there is an element of progressiveness to the pricing with very low-income people paying less/nothing, it is weak, families making > 30K per year pay full price.
    2. Drugs: For some reason, drugs are not covered by our “universal” healthcare system and are provided by workplace “supplemental benefits”, as if taking a thyroid pill every day is a “supplement”. The CCPA makes an excellent case for universal pharmacare, if you need more convincing. 10% of Canadians cannot fill prescriptions for financial reasons.
    3. Our public health insurance system assumes people don’t have eyes or teeth. So, if you want your cavities filled, a root canal, or want to see clearly, you need “supplemental benefits”, and these are mostly employer-provided. Oral health is a clear marker of health inequality.
    4. Mental health is not covered, this is inexcusable, as Andre Picard notes.
    5. Treatments that improve overall health, like massages, are not really covered. Once again, your employment status determines whether you have the “luxury” of holistic preventative measures to reduce stress, pain, and many other issues.
    6. Historically and currently oppressed groups, Canada’s indigenous people for example, get a short shrift on the benefits like massage, nutrition, counselling and holistic treatment they need because of disparity in employment availability.

    This quote from the Andre Picard article I mentioned summarizes the discrimination.

    The well-to-do pay. The middle-class scrape together the money the best they can, sacrificing so their child can get care. And those without the means wait, or do without care.

    There are other side-effects. Because “benefits” are expensive, companies have a vested interest in only having certain “valuable” employees benefit. The rest get treated as contractors, have their hours strategically reduced, and much more.

    It’s almost as if there’s an unspoken moral argument here, you don’t deserve good teeth or a massage if you don’t work for a living.

    Yes, you can buy individual supplemental insurance, or pay per use, but neither of these are cheap because you as an individual have no bargaining power.

    We in BC also have a long way to go to break the link between healthcare and employment. Will it cost the average BC resident more money? Let’s consider:

    1. A simpler system with one buyer is administratively efficient. It takes the thousands of decision points every HR administrator or group in every company/union has to make and transfers that to a single entity. Public universal plans are about four to ten times more efficient (pdf) than fragmented private plans.
    2. A bigger entity can negotiate much better rates for you, whether it is for drugs, or for dentistry, or for anything else (a bigger risk pool). If all of Canada administered one simple pharmacare system, we would negotiate much lower prices with pharmaceutical companies. We would also have better funding to run and evaluate effectiveness studies.
    3. Funding preventative, holistic healthcare means fewer hospital visits. In a universal system, there are no artificial barriers between a massage, drug treatment, surgery, stress reduction counselling, or ergonomic counseling for back pain. You don’t have to prove your work injured you in order to get the right treatment, your first point of contact with a medical professional (not necessarily a doctor) decides which path works best. You do not have to get sick enough to go to the hospital before you get treatment covered by insurance.

    Pitfalls

    There are concerns with a universal single-payer system:

    1. As Vox points out, if a government administering the single-payer system decides not to pay for contraception, then no one gets it. So, getting good universal healthcare is about constantly winning political battles. The good thing about universal healthcare in Canada is that it is incredibly popular, polling near 90% approval (pdf). So once quality is improved, governments will find it hard to cut back.
    2. Like any other public system, the quality of the institutions drafting policy and administering the system is vitally important. Well run public systems are efficient. But conservative movements in the last 30+ years have worked hard to dismantle the quality of public institutions and trust in such institutions. In this reality of shrinking budgets and staff levels where bureaucrat is a term of insult, ensuring that public system expansion is handled efficiently is no given. There is an entire industry of political parties, think tanks and media devoted to tearing down the concept of a publicly administered good, and ready to pounce on every little misstep (Remember the Obamacare roll out anyone?)
    3. Will employers raise wages from all the savings they get from not providing health benefits, and will these raises cover the increase in taxes we will pay for universal healthcare? Probably not right away, but it will happen eventually.

    Transitions

    Clearly, we can’t transition tomorrow. A public system would need to be in place and functioning before our employers get out of the health insurance business. I would phase universality in the following order:

    1. Drugs
    2. Teeth and eyes
    3. Preventative and palliative care.

    We would also need to rethink the”fee for service”, where healthcare providers are paid per widget, and think about a different system closer to a salaried model, more on that in future blog posts.

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    The Weirdness That is Victoria Resident Parking

    Byoliveridley
    Picture of many cars parked on both sides of a street

    Donald Shoup, the author of the high cost of free parking and a god-like figure in the urban circles that look at parking in cities/towns and say “too much, too cheap!” (we’re very popular at parties) died recently. His death reminded me that for a while now, I have wanted to talk about Victoria’s strange and ridiculous neighbourhood resident parking system that rewards already wealthy people with free public land to store their personal belongings.

    I’ve always lived close enough to downtown that the parking spots in front of my home had been restricted, either no parking or two hour parking. So I hadn’t really paid much attention to the resident parking rules except to know when I could get away with parking in a residential zone for a few minutes. That changed when I moved to North Park and discovered that around the corner from our new place, I could leave my car parked with zero restrictions, all the time! So, I was curious and started ducking (is that what you say when you use Duckduckgo?!) to see how I could get a permit? Turns out, there are no permits! And it’s FREE! You park your car on your block till someone complains about you, then parking enforcement gives you a ticket. You appeal this ticket with documentary proof of your address, and voila, ticket is rescinded and your license plate is entered into the system. WHAT?!

    First off, FREE? Parking especially in Victoria is a scarce commodity, and the people who live in these blocks are already either relatively well-off (relative, don’t compare yourself to the Westons!) or renting from the wealthy. Resident blocks are typically found only in what we call “residential” neighbourhoods, and by residential we mean single family home-heavy, not rental building with hundreds of residents. This is a massive subsidy. In my neighourhood, I see commercial parking advertised for 250-300$ a month. Perhaps there’s less demand in Rocklands, but at a minimum, that’s approximately 160 sq feet (or 15 m^2) of public land that’s paved, maintained and given over to store your stuff (if your stuff is a car, good luck if it’s a tent and you want shelter) for free!

    Secondly, a SNITCH DRIVEN SYSTEM? Someone’s neighbour with little better to do has to complain and then we waste city resources on writing a ticket, sending one, an appeals process, all of which is time spent by a city official that generates cost and no revenue? Where does this money come from? I presume from property taxes?

    At a time when we’re struggling to pay for the mandatory police-dominated municipal budget and everything else that needs building and maintaining, why are we giving away storage on public space for free? We need to start the discussion around what’s appropriate payment for a resident to store their car in a well-maintained public space. Given it’s not guaranteed parking I guess it can’t be $300 a month which is full retail value, but some reasonable fraction right? Remember that in most of these neighbourhoods, your home already has a garage that’s meant for car storage but has been repurposed as extra house because you can store your car for free. Even if we start at a $200 per year, that gives a permit to hang in the car/sticker so we can stop this snitch-based enforcement mechanism.

    Anyway, nothing’s likely to happen given how loud the people who own homes and thus assume ownership of the free parking in front of their homes get, and how afraid councillors are of loud home owners. But I’m still going to advocate for a better system when I talk to someone on council next. Donald Shoup would insist!

    Anyway, the always excellent SIdewalking blog has a very informative post on the same issue, check that one out too!

  • In Praise of Red Tape

    Byoliveridley

    In Praise of Red Tape

    Is there any figure in American political discourse more reviled than the bureaucrat? Say the word and a potent caricature leaps to mind: the petty and shiftless paper pusher who wields his small amount of power with malice and caprice. Whatever the issue–from school reform to overhauling the nation’s intelligence apparatus–the bureaucrat is on the wrong side of it.

    Hayes makes an argument that I try to make at mixed gatherings everywhere. Unfortunately, I do not make it as coherently as he does. The secret to any functioning government is a good mid-level bureaucracy that has enough technical experience to implement reasonably good policy, but isn’t overly politicized or corrupt. When I was growing up in India, one of the constant refrains was “Why can’t we be like the Americans? You can actually get a driver’s license without bribing someone!”

    The DMV (which is low level bureaucracy) still works well in the US (yes, my American friends, try getting a license in India!), but the mid level bureaucracy has gotten overly politicized in its top leadership over the years. This leads to that vicious cycle I have blogged about previously:

    1. Appoint lackey to head agency
    2. Appoint viceroy to oversee regulation
    3. Rewrite rules to increase power of executive over legislative
    4. Shift burden of proof away from the regulated to the regulators
    5. Slash budgets so regulating agencies cannot do the work adequately
    6. Hound competent employees out of the agency
    7. Routinely bash said agency as an example of “big government”

    Repeat steps 4-7 as often as necessary to ensure “success”

    Well, it appears that the mid-level bureaucrats pushed back, and Hayes catalogs the results.

    I leave you with a good truism:

    Red tape is what binds those in power to the mast of the law, what stands in the way of government by whim

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    Fun with maps: BC Smart meters and the 2013 election

    Byoliveridley

    SmartMeterVotingMapI have been MOOC’ing this summer and learning how to do maps. Geography as an adult is much more fun than my 10th grade geography class.

    Chad Skelton over at the Vancouver Sun intrigued me with his data retrieval and mapping of British Columbia’s Smart Meter uptake. if you’re not from BC, here’s a short intro (#BCpoli-aware feel free to skip the next two paragraphs).

    BC Hydro is the government owned (Crown Corporation) utility that produces and distributes electricity for the province of British Colombia in Canada. In 2011, BC Hydro announced its intention to spend $$$ upgrading all its electricity meters to “smart meters”. These meters are capable of being read via wifi by meter readers, and potentially also give BC residents the ability to monitor their electricity usage in near-real time.

    Many concerns were raised about the smart meters. One was about the costs of the program vs. perceived benefits. The others, which gained traction were around an emerging movement in BC connecting wifi, cell signals and wifi-enabled smart meters with a whole variety of health effects. While few, if any of these health concerns have been actually causally linked to smart meters, or even to the amorphous descriptor “wifi radiation”, these health concerns have gained traction even among official bodies such as the Union of BC Municipalities, municipal councils and school boards. The BC provincial election in 2013 was a chance for people to voice their concerns. The opposition parties all brought the issue up during canvassing.

    For my peer assessment mapping project, I wanted to see if areas of relatively high smart meter refusal were correlated or co-located in any way with voting against the ruling BC Liberals.

    This is the map I made, my first ever map not scrawled on paper.


    View Larger Map

    Reading the Map

    The electoral districts are colour-coded by BC Liberal Party percentage, darker means higher vote for the BC Liberals. I chose this rather than “who won” because I was looking more for an anti-BC Liberal effect. I will, at some point in time, try to overlay “who won” as well. The smart meter refusal data is in three different coloured and sized circles. Large and red means higher refusal, and small and green means low refusal. This is a hybrid of a graduated circle symbol scheme and a diverging colour scheme. Clearly, using points to represent areas is a big limitation, but it is sufficient for a quick peek.

    Anything to See?

    • An overwhelming majority of people had smart meters installed, > 90% in most places. So, BC Hydro’s brute force, no options, default installation plan was mostly successful
    • Places of higher than normal refusal tended to vote against the BC Liberals. I believe this had more to do with existing anti-BC-Lib tendencies influencing smart meter refusal rather than the other way around.
    • Urban centres like Victoria and Vancouver had relatively low rates of refusal. Is this because of higher apartment proportions, or because smart meter refusal was restricted to a small number of high information, highly motivated individuals whose number varied by location and whose numbers in places like Victoria were muted by larger populations?. Note that my home area of Victoria had the most (7300) rejected smart meters, even though the percentage is small. The ageing white (l)iberal enclave of Saltspring Island (Ganges), aka hippieville, Canada had by far the highest refusal percentage. So, is this smart meter refusal map mostly a hippie population distribution map?

    The take home message for me was that the anti-smartmeter movement had little influence on the election, which was most likely won on the usual and mundane issues of the economy, trust and corruption.

    Methods

    1. I downloaded data on smart meter refusal from the Chad Skelton’s post and Tableau public
    2. The data from BC Hydro is categorized using their division of BC into distinct geographical billing areas. I used billing area names to geotag the information. The site http://www.findlatitudeandlongitude.com/ has a feature where addresses can be uploaded in bulk via a text interface, and the site returns the place, and latitude longitude. I added province and country to the place names, and edited ambiguous names to make the search more effective.
    3. I uploaded this table to arcgis to form one layer. Arcgis is a big and expensive GIS software, with a limited free online playpen where this map is displayed. I used graduated circles and natural breaks to represent the different levels of smart meter refusal. A big limitation to this approach is that the BC Hydro billing areas are just that, areas, not points on a map. However, the area boundaries are not available as a shape file, and geographical areas vary widely. So, the points correspond to the centre of the nearest big population area mentioned in the BC Hydro billing area description
    4. I downloaded BC electoral district shape files from Paul Ramsey of Open Geo. These shape files are an improved version of those available from Elections BC, again, thanks to Chad Skelton for pointing me in this direction
    5. Elections BC lists 2013 provincial election results information by party by district. However, there is no publicly downloadable mapped source for the election data results. I used the open source GIS desktop software QGIS to open the shape file and add the attribute of BC Liberal percentage to the shape file. I uploaded this shape file to arcgis and layered it with the smart meter refusal rate graduated circles to look for patterns.

    Maps are fun to play with, and I know very very little about them, which is a great combination. Every minute I spent making this map was a learning experience. Comments and feedback, please. I think I will slowly incorporate mapping into my skill set. But I think I will use open source/free solutions in the future.

  • To Read! Dark PR by Grant Ennis

    Byoliveridley

    In his new book, Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms Our Health and the Environment, Grant Ennis — a lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia — identifies the “nine devious frames” that corporations such as automobile manufacturers and road builders use to advance their interests, manipulate the public and maintain a status quo that harms human health and the planet. 

    Image Book cover of Dark PR by Grant Ennis
    The War on Cars Podcast on Dark PR

    I love the War on Cars podcast for its great content detailing how cars and cities aren’t BFFs. And I specifically liked this podcast with Grant Ennis the author of a new book Dark PR as it connects the much larger and universal public relation framing on every important issue to the specific subject of cars. While I have not read the book yet (my desire to read non-fiction is not always matched by action), you should listen to the podcast, and here are the 9 frames divided into 3 themes 🙂

    • Big Lie – Serves to deny, obfuscate and redirect
      • Denialism: Deny deny deny.
      • Post-Denialism: It’s happening, it’s not bad, it’s actually good!
      • Normalization: This is inevitable, deal with it.
    • Pseudo-Solutions: Solutions that are anything but
      • Silver boomerang: Here’s an amazing solution that won’t solve the problem and will rebound into profit for us!
      • Magic: Ooh look, if y’all do this one thing that will be available tomorrow, the problem will be solved, so don’t worry about it today
      • Treatment trap: Sorry your air quality sucks, but here’s a great air purifier for only 399.99
      • Victim blaming/individualism: It’s all your fault, if only you’d composted more…
    • Complicated frames
      • Knotted web: This is such a difficult problem, here are 10000 different aspects blah blah blah, oh good, you’re asleep!
      • Multifactorial framing: To solve this problem you have to do x, y, and z all at the same time, all of the above! Dilute dilute dilute!

    As you look at various issues affecting us like housing, climate change, city planning, wars, drug poisoning, you name it, you’ll see one or more of these frames in use.

    Anyway, listen to the podcast, it’s edifying.

    This post is thanks to my friend Sherwin who updated my website yesterday and reminded me that low-expectation writing can be fun! As he just messaged me, “CLOSE YOUR EYES AND TYPE” (caps all his).

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    Who is Local?

    Byoliveridley

    “Ahmadi is still months away from getting permanent resident status, putting him in the unlucky group of middle-class British Columbians who have found themselves targeted by a tax purportedly imposed to crack down on rich real estate speculators from overseas”

    I’ve never been this hopeless

    I would not call Hamed Ahmadi unlucky, he’s a victim of the all too common policy apparatus that confuses residency with visa status. The BC non-resident tax of 15% on properties is supposed to target “foreign” (read Chinese) investors buying in Vancouver with no intentions of living there. I presume there are multiple other ways to determine residency and “localness” for the purpose of determining who lives here and who does not. The BC government, in its haste to demonstrate it was doing something, took the easy route and used visa status as a proxy.

    Hamed lives and works in BC, which meets my definition of local. While a speculation tax on non-residents is a reasonable approach, using visa status to determine residency, and providing no sensible exceptions for locals with alternative paper work is lazy and thoughtless policy making, so is not providing exceptions for people with home buying applications already in process. It’s almost as if someone looked at the polls and press and wrote the law in a day.

    In many ways, this is personal for me because I lived in the US for 10+ years under various non-permanent visas that left me vulnerable to these poorly designed, thoughtless policy measures. I lived in the same town for 10 years, was very much a local by the time I’d left, with a stable set of friends, family, work, places I shopped in, hiked to, causes I supported, volunteer work I did, and more. So, Hamed’s story could have been mine, and in some smaller ways, was mine for other parts of my life.

    “CTV News spoke with BC Liberal cabinet minister Andrew Wilkinson on Wednesday and asked several times for comment on Ahmadi’s situation. Wilkinson responded by repeating a piece of blanket advice for the people impacted. “Those who find themselves affected by the tax should seek legal advice because individual circumstances vary,” Wilkinson said.

    This is typical of policy makers who are so removed from the day to day lives of the people whose behaviour they seek to regulate. The casual assumption that regular people can afford professionals who bill at multiple hundreds of dollars an hour speaks more about the types of people these ministers hang out with than anything else. But this sounds familiar too, I needed to consult lawyers multiple times to help me with immigration paper work.

    As someone with a high level of institutional trust, and who thinks governments can affect our lives for the better with sound and thoughtful policy interventions, these types of hasty policy making are deeply disappointing. There are multiple other policy measures to make housing more affordable. The CCPA just released a comprehensive document of policies, focusing on the actual problem, the lack of affordable housing. Investment in affordable housing with a focus on cohousing and social housing, and zoning changes that reduce the protections afforded to affluent property owners would go a long way.

    Originally posted on Interrobang 04-August-2016

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