Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - August 6, 2024, Winnipeg, Manitoba A4 ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A FEW weeks ago in Winnipeg, Rob Jenner was killed by a driver while riding his bike to work. On July 29, a few blocks away, a young girl out for a bike ride with her dad was hospitalized after a driver crashed into her. Every year, an average of 70 people riding a bike are hit by drivers so severely that an injury report is filed with the police. In a six-month cycling season, that’s every third day. Yet, when the city began public con- sultation for three new protected bike lanes, two downtown and one in the West-Alexander area, the usual public opposition was heard. The talking points are always predictable and can be addressed one-by-one. ● Winnipeg is a winter city. We don’t need bike lanes for six months a year. This is like saying, “I don’t need to wear a life jacket because I only go boating in the summertime.” Far fewer people cycle in winter but this shouldn’t diminish the need for safe streets in the seasons when people are riding bikes and fighting for road space with thousand-kilogram machines. We publicly invest in many things not used to their full capacity year-round. Would this same argument not apply to parks, sidewalks, arenas, pools and splash pads? ● We can’t afford bike lanes. Bike lanes are cheap. We spend $5 million per year on all active transportation projects. Most of this funding is used to build and maintain sidewalks, with a small percentage used for on-street bike lanes that are often rolled into larger road renew- al projects. Spending on dedicated cycling infrastructure is a rounding error in our overall roads budget. We spend $170 million every year fixing existing roads and the Transportation Master Plan projects spending almost that amount building new roads. If we can’t afford bike infrastructure, we really can’t afford car infrastructure like the Kenaston Boulevard widening, pegged to cost the equivalent of the entire active transportation budget for 150 years. ● Winnipeg is a car city. It sure is but with 8,300 kilome- ters of public roads and less than 30 kilometres of on-street protected bike lanes, there’s lots of room for cars. ● Nobody rides a bike in Winnipeg anyway. The federal census shows between 5,000 and 7,000 people ride a bike to work daily between May and October. While this represents less than two per cent of commuters citywide, it varies significantly by neighbourhood. About two-thirds of bike commuters live less than five kilometres from Portage and Main. In suburban neighbourhoods like Bridgwater, Seven Oaks, Island Lakes, Linden Woods, Sage Creek, and North Kildonan, this percentage is close to zero. It’s understandable, if you live in this type of neighbourhood, you might believe nobody rides a bike. In mature neighbourhoods like River Heights, West Broadway, Osborne, and Earl Grey, cycling mode share is closer to six per cent of all commuters. Wolseley is ranked as a top 10 cycling neighbourhood in Canada with 12 per cent of commuters riding a bike. Many more people, including children, cycle for other reasons, such as recreation, exercise, or riding to school. The bike counter near The Forks regularly shows more than a thousand people biking past on a sum- mer weekend day. A 2022 CAA survey found that 15 per cent of Winnipeggers ride a bike at least a few times per week, with a further 30 per cent riding occasionally. Forty per cent of respon- dents said they would bike more if they had safe, protected lanes to ride in. ● If cyclists want bike lanes, they should pay for it themselves. City streets, sidewalks and bike lanes are paid for overwhelmingly through property taxes. Like drivers, people who ride bikes pay property taxes. Cyclists don’t pay fuel taxes that go into the government’s general revenues but the money they save is spent on other things that are similarly taxed. Most cyclists also drive a car. ● Bike lanes take parking away from downtown businesses. Planners are careful to design bike lanes to be as minimally disruptive as possible. When the Exchange District bike lanes were built, diagonal parking was implemented to increase the total number of stalls in the immediate area. The downtown lanes currently being proposed will remove 97 on- street stalls, representing 0.3 percent of downtown’s 26,000 public parking stalls. Diversifying mobility options is a key step in the long-term process of creating a downtown residential neighbourhood to support local shops and businesses, so they don’t have to rely on the ever-dwindling number of people driving downtown to shop. ● Bike lanes make driving worse. Separating cyclists, drivers and pe- destrians into their own lanes is better for everyone. If you get frustrated as a driver having to pass slow-moving cy- clists on the street, you should support bike lanes that keep them separate from car traffic. Bike lanes often get blamed for narrowing car lanes but most often, as in the case of Goulet Street, this is done intentionally to slow vehicle speeds and calm traffic having nothing to do with bike lanes. Many people will read this angrily and think cyclists deserve their fate because they don’t follow the rules of the road. Undoubtedly, some percentage of the population is selfish and irresponsible but just as many of those people are drivers, or pedestrians. Cyclists aren’t protected by a thousand kilograms of steel with crumple zones, air bags and seat belts. Improving their safety comes from the built environment. When we create safe streets by nar- rowing lanes and intersections, slow- ing vehicle speeds, improving sight lines, widening sidewalks and building bike lanes, we build in a safety factor that allows for mistakes, distractions, careless behaviour and unexpected conditions to happen — without having someone pay for it with their life. Brent Bellamy is creative director at Number Ten Architectural Group. NEWS I LOCAL / CANADA TUESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2024 SUPPLIED A young cyclist was injured in a collision last week at Wellington and Academy. More bike lanes make for a better city BRENT BELLAMY OPINION BRENT BELLAMY The busy Wolseley bike lane during rush hour. It’s a top 10 cycling neighbourhood in Canada with 12 per cent of commuters riding a bike. Canadian funeral directors warn of unauthorized obituaries HALIFAX — Funeral directors across the country are warning grieving fam- ilies about a trend of third-party web- sites republishing obituaries for profit. Jim Bishop, the funeral director for Bishop’s Funeral Home in Frederic- ton, said he’s noticed an increase in grieving people who use his services complaining of altered death notices — sometimes with erroneous details — appearing on one such website called Echovita. Bishop said Echovita’s actions are part of a trend of scraping information from funeral home and newspaper web- sites and reposting it alongside options to buy flowers and digital candles. He said this data-scraping poses “a mor- al issue” because it is capitalizing on obituaries without the families’ know- ledge or permission. “When people click on Google and they search a person’s name … they don’t always realize they’re not dealing with the funeral home’s website with that source. They’re being sent a link to a third-party outfit they think is us, and it’s not.” He said that since mid-July, about a dozen people have advised him their loved one’s obituary had been taken. Jeff Weafer, president of the Funeral Services Association of Canada, said the practice is particularly problematic because writing an obituary is the last chance a family gets to tell the story of their loved one’s life. Having that story taken and used without permission can feel like an invasion of privacy during an especially vulnerable time. “Part of the expression of grief for families is they want to proudly tell the story of their father, their brother, their mother. It’s very therapeutic to tell that story, whether that’s done through an obituary or a Facebook note that shares the details of one’s life,” Weafer said in an interview. The website of the Better Business Bureau, which has not awarded Echovi- ta accreditation, shows five complaints against the company. One complaint from 2022 called Echovita a “trolling company” for posting an unapproved and altered version of an obituary, causing great distress to the grieving family. An unnamed Echovita official re- sponded to the complaint that the com- pany had removed the obituary from its site. “I would like to add the informa- tion we share was not private as stated, since the original obituary was posted publicly on the internet,” the response said. A review of Echovita last month on the Better Business Bureau site also expresses distress over the website’s practices, noting the obituary living family members mentioned in the ori- ginal notice as deceased. “My family was devastated that this fake obit was the first hit people would see when they looked up my grand- father’s name. We were so embarrassed that people would think we’d written something of such poor quality to ‘hon- our’ our late loved one.” In a reply to the review, Echovita apologized “for any errors within the obituary.” Echovita representatives did not agree to an interview with The Can- adian Press. In an emailed statement, a public relations agent speaking on be- half of the company said family mem- bers who notice errors in obituaries can request a revision directly on the web- site but provided no details about the company’s verification processes. The Canadian Press also asked how Echovita verifies that flowers pur- chased on the website — which range in price from $90 to $334 — make their way to grieving families or the funeral homes where services are held. Echovi- ta’s spokesperson said that 95 per cent of all flowers that are ordered arrive at their destinations. However, the spokesperson offered no details to back up that claim. Weafer said the Funeral Services As- sociation of Canada is lobbying the fed- eral government to strengthen privacy legislation and prevent families from suffering more but he said the funeral association has yet to see a “significant response” from lawmakers. Quebec’s registry of businesses lists a Quebec City address for Echovita and Paco Leclerc as its the president. In a 2019 court decision, Leclerc was named as one of the directors for the now-defunct website Afterlife, which was ordered to pay $20 million in damages to grieving families for the unauthorized use of death notices and photos. The ruling found that Afterlife repeatedly violated copyright rules by using data to market flower sales. — The Canadian Press Cities turning to AI to predict homelessness ANJA KARADEGLIJA OTTAWA —How old are you? What is your gender? Are you Indigenous? Are you a Canadian citizen? Do you have a family? Those are just a few of the data points that a new artificial intelligence sys- tem will use to determine if somebody might be at risk of chronic homeless- ness in Ottawa, thanks to a team-up with a Carleton University researcher. The national capital is not the first municipality to use the emerging tech- nology as a tool to mitigate a worsening crisis — London, Ont., previously pion- eered a similar project, while in Cali- fornia, Los Angeles has an initiative that identifies individuals at risk of be- coming homeless. As cities increasingly turn to AI, some advocates are raising concerns about privacy and bias. But those be- hind the project insist it is just one tool to help determine who might need help. The researcher developing the Ot- tawa project, Majid Komeili, said the system uses personal data such as age, gender, Indigenous status, citizenship status and whether the person has a family on record. It also looks at factors like how many times they may have previously been refused service at a shelter and reasons they received a service. The system will also use external data such as information about the weather and economic indicators like the consumer price index and un- employment rate. Komeili said the sys- tem will predict how many nights the individual will stay in a shelter in six months’ time. That information is available in the first place because people are already “highly tracked” in order to receive various benefits or treatments, argued McGill University associate professor said Renee Sieber. “Homeless people, unfortunately, are incredibly surveilled, and the data is very intrusive,” Sieber said. The data might include details about medical appointments, drug addictions, relapses and HIV status. Sieber said it’s important to ask whether AI technol- ogy is really necessary. It was only a matter of time before AI got involved, suggested Tim Richter, president of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness. Though they are not widespread, such tools “can to a degree probably anticipate who’s more likely to experi- ence homelessness or chronic home- lessness,” he said. “Using AI to do that could be very helpful in targeting inter- ventions to people.” Most places do not have good enough data to establish such systems, said Richter. His organization is working with cities across the country, includ- ing London and Ottawa, to help collect better “real-time, person-specific” in- formation — “in a way that protects their privacy.” Chronic homelessness means an indi- vidual has been homeless for more than six months, or has experienced repeat- ed episodes of homelessness over that time frame. While 85 per cent of people are in and out of homelessness quickly, some 15 to 20 per cent “get stuck,” Richter said. AI systems should be able to do their job and flag individuals who are at risk by looking at aggregate commun- ity-level data and without knowing the specific identity of the individual in- volved, said Richter. That’s the approach the Ottawa pro- ject is taking. Identifiable information like names and contact information is replaced by codes. He noted the system uses data that has already been gathered in previous years and isn’t specifically being col- lected for use by AI. One long-acknowledged problem with AI is that its analysis is only as good as the data that is fed into it. That means when data come from a society with systemic racism built into its systems, AI predictions can perpetuate it. Luke Stark, an assistant professor at Western University, is working on a project studying the use of data and AI for homelessness policy in Canada, including the existing AI initiative in London, Ont. He said another problem that human decision-makers need to think about is how predictions can cause certain seg- ments of the homeless population to be missed. Women are more likely to avoid shelters for safety reasons, and are more likely to turn to options such as couch surfing, he noted. “One concern that we have is that all this attention to these triage-based solutions then takes the pressure off of policy-makers to actually look at those structural causes of homelessness that are there in the first place,” he said. As Richter put it: “Ultimately, the key to ending homelessness is housing.” — The Canadian Press CASSIDY MCMACKON ;