Coastal erosion laws in NSW rankle councils

The private versus public debate - and who pays of course:

New legislation on the management of coastal erosion has once again stirred debate over the amount of control landowners should be given to protect their properties.

With three-quarters of Australians living on the coast, the issue is being discussed at all levels of government.

In New South Wales, the State Government is putting together new legislation which could - for the first time - give landowners the right to erect emergency barriers to shield their properties.

The legislation is aimed at preventing court cases similar to one that played out recently in Byron Bay on the NSW north coast, where landowner John Vaughan took the council to court for the right to defend his land.

Sydney opens Australia’s first electric car charging station | Travel News

I remember the "if you build it, they will come" approach from the nineties, but I suspect that this is a bit more focused and likely to be more successful - from two days ago:

Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore MP opened the first public electric car charging station in Australia...

The on-street charging spot is located in Derby Place, Glebe. It is managed by ChargePoint and installed by Visionstream. The station uses 100 per cent Origin GreenPower and can recharge converted plug-in hybrids such as a Toyota Prius in three hours.

Ms Moore said that Sydney has joined other cities around the world that have installed electric vehicle charging stations, such as Amsterdam, Houston, San Francisco, London and Vancouver. Over 700,000 vehicles travel throughout the Local Government Area in Sydney every day, contributing significantly to pollution, smog, greenhouse gases, noise and congestion.

Vehicles that are part of the car share scheme GoGet, such as the converted Prius, have an electric motor range of 30kms and cover two kilometres more than 80 per cent of GoGet’s regular trips. Moore said that electric vehicles contribute zero exhaust emissions and added that a shared vehicle substituted up to 10 privately owned cars.

Sydney opens Australia’s first electric car charging station | Travel News

Another good reason to live in the suburbs

Try charging your new electric vehicle out the front of 60 apartments....

Scotland’s large number of tenement flats and lack of adequate off-street parking will hamper drivers switching to electric cars, a report predicts.

Environmental charity WWF has concluded that, in order to meet Scottish Government targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, at least 290,000 petrol-driven cars will need to be replaced with electric ones by 2020, representing one in 10 vehicles on Scotland’s roads.

The charity identified an equally challenging goal of ensuring electric vehicles comprise one in five cars sold by the same date in order to help bring down total carbon dioxide emissions by 42%.

But the predominance of tenement housing in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen represents a significant hurdle to achieving this green revolution, the WWF said.

It pointed to research which found that domestic charging of cars represented the most effective and efficient means of powering private vehicles as they did not require the installation of any additional infrastructure. Large cities represent the ideal place to roll-out electric vehicle technology as many of the trips are short distance, which they can handle without running out of power.

However, the proportion of homes with garages or driveways where cars could be plugged into the mains is limited in Scotland. Glasgow had the lowest rate, with only 22% of homes having access to off-street parking; in Edinburgh it was less than a third; in Aberdeen, fewer than half of homes had off-street parking .

Putting up publicly available on-street charging points is an “expensive solution” but one that local authorities and government would have to consider, WWF said...

It is thought some investment for on-street charging facilities may be available from electricity companies which will benefit from related sales. However, it is unlikely this will be sufficient without public investment, industry sources claimed.

One step forwards, two steps back

From the ABC:

Adelaide City Council has agreed to remove a $400,000 bicycle lane from Sturt Street in the city because of a community campaign. The concrete bikeway was built last year between Whitmore Square and West Terrace to separate cyclists from motorists. The council will now spend another $100,000 removing the lane.

Adelaide MP Rachel Sanderson says the lane is dangerous for pedestrians and bad for business. "People couldn't get parks, there was a downturn in their [business] turnover," she said.

Jeff Smith, who has a town planning business in Sturt Street, says cyclists have not been using the lane. "The cycling public wasn't familiar with the concept and they continuously rode on the carriageway," he said.

City Councillor Richard Hayward says removal work will start as soon as possible. "There's a whole raft of reasons why it wasn't successful," he said.

"We trialed it, it didn't work, we made a decision in the best interests of the responses to the stakeholders and that is to return it to how it was before."

Yikes! What is "top-down planning" code for?

Andres Duany is the "father of new urbanism" - a positive thread in planning for the last half century or so - and yet he sounds not only like a grumpy old man ("There's this generation who grew up in the suburbs, ...They have this techno music, and the food cheapens, and they run in packs, great social packs, and they take over a place and ruin it and go somewhere else") but his reflections on democracy in this piece are a little strained:

While democracy does most things well, I think we need to confront the fact that it does not make the best cities. And that the cities that were great were rather top-down. You know--Paris and Rome, the grid of Manhattan. What would those have been like if there hadn't been some top-down stuff? Every landowner would have done a separate little pod subdivision. That's one of the things that's naive about Americans--extremely naive, I find, as an outsider having lived in places that are possibly less democratic, like Spain. This idea that you have an individual right to do whatever you want with your land is very democratic, but the result is pretty questionable.

You want WHAT job?

The countdown to Mexico starts...

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday appointed Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica as the new U.N. climate chief. She is an expert on climate negotiations and the daughter of the country's former president.

Figueres, who has been a member of Costa Rica's negotiating team on climate change since 1995, will replace Yvo de Boer as executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The wet trousers test

Car owners are waiting at the entrance of a underground parking lot, hoping their Audi, Volvo, BMW etc could float themselves out.

A Guangzhou blogger tells:

How to decide whether a country is a developed country or a developing one? Taiwanese essayist and cultural critic Lung Ying-tai proposed a simple way: when there is a rainstorm that last for 3 hours or so, take a walk, if you find the legs of your trousers are wet but not muddy, the traffic is slow but not jammed, the streets are slippery but not waterlogged, this is probably a developed country; on the other hand if you find that standing water is everywhere, that teapot and comb are floating out of shops to the middle of the street,that children are net fishing over the crossroad, you are probably looking at a developing country. Developing countries may have the money to build sky scrapers, but they care less to develop their drainage system; you can see sky scrapers but not the underground sewer, a good rain storm can lift the veil.
According to this criterion, Guangzhou City is not so mush a cosmopolis as it claims itself to be after all. An exceptionally severe rainstorm struck the whole Guangzhou city during midnight on May 6th, and last 3 to 4 hours, resulting 118 waterlogging points 89 of which are new, and 44 of them are heavily flooded.The average rainfall of the city is 107.7 mm with downtown average at 128.45 mm. The heaviest rain fell in a reservoir in Baiyun District with 232 mm fall.

Another take on sustainability

From the ever helpful Chinahush:

May 6, another Foxconn worker leaped to his death, and this is jump number 7 since January, another suicide, again jumping off a building, again at Foxconn. People call it the “7 consecutive jumps”. I also recall writing about an incident last July, a Chinese worker at Foxconn committed suicide after iPhone prototype went missing. Everyone wants to know why so many Foxconn workers are jumping to their death, 7 of them just this year? What was behind the incidents? Is it coincidence or inevitable?...In an interview, Foxconn spokesman Liu Kun admitted that the management has loopholes, but facing the huge number of 420,000 employees in Shenzhen, and as for why the spate of such incidents; how to avoid similar incidents from occurring, he also seemed to be helpless.

Liu Kun:

Do we really have preventions in place? Can we really touch 420,000 people’s heart? As a business, we are not capable of doing this. And I don’t know what reason will cause the eighth jump.

But yikes:

As I am writing this, jump number 8 happened today, May 11, a Foxconn female employee jumped off 8th floor of a building to her death…

Where are they now?

Business Wire reports:

"Living Cities (www.livingcities.org), the long-standing, urban-focused philanthropic collaborative of 22 of the world’s largest foundations and financial institutions, is proud to announce its latest Distinguished Urban Fellow, Greg Nickels, the former Mayor of Seattle. With his own accomplished record of public service, Mayor Nickels will work closely with Living Cities’ CEO and Board of Directors to shape the organization’s expanded and ambitious green economy agenda aimed at helping America’s cities lay the foundation for a new green economy that includes expanding opportunities for low-income people."

What IS going on in NZ?

Lots of Local Government people privately bemoan the amount of consultation that occurs - often with the same small groups of people in their local communities. But to legislate consultation in the proposed manner in NZ is simply mad. A local resident activist describes the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill as a:

"... desire to strip local communities of their consultation rights. The Bill goes on to say that an intention is to “remove unnecessary consultation”, particularly around Long Term Council Community Plans. These are the 10-year plans that set the strategic direction and imperatives for Councils; a great many Wellington community and private groups currently provide input into how these are shaped by the Wellington City Council and the Regional Council.

Under the proposals in the Bill, the community consultation for LTCCPs would be completely removed – and then in a move that would make George Orwell gasp in admiration, Councils are constrained by the Bill to only being able to undertake activities that are included in the LTCCP."

One way to deal with cross-mandates in government

The Geelong Advertiser reports that a directly elected Mayor in Geelong is unlikely:

"BRUMBY Government Local Government Minister Richard Wynne has tried to shut down the push to get a directly elected mayor for Geelong. The Minister told a room full of city leaders yesterday that the push was not on the state's agenda despite a concerted effort by lobby groups such as the Committee for Geelong.

The Minister was asked by Committee for Geelong head Michael Betts whether the state would introduce an elected mayor to break a perceived power vacuum at City Hall. Mr Wynne said if the serving councillors wanted ``continuity with leadership'' they had the ability under the Local Government Act to select a mayor for two years.

Mayors in Geelong have traditionally been selected for one-year terms by fellow councillors. "And then if they are happy with the performance they can vote them in for another two years,'' he said."

The Wilderness Society splits gets worse

The Sydney Morning Herald reports on a really bad split in The Wilderness Society. So what is going on? Is it generational (the management is older and made up of long-time activists), financial (it is still very well-funded I understand), ideological (the management is seen as not radical enough)..? The meeting last night looks set for even more pain at a time when the green movement needs to be working on angles for the upcoming Federal election.

"One of Australia's largest green groups, The Wilderness Society, has torn itself in half, with two factions claiming to be the legitimate managers of the 46,000-member organisation.

At a dramatic series of meetings in Canberra last night, a splinter group protesting the performance of the society's long-standing management team and its executive director, Alec Marr, stormed out of a special general meeting and held a separate meeting 700 metres down the road to elect a new management committee."