Haters Gonna Malahat

Okay, that's it, nothing to see here, time to roll up the sidewalks while we try keep the other cities from seeing the tears; the Economist Intelligence Unit has released its latest report, and according to its calculations, for the first time Vancouver is no longer the world's most liveable city. That title now goes to Melbourne, which tells me that "being in a country full of drop bears and clockspiders" does not have a negative effect on urban liveability ratings. The Toronto Star, playing to the whole hating-Vancouver-because-we-can't-move-to-Vancouver memeplex that's endemic back East, framed it as a loss of "bragging rights." Personally, it doesn't affect me; technically speaking, I don't live in Vancouver at all. More power to Melbourne for being on top of the game.

What concerns me, though, is the nature of the methodology that went into making this decision. According to the EIU's full release, which I haven't been able to locate - presumably it's one of the things you need a paid media membership in their website to access - Vancouver's rating was brought lower this year due to traffic congestion - which is honestly nothing new to Vancouver - though this particular congestion, which apparently derives from one closing of the route in April due to some kind of truck accident, is on the Malahat Highway.

Never heard of it? I'd lived here for a year and I hadn't either, and there's a good reason for that: Malahat Highway is on Vancouver Island. It's a twenty-five kilometer portion of Highway 1, the Trans-Canada Highway, on the far side of Victoria, and described as "the key Malahat Highway" by The Age of Melbourne - thus demonstrating that The Age's writers are regurgitating the EIU's press release and are unfamiliar with Vancouver's transportation infrastructure. Which is only understandable, as my knowledge of Melbourne's transportation infrastructure is limited to the fact that it has the largest streetcar network on Earth. But it seems to me that the use of this example means that the EIU has no greater understanding of Vancouver's situation.

"When we compile the scores, we look at the area around a city as well as the city itself for assessing indicators," said Jon Copestake, an analyst for the Economist who was quoted in the Vancouver Sun. "For example, congestion on the M25 is an indicator of problems in London's transport infrastructure. So we used the Malahat highway as an example of this for Vancouver."

Great, great, except for one thing... the M25 is a ring road that almost completely surrounds London. It's impossible for a ring road that surrounds a city to not be a canary in the mine for that city's transportation issues. The Malahat Highway, on the other hand, is not a ring road and does not surround Vancouver. Point of fact, there do not appear to be any ring roads anywhere in British Columbia. Not to mention that, realistically, sailing delays and fare increases on BC Ferries would have a far more substantial impact on traffic patterns in Vancouver than would the Malahat.

British Columbia Highway 99, passing through the farm fields of central Surrey, is a far more effective indicator of traffic issues in Vancouver by dint of actually being in Metro Vancouver.

I can understand the whole aspect of taking regional issues into account when rating a city. A look at, say, Toronto would be incomplete without also looking at the surrounding municipalities of the Greater Toronto Area, the highway network and GO Transit commuter rail system, considering that huge portions of the suburban population work in the big city. But on what planet is Victoria, an independent city on an island ninety kilometers from downtown Vancouver as the crow flies, part of Vancouver's region? This is more than the distance from Hamilton, Ontario to Niagara Falls or Kitchener-Waterloo, but would anyone consider it legitimate for Hamilton's cultural or high-tech liveability rating to be elevated because of those other cities?

What this makes me wonder is whether it's possible to make truly cogent evaluations about a thing without having specific familiarity with that thing. Someone who knew Vancouver, someone who had direct experience with it, would know better than to use the Malahat Highway as an indicator of traffic congestion in Vancouver - particularly when there are plenty of congested highways right here in the Lower Mainland. On the other hand, someone in a comfortable office in London, perhaps whose only familiarity with British Columbia is from a map, might find it believable to knock off Vancouver's points for problems on Vancouver Island. I mean, they practically have the same name, and they're right next to each other!

Honestly, the only thing these new ratings do for me is give me reason to be suspicious about their validity. If the Economist Intelligence Unit is willing to mark cities down for something that's by no stretch of the imagination in their region, not even on the same landmass, then how accurate are the rest of their assessments? I don't care about Vancouver losing the top spot in the ranking - it's more about losing faith in the idea that the ranking means something.

yes I know it's probably not pronounced that way

Photo: Get A Load of That Microbus

This past Friday night, I was at the corner of Granville and West Georgia and came across a vehicle that, if not for its license plate, might well have driven straight out of 1967. I know that back East, the standard Vancouver stereotype is that it's populated by granola-munching hippies; still, encountering something that matches that stereotype is almost shaking. That limp flag the microbus is flying, by the by, is of a peace sign.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Breaking the Action

For a while, I've been buying and reading old science fiction magazines - Astounding, Galaxy, If and so on, partially because they reflect the stages through which writers' sensibilities have passed. Even reading something from the 1970s gives me some insight as to how styles, assumptions, and modes of thought have changed in the subsequent decades, and I think that helps me improve as a writer. Still, it also means I find things fairly often that annoy me, and which I can't explain.

Things like the commercial break.

Okay, that's not what it's actually called - I call it that not only because I have no idea what term is appropriately applied to it, but because that's what the thing feels like. I'll be reading through a story, generally be in the middle of a conversation between two people, when the author will toss this my way:

#

That, in standard manuscript format, indicates a line break, and line breaks are generally used to separate scenes. What really gets me, what really grinds my gears and so on, is when it feels like that line break is misused - when it's jammed in the middle of a conversation for absolutely no reason. I was always of the impression that a scene should end on a conflict, an unresolved question, or a potential sticky situation in order to encourage the reader to keep going on. What I tend to find more often in these twentieth-century stories are line breaks inserted seemingly for the sake of line breaks. There's no scene transition - when they're misused, things pick up after the break exactly where they left off, and it's not even a natural break.

Let me illustrate what I'm talking about - here are a couple of paragraphs from my short story The Platinum Desolation, very slightly modified to accord with what I'm complaining about.

"Then it's a betfair that Lady Luna didn't start potshotting their ride until they were long after gone," Sujatmi said, ensconced in their own rumbling rover. "Question is, why haven't they come back? No one's filed any recent missing reports. The rover's listed as surplus out of Yutu, thirty years old. They rent them out to tourists, I've heard."

#

"Goddamn idiot earthworms," Christine stood and sighed. It figured she'd have been led there when the beacon needed quick fixing, lest some hauler wander off the trail and end up paying an unscheduled visit to Neil Armstrong's grave. "Don't know the first thing about their own security. They'd take off their own helmets on the surface if they could."

That break seems a bit out of place, doesn't it? I mean, nothing's changed. The situation is exactly the same as it was before, the characters are doing the same thing, and the break feels as artificial as a shoehorned TV commercial break. There's no reason for it to be there.

Maybe this was some kind of style back in the day. I don't know. All I know is that it's distracting; the way I see it, scenes should be separated because they're different scenes, not because separate scenes are just something that's done.

Photo: Port Mann, Old and New

For some time now, work has been underway on a replacement for the Port Mann Bridge, a 1960s near-twin of the Pattullo Bridge that connects Surrey to Coquitlam. Yesterday, the BC government announced that construction on the new bridge, which rather resembles the SkyBridge in renderings I've seen, has officially passed fifty percent completion. What I find interesting about the new Port Mann Bridge is that its design included reservations for a rapid transit line to be added at some point in the future. That in itself is good news; whether or not we need more bridges across the Fraser, in another couple of decades Surrey will definitely need another rapid transit connection to the Burrard Peninsula.

I got this shot from Coquitlam, right on the edge of Colony Farm Regional Park south of Lougheed Highway.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

A Choice of Engineering

When it comes to transit, not everyone thinks the same way I do. I can understand the arguments people make in favor of their cars - it's quicker, more comfortable, and they don't have to wedge themselves into the press of humanity that is an Expo Line SkyTrain no matter what time of day it is - but they're not for me. All I ever ask is that those people reciprocate; all I want is a wider understanding of people like me, people who choose public transit before private. Both modes are going to be an integral part of our transportation network for a long time to come, and creating an "us versus them" dichotomy serves no one.

It serves no one, at least, but it's advantageous to people who are peddling a particular political philosophy. Look east, to Toronto: last year Rob Ford was swept into office as the beneficiary years of media rhetoric that presumed the existence of a "war on cars" - a war that, at one point, the Toronto Sun defined as including speed bumps. Today, the city of Vancouver is gearing up for an election, and while it fortunately doesn't have to worry about the car-centric suburbs getting a vote, I can hear the same wheels spinning as were spun in Toronto last year - but they're not so much "spinning" as they are "furiously grinding, sending off a crazy shower of sparks."

My evidence: a Tuesday editorial in The Province - readable here on the Price Tags blog, as I have no desire to send extra traffic to that paper - which takes TransLink to task for... its ridership being at an all-time high? I remember writing about this the other day; I recall casting it as a good thing, meaning that more and more people in Metro Vancouver were considering transit a serious alternative for their getting-around needs, and that such a demand is necessary for TransLink to continue expanding its transit network, rather than be stuck with an ineffective, crumbling system as Toronto is.

The Province has another idea. You want to know why there are transit problems? Because of "the overpaid social engineers at TransLink, on various municipal councils, and various taxpayer funded institutions such as Simon Fraser University" - and because it's striving to keep expanding its network. According to those paragons of sentience at The Province, TransLink's ridership record "can largely be blamed" - blamed, mind you, in case any of you foolish sorts thought more people on transit was a good thing - "on the organization and its backers' constant attack on drivers." Aside from taxes, the paper blames "a failure to upgrade the road system leading to congestion" as forcing people onto public transit.

It is only the lack of grammatical errors that leads me to conclude that this editorial was not, in fact, written on Bizarro World.

Taking advantage of quick, efficient, inexpensive public transit to and from the airport? HOW DARE YOU!

Price Tags is right - that editorial reflects an attitude that should be decades buried. From my perspective it exhibits a paradoxical attitude, namely that while expansion of a public transit system is "social engineering" and a reflection of too high a tax burden, the expansion of a private transit system - Metro Vancouver's road network - is only natural. I can only suppose that the concept of induced demand is beyond the ken of The Province or its intended readership, as the idea of reducing congestion by building more preferable alternatives to driving, rather than building new roads and new lanes that will quickly be congested by new drivers, can seem a bit counterintuitive.

Granted, this isn't anything new for The Province. Its philosophies are those of a segment of society that had its day in the sun, and is slowly but steadily losing its grip on the discourse. In the meantime, though, there's still a lot of opportunity for significant damage to be done. To have a transit network that exceeds ridership records is something that deserves commendations, not blame. I suppose what I find most loathsome, though, is the paper's smug assumption that the only reason people ride transit is because they have no better choice.

I choose to get around by transit. I choose not to own a car, to the degree that I'm letting my Ontario driver's license expire and replacing it with a simple BC ID card. I choose not to be a part of that system, and there is no reason why my choice should be invalid. If TransLink is engineering anything, it's not society - only the means by which society may make a choice other than the car.

Photo: Tall Ship, Short Ferry

When the weather's warm and the TTC isn't on strike, there's a place out on the lake where plenty of Torontonians go to cool down and get away - the Toronto Islands. It's not far at all from the lakeshore to the islands, only four hundred meters at the Western Gap where the airport is, but the ferries are pretty much the only way to get there. In this photo from September 2009, the ferry Ongiara is making for the Centre Island Docks, I think - the tall ship isn't usually around. But it sure looks nice.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

A Will to Build

For more than a year now, off and on, I've been testing my skills at Starcraft II against other people with strange handles, and I've still yet to arrive at the point where I can win more often than not. Having thought about it, I've concluded it's down to my playing philosophy - I will advance my capabilities to a certain extent, but stop somewhat short of the top of the game's technological tree, subconsciously assuming that my opponent is doing the same thing or is slower than I am. Subsequently, I am obliterated by advanced units that I am incapable of turning away with the army I've managed to slap together.

It's common to encounter the same sort of problems in a public transit system... or, rather, a lot of the common problems suffered by public transit systems spring from similar lines of thinking as to what leads me to lose in Starcraft again and again. There's a temptation for cities to rest on their laurels, to decide that their transit system is "good enough," and put off necessary expansions time after time until it's been left behind, and can no longer cope with the demands placed upon it.

Earlier this week, TransLink put out a press release reporting that ridership across Metro Vancouver's transit system - bus, SeaBus, and SkyTrain - is approaching new highs, on track to shatter the 2010 record of 211.3 million passengers over the course of the year. Though TransLink apparently is on a sufficiently stable keel, financially, that it's able to keep the current system in a state of good repair without overstretching itself, that's just not good enough for a system that's consistently being used by more and more people. Thankfully, TransLink recognizes that, and is well aware of the need to expand the system - both to keep up with the demands being placed upon it, and to ensure that ridership continues to increase by making it more worthwhile to use.

Too bad TransLink doesn't have a sufficiently stable keel to embark on a major expansion program. Right now, the only serious plan on the books is the Evergreen Line, still planned for 2014 - and they'd better start building soon if they want to make that schedule; construction of the Millennium Line took four years, from 1998 to the end of 2001, and it's slightly less than twice as long as the Evergreen is planned to be. Beyond that, the Evergreen Line is only the closest-to-realization of an array of projects, many of which have barely even been conceived, that will be necessary to keep Metro Vancouver moving in the decades ahead.

An unfinished portion of the streetcar right-of-way on Toronto's St. Clair Avenue West, as of November 2009.

Transit systems are like sharks, in some ways - if they stop moving they die, and the same is true if they stop building. A transit system that has stopped expanding, that has no plans to expand, is as good as dead; many such systems were built in times of higher ridership, but have since been left to wither on the vine and are no longer capable of addressing urban or regional transportation needs in any significant way. This is unfortunately common in some American cities such as Buffalo and Cleveland - you didn't know Buffalo and Cleveland had subways, did you? Part of that is because the systems there are not enough to provide dynamic transit to the city as a whole. If you did know, well, good on you for knowing.

Thankfully, Metro Vancouver hasn't arrived at that state yet. The system here is still relatively new, still dynamic - in the last ten years alone the Millennium Line and Canada Line have been added to the rail network, and plans are in play to further expand the B-Line express bus system. For now, it seems that TransLink is on a generally ascending trajectory, and that the biggest barriers that will likely be faced for the expansion of Vancouver's transit is how to pay for it - rather than finding the will to expand to begin with.

For an example of a city that did not keep up with that pressure, and which has continually lacked the will to do what was necessary to ensure its transit was up to snuff, you need look no further than Toronto. Back in the 1980s, the Toronto Transit Commission was uncritically known as "the Better Way" - there were TV commercials advertising it! Of course, the 1980s may well have been the last good days for the TTC; the 1990s saw the election of the Progressive Conservatives to provincial government, and the operating subsidies provided to the TTC by the province - to the tune of more than $100 million - were unceremoniously yanked, and it was thereafter forced to maintain service based on farebox revenue and whatever money it could cadge from the city. In 2009, 66.7% of the TTC's cash came from fares paid - contrast this to TransLink, which only got 46.3% back from the box in the same year. Toronto's system is the most reliant on farebox revenue in all of North America - only Amtrak and GO Transit, neither of which are single-city public transit providers, rely more on what riders pay.

That lack of strong financial foundations is obvious now. The last substantial expansion of the Toronto transit network was in 1978 - when there was no SkyTrain and the SeaBus was new. The Transit City light rail plan could have done a lot to correct this imbalance, but thanks to a mayor who has consistently enshrined ideology over effectiveness, all Toronto will be getting now is a single, completely underground, crosstown light rail line that will cost more than some airports.

Vancouver doesn't have to go down this same path. We have the will. All we need is to make sure we find the means to realize it.

Photo: Heritage Clearance

This is 817 Granville Street, a City of Vancouver Heritage Building at the corner of Granville and Robson. Known as Power Block, its internal structure dates back to 1888, making it one of the oldest buildings in Vancouver; the outside was renovated in 1929 into its present Art Deco styling, something that's not too common in here even though Art Deco was all the rage when the city was new. Now, though, the site faces redevelopment - and while the presence of the Art Deco facade on the heritage registry means it will be retained when a new five-storey building goes up on the site, that's all that will be retained. The 1922 building next door, which isn't a listed heritage property, will of course be completely razed.

I suppose it could be worse, though - I suppose they could just demolish it. Coming from Toronto, I'm accustomed to cities bulldozing their pasts.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Better Than Despair

If you haven't read Jack Layton's last letter, I encourage you to do so. Even if you didn't agree with the man or his politics, I believe that the thrust of his letter is such that it's valuable across the political spectrum. Like Layton himself, the letter represents a fundamentally optimistic view, that "we can be a better, fairer, more equal country by working together. Don't let them tell you it can't be done."

There's no recourse to fear in it, which is only natural - even during the election, the NDP's campaign materials hewed toward the hopeful side of the spectrum, while it was the Conservatives that aimed straight for the fear centers with rhetoric like "Canada is an island in a sea of chaos." That's important today, I think, more so than it's been for a while. Because these aren't only trying times, but times have been trying for so long that people are starting to buckle with the strain. Rips in the social fabric are becoming more and more prominent.

"Love is better than anger," Layton wrote. "Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair." He's right... but what he doesn't say is that hope is harder than fear, and optimism is more difficult than despair. Sometimes it seems that pessimism comes naturally to humanity, which isn't all that shocking, when you consider that hundreds of thousands of years ago, pessimism - or, at the least, a disinclination to sit back and be assured that the world would deliver what was needed - could have been a survival trait. Within reason.

In recent years, though, I feel as if a profound sense of pessimism has sunk into mainstream culture - and by "recent years" I mean the entirety of the twenty-first century thus far. The last time I can remember a general cultural agreement that things were just awesome and would continue to do so was early 2000, before the dot-com crash and ensuing recession. A year later, the September 11 attacks, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the steadily creeping security focus of Western governments precluded any significant renaissance of optimism. The economic crash made pessimism more of a fact of life, and with today's headlines filled with stories of panicky herds of sheep-like investors and speculation about another recession - because, you know, the last one wasn't enough - there's no sense that things are going to get better any time soon.

Ducks are also better than despair.

Personally, I think this ties in with the disappearance of the future as something to look forward to, something to strive toward. There was a time, not so long ago, where the future was something that was going to change the world, was going to deliver better lives for everyone, was going to be glorious. That all changed once the future - that is, the twenty-first century - got off the plane and picked up the twentieth century's baggage. Culturally speaking, I don't feel as if there's any sense that the future is going to be anything special anymore - if anything, the seems to be a sense that tomorrow is going to be worse than today. While this isn't an unusual perspective in the grand sweep of history, it's a dramatic reversal of the last hundred years of cultural expectations.

It feels like we've settled for mediocrity and are retreating into the past. Whenever I'm in public now, I find women wearing those off-the-shoulder shirts imported direct from the 1980s - and I hear even legwarmers are coming back into style now. The neo-Victorian steampunk ethos is slowly approaching the social mainstream. The past is known, it's comfortable to many people, and - presuming that you ignore that vast, staggering social problems and inequalities that made the actual past an incredibly unpleasant place for huge sections of society - it's a place where you can be optimistic. Where you can forget about the future we're heading towards and try to create a new one instead.

It's easy to fear the future, because we don't know what's going to happen. It's easy to have despair for the future, because it will take long, difficult work to solve the problems we've got today. It's easy to forget that the difficult things in life are those most worth doing.

Hope and optimism are better things, and we still have a chance to use them in building a better world. All we need is the will to do so - because it can be done.

Photo: Among the Grasses

The news is travelling fast - Jack Layton, head of the New Democratic Party and leader of the Official Opposition, died of cancer this morning. Nobody expected it, really; people fight renewed bouts of cancer all the time, but there are always reminders like this that people don't always win.

I only saw him live twice - once in December 2008, during the freezing demonstration outside of Toronto City Hall against the first prorogation of Parliament, and then again in May, in the final big British Columbia rally in Burnaby a couple of days before the last election. He had an inspiring fire - more so than what you'd expect from an average politician, I think. He carried a sense of energy, of optimism, telling us in not so many words that there were great things we could do together.

Not many people such as him come around in any given time. I know he'll be sorely missed from one end of this country to the other.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Strange Kind of Freedom You Got There

Aside from a few inferences I've been able to pick up from television, film, and literature here and there, I'm not all that sure what North American city living was like eighty years ago. I suspect it can't have met the desires of everyone, though, considering the suburban exodus that began in the years after the Second World War - an exodus that still echoes today; look no farther than Toronto for the influence that a suburban emphasis can have on the political sphere, for instance. At the same time, I think it's highly reflective of how vast the cultural differences are between the 1950s and the 2010s.

The other day I encountered a 1950s television ad, "Two Ford Freedom," via the Seattle Transit Blog. It's an unintentional time capsule of '50s sensibilities, filled with such earnestness and innocence that at first it was hard for me to believe it was real - so syrupy sweet that I have to wonder if there was an unspoken cultural agreement not to look behind certain things, because the alternative was just too darn unpleasant.


There are a lot of deep problems hiding behind the superficial happiness of that commercial. So, in that respect, it's actually perfectly reflective of the 1950s!

"When he was gone, I was practically a prisoner in my own home," the nameless housewife says. "I couldn't get out to see my friends, couldn't take part in PTA activities - I couldn't even shop when I wanted to." With advertising like that, I can understand why people were just jumping at the chance to get a suburban house of their very own, surrounded by identical houses and isolated from all the services that improve quality of life! I tell you, cities of the '40s and '50s must have been something - either that, or the privations of the Depression and the war were such that having a house was the Important Thing, More Important Than All Other Important Things.

As someone who grew up in a suburban setting - admittedly, the very inner fringe of a suburb, but still - the housewife's complaints ring familiar, to a degree. If I wanted to go anywhere and couldn't bug Mom to give me a lift, I would have to take my bike, negotiate the intricate complexities of Barrie Transit, or just not go. The advantage of the 1990s is that those alternatives existed - not so in the 1950s suburban paradise.

Across the United States and Canada, public transit systems were under incredible strain from the explosive growth of suburbanization, the disappearance of significant portions of their ridership, and the conflicting demands of motorists. New suburbs just didn't have public transit, and commuter rail is out there either - aside from the Long Island Rail Road and the South Shore Line, I don't believe any of the present commuter rail systems in North America had begun service in the '50s. The bicycle, which in the nineteenth century was hailed as a means to liberate women, had by the 1950s become effectively a child's toy in mainstream North American culture - it wasn't until the '70s that bikes really started taking off for adults.

The solution is, of course, absolutely '50s. Rather than strive for a life that doesn't reduce people to prisoners in their own homes, just buy another car! Don't try to put any effort into the underlying problems that are evident in your society, don't even acknowledge them - just surrender to the Man and get behind that wheel. Just make sure it's a Ford!

After all, as she says - or as I expected her to say - "why be stuck with one expensive car, when you can be stuck with two?"

Photo: That Building Has the Right Idea

In this day and age, it's easy to feel down. No matter where you look you can find bad news without even wanting to, and it seems like it's been a long time since anyone honestly looked forward to the prospect of a better tomorrow. So it's good to find messages like the one on the side of the Wing Sang Building in Vancouver's Chinatown, a simple art installation with the message that "everything is going to be alright." It's visible from the SkyTrain between Stadium-Chinatown and Main Street-Science World, and there have been times after work where it's made me feel a bit better on seeing it. It's a message I wish could be reinforced more often in the media - when it comes down to it, a great many panics are sustained by the news telling people that they should be panicking, and people being too stupid too think about whether that's really the case.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Lying On A Bed of Rails

"This subway plan is realistic, it's affordable, and it will deliver real benefits for people living and working in Toronto in time for the 2015 Pan-Am Games."
- Rob Ford, from the Rob Ford for Mayor Transportation Plan, September 7, 2010

These are strange times to be a transit supporter in Toronto - which is just as well for me, seeing as how I'm not in Toronto anymore. Despite that, as a member of the Torontonian diaspora I can't help but watch and listen as the city groans a little bit louder with each passing day. I think it may come from the gradual realization of certain truths - such as the way in which Toronto's transportation infrastructure is continuing to lag behind, the way in which Hizzoner da Mayor's ideological emphasis on subways - specifically, the Sheppard subway, a wholly suburban line connecting a mall in North York to another mall in North York - and staunch opposition to surface-running light rail is making sure that Toronto will continue to operate a 1970s public transit system well into the twenty-first century.

Many of the important truths in life are simple. So simple, in fact, it's easy to go past them without noticing, leaving them lying neglected on the pavement. One such truth is one of the key points of argument - correlation does not imply causation. Said another way, just because two things happened at the same time, it does not mean that one caused the other. This would be a good thing for politicians to know about, or at the very least not ignore quite so much. That's more than I can expect for Hizzoner, though.

Recently, Ford claimed that he "campaigned on the Sheppard subway and people supported my platform." Well, I'll give him this - both of those statements are true. He did campaign on building the stubway to nowhere out to Scarborough Centre, and enough people did support his platform to propel him to the Mayor's Office. The assumption here is that people supported him because of his subway plans. Myself, I don't buy that - but I don't imagine that matters. People voted for Rob Ford, so in Rob Ford's mind, every single person who marked his name on their ballot wanted the whole package. To be fair to him, too, he's not doing anything that he didn't warn us about in his pre-election transportation plan - which is one of the reasons I was so opposed to him.

Mostly because his transportation platform rested on discarding a plotted-out system with plenty of dedicated funding that had been in the offing for three years, in favor of back-of-the-napkin "plans" with no money to pay for them. Now, that proud brashness may finally be biting at Ford; Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty appears singularly uninterested, and rightly so, in giving Ford $650 million to pursue his dream of a completed Sheppard Line three years from now. Dollars which, by the way, come from the Eglinton Crosstown LRT construction - because the Ford camp is "already certain" that one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in Toronto's history will come in under budget.

Pull the other one.

A subway train departs from, or possibly arrives at, Sheppard-Yonge Station. Since they use the same tail track it's hard to tell sometimes.

There's ideology, and then there's just stupidity. Sure, I like subways; they're fast and smooth and have a lot more room for people to move around inside - unlike the SkyTrain here in Vancouver, where just because someone's standing next to the door it doesn't mean they're getting off at the next station. I feel that the Ford administration has already breezed past ideology and moved to stupidity in its monomaniacal pursuit of a subway underneath Sheppard Avenue East. If only Ford was pursuing his promise to not cut services with the same sort of mania.

On Wednesday, Randy McDonald at A Bit More Detail asked whether it was worth it for McGuinty to throw sand in Ford's eyes, for Toronto's sake - "is it worth taking down Ford if Toronto's left with no major transit expansion plans?" Personally, I say yes. Despite what we may be inclined to believe, there are circumstances where it's better to have nothing than to have something that's not appropriate for the situation. A completed Sheppard Line would be a money pit for years; the TTC is struggling to afford its current operations, and that doesn't even take into account the additional fiscal pressures that will kick in once the extension to Vaughan opens in 2014.

It was the suburbs who voted overwhelmingly for Rob Ford, drowning out the old city of Toronto's support for Smitherman. It was the responsibility of the suburban voters to know what they were in for when they marked Ford on their ballot. It's the suburbs who will suffer because they decided to listen to the subway crusader, without stopping to consider that the choice wasn't between LRT and subways - it was between LRT and nothing. This isn't the same category as people voting for Ford on his gravy-drinking bona fides, only to find him preparing to close libraries left and right - this was his plan for the start, regardless of whether the money was there.

The money isn't there. So there won't be much of a start after all.

Photo: Treads and Wheels

For a while, there have been tanks on Beatty Street. Two of them, to be precise, placed as static installations outside the Beatty Street Drill Hall - an M4A3E8 Sherman and a Ram Mk II, both of Second World War provenance. I was thankful to see that they'd been cleaned up; some weeks earlier I'd been going down the far side of Beatty Street, and one of the tanks had been covered by graffiti - probably the work of some group of morons completely ignorant of both historical importance and simple respect, perhaps a result of the riot.

Photographed here is the Sherman, contrasted against the more common sort of wheels you'll find in Vancouver today.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

A Chip Off the Old Book

"Most importantly, putting many titles into a story makes it easier to find your place if you happen to use your book to smash an irksome buzzing fly, and you hit the fly so hard that pieces of metal and plastic go shooting out of the book mechanism, so then you are forced to put the story chip into a new reader and you cannot remember where you were.

"This happens more often than you might expect."
- James Alan Gardner, Ascending

Technological advance rarely goes in the directions it's expected to. It can be argued that today we live in a world of electronics, but fifty years ago electronics was something of an also-ran; in 1961, people looked ahead to a future of personal helicopters, space colonies, and too-cheap-to-meter nuclear power. By the same token, it's an assured bet that the future will not look like what we expect it to - while the tranformative technology that will throw our projections out of order may well exist already, it takes time for technology to mature to the point where it can really influence the world. Even when we're pretty sure what we can reasonably expect, the future has a tendency of buggering up all our neat estimations.

One significant example of this is the present-day ebook revolution. Now, the idea of an ebook was something simple, simple enough that it's been a fixture of science fiction for decades; it did not require much of a logical leap to assume that in the future, it would be easy and economical to read books on a computer rather than paper. Where those visions ended up conflicting with reality was in the details of how they worked. It's understandable, as these visions tended to emerge when the internet was less capable than it is now, and when "filesharing" was letting your colleague use the papers socked away in your cabinet.

The quote at the top, from James Alan Gardner's 2001 novel Ascending, marks one of the common ways to visualize how ebooks would be adopted into society: like books, but more advanced. Rather than going to the store to get a couple of hundred pages glued together and sandwiched between covers, you'd instead get a computer chip that contained the book, and which you'd need to insert into an ebook reader in order to use - now that I think about it, greatly similar to the way Nintendo DS games are packaged and used, though I always imagined those "book chips" as looking more like SD cards.

Heavy, ain't it?

Presuming that they come with "covers" sufficient to keep out dust and so on, a library of book chips would be substantially less bulky than actual, physical books, and far easier to move around - though considerably more vulnerable to being fried by electromagnetic pulses. A book chip-based model would also preserve the book market in the form that was familiar right up to the last couple of years. Sure, if you have a blank book chip you'd likely be able to download the public domain texts from Project Gutenberg or a Creative Commons-licensed work onto it, but digital restriction technologies may well have been in place to prevent you from downloading an ebook to one of your blank book chips. Why? Because it lessens their control.

The ebook model we've got, that of direct downloads to reader devices, has its advantages and its disadvantages. When it's working, it's efficient - you don't have to truck your butt down to the store to get the next book in the series, you can just order it online and zap it's there. That, incidentally, leads into one of the model's great disadvantages - if for some reason the company doesn't want you to have a book that you've previously bought, they can just sound the recall on their devices and zap, the book is gone. This is not just idle speculation; Amazon has already demonstrated it can do this, as demonstrated by its remote recall of Kindle-purchased copies of 1984 back in 2009. Afterward Amazon said it wouldn't do this again... but corporations say a lot of things, and Amazon is not the only ebook retailer out there. Whereas if I buy a book from Chapters, I can be reasonably confident that a couple of Customer Experience Representatives won't break into my apartment in the dead of night and return it to their shelves.

There's another thing that "book chip" ebooks gives us that actual ebooks don't - a used market. Whenever you've got any sort of physical media, you can be assured that someone out there will be in the business of buying and reselling it, sometimes to ridiculous extremes - the last time I was in the Salvation Army Thrift Store, they had for sale the CDs for Total Annihilation, a 1997 RTS computer game that would be hard-pressed to run under modern operating systems. I recognize the value of the used market; it was a used book store on Dunlop Street in downtown Barrie, a couple minutes away from my high school, that started me into things that I wasn't then able to find in the dedicated bookstores. For non-physical media like modern ebooks, though, there's no such thing. It puts a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of the producer and the provider, and not of the buyer.

I think I prefer the older, speculative ebook model because of familiarity - it provides new opportunities within a framework that's already known.

Photo: Crowing Over Plastic

Even though I've been here for nearly a year, I still find it a bit odd how crows are absolutely ubiquitous in Metro Vancouver. Everywhere you look, there's one chilling on some telephone lines or hopping around on the ground. Over the weekend I caught this one in Thornton Park, across from Pacific Central Station - I presume it did not much care for the taste of the discarded plastic bag some thoughtless person left in the grass.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Gaucheworld

As a creator, it's easy to make paradoxes without really meaning to. It's easiest for people who make television and movies, and it manifests in the form of the Celebrity Paradox - that is, with a given show that stars a specific celebrity, the generally non-stated assumption that it exists in an alternate universe where neither that show nor that celebrity exist. Otherwise things would get pretty meta, as the celebrity's character could conceivably run into the celebrity on the street, and they could gain insight into their situation by buying the series on DVD.

Recently I've been giving more thought to a subset of this - think of it as the Creator Paradox. Simply put, it's this: within the context of a specific work by a specific creator, what becomes of the rest of that creator's output?

The reason I've been thinking about this is Robert L. Forward's 1985 novel Rocheworld, the story of a voyage of exploration to Barnard's Star. Thankfully, the trigger didn't come until the last few pages, at which point the story was winding down and it didn't trip me up the way it could have.

"George was in his bed, staring up at the viewscreen in the ceiling and scanning through an old science fiction novel, Dragon's Egg. He'd read it many times before, but it was so full of scientific tidbits that he always enjoyed dipping into it before going to sleep. His favorite part was when the alien 'cheela' came up from the surface of a neutron star to visit the humans in orbit above them, riding on miniature black holes."

Granted, when I first read that, it didn't trip me up. Instead, what I thought was something along the lines of "nice, a shout-out to Larry Niven!" Because I've never read Dragon's Egg, you see. It was only later that night while I was tooling around Wikipedia that I went over to the novel's page, found that it had won the 1981 Locus Award for First Novel, and that it was written by... Robert L. Forward.

My reaction was along the lines of "man, how gauche." Giving a shout-out to one of your friends or fellow travellers within your work is one thing. Giving a shout-out to yourself is something else again. Sure, I know that as an author you're going to think your stuff is gold, that it's platinum, that it's so awesome that people will be appreciating it long after you're gone. A touch of arrogance is necessary in a starting writer, or that writer wouldn't believe their stuff is good enough to be published anyway. But outright stating it... it's a big bump in the road that adds nothing to the story. In fact, I think it subtracts from it. It's not smart or witty or anything like that. It's tooting your own horn, and it just looks sad.

Presumably, though, Rocheworld takes place in a world where Dr. Forward never wrote The Flight of the Dragonfly and never expanded it into Rocheworld. This is something I've thought about for myself in the past for my own stories, if only so that I'd have an answer at the ready in the unlikely event anyone ever posed the question. In the context of what I write, I died in 1996 after an unfortunate bicycling encounter with a rusty mailbox. We all have our solutions.

Photo: Distorted Harbour

You don't have to get close to the speed limit of the universe for light to behave in interesting ways. Sometimes, the right kind of reflective surface is enough. Last Friday evening as the sun was landing low in the sky, I caught this shot of the Harbour Centre tower distorted in the windows of Vancouver Community College on Dunsmuir at Hamilton.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Lock

People change their minds all the time. They change their minds about what route they're going to take to work, what they're going to have for lunch, and what they're going to say to the boss when they finally win the lottery. I happen to think that changing your mind is good; it demonstrates that you're open to new information, new knowledge, new experiences and new conclusions, and that you're willing to allow that newness to influence the manner in which you look at the world.

In politics, however, it almost seems like this is a cardinal sin.

Changes of mind and direction have been somewhat prominent in the news recently. In Toronto, there haven't been many recent stories about city councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, he with the communist-detecting nose, that have skipped over his past involvement as a union leader and a member of the New Democratic Party - posts practically diametrically opposite from his current place as an ally of the Ford administration. Before that, federal NDP interim leader Nycole Turmel took heat in the media for her ties to the Quebec sovereignty movement - ties which were, incidentally, dissolved once she became interim leader.

I've seen politicians been lambasted in the world of public opinion for daring - daring - to change their opinion on an issue. Note that this is something entirely distinct from not living up to platform promises, as I suspect that aside from circumstances where a dog is elected mayor of a small town, you're not going to find a politician who doesn't renege on electoral promises in one way or another.

I can't help but see this as completely backwards. The last sort of person I want in a position of power is someone who will hold on to their view of the world come hell or high water, despite new information or changing circumstances. The modern world is a protean thing, and it will not be forced down the same old channel no matter how much you want it to. A proper leader should be able to go with it, to change course mid-stream, and not stand resolute against the current. That's the problem with leaders such as, say, Rob Ford - he knows what he knows and he'll be damned if anything's going to change his mind, so the world had better adapt to the way he wants it to be.

Too bad the world doesn't actually work that way.

Photo: Totally West Coast (Express)

Though I've been in New Westminster for nearly a year, so far I've never had a reason, much less an opportunity, to ride the West Coast Express - however, I understand that this is fairly common for people who have spent much of their lives in Vancouver or the immediately surrounding cities. I wouldn't mind trying it out sometime, if only to see the manner in which the West Coast Express distinguishes itself from GO Transit, Metrolink, Coaster, Agence métropolitaine de transport, and all the other commuter rail networks that use Bombardier Bi-Levels - the Cappuccino Car. It hosts a small coffee shop that sells coffee, cappuccino, snacks, juice, and so on while the train is in transit.

Surprisingly, Seattle's Sounder commuter rail doesn't appear to have an equivalent to this. But it's a reminder that sometimes, a regional stereotype has a basis in fact.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

A Smell of Communism

Toronto is, I'm sure, becoming more of a laughingstock by the day, and by the time 2014 rolls around I expect the administration of the Brothers Ford to have provided textbooks worth of object lessons for "what not to do" in the world of public relations. The most recent event isn't even that much of a surprise when you put it into a Fordian context... but just because something isn't surprising doesn't mean you expect for it to happen.

On Monday, Toronto city councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, one of my opponents in the mayoral election last year and now a strong ally of the Brothers Ford, opened a new page on Facebook: “Save the City..Support the Ford Administration.” In itself, it wouldn't be newsworthy; people create Facebook pages all the time. What's different about this, though, is that Mammoliti has explicitly set it up from the get-go as a political echo chamber. Only posts that agree with and support the direction Toronto is taking under the Fords will be allowed; posts from "people who are clearly working for a living, and wanting their tax dollars to be used in a particular way." Why? Because Mammoliti is "trying to wean out the typical communist thinker who will be doing nothing but whining."

After all, if you didn't vote for Ford, you don't deserve to have your voice heard. Ford won (with a plurality of a minority of valid electors), so for the next four years what he says goes. Granted, it fits within the letter of democracy, but it savages the spirit of it. The point of leadership is to lead.

But it doesn't matter, not to these folks. Because, you see, there are communists in Toronto. Not only have they smashed open the gates, they're attending all-night deputations at City Hall to speak out against service cuts! Amazing that out of one hundred and sixty-nine speakers, one hundred and sixty-six would thus prove to be communists, but don't worry. Mammoliti and Doug Ford and Denzil Minnan-Wong have determined, presumably through science, that the speakers at the deputations were unrepresentative of Toronto's population and thus their opinions can be safely ignored.

Except for one thing - it's goddamn ideological bullshit. Either Ford's supporters are too lazy or self-interested to go down to City Hall to support their leader, or... gasp... Ford's supporters supported him because "no service cuts" was the core of his platform. The political doublethink here is amazing, if also disgusting. So, magically, people who oppose the Ford administration's current priorities, who want Hizzoner da Mayor to live up to the commitments he made on the campaign trail, become communists... and who ever cared about what a communist thought, anyway?

This is what Giorgio Mammoliti sees when he sleeps, presumably; only Ford stands between Toronto and this.

To me, this is just another example of how hopelessly out of touch this administration is with the modern day and with people of my generation and after. Rob Ford is forty-two and Mammoliti is fifty; I can understand that when they were growing up, in those heady days of the 1970s and early 1980s, Canada's popular culture was vastly influenced by the Cold War and the idea that communists were the bad guys was a given. They grew up surrounded by the threat of war, with the idea that the Reds over the horizon were just waiting for an opportunity to nuke the hell out of them.

Today, it's vastly different. I don't remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, the effective end of the Cold War; I was six years old at the time. By the time I started becoming really aware of the greater world during Operation Desert Storm, the Soviet Union had less than a year of life left to it. It's been twenty years since there's been a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and for an increasingly large segment of the population, communism is effectively irrelevant. It's something people learn about in school. Communism doesn't keep Canadian sunseekers from the beaches of Cuba, it doesn't hamper the flow of trade between Canada and the People's Republic of China, and North Korea is almost as much a monarchy as it is communist. When Mammoliti says he's not going to be accepting comments from communists I have to laugh, because it's meaningless.

It still has an effect, though. It legitimizes polarization. It demonstrates that the administration is concerned only with its supporters, and that it does not care about those who disagree with the direction it's moving in. Which is a problem, as the government of the City of Toronto is supposed to represent all Torontonians. It poisons political discourse in the city, and it makes me thankful that I was able to escape to British Columbia when I did. I mean, were there ever any city councillors during the Miller years who dismissed their opponents as fascists or Nazis? Mammoliti is doing the same damn thing right now.

Speaking of the Soviet Union, though, there is a very good Russian term that deserves to be brought into this, I think: nekulturny. Literally translated it means "uncultured," but like many insults there's a hell of a lot more oomph packed into it, and so far as I know it is one of the strongest insults available in the Russian language.

If Mammoliti can smell communism, it's only because he and the Fords - since if they really didn't agree with his direction, they would've come down on him by now - are simply nekulturny.

Photo: The Flag of Communist Toronto

Having failed to find a place to build Toronto a red light district, it looks as if he's settled for just finding some Reds. Yesterday, news broke that Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, erstwhile mayoral candidate and now one of the Brothers Ford's allies on Toronto City Council, opened a Facebook site "to give voice to the silent majority of working-class Torontonians" - because you know all of the people who showed up at the all-night deputations a little while ago to speak out against the service cuts that Hizzoner da Mayor assured us would NEVER HAPPEN back when he was on the campaign trail? They're communists. I am not exaggerating here; these are Mammoliti's own words. He knows how "communists smell," and believes they are attempting to "brainwash" him.

So to commemorate this red-letter day in city politics, I thought I'd present this - a flag for the communist City of Toronto. Would that make it the Union of Torontonian Socialist Municipalities?

Comments and criticism on the design are welcome. Photos will return on Friday, but you will likely be seeing this flag again tomorrow, as I know precisely what I'm going to be writing about.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).