Photo: Millennium in Motion

Some photos are purely opportunistic, based on an instant's realization that something could look interesting. That's the kind of thought I had while I was waiting on the Lougheed Town Centre platform the other night, and since Lougheed will be a Millennium Line-only station until 2016, I had a fair bit of time to wait. Here, a train bound for VCC-Clark accelerates past the far platform, reflected in the platform barriers that, I suppose, keep people from climbing up to the track from the ground and electrocuting themselves on the third rail.


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The Park(ade) of the Covenant

For much of the twentieth century it was there, balanced on those dozens of bare metal supports drilled into the ground, standing between the city and its waterfront. The New Westminster Waterfront Parkade appears to be the single largest assembly of parking spaces in the downtown area, with seven hundred and forty-nine spots available, but at the cost of completely overshadowing Front Street and acting as a physical and psychological barrier - not to the same degree as something like the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto, but a barrier nonetheless. The approaching completion of Westminster Pier Park may change this, but for now the parkade is, for all its potential utility, a definite eyesore that means downtown perpetually has one foot in the 1950s.

What's worse is that it's not even heavily utilized. Back in 2008, the city government found that demand for the parkade's spots was such that there was only a 38.3% usage rate; I visit the parkade fairly regularly on the weekends, as its top deck provides an excellent vantage point for photographs of the bridges, the mountains, the river, and the Surrey waterfront, and in my experience it's never seemed as if even a third of the spaces were being used. Meanwhile, down underneath the business of Front Street soldier on in obscurity, with handmade signs placed at strategic Columbia Street intersections to let people know that, yes, there are actual things underneath that hulking assembly of green-painted steel. Only to a degree, though; Front Street is a wasteland between McKenzie and Begbie, and I can think of only a single business that actually operates there between the shuttered doors and newspapered windows.

Recently, though, downtown New West has begun to experience a renaissance. Much of the preparation for this was made before I arrived, but even in the last year I've seen the development of downtown with the opening of River Market and the transit-oriented construction around New Westminster Station and the work on the Pier Park and the Multi-Use Civic Facility. Downtown New West may be leaping into the twenty-first century, but... there's still the issue of the parkade; there's a small but growing divide between those who want to maintain it and those who want to tear some of it down.

It's the business owners of downtown New West, by and large, that want the thing to stay up. Last week the New Westminster News Leader covered some of the issues surrounding the parkade; Bill Shannon of the Downtown Business Improvement Area led off the article with concerns about how a lack of parking could increase uncertainty for businesses, particularly with so many new people coming to downtown in line with the new developments. I can understand where the BIA's concerns come from, but I can't help but feel they're rooted in a view that is becoming increasingly out of step with the modern world.

The upper deck of the western end of the downtown parkade, photographed on Sunday, January 8 at 2:30 PM. This is the section currently being considered for removal by the city.

The BIA's concern is that a more people coming to downtown New West to live or to visit will create a parking crunch; based on what I see, I can't take that view. The civic facility will include a small parkade of its own when it's finished, and there's already significant on-street and in-lot parking in downtown for visitors to the pier park. What I take issue with in this is what seems to be an unconscious twentieth-century bias; all people are assumed, as a matter of course, to be reaching downtown by car.

My own view is that private vehicles will bear an increasingly small percentage of the modal share for transportation to downtown as time goes on. It's easy to get to downtown by transit; it's bracketed by two SkyTrain stations, an advantage that many cities in the Lower Mainland lack. Beyond that, I don't see how an increase in downtown's population will be the salvation of the parkade; it seems to me that people who live downtown would patronize downtown businesses as pedestrians, not drivers.

My own view is that the city should remove the underused, western portion of the parkade. It would open up an entire block of Front Street to the sky and to the riverfront. If additional parking does become necessary somewhere down the line, I'd rather see the city investing in a new structure that's far more integrated with its surroundings, and which doesn't look like it'll come down like a bunch of Jenga blocks in an earthquake.

I'd like to see downtown really move into the twenty-first century. Re-evaluating the parkade would, I think, be a good place to start.

Photo: Breaking Down, Building Up

When I moved to New Westminster in 2010, there wasn't much to distinguish Alexander Street. It was just one of multiple small, mid-block roads where you could find a few small businesses, a Money Mart, a corner grocery store, and so on. That's all gone now, because it's the site of New Westminster's new Multi-Use Civic Facility, still unnamed and with completion not expected until late 2013. Right now the site is still being readied in preparation for construction. I'm interested in seeing what this thing looks like once it's finally done; also, what they decide to name it. Names are important, after all.


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A Den of VIPRs

At this point, it's unlikely that we'd be able to go back to the way things were twelve years ago; too many variables have changed, too many vested interests have entrenched themselves. It's difficult to project a near-term future where the security theatre that's become increasingly dominant in the West in general and the United States in particular will take a step back - instead, what's easiest to see is a future where that security theatre keeps moving forward, grimly and relentlessly, and in the name of security it may stamp freedom into the dust.

On the face of it, Canada and the United States responded to the September 11 attacks in similar ways; where the US set up the TSA under the Department of Homeland Security to take over airport security, which up until then had been overseen by one of the airlines using that airport, Canada established CATSA. The airport experience in both countries is broadly similar; airports on both sides of the border have pornoscanners, though you won't necessarily have to go through them, and while they didn't made me take my shoes off in the screening lines at Vancouver or Fredericton, that's been the case in Toronto and Los Angeles. The liquid restriction rule, intended to prevent binary explosives like in Die Hard With a Vengeance being brought on board, is universal, which for me just makes Amtrak that much more attractive for cross-border travel.

There is, however, one key difference; it's right in the names. CATSA is the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority; it's specifically responsible for security in airports, and nowhere else. The TSA is the Transportation Security Administration, and while many people consider it to be just the agency that deals with airport security, its actual bailiwick is "[to protect] the Nation's transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce."

That's right, the TSA's authority isn't just limited to airports, but extends to all transportation systems within the United States... which is rather a large point of responsibility, don't you think? It's also a rather unsettling one when you take into account issues of the sort that were raised in the Orange County Register's editorial of December 28th, which shines a light on the TSA's moves after ten years to expand their presence outside the airports. Right now there are twenty-five Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response, or VIPR, teams active in the United States.

What are they doing, you might ask? Well, according to NewsChannel5 of Nashville, back in October some of them were in Tennessee, establishing security checkpoints at two bus stations and five Interstate weigh stations in the state - giving Tennessee the somewhat dubious honor of becoming the "first state to fight terrorism statewide," as the headline rather bombastically puts it.

I'm sorry, sir or madam, but federal regulations dictate that no person may travel outside their homes with unscreened liquid in excess of 100 mL in a clear plastic bag. Please exit your car for secondary screening.

This is how it starts - not with a bang, but with a whimper. This is how control is extended. This is where police states begin. Sobriety checkpoints are one thing, but these are something else again; if anyone had suggested establishing security checkpoints on the highways to combat terrorism twenty years ago they would have been dismissed as a lunatic, and from 1992 to 2012 we get the entrenchment of lunacy as policy. How far can this go? Will security checkpoints along the highways, in metro stations and train stations, and on the streets be facts of life? Will there be something that, although it would never be called as such, acts like the internal passports of the Soviet Union - something to justify the warnings of "your papers, please?"

I'm thankful that, for now at least, Canada's version is specifically limited to airport security. There have also been pushbacks in the United States; in 2011, Amtrak ordered VIPR teams off its property for a time in response to some of these searches. Freedom of movement is an integral right in a free and open state, and while these random security checkpoints on previously open routes are justified by the spectre of terrorism, the real threat is what this sort of thing normalizes. Ten, twenty years from now - who knows?

Plus, that's if there isn't another major attack. If terrorists strike the United States again in a big way, all bets are off.

Photo: The Rails of Arbutus

I'd been living here for a while before I came across the old Canadian Pacific track along the Arbutus Corridor in Vancouver. The rails were abandoned about ten years ago, and have since been the subject of court battles over development disputes - CP wanted to sell it off to be developed, while the city wanted to retain it for use as a future transportation corridor. As I understand it was one of the potential alignments considered for what became the Canada Line, but due to a lot of back and forth it's been mostly dormant - because, you know, the locals are "the creme de la creme in Vancouver." Today, toward the northern end of the line near Granville Island, the right-of-way has been mostly given over to community gardens.


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The Developing Country and the Heavenly Palace

Some people spend their whole lives looking for the right excuse; a few simple words that give them a free pass to do whatever they want to do. It's equally true of countries looking to justify their own policies, and I can't think of any state that falls back on this kind of "excuse politics" more than the People's Republic of China. It's simple as excuses go, but it keeps appearing again and again: China is a developing nation. Therefore, China can do whatever the hell it wants and feels free to ignore any kind of environmental regulations, because it is a developing nation and is still building its economy.

I most recently encountered China falling back on this excuse in the context of the European Union's new carbon fees for airlines flying to European airports, a project that has also drawn vociferous opposition from airlines like Delta and Qantas because, boo-hoo, won't someone think of the airlines' profit margins? The Guardian reports that China's position is that "it is unreasonable for Europe to apply its policies to developing nations, which are still at the stage of rapid expansion of their airline industries and so find it difficult to cut overall emissions."

Most developing countries don't have four national airlines flying to Europe, and ultimately, the decision on what airlines fly to Europe is Europe's, not China's - and if Air China, China Eastern, China Southern, or Hainan Airlines don't want to pay the EU's carbon fees, I'm sure that other Asian ones like Cathay Pacific or Singapore Airlines will. Nevertheless, this is just the latest appearance of China's favorite excuse, and the latest reminder that the Chinese leadership apparently considers itself to have absolutely no responsibility at all for its current and future pollution path.

How dare you suggest this airline should pay for the externalities that its operations create! Why, next you'll want mining companies to finance the remediation of exhausted lands themselves, too!

Facts change quickly, though. Twenty years ago, maybe even ten years ago, China was unarguably a developing nation, but its breakneck development pace threatens to undercut its arguments. You may recall that back in September, China launched Tiangong 1 into orbit to serve as a testbed and demonstrator for its planned space station, and last week it reiterated its plan to undertake a crewed moon landing in the 2020s.

You'd think a developing country would have more important things to do with its money, like ensuring its major cities aren't drowning in choking clouds of smog that make 1970s Los Angeles look like a day at the park - but no. While its goal of lifting the Chinese population out of poverty is one that should be pursued, its method of pursuing it works at cross-purposes; with every day that passes, the strain on China's own environment becomes greater. It seems to me that a country in China's situation should have more important things to focus on than whether its airlines are making as much money as they can possibly make, or how much prestige it can earn in the international arena by putting boots on the moon.

That's just it, though. I seriously doubt that the Chinese government actually cares about the Chinese people in anything but an abstract sense; rather, I imagine that its priority is squarely the strengthening of China, with millions of people reduced to little counters in the game the Politburo plays. China's cooperation is essential for any developmental trajectory that would see the end of the twenty-first century better off than the beginning of it, but that cooperation will likely be hard to come by as long as it keeps beating its "developing" drum.

Photo: Between Shadows and Centuries

It's easy to tell that Chicago has been an important city for a long time from the sheer amount of nineteenth-century buildings that still stand there. The Loop is full of structures that were already well-used by 1900, and while some newer buildings blend into that there are outliers; outliers like the Trump Tower, that shining silver structure up ahead, originally planned to be the tallest building in the world but eventually its builders settled on it being the second-tallest building in Chicago. This photo was taken at some point along N Wabash Avenue looking north in the autumn of 2009.

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Plotting Out Your Motivation

Not all narratives have to have a plot. While it's very highly recommended it's not one hundred percent mandatory, and this is how the literary canon gets things like Finnegans Wake, where things like "characters" and "story" emerge not from an ordinary reading, but from decades of analysis and argument by English professors, from swerve of shore and bend of bay and so on. Still, very few of us are of the caliber of James Joyce, able to produce something that is regarded as one of those weird classics of literature and which is nevertheless absolutely opaque. Beyond that, there are successful slice-of-life works, which don't necessarily have a plot so much as a series of events. No plot in real life, after all.

On the whole, though, plots are important when you're creating a story no matter what mechanism you're using it to create it - words, art, music, and so on. What's equally important is the motivation for the characters to move through the plot. Sure, on occasion it's understandable and believable for a character to be caught up in events, but a whole story of that is unsatisfying. The key to a good story is allowing a disentangled character to follow the plot for her own reasons. The necessity for choice is a fundamental part of a good plot, as it puts control of the situation into the hands of the character you're following; particularly when you're talking about a protagonist, you want to be in control of the situation. What you don't want to be is a puppet of outside events.

It's a lot easier to encounter this problem in the modern generation of video games, many of which are essentially interactive stories. It's still a new medium, only a few decades old, and so it's understandable that creators are still coming to grips with the opportunities and pitfalls inherent in it. While this doesn't apply universally, when it comes to games that are story-driven and advertise themselves as specifically role-playing games, I think the issue of motivation should be a key one to consider.

Take, for example, Fallout 3. Released in 2008, it was the long-awaited follow-up to the two original games of the late 1990s about survival, discovery, and justice in post-apocalyptic California. Ten years of technical refinement makes it stand apart substantially from its predecessors; while the original games used an isometric, overhead view with a turn-based battle system in which the echoes of rolling dice were never far away, Fallout 3 thrusts the player into the game with a default first-person perspective and a limited third-person viewpoint that owes far more to first-person shooters than to its RPG heritage. Granted, this is a popular mechanism today, and using that kind of viewpoint does not diminish the quality of a game's story - what it does do, for me at least, is increase my investment in the story. Ordering around the Vault Dweller or the Chosen One from somewhere high in the sky is one thing, but when you're looking through the Lone Wanderer's eyes, her story gains that immediacy as well.

If only the creators of the game had actually made a story worth that feeling.

This is actually the Arizona desert, but the Capital Wasteland looks pretty much exactly like this.

The biggest problem that I saw in Fallout 3's plot was that most of the world that Bethesda created for it was wasted. When you boil it down not only is it simple, but it's extremely easy to end up on a treadmill straight to the ending without even realizing you're on it. The game's plot begins with you looking for your father and ends with you saving the Wasteland, and while there's a wealth of additional content scattered across the ruins of D.C. there is very little reason, in terms of plot and motivation, why your character would ever find it. The whole "find your father" plot is actually very straightforward - in the first town there's a guy who tells you he went somewhere else, and when you arrive there there's a guy who tells you he went to another place, and once you arrive at that place you get sent to where your father is. There's no misdirection, no uncertainty, no discovery - the only difficult bits are ensuring you have enough money or a sufficiently silver tongue to get the people with the proper knowledge to give it to you.

Where's the in-story reason to wander around the Wasteland? It's not like you have to assemble the fragments of a puzzle leading to where your dad is. There isn't one. It's a game of connect the dots, but following up on the non-plot content is basically your character saying "all right, I know where to go to find my dad so that things will be comfortable and familiar and the way they were before," and instead deciding to traipse around the blasted Wasteland with two hundred pounds of weapons and armor, getting poisoned by radscorpions and shot at by super mutants, because... because.

The first time I played through Fallout 3, I obediently followed the story because I figured "hey, Bethesda went to the trouble of building this huge-ass open world, it's not like they're going to waste ninety percent of it." Then I realized I was on the last mission of the main campaign. I'm thankful I bought the Game of the Year addition, which includes the extra downloadable content that was released after the original game, because I would have been pissed as hell if the game had ended the way it did originally.

I know that not everyone will see things the way I do - but role-playing video games are a new mode of storytelling, with a great capacity to tell stories. I don't like it when that capacity isn't used to its utmost.

Photo: Written in Chalk

While the wooden boards that were used to cover up the Bay's broken windows may have become one of the more prominent symbols of popular response to last year's Stanley Cup riot, those boards weren't the only place that people were leaving their mark. The small plaza at Granville and Georgia, immediately outside Vancouver City Centre Station, gathered some of its own messages in chalk. Even in summer they didn't last long, but long enough that I was able to capture some of them. As 2012 unfolds, everyone in Metro Vancouver would do well to keep the experiences of the last year in mind.


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I Don't Know Why They #RIDE-in' So High

Happy New Year! If you're reading this, it means that you weren't struck and killed by a drunk driver last night; good for you! New Year's Eve is one of those dates that draws drunks to steering wheels like moths to a flame, and though it doesn't appear that anyone in the Lower Mainland is dead thanks to a drunk driver, the lead story on CBC British Columbia deals with a suspected drunk that totalled an RCMP cruiser. Hell of a way to start 2012, right?

The fact is, even if that's the case, there were people out and about yesterday doing what they could to help people drive drunk.

I'm not sure if it's done in British Columbia, but for the last thirty-five years Ontario's RIDE program - initially just in the city of Etobicoke, but province-wide for as long as I can remember - which is essentially a series of checkpoints on the roads where police officers might pull you over to find out whether or not you blow high on the breathalyzer. The program is active all year and news articles about drunks arrested at RIDE checkpoints aren't unheard of no matter what month it is, but the only time you're actually likely to encounter a checkpoint is around a long weekend, Christmas, or New Year's Eve, for the simple reason that more people tend to drink and drive at those times. As I've never been stopped at a RIDE checkpoint, nor do I know of anyone who has been, I can't really give any more details than that. A similar program is, I understand, run in Alberta under the Checkstop name.

So, for decades, this is how it's been. If someone was idiotic enough to drink and get behind the wheel, they ran the risk of being found out by the police - and then the mobile internet started its little revolution. This past Christmas Eve, a number of people got it in their heads to broadcast the locations of RIDE and Checkstop locations over Twitter. After the initial shock and outrage among a wide section of the tweeting population, people struck back on New Year's Eve by appending the #RIDE and #Checkstop hashtags to irrelevant messages - the goal being to bury the messages that actually contained checkpoint information. What followed was something of a hashtag arms race, with the checkpoint-busters switching to new hashtags and using anonymous accounts to spread information by direct messages invisible to everyone but the sender and recipient. In a Twitter war like this it's nigh-impossible to tell with any certainty which side "won," but I suppose the real winners are people who didn't get killed by a drunk driver last night.

Still, why would anyone tweet the checkpoint locations to begin with? Well, it's complicated.

The Christmas lights are there to make drunks doubt their perceptions. Well, not really - but wouldn't that be something?

For some people it comes down to liberty - and as much as it makes me gnash my teeth, I can understand that. Ten American states have outlawed sobriety checkpoints for exactly that reason. For some people, the idea of the police being able to stop people at random with the "reasonable suspicion" being "a lot of people try to drive drunk around now." So, yeah, I can see where they're coming from - but the issue here is there is a world of difference between taking issue with what they see as overly intrusive police, and actively working to subvert the system.

"RIDE was the beginning of the end of civil liberty in Canada," argued one of the checkpoint tweeters, who hid behind an anonymous account but appears to be from the Calgary area. "Once the precedent is established that police can stop you, question you, order you out of your vehicle, demand identification, etc, etc when they have absolutely no reasonable grounds to believe you have or are committing a crime it is all over for our freedoms. In a few decades we have gone from RIDE to cops issuing summary judgements at the side of the road to the G20 outrage. Where will a few more decades take us?"

The slippery slope is an attractive idea when you're standing up against what you feel is dreadfully wrong, a clear and present danger to society as you see it. Arguing that sobriety checkpoints represent the creeping advancement of government controls, however, feels overly simplistic to me; a transition from a free and democratic state to a police state is something that happens on multiple fronts, and the growth of increasingly militarized police forces - witness, say, Occupy Oakland, and the manner in which the Oakland Police Department conducted itself - is far more threatening to liberty than a limited network of flying checkpoints. Washington is one of the ten states that outlaws the checkpoints, and yet it had the Battle of Seattle in 1999.

"Absolutely," our anonymous Albertan said when asked if he or she really believed tweeting the locations of sobriety checkpoints was the right thing to do. "If your government wanted to curb drinking and driving, they'd make alcohol illegal."

It really is amazing what people can justify to themselves. I mean, have people already forgotten about Prohibition? Have people forgotten that the "moral crusade" was a horrific flop that took an honest industry, pushed it underground, gave organized crime an incredible opportunity to grow, and resulted in what may have been the drunkest decades of the twentieth century?

Really, you think that random spot-checks on the roads to catch people who are operating heavy, potentially deadly machinery while drunk is a blow against liberty and a step toward the police state, but banning something as ubiquitous and culturally important as alcohol isn't? What planet did this person come from?

Yes, both the United States Constitution and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms enshrine freedom of movement. In a real police state, it wouldn't matter what mode of transportation you're using should you come across a checkpoint, if you're driving or walking or sitting in a little red wagon being pulled by a pony. You'd still need your papers, please. Sobriety checkpoints are targetted specifically at people who are driving - people who do not appreciate the damage that can be easily done with a car at speed. That appreciation is one of the reasons why I gave up my driver's license.

Sure, it's a new year... but people will keep using the same old eyes.