Letter to The Editor
Kingtston Whig Standard
April 27 2004

Educate Your Kids About Rosen-Style Municipal Politics

Here's an interesting activity you can do with young people either at home or in the classroom. It's an exercise in geography, geometry, civics, municipal politics, and ethics. These are important lessons, and this exercise is timely since the city may soon give the OK to an "Entertainment Centre" development that will cost all of Kingston's kids a great deal in foregone social and recreational services as they grow up, and also much later, as taxpayers.

For the exercise you need the following materials: a reasonable map of Kingston, one with a scale. It doesn't need to be a great map, any map that can distinguish 25m, one way or another, will do. You'll also need the CastleGlenn Consultants' report titled "Traffic and Parking Viability Assessment Study" which is on the city of Kingston website, in the LVEC section. If you aren't familiar with the downtown landscape, you'll also need a diagram identifying the City's downtown parking lots, available from the parking section of the City's website.

Start by locating the site of the proposed LVEC on the waterfront, in the park, just North of the marina and the dry dock. Explain that this is where the City of Kingston wants to spend $40 million, likely much more when land costs, creeping scope, pork, and contingencies are properly factored, to build the LVEC. You could mention that the city has no money to properly maintain the facilities and infrastructure it already has, but it's got $56,000 to give, without tender, to out-of-town consultants personally hand-picked by Don Gedge (another out-of-town person) who's in charge of doing whatever Mayor Rosen tells him to do with this LVEC project.

Locate page 9 of the Traffic and Parking study, the page with concentric circles labeled "600m" and "800m" on an aerial photograph of downtown Kingston. Have your kids measure the radius of those circles on the scaled map of Kingston. If your measurements are like mine, you'll find the circle labeled "600m" is actually 710m from the proposed LVEC, and the circle labeled "800m" is 925m from the proposed LVEC.

Explain to your kids that the area of a circle is proportional to the square of its radius, and when you overstate the radius of a big circle, that makes for a very big error in area. If you overstate an area by 40%, you might expect the error to inflate the tally parking spaces within that area by about 40% which, in fact, is what this study does.

Explain to your kids why they get a red "X" on their math or geography homework when they make mistakes like that, but when adults hired by the city make mistakes like this, they get approval from steering committees, and vocal attaboys from downtown businessmen who praise the "accurate data" from these studies at televised public meetings. Explain to your kids that many adults don't do homework when, really, they probably should.

Now, on your map of Kingston, locate any of Kingston's downtown parking lots. It doesn't much matter which ones you select. Measure the straight-line distance between the LVEC and each of the parking lots you picked. It doesn't much matter whether you measure to the centre of the lot (which would give you an average distance for the whole lot) or the edge closest to the LVEC (which gives you the best-case). Now compare the scaled distances you just measured with the distances reported by CastleGlenn Consultants in the Traffic and Parking study on pages 11 and 18.

Depending on which parking lot you measured, you'll notice many errors, all of them in favour of minimizing the expected distance the LVEC's customers will be forced to walk, and some of these distances are off by a hundred meters or more.

Now measure the distances to the parking lots by following street lines, as you would actually walk. Ask your kids what they think of these results compared to what appears misrepresented as "walking distance" in the report.

Explain to your kids why, when they submit homework full of mostly wrong answers, they get graded accordingly, but when adults hired by the city do the same thing, they get great marks. Also explain to them that the city has other adults that are supposed to be overseeing the work of those who made these mistakes, and moreover all these people were told about these errors, yet they didn't do or say anything about it. They just rubber stamped the work of the consultants, and declared it trustworthy and sound.
Also explain that the Traffic and Parking Viability Assessment Study contains many statements that are not so measurable. For example, statements about the minimal impact of the LVEC on other downtown operations, and on the neighborhood. Conclusions that there is ample parking within what they define as "600m", are all supposed to be accepted on faith in people who can't properly measure a straight line. Ask your kids if believing these conclusions, in view of what they know about the study, makes any common sense.

See, the Mayor and his friends are in a big rush to do all this quickly, so that this LVEC doesn't become something that regular people like mum and dad can vote on, even though, collectively, all the families in Kingston will be on the hook for nearly all its costs.

Explain that no, all this is not OK, but that's how things work here in Kingston. Talk with your kids, and ask them, what's the right thing to do here? Maybe your kids could share their results with this newspaper, or write a letter to the Mayor and council describing the errors they were able to find. Maybe your family could decide to boycott the downtown businesses that are mostly behind all this, even encouraging these shenanigans. But please, do something. The Mayor and his hand-picked stooges, you see, are paying no attention whatsoever to the clear majority of adults in Kingston who find the accelerated LVEC process appalling, pretentious, reckless, and totally unacceptable.

For more on this, and a long list of other LVEC-related shenanigans, visit www.kcal.ca. The measurement problem described here is just one of 18 major errors in the traffic and parking study, which itself is but one of several questionable premises supporting the LVEC as currently conceived.

Steven Black
Kingston, Ontario

Steven Black is the website manager for www.kcal.ca, "Kingstonians Concerned about the LVEC".