PDP #146: The Flight of Pigeons

Here in Toronto, in my experience pigeons tend to be meek creatures, walking through a crowd only when no one in it is moving and bursting into flight at the first major sign of human activity. Their cousins in Los Angeles seem to have different habits; maybe it's because they never have to worry about the cold. At the corner of North Vermont and Melrose, I stumbled through and stirred up a flock of pigeons that took to the air all around me. I've never before had to worry about urban birds dive-bombing me, but in those few seconds I thought it was a distinct possibility.

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A Short Circuit in the Electric Sewer

In a lot of cities, rapid transit isn't - at least, with my experience and expectations created by the Toronto Transit Commission's operations, that's how it often seems to me. On Toronto's three subway lines and the Scarborough RT, trains run so close together that if one's pulling out right as you hit the platform, you'll only have to wait 5-6 minutes for the next one. It's not often, in my experience, that the scheduling seriously breaks down. What I've come to realize is that this is unusual, as far as North American cities go. Though the rapid transit systems in Montreal, Chicago, and Los Angeles beat out Toronto in some respects, in my opinion none of them stand above the TTC in terms of this dedication to timely service.

The recent TTC fare increase is, in its way, emblematic of that. Adam Giambrone has stood firm against the prospect of service cuts to make up the budget hole, and in so doing, the TTC is one of the few major transit systems on the continent that's taken that option off the table. In New York City, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is staring into a budgetary abyss, stemming from a $200-million shortfall in a recently-enacted transit payroll tax as well as reduced support from the New York state government. Yesterday the New York Times reported the shortfall as $383-million in spite of a 25-cent fare increase in May, a far more sobering amount than the expected $106-million gap the TTC hiked its fares to fill.

Ultimately, as it turns out, an extra twenty-five cents per ride doesn't seem to have been enough to stabilize the system, and the MTA has been forced to slash service in order to stay afloat. Two entire subway lines, the W and Z, will be cancelled - unlike in Toronto, where "line" and "track" are synonymous, in New York multiple subway lines can use the same track - while off-peak service would be reduced and discounted student fares would be eliminated. Its version of Wheel-Trans would be cut to the absolute minimum. The budget which would force these cancellations hasn't been passed yet - it goes before the MTA board tomorrow for approval - but this isn't the first time I've heard tidings of budget armageddon coming out of Manhattan, and the MTA only has so many saving throws against recession.

Cutting service is, fundamentally, a short-term solution that creates long-term problems. The usefulness of an urban transit system comes not just from its length but from its capacity for connections. One subway line may feed multiple bus routes, and the passengers that transfer off those buses filter through the system according to their individual needs. Service cuts inevitably break these connections, and the echo of a scissors' snip will be magnified as it resounds across the system. A frequent transit rider whose bus route is cancelled or chopped into an inconvenient schedule may well find it easier, if not cheaper, to drive and find their own route on their own merits.

A certain level of complexity is necessary, I think, for a truly functional and reliable transit system. Sufficient service grants the system a robustness that would allow it to weather damage and continue functioning. For example, I feel that the Downtown Relief Line should be a far more immediate project for the TTC than the current Transit City system. Not only would the new subway line spur new ridership, by extending higher-order transit service to areas of the city that currently lack it, it would give the system resiliency. A DRL that reached north to Eglinton Avenue would have been invaluable last month, when an accidental tunnel breach shut down a four-station section of track that left tens of thousands of commuters in the cold.

While it may be necessary in the short term, a transit agency cutting service in order to survive runs the risk of cannibalizing itself - service cuts decrease the connections of the system, which drive potential passengers away, and if enough are driven away farebox revenue is insufficient to sustain the system, which in the absence of government assistance necessitates further fare increases or service cuts - in much the same way as the protagonist of Stephen King's Survivor Type. Though I hope that the MTA can come out of this pit as soon as possible, I'm thankful that the TTC is so far refusing to consider the kind of drastic measures that could lead to another lost decade for transit in Toronto.

PDP #145: That's No Trolley

Seventy-five years ago, dozens - perhaps hundreds - of North American cities operated streetcar systems, though in the United States they're also known as "trolleys." New Orleans is the only American city that operates a traditional streetcar system today, and it's only a fragment of Toronto's. Nevertheless, the trolley - streetcar - whatever you want to call it still has a place in peoples' hearts down there, most often as a nostalgic throwback to when days were less complicated. Only a few American cities today utilize streetcars for serious peoplemoving.

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation operates its own downtown-focused transit service in addition to that provided by LACMTA's Metro Bus and Metro Rail systems. One of these routes is the weekend-only Observatory Shuttle, which provides people an alternative to driving or hiking to the top of Griffith Park to see the observatory. These shuttles are buses that echo the old-timey streetcar shape, the same way as Hard Rock Cafe shuttle/tour buses do in Toronto.

But they're not trolleys.

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No Such Thing As Free Sequestration?

The major thing now that a lot of big corporations are talking about to make themselves sound like they've got environmental credibility is carbon capture and storage. On paper, what it means is that where power plants, factories, and other large carbon dioxide producers would previously emit the gas into the atmosphere, with CCS they would capture much of the carbon dioxide before it can be emitted and then sequester it, either deep underground or in the soil cycle, where it wouldn't contribute to climate change.

So the theory goes, anyway. Big businesses are beating this drum for all it's worth, even though there hasn't been so much as a pilot project to tell us whether or not it actually works - and not only if it works, but if it can work economically. It's one of the environmental hot potatoes right now, and personally, I hope that it works: I think we'll need all the avenues of mitigation we can find in the years ahead, and that's not even taking geoengineering into account.

What worries me, though, is the potential nature of these subterranean carbon dioxide reservoirs, and what happens if they're breached - either inadvertently by human activities, or as part of natural processes. The first is simple enough to avoid. I would imagine that carbon dioxide reservoirs would be sufficiently deep underground that some guy with a shovel wouldn't need to worry about breaching one, but nevertheless, I can see governments creating no-dig zones in and around these reservoirs to eliminate, or at least seriously reduce, the chance of a breach.

What I find more concerning is the prospect of these reservoirs in earthquake zones. The planned CCS schemes I've seen are rather local to the point source of the emissions, and so unless actual CCS programs end up taking a rather different shape, planners and engineers will have to reckon with the local geography and geology.

This could be an issue in earthquake zones. In California it's not too much of an issue, as there are only a handful of small coal-fired power plants within the state itself, but elsewhere it's a different story. The necessity - if it does turn out to be a necessity, depending on how CCS takes shape - of insulating these reservours against seismic shocks might well make CCS far less of a deal than it seems at the moment. The Los Angeles subway system cost considerably more to build per kilometer than comparable subway systems due to the need to reinforce the tunnels against earthquake damage, and governments or concerned citizens' organizations might demand that carbon reservoirs be similarly reinforced. Los Angeles spent billions building the 28-kilometer Red Line and Purple Line subways, but I don't imagine it would take very long for a coal plant running at full tilt to fill them up with gas.

It's probably for the best that there aren't yet any active CCS demonstrations. I think there are a lot of biting questions that remain to be asked.

PDP #144: One City Hall

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle described Los Angeles City Hall as "phallic" in their novel Oath of Fealty, but I don't really see it - if this is a phallic building, than any building taller than it is wide is a phallic building. It's certainly dominating, though, and representative of an entirely different architectural school than both Old City Hall and New City Hall in Toronto. For nearly forty years after it was completed, it was the tallest building in the city of Los Angeles. The Cicero quote, I think, gives a touch of class, and it's one that I think more politicians should take seriously.

On that note, the dozen or so of you who read this weblog on a regular basis may be interested to know that I intend on registering to run for Mayor of Toronto in 2010. Yes, seriously. It's not as if I'm the first to talk about throwing a hat into the ring.

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Think of It as Evolution in Action

Despite the way they tend to attract sf writers, there are a great many stumbling blocks in the path of anyone who dreams of building an arcology. Aside from the financial gymnastics that would be required to build and maintain a hyperstructure inhabited by tens or hundreds of thousands of people, it's a safe bet to say that the underlying technology to build a city in a box does not exist as of 2009. It's an equally safe bet, however, that solutions to those problems will be found during the course of the twenty-first century - so long as industrial civilization remains sufficiently intact to capitalize on them.

The threat of environmental degradation and collapse, as I wrote on Wednesday, may be one factor that spurs the construction of arcologies or arcology-like habitats over the next hundred years. It's hardly the only one. In a 2004 comment on the nature of Todos Santos, the arcology at the center of affairs in the Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle novel Oath of Fealty, James Nicoll had this to say on what happened to drive people into the City in a Box:

Fear is what happened. Todos Santos existed because there were a lot of white folk and black people of a particular sort who were terrified after the riots that cleared the ground TS was built on. Once there was a huddling place for them to flee to that wouldn't cost them their jobs, they ran to it.

This probably means even without the unfortunate events of 9/11 a lot of cities couldn't build up the head of pressure needed to make people live in a society like TS (One that combines the worst aspects of a small town, a condo and a stockage deep in enemy territory) and so whatever Lord Haw Haw thinks while drinking himself blind Toronto just isn't going to be able to generate the fear to make people ignore the downsides of living in a big box. The future of TS style enclaves is in nations where sharp divides exist between groups, whether it's rich/poor, ethnic divisions or other visible differences. Think Sao Paulo, not Minneapolis.

When Oath of Fealty isn't following the brave, upstanding, forthright, free-willed, yadda-yadda "heroes" of Todos Santos as they work to suck Los Angeles dry, one of the continuing subplots involves a visiting Canadian governmental official investigating possibilities for a new arcology to be built up north. The novel ends with those possibilities being set in motion, for a northern Todos Santos that might not stand apart so sternly from its neighbors.

I think the idea's ridiculous, though considering that said Canadian official sported an honorific ("Sir") of the sort that's been verboten since 1935, at least Niven and Pournelle seem to have given Canada an even coat of paint from the unrealistic brush. While the traditional idea of the arcology has a certain attractiveness in a land with such punishing climates - the 1883 pamphlet The Dominion in 1983 described many Canadian cities as being similar to the modern concept of the arcology - I agree with James Nicoll, and I don't think that the psychological necessity is there. There's nothing to run from in Canada. Cities like Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver don't have the same undercurrent of tension or separation that seem to pervade cities like Los Angeles. From the gilded mansions of Beverly Hills to the low-slung, barred-windowed, chipped-paint neighborhoods of Boyle Heights or South Central, there are subtle indications of a "class system" in LA - something which would be fertile ground for a fear-driven isolationist impulse, but which does not exist to nearly the same degree up north.

Los Angeles isn't unique in this respect, though. If the "fear model" of arcologies does get off the ground, I suspect that many of them will be built in Europe. European states tend to have a fractious relationship with their immigrant populations - while the idea of a Canadian ethnicity or "Canadian blood" (as opposed to First Nations, that is) is faintly ridiculous to me, countries like France, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and so on have been ethnically homogeneous for most of their history - and as more and more people from Africa and the Middle East seek sanctuary in Europe, I imagine there's going to be more and more backlash from the people already there.

In France, the habitation à loyer modéré subsidized housing projects are where nearly 25% of that country's population resides, and the inhabitants seem to be disproportionately immigrants. A similar undercurrent of tension exists between the "ethnic Francais" and the immigrant community, most recently manifesting in the 2005 and 2007 civil disturbances. If arcologies could feasibly be built, I would not be surprised at all to see Arcologie Toussaint rise atop a burned-out chunk of suburban Paris, a secure refuge for "pure" French culture.

There seems to be, I think, a similar undercurrent of alienation in the United Kingdom. It goes at least as far back as Enoch Powell, who in 1968 made a speech where he described the UK as "busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre" for allowing continued immigration. Today, the Daily Mail is Britain's bastion of anti-immigrant rhetoric - I didn't have to look far to find an editorial there decrying "Labour's open-door immigration policy putting Britain's burgeoning population on course for a Black-Hole-Of-Calcutta nightmare of 70 million." If All Saints, or maybe New Camelot, or Albion, ever went up in the green and pleasant land, the Mail would probably be sponsoring it.

To me, it's something I have difficulty wrapping my brain around. That may come from my upbringing, since as the most cosmopolitan city on Earth, Toronto is effectively the antithesis of an arcology - open, rambling, full of different people and different viewpoints. Arcologies may well come to dominate skylines in the years ahead, but I don't think many - if any - will rise under the maple leaf.

PDP #143: La Cienega Sunset

Los Angeles has a much-deserved reputation for being built around the automobile. As a result, the city spreads lazily over a vast tract of land that feels like it could swallow multiple Torontos - two, to be precise, but that doesn't take into account LA's equally sprawling metropolitan area - and sees punishing traffic jams that turn streets into seas of brakelights and high-beams. The varied geography of Los Angeles, built as it is in and around a low valley, provides many opportunities for fresh perspectives on this.

When I first saw this sight, it took my breath away. This is La Cienega Boulevard, looking south and extremely downhill from its northern terminus at Sunset Boulevard, just before 6 PM. It's a river of light worthy of the Don Valley Parkway.

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Architectural Ecologies

The arcology, a single massive building that amounts to a city in its own right, has occupied the imagination of visionary architects and science fiction writers alike since the twentieth century. In part it's the extension of the twentieth century experience to its ultimate conclusion; after a period shaped by people moving from rural to urban or semi-urban areas, the idea that the vast, rambling city could be boiled down to its essence within just one set of walls seems like a natural endpoint.

In theory, arcologies are great. They're the absolute antithesis of sprawl, since by their very nature they must be efficient in order to prosper. While today a city can expand by annexing land from rural neighbors and throwing open the floodgates to suburban development - this is pretty much the way Mississauga went from a cluster of small towns to a city of 700,000 in fifty years - adding on to an existing arcology would be a major construction project, extremely taxing in time, effort, and money, and so rewards would naturally stem from working within its limits to the best possible degree. Arcologies would, by necessity, advance the frontiers of knowledge in sustainable living.

I've recently started reading Oath of Fealty, a 1981 novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle set in and around Todos Santos ("All Saints"), a massive, hulking, fortress-like arcology built upon a riot-ravaged residential neighborhood somewhere in Los Angeles ("Los Angeles") of the near future. Though I can't say which side the authors come down on, having only made it to page 125 out of 324, I can't say their speculations about what life in an arcology might be like are off the mark. Todos Santos is a society tightly controlled by custom, its inhabitants under the constant possibility of surveillance, and absolutely ruthless in dealing with what it perceives as threats to its security.

Part of Todos Santos' reason for being is described as practice for starships - in a world without the possibility of faster-than-light travel, starships would out of necessity need to function as self-reliant, sustainable, entirely self-contained societies. Other arcologies arose out of a belief that denser and denser populations would be the wave of the future - this is their primary function in SimCity 2000, for example, as they allow mayors to gain a large source of tax revenue with a small physical footprint, or as a means to combat overpopulation, as in Robert Silverberg's The World Inside.

Personally, I don't think either motivation will be particularly strong, should arcologies ever be built - particularly not for overpopulation, for exactly the same reason that space colonization would not solve that problem. What I think could spur arcologies is simple - the need for security in an environmentally unstable world. GURPS Terradyne follows this trajectory in some respects - set in 2120, on an Earth that is suffering from environmental degradation, many states operate "complexes" for the poor that amount to arcological slums that police will not enter.

Should environmental degradation continue into the future, I can see the concept of the arcology becoming more and more attractive as a means to potentially create islands of social stability. In Oath of Fealty, Todos Santos is portrayed as something of a vampiric parasite on Los Angeles, sucking whatever jobs and wealth from the city it can while constantly planning new methods to come out on top. It might be more appropriate to cast a twenty-first century Todos Santos as the castle of the feudal lord and Los Angeles as a village of serfs, with LA dependent upon the rigidly controlled, self-sufficient arcology for its own stability and survival. In other environments, social stratification and separation between arcologies and neighboring cities could result in rich, powerful arcologies with feral cities, metropolitan centers devoid of central authority or security - effectively, extending Mogadishu to its ultimate conclusion - just beyond their walls.

So far, no one has solved the multitudinous engineering and ecological problems that would constitute the foundation of a successful arcology. Pioneering efforts such as Biosphere 2 and Arcosanti have not necessarily lived up to their expectations. Nevertheless, no matter how much of a positive or negative effect an arcology would have on its surroundings or the people within it, the underlying technologies and concepts are still worthy of investigation and development. We've come to a point where, for good or ill, humanity is actively managing the planetary ecosystem. Knowing how one works in miniature would be a boon to understanding the whole of Earth.

PDP #142: Yes, It Rains in Southern California

Yesterday, it seems, Los Angeles flipped its collective shit about the weather. It really doesn't rain much here - particularly not recently, as I believe the city did not receive so much as a raindrop over the entire month of November. That came to an end today, when Southern California's first winter storm crashed in from over the mighty Pacific. What was a winter storm here, though, would be an ordinary rainfall in Toronto. Aside from an hour or so of moderately heavy rain around noon, the precipitation was light enough - or, for that matter, nonexistent enough - that I didn't have to crack open my umbrella once while I hiked along Wilshire Boulevard from Vermont to Western, a little less than 1.7 kilometers.

One odd thing I noticed on my way was the number of streetside umbrella vendors - usually just a guy with a bucket full of umbrellas he'd try to hock to passing pedestrians. Thinking about it, though, it's not too surprising - since it hardly ever rains, most people would probably find it easier to just buy a cheap umbrella when necessary. I found this umbrella vendor outside Hollywood/Highland station, a little while after the rains had pushed on.

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Not A Moment Unsung

Yesterday my digital camera died - I killed it, to be more precise, by accidentally dropping it on a hard concrete floor - and today I feel incomplete. I picked it up on April 25, 2008, and in the time since I've taken more than eleven thousand photos and videos with it. The vast majority of the Public Domain Photography photos I've posted here over the last year came from it. I've been able to document my world with it, to preserve old and fresh perspectives alike while the capability still exists to record them. Now, everything that passes by just passes by, unable to be appreciated and soon forgotten.

Personally, I can't abide that. There are too many fleeting things in this world to go uncaptured, too many pieces of life that deserve to be remembered. Look at the present gulf between the film photography past and the digital present. While almost every house have albums upon albums of vacation, holiday, and family photos, most of these are left sandwiched between the pages and rarely ever see the light.

Other times it's difficult to find a photograph of something that's since been destroyed. For example, a while ago the city of Barrie demolished the historic Barrie Arena, home of hockey since the 1930s, so that a new fire station could be built on the site. It was demolished in 2008, well into the era of digital photography, but nevertheless only a handful of decent photos of the place exist online. UrbEx Barrie has the best ones I've found. Two photos out of a seventy-four year history. I have just as many photos of a soft drink called Leninade, the last photos I took off my camera before its untimely death.

The camera that photographed this tall, sparkling glass of Leninade is now as dead as Communism.

The present proliferation of cameras, in the form of cell phones and digital point-and-shoots alike, may help to end this. Whereas in the past cameras were bulky, had limited capacity and film development required a significant investment - a friend of mine still has fifteen or so undeveloped rolls of film from a trip we took to the United Kingdom in 2004, because he couldn't justify the cost of developing it since I'd taken a digital camera - modern cameras can hold hundreds of pictures that can be disseminated around the world cheaply and easily.

Nevertheless, just because capacities are there, it doesn't mean that the documentary inclination is. People generally photograph things that interest them personally, and I don't think the documentary inclination doesn't interest the average person. I certainly don't know anyone else offhand who would think to collect photographs of city buses or station nameplates in the Red Line. How many people, upon landing in Los Angeles, would practically salivate at the prospect of riding the Gold Line Extension?

Not everyone's doing it. That's as good a reason for me to keep on with it, no matter how many cameras fall along the way.