King & University: a traffic problem?

Taxi drivers are saying that they are risking their lives to pick up and drop off passengers outside the new high rises on King Street north of University Ave. The problem is that the buildings have no pull-in area so cabs have to stop on busy King Street. I have noticed private cars stopping on the street to pick people up, too.

King & University: Density node? Neighborhood? Mess?

The density at King & University has been a long time coming. When I was a teenager in the 70s there were already large apartment buildings on Regina Street North. University Avenue in the King-Regina area has been steadily growing with apartments and strip malls. WLU is building more and more student residences in the area.

We now have one of the densest parts of the region (perhaps the densest in Waterloo) located at King & University, and it's difficult to see any coordination or planning whatsoever. It's the node that Waterloo City Hall forgot.

The intersection at King & University is one of the most dangerous in the Region. In 2012 there were 41,000 vehicles and 6,000 pedestrians using the intersection each day, and there were 130 collisions, including 11 involving pedestrians. (link) City Council recently debated installing a pedestrian scramble there but decided not to, apparently because it would cause even greater traffic delays.

Both King and University are major routes for drivers going cross town. The intersection is a bottleneck, largely because of the lack of a right turn lane for traffic heading south on King turning west on University. Traffic backs up because those right-turners have to wait for all the pedestrians to clear the crosswalk.

It's a real problem that such a dense neighborhood lacks a grocery store. The area was recently reduced to just one corner store when Forwells threw in the towel. And there are other amenities that should be apportioned to neighborhoods, such as a park. For the student population, you'd think a beer store would be appreciated. For non-students, some sort of sports field or playground might be useful.

There are some student eateries in the area (notably Frat Burger, Burrito Boyz, Morty's, and a Starbucks), but the retail shopping is not aimed at the local population or pedestrians in general. There is an automotive repair place, a store that sells 20-liter bottles of water, specialty medical buildings.

For pedestrians, the area is inconvenient and unpleasant. The sidewalks abut against the street. The strip malls have large parking lots out front. The stores are widely spaced. And then there's that dangerous intersection, which is no fun at all to cross.

The City of Waterloo can't help that the Region decided to make the LRT bypass King & University: the Region was bound and determined to route the LRT through the UW campus so that its ridership numbers will be bolstered by students with free transit passes. But the city has to do something to improve the King & University neighborhood. For starters, it needs a name. Next, it needs a vision. Then it needs a plan.

Maybe we need to restrict cars from turning off of King and/or University. Add pedestrian islands in the crosswalks. The area could use a streetscape improvement plan with better sidewalks, planters, trees, and benches. A beer store could perhaps anchor a development with a grocer's. It's all going to be time consuming and expensive, but it's too important an area to overlook any longer. Just consider how much time and money Waterloo has spent on Claire Lake (a pond in a wealthy subdivision) or the Clay & Glass Museum (which practically nobody goes to except school children who have no choice).

And almost more important than anything else, if we built a proper hiway on the west side of Waterloo, we could hugely reduce the traffic that floods down University and Erb to the Conestoga Parkway - a hiway that connects major arteries like the 401 with the east side of town.

Before any decisions are made, we need a solid understanding of the neighborhood now and in the future. Think you know everything? This is being built just a couple of blocks away:

Update, January 10, 2014:
I drove down King from Columbia to William last Thursday around 10 PM. In the area from Hickory to Lodge there were masses of people on the snowy sidewalks. The uptown had less than half as many people, even including those at the skating rink in Waterloo Square.

Let's rethink the St Jacobs Farmer's Market

Waterloo woke this morning to the sad news that the main building of the St Jacobs Farmer's Market had burned to the ground. Already there is an outpouring of sympathy and support to the owner, Mercedes Corp. I am afraid that this post has a somewhat different tone. I see this tragedy as an opportunity to rethink our approach to the market - and make some substantive changes.

In a 2009 post (Market Memories) I was quite critical of Mercedes Corp. I wrote that post when Mercedes shut down the Waterloo Mennonite market and moved the vendors across the street to their tourist-oriented site, which locals historically called the Stockyards. That site is now our sole farmer's market - the St Jacob's Farmer's Market - and is the site of last night's fire.

A farmer's market is part of our heritage, an important part of our economy, and a vital link between the rural and urban parts of our community. It is much more than a tourist attraction. It is a resource for the community: for farmers and small businesses to sell their goods, and for people to purchase locally-made food and other items.

Mercedes Corp did not invent the market. We always had one. Mercedes Corp was somehow able to purchase the market, but many of the shoppers and best vendors predate Mercedes. Over the years I have increasingly felt that the market should not be in private hands, or at the least should be more influenced by the needs of its stakeholders.

My particular concerns are:

1. I am concerned that Mercedes Corp does not provide a fair environment for the vendors. The vendors seem to have no security - apparently they can be (and are) moved or kicked out without notice. I haven't asked vendors recently about the price they pay to have stands at the market, but a few years ago they said that the prices were doubling and then tripling. The vendors are rationally afraid to speak out, but the ones I talk to say that their sales have dropped as the number of visitors increase: the marketing strategy of Mercedes Corp has attracted too many non-shopping tourists, or people who are there for cheap sunglasses and tube socks. This isn't a new problem, but it continues to get worse.

2. I am concerned that Mercedes Corp does not provide a safe and convenient environment for shoppers. The aisles are too narrow for the crowds. That means that people waiting to buy on both sides of the aisle leave only a narrow space for people trying to move down the middle. The problem is compounded by the many enormous baby buggies. The overcrowding isn't just inconvenient; it's unsafe: God forbid something happen during market hours. (The new building should have wider aisles or it should have bollards that prevent non-pedestrians from entering the shopping aisles.)

3. I am concerned that the business model of the current market allows only for vendor-businesses, and shuts out homegrown initiatives. I remember one summer buying sweet peas from two teenage boys who had created summer jobs for themselves by planting a lot of flowers and renting a table at the market for part of the summer. You used to see a lot of that sort of thing, but the current market seems to have no amateur or short-term vendors.

4. I am concerned that the market is no longer Mennonite-friendly. There are fewer and fewer Old Order Mennonites there, although there appear to be some vendors who impersonate Mennonites (heavy eye make-up under a bonnet is a suspicious clue).

I'm 55 now. I've been shopping at Waterloo's farmer's markets since I was 7, and I still go to the St Jacobs market weekly. I do hope that the building will be replaced speedily, for the good of the vendors, the shoppers, and Mercedes Corp. I strongly believe that the new market needs to be more attentive to the needs of its stakeholders, but I fear that Mercedes Corp will use this opportunity to make the market even more commercial and take it even further from its roots.

See also my 2009 post: Market Memories.

Mechanics of Dysfunction

When I read about towns in the US that are incorporating and privatizing (such as in the New York Times this week), my first reaction is horror at this latest outbreak of libertarianism. Communities take this route in order to shirk their responsibilities to poor people who live outside the new town limits, and they outsource local jobs to huge multinational corporations.

The problem with the ideological-emotional reaction is that it demonizes without understanding motivations, and so isn't at all pragmatic. When I look into the matter further I continue to deplore it, but start to understand it.

Parts of the US have such horrendous disparity of wealth that you find small enclaves of the middle class surrounded by a sea of poverty. It's not just that the rich don't want to pay for the poor: it's that the rich want decent services (such as good policing and roads) and they're having trouble achieving that when the county government is struggling to provide even subpar services to large poor communities. Separating might seem like the only way to attain decent services.

I don't understand racial politics in the US, but places that have incorporated are called "white flight" towns, so part of the problem seems to be racist - especially in the southern states, where poverty falls disproportionately to non-white communities.

Once incorporated, many of these towns outsource almost all of their civic services. Some are left with only one public employee. Many outsource everything except for the police and fire departments (because of insurance prices). The reason for outsourcing is the cost of unionized employees. We might call this union-busting, but think of it from the perspective of the communities that are privatizing. The New York Times quotes John Donahue of Harvard as saying, "A lot of jobs in government are middle-class jobs that in the private sector are not middle-class jobs. People aren't willing to support conditions for public workers that they themselves no longer enjoy" ...like pensions and excellent health coverage.

While incorporation and privatization have been around for a while, they have picked up since the 2008 financial collapse because communities are going through crisis. When faced with imminent bankruptcy during a recession, there aren't a lot of options. Raising property taxes is a problem when people are already losing their homes in record numbers; in some cases it just isn't feasible because it could exacerbate the downward spiral and result in even lower tax revenue. Much of the cost structure is fixed because of union agreements. Reducing financial obligations to the rest of the county is egregious, but it saves towns millions that they might not be able to save otherwise.

Historically, Democrats prevent incorporation from happening, but in the current economic downturn Republicans are surging, and it only takes one term of Republican majority in state legislatures to allow a slew of incorporations.

The tragedy is even greater that the solution to the dysfunction is increasing the dysfunction. Incorporation and privatization are removing local jobs, increasing local poverty, and hurting social services and schools that could help pull the poor out of poverty. When one town in a county chooses white flight, it puts financial pressure on other towns and makes it more likely that they'll go too. Income inequality and racial tension continue to increase.

It's all just going to shit. That will continue until the US effectively addresses poverty. It might help to change the terminology; instead of calling it the war on poverty, call it the war on lack of opportunity, or the war on hopelessness.

The other issue is how to transform into the post-union world we're becoming. Unions served a useful purpose a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, maybe even twenty years ago; but now their time is done. We need a better transition than moving from unionized income for life to outsourced minimum wage jobs. (And in the US, even the low minimum wage is under attack from business lobbyists.) We need stronger employment laws and better retirement savings options for everyone.

See also:
Did Philip K Dick Dream of Palm Jumeirah?

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Devolution of the Corner Store?

I'm in San Francisco (for BlackBerry DevCon) (and yes I just felt an earthquake - what a cliche - and yes it freaked me out) and I went into a CVS Pharmacy near my hotel today. They don't have checkout counters at that store: it's purely self checkout. In addition, the checkout assumes that you have a CVS credit card. You can use a different credit card, but only if you understand that you have to press "Courtesy Card" and go from there. The prices are all different for CVS card holders, as well.

Over the last five years, especially in big US cities, pharmacies have displaced the corner store. The new pharmacies have junk food, toiletries, make-up, and a few groceries and household items. They're ubiquitous: in New York and San Francisco, there's a Walgreens or CVS or Duane Reed on every block, it seems. Corner stores, family grocerers and newspaper/smoke shops have all but disappeared.

In Toronto, the immigrant-owned small grocer with a display of fresh flowers out front is still ubiquitous, although the pharmacies are getting a foothold in the financial district.

In Waterloo we never had many mom-and-pop grocers (at least in my time there, since the mid-60s); instead, we have stands at the farmer's markets. Diners used to sell candy and cigarettes at the cash, and the only place I know that still does that is The Harmony at King and Central (not cigarettes anymore, of course). Our corner stores were and are of the 7-11 variety, and I wouldn't miss the demise of their magazine racks with porn at the eye level of 11 year-olds.

My main problem with the preponderance of pharmacies is the horror of having the same company dominating every street. Outside they look the same. Inside they look the same. They all carry exactly the same stuff, and there's nothing local or individual about it. You won't find homemade butter tarts or samosas on the counter, as you do at mom-and-pop outfits, or artichokes from the home town of the Italian owners. They don't offer an array of newspapers. Now they don't even have a human being at the checkout.

It is more than nostalgia, I hope, to think that we're losing something here.

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Representative democracy, public participation and social media

There was an interesting controversy in Waterloo this week. A city councillor, while sitting in Council listening to a delegation of residents who were concerned about a proposed development in their neighborhood, tweeted disparaging things about the delegation. The residents filed a complaint with the city integrity commissioner, who cleared the councillor of wrongdoing on the grounds that the tweets were ambiguous.

The delegation was from an upscale part of town and the issue was a townhouse development planned for their neighborhood. The Councillor’s tweets, apparently sent while the delegation was speaking, were:

“I am aghast. Embarrassed. Furious. #not impressed #this is not my Waterloo.”

“About to revisit my prairie girl roots, connect with Tommy Douglas and share some very honest and blunt thoughts about community.”

(The Councillor’s attempt at populist bonding seems a little weird, at best. Some quick Google searches show that she lives in a posh neighborhood with house prices comparable to the delegation's - and no townhouses. But that’s another issue.)

As someone who has made a number of delegations to local government, both at public Council meetings and in private, I know how difficult it is to provide input when you know the government official has already made up their mind. But I’ve been lucky – I have never been in the position of arguing a case before an official who sneers at my arguments just because of who I am or where I come from.

I also know how difficult it is to participate in local government. Despite calls for public involvement, transparency, and so on, Waterloo government appears to most of us as a cliquey group that is not very receptive to outsiders (even though the “outsiders” are local residents). City Council invites the public to participate on committees, but they renew membership every year and boot you off if they decide you’re too controversial. Councillors will let you tell them your concerns, but few of them (I exclude our current mayor) give the impression that their minds are at all open.

Now it seems that the situation is worse. This event – and the exoneration of the tweeter, and her declaration that she won’t change – paints a picture of City Hall as a place where councillors are playground bullies who will use their stature to publicly humiliate us if we have the temerity to say something they disagree with.

An editorial on the tweeting scandal argues that the problem is not what the Councillor said, but the fact that she tweeted during a meeting. I disagree. It was disrespectful of her to not at least hear them out, but her tweets expose her attitude - that she was never willing to give them a chance because "they're rich" - and I'm glad that's public. If it's not public, we can't deal with it.

Tweeting increases transparency, and that's a good thing. Transparency isn't easy - it can uncover some rotten stuff - and we need to look at addressing those issues. I also hope we can discourge this sort of political grandstanding.

What we need is an enhanced - or at least reaffirmed - code of conduct for city councillors that reinforces their obligation to treat the public in a respectful manner and truly engage them.

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Bringing Pragmatism to Environmental Issues

Waterloo Region health officials are agitating against a provincial initiative to allow convenience stores to sell wine and beer. Their argument is that it will lead to more drunkenness.

There is no evidence that convenient liquor sales leads to more drinking, and ample evidence to the contrary (in Quebec and the many US states that allow it). However, common sense is all that's needed to see the benefits: less driving. Beer and wine stores are so widely spread in our area that you practically have to own a car to get to them. In all of Waterloo - a town of over 100,000 people in a massive suburban sprawl - there are only three LCBOs and two beer stores.

Having wine and beer in convenience stores will also make corner stores more profitable, which should reverse the trend of declining numbers of corner stores. That will provide even more environmental benefits as residents won't have to rely on a car to pick up milk, the newspaper, and a host of other items.


In our older neighbourhoods you can still see where convenience stores used to be. They are usually on corners, and are often either boarded up or have been converted to a residence. They are reminders of a time when families either shared a car or did without, and were able to buy many necessities on foot.

We're always talking about creating a walkable city. This is how you do it: small, pragmatic steps that consider how people really live.

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The Walmart Effect

After a twelve year battle to keep it out, Walmart recently opened its doors in my community, or at least nearby in Woolwich Township.

Local retailers have been quaking for years in anticipation, trying to figure out how to stand up against the giant Borg-like invasion.

Our local Loblaws chain, known as Zehrs, glitzed itself up. It seems at least a quarter of the goods have signs saying they're reduced in price. The Zehrs I shop at had been a stable place for decades, but in an apparent attempt to keep us in the store longer, has taken to reorganizing its stock every few months. Shopping has become a tiring sensory overload.

Loblaws has also opened a bunch of Walmart-clones called Great Canadian Superstores that specialize in household goods and junk food.

The bizarrest effect is on Canadian Tire stores, many of which are trying to keep their clientele by selling groceries. There's something just wrong about buying milk at a tire store.

As municipalities across North America have learned, this is all fruitless. Walmart has: (1) A huge advertising budget and a good PR firm; (2) Low prices; and (3) Scads of convenient parking. I know someone who lived right across the street from the Waterloo Zellers but drove all the way across Kitchener to the Sunrise Mall to buy things at Walmart that were available at Zellers. No, it didn't make any sense and it didn't save any money, but Walmart advertises more than Zellers and it sucks in the shoppers.

Waterloo city Council hopes that Walmart will not compete with the independent, boutique-style shops in Uptown. However, those aren't the only shops in Uptown. We also have a small grocery store and a hardware store, and they serve a very important purpose: they mean that the growing residential population in Uptown doesn't need to drive for necessities. If they die, then there will be no environmental benefits to a compact urban core. The core will just be a pretentious place to live, and not a true urban experience. Uptown residents will get in their SUVs and drive to the big box stores on the outskirts of town to shop. It's not anyone's vision for uptown Waterloo.

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Time to Step Up

"Accessibility" is one of those words people bandy about as an objective they want city planners to follow. At public forums, it is invariably the case that the public says they want a downtown that's "walkable," "accessible," "a people place."

Then it snows and the ideals go to shit.

Today I saw two very frail-looking, slow-moving elderly people pushing their walkers in traffic on Bridgeport near the intersection of Erb. Why? Knox Presbyterian Church hadn't ploughed the sidewalk on their property along Bridgeport Road. There was lots of traffic and cars were slipping in the snowy street; it was incredibly dangerous to be walking in the road. My guess is that the couple had gone to the library and were trying to get home.

Most winters the sidewalk clearing around uptown Waterloo is so poor that many elderly people in the uptown area are housebound for months. The uptown is ringed by seven residences for elderly people, from the full-care facility at King-William to the high rise Water Park apartments. The Adult Recreation Center (ARC) is also in uptown.

It's not just people with walkers, but anyone who's a little unsteady on their pins who can't get through the snow drifts that are left all winter in front of many properties. And it's not just home owners. The city often doesn't clear the pile of snow in front of the crosswalk at Erb and Peppler, so people trying to cross the street have to climb a sizable hump of snow. The sidewalk beside the city lots of Caroline are never well shovelled; at best we get a narrow track. The empty lot at 32 Alexandra, owned by the Auburn company, is rarely if ever ploughed.

The Waterloo city by-law "Snow and Ice", #82-12, states that sidewalks must be cleared 24 hours after a snowfall. This applies to occupants as well as owners, to vacant land as well as occupied. It applies to houses, apartments, churches, public land, schools, and every other type of property. Failing to adequately clear your sidewalk of snow and ice can result in a $2,000 fine, as well as the cost of the city clearing it.

The city mostly acts on uncleared sidewalks when they receive a complaint. We can all contact the city about uncleared sidewalks by calling 519-747-6280 or by filling out this form, which goes to the by-law enforcement department.

Fair warning: I am planning to rat on everyone in uptown Waterloo who breaks the by-law this winter.

(If requested, the city will help clear the sidewalks of the physically disabled or people over 65. Call 519-579-6930.)

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Did Philip K Dick Dream of Palm Jumeirah?

I read a lot of science fiction, so I may be a little paranoid about the possibility of our freedoms being stripped away by a megacorporation that uses human life as a disposable raw commodity and makes us live in underground warrens where everything is painted white and lit by fluorescents and we have to wear identical one-piece jump suits with a number on the back and eat protein pellets and old people sit around telling children about things they remember from their youth, like voting and the sky.

Also, I just watched the movie Recount, which I recommend highly but which scared the crap out of me to the point that I had to watch it in short bursts because while the movie is engrossing, the story it tells (of the US 2000 election) is astounding and tragic and devastating.

That's my caveat as I start this post about Palm Jumeirah, Palm Jebel Ali and Palm Deira.

Pictures of this stunning development in Dubai have been wowing us for years. The first and largest artificial island, Palm Jumeirah (shown right), is designed for a population of 2 million people. Most houses have a beach and many have marinas. There are also dozens of high rise condo buildings, 100 hotels and on and on. In total, the development has three island complexes that were designed to house nearly 5 million people. Prices were originally very hefty, with a 14,000 SF undeveloped plot of land starting at about C$2M. Movie stars and other rich people bought up plots like crazy; some have already moved there. (The development is still years from completion, delayed by the current economic troubles, and prices have fallen.)

Futuristic paranoiacs (paranoid futurists?) like me are somewhat mollified by the thought that people with democratic freedoms would not just throw them away - and even if they wanted to, we have institutions to protect us from ourselves. To lose our freedom, there would have to be some sort of perfect storm of events.

When I started to research Palm Jumeirah and its sister islands, the first thing to set off alarm bells is that there will be no local government or citizen representation - the entire 5 million population will be administered by the corporation that built the islands. Or as that corporation, Nakheel, puts it, "Nakheel Asset Management (NAM) team will provide a top quality community management service to Palm Jumeirah's owners and residents." Note that's community management, not just property management.

Nakheel's literature about the islands has a large emphasis on "community", but community in their context means consumption and amenities. In pages about community, there are lavish descriptions of shopping, golf and gyms. There is nothing about local government, civil society, laws, codes of conduct, social services or means of communication. Your average North American subdivision provides more information.

The Palm artificial island development is just one of many megaprojects by Nakheel. Here's the Resident's Hub for residents of International City, another Nakheel development in Dubai (it's difficult to find how big it will be, but one of the five original districts is designed to house 120,000, and it seems that four additional districts have been added). The hub has a dizzying array of rules, many so vague that they could be interpreted to restrict almost anything, and after a lot of digging I found a page that suggests that Nakheel Corporation makes all decisions that would normally be made by the government. It's fair to assume that the Jumeirah islands will be governed in a similar way.

It's not just anywhere that you could strip away the rights of an entire city of 5 million wealthy people. Dubai has been ruled by the Al Maktoum dynasty since 1833. The government and private sectors are closely entwined, with Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum being Dubai's ruler and Prime Minister of the UAE, but also the vice-president, founder and majority stakeholder in Dubai World, a private company that manages businesses for the Dubai government. (Dubai World was in the news recently when it informed its creditors that it can't pay its US$60B debt. That debt represents three-quarters of the debt of Dubai, so Maktoum was pretty crafty in creating arms-length liability for his government finances.)

The company that is building the Jumeirah islands - Nakheel - is a subsidiary of Dubai World, so while Jumeirah presents itself as a private development, it is really a project of the ruler of Dubai.

In 2006 Dubai had 1.4M residents, only 250,000 of which were citizens. Another 250,000 are foreign laborers, many living in appalling conditions and not making enough money to be able to return home. In response to falling property values, Dubai is introducing new laws to protect property owners, but in response to protests by foreign laborers, it has filled its jails. This is already a corpogovernment that exists purely to enrich itself.

This all took an obvious path. Countries in the middle east had to diversify beyond oil, and Dubai has been very successful in the areas of tourism and property development. At one point, property development accounted for 32% of its GDP. A lot of people like the idea of an endless summer, and the middle east has a very nice climate (in Dubai, there is little rain and it is never cold, although five months a year the average high is more than 100 F). So why not attract massive population shifts? Start with the rich, which gives a glamorous cachet to the idea of living in the Persian Gulf, and then build cheaper homes, and cheaper, and cheaper. Nakheel is already starting to develop a number of other artificial islands in the Gulf. Jumeirah is attached to the mainland by a bridge, but the newer islands are miles from land.

There are beautiful pictures of the Jumeirah islands taken from the international space station. When you see closer views, a few problems emerge.

In some photos the air is hazy, probably from sand or pollution. The houses are built extremely close together: several million gets you a few feet of space from your neighbours. The emphasis on beachfronts means there is a lot of driving required to get anywhere - some public transit is proposed, but there are no details of how extensive it will be.

The economic downturn has resulted in the reduction of public services. Tight corporate restrictions on resident activities means there aren't a lot of alternatives - or avenues for complaint.

At inception, there seemed little to worry about. If Brangelina don't like the way their community is governed, they can pack up the kids and move elsewhere. But when you start to consider a much larger and less powerful group of residents, many living miles from land, with all means of communication, transportation, life support and other community decisions being made by a for-profit corporation - and then think of possible futures when there might be a war or a severe economic downturn, when there might be water shortages or food shortages - then it isn't such a big jump to get to soylent green.

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Unpleasantness as a Political Tactic

Many years ago I was on the board of a neighborhood association in downtown Toronto. All the members of the board were residents of the area except the president, who owned a gas station there but lived in the suburbs. At one point the interests of residents diverged from the interests of the gas station, and at the show-down meeting our president pulled an effective trick. He changed the meeting room to a small airless room, and he wore coveralls that reeked of gasoline. (Normally he wore a suit.) Then he insisted on giving a long-winded oration of his arguments, during which the rest of the board visibly wilted. Some even left. At the start of the meeting he was outvoted 7-1, but by the end of the meeting he won his vote.

A few years ago I worked with a guy who was uber passive aggressive. If he was mad at me or disagreed with me or – I can’t say I ever fully understood his motives – he’d stare at me fixedly during a meeting while ostentatiously picking his nose. Or stretch his legs wide apart and thrust up his pelvis while glaring at me.

These sorts of tactics are a bit hard to pin down: you feel quite certain they’re deliberate, but there’s always the possibility that the person is doing it without realizing it.

(People writing comments on blogs and newspaper articles are frequently unpleasant, of course, but I think of comment-writing as a combination of writing a letter to the editor and yelling at the TV: I think you have to expect a higher level of emotion than is usual when we communicate, and adjust your reactions accordingly.)

Nowadays I’m in a group that questions the transit plans of the Region of Waterloo, and we have been targeted by a group, mostly students it seems, who oppose our opposition. This antiopposition group has employed some pretty aggressive tactics, engaging in personal attacks such as calling members of my group liars, saying we are fear-mongerers, and publicly questioning our motives. They have done this on a call-in show on the local Rogers channel, at a public meeting, in an op-ed in the Record, in comments on this blog, and elsewhere.

So I’m wondering... is this just a tactic to dispirit us and keep us down? It doesn’t seem possible that the antioppositioners could really believe that we’re liars and so on: could they really be so partisan and hate us so thoroughly that they really believe any nasty thing about us that pops into their heads? They could just be bullies, but that begs the question of where they got the notion that public discourse is about attempted character assassination.

In any case their nastiness isn't helping their cause, and if anything is galvanizing people against them. I'm more interested in the general question... This issue is a little easier for me to discuss because I'm not the one being attacked this time, but I still don't understand it.

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Bike Couriers, Road Rage, and Tragedy

Following the death last night of a bicyclist near Bloor and University, the Globe & Mail is having an online discussion tomorrow about the issue of bike safety in Toronto.

Former Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant is facing charges as a result of the death of bicycle courier Darcy Allan Sheppard. We don't know all the facts yet about the incident, but one thing appears clear: this is not a typical bike safety story. However heinously the driver reacted, the altercation started, according to witnesses, when Sheppard slammed the hood of Bryant's convertible with his pack and then grabbed the rearview mirror. It sounds like Sheppard attacked Bryant.

I'm not excusing Bryant, who then (again, according to witnesses) tried to knock Shepherd off his car, thus causing his death - but this isn't a one-sided tragedy.

I used to be a bike courier in Toronto (a long time ago) and I was appalled by the attitude and road behavior of some other couriers. The ironic thing is that the real insiders in the bike courier business get cushy routes and don't cycle that far. As a non-insider I was biking furiously all over town while the guys downtown had a two or three block radius of deliveries and spent a large part of their working day hanging out at a sandwich shop.

There are loads of horrible drivers in Toronto, and they're especially dangerous at rush hour when they're tired and hungry and want to get home. My life was endangered numerous times by drivers who were total jerks - who were essentially psychopaths in their utter disregard of the lives of bicyclists they shared the streets with.

But it's not going to make the roads any safer if we polarize the participants by misrepresenting this tragedy. Before we start drawing conclusions, we need to hear the whole story. This may be a case of road rage and a driver murdering a cyclist, or it may be a case of a driver in an open car fearing for his safety when attacked by a bicyclist. Or something inbetween, or something altogether different.

Update: Christie Blatchford wrote in the Globe tonight that "the cyclist will always physically lose in any contest with a car". That's simply not true. There was a case in Toronto a couple of years ago of a shouting match between a cyclist and a motorist, and the cyclist killed the motorist with a knife. If you're in a convertible and someone attacks you, you're pretty exposed. In this case, the developing story is that the cyclist was drunk and his girlfriend had called the police earlier in the evening because of aggressive behavior; a witness says that the cyclist tried to strangle the driver; and the driver called 911 before trying to shake off the cyclist.

Update nine months later, when charges were dropped: Prosecutor's report

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Waterloo - Uptown Vision

Sitting in our new public square on a recent Saturday afternoon with several hundred people watching Rossini's opera La Cenerentola (Cinderella), I had one of those happy moments of optimism, a glimmer of what we as a community are becoming. The event was enlightened. It's a fun opera with good tunes and lots of laugh lines. Little kids danced around in front of the orchestra. People sat in folding chairs or on the concrete steps around the square while cars drove by on King Street (and surprisingly, the car sounds weren't intrusive). There's a bus stop by the square and most of the people who got off the bus, as well as pedestrians and bikers going by, stopped for a while.

The city has a full-time programmer for our new public square, with events throughout the summer. This is the only opera: there will be events for all ages and interests, during the day and in the evenings. The city has a calendar of events here.

The fully-programmed public square is the final piece in the new Uptown envisioned in the planning document project2007 - a document whose planning started in 1992. Many Waterloo citizens, city staff and councillors have worked hard to transform uptown into what it is now. It isn't exactly what everyone wanted, but it's pretty damn good.

I'm on a Waterloo city council advisory committee that's engaged in the next stage of long range planning for Waterloo, and is currently working to write Vision 2025. I have been working on that for a couple of years now (which is why I have such strong feelings about the impact of LRT on the uptown). I'll be writing more about uptown vision in the coming months, and always appreciate feedback and ideas.

Smoke and Punishment

Conversation I overheard today: A man says he hates the smell of cigarette smoke. The woman he's talking to (I couldn't see either of them) launches into a series of complaints. First she says she can't stand the smell of "dead meat" to such an extent that when she walks by the deli counter downstairs she faints at the smell. Then she complains that when she lights a cigarette at the bus stop in the morning people move away from her "even when they're upwind" - and says she finds that terribly rude.

My first reaction was along the lines of "What an idiot", but then I started to think that the woman has a point. (Other than claiming that she faints when she passes a deli counter.)

For example, I have heard two people in two separate conversations complain about driving past a bus stop and being bothered by smoke from people standing at the stop. When told that their car is spewing a lot more harmful fumes than come from a cigarette they're like, Everyone drives - what's the problem with that?

Or this one: Residents in my condo building complain about smelling smoke from people standing outside - even when the smokers are far enough away that no smoke gets in their units, just a faint smell - and so we've enacted a property by-law to keep people from smoking anywhere near the building. But residents can still control what they do in their own units, so they've just started smoking indoors - and the whole building shares air so we're brething in more smoke now.

The by-law is shooting ourselves in the foot, but the anti-smoking contingent doesn't care because, let's face it, the anti-smoking movement is partly about punishing people for doing something we don't like.

I don't like smoking either, and I hate the smell. I even dislike being on an elevator after a stinky smoker has been on. But there has to be a limit on how much we clamp down on smokers. Make it illegal to smoke in cars with kids, sure, but can't we let people smoke on the street?

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Rapid Transit Is Poised to Destroy Uptown Waterloo

Few residents seem to realize that a policy foisted on the City of Waterloo by the Region will radically change uptown Waterloo as we know it. If you don't know the details, rapid transit sounds like a great idea: a fast futuristic system that will help the environment by taking cars off the road. However, the rapid transit plan being prepared by Waterloo Region will likely have the opposite effect: it will be a giant white elephant that will suck money away from more highly-used regular bus routes. And it will change uptown Waterloo from a pedestrian-friendly small downtown core to a place with congested sidewalks, traffic jams, no street parking, pedestrian barriers, no street festivals... read on for details.

The Region's rapid transit plans were designed for Kitchener. Kitchener has problems. A fancy new transit line with only a few, widely spaced stops could direct development around those stops, potentially leading to revitalization of an ailing core.

Waterloo doesn't need to be revitalized. All the locations being considered for stops in Waterloo are places that already have plenty of density (present and planned). Worse, the Region plans to run the new transit line right down King Street in Waterloo, turning left at Erb and running against traffic down to the Clay & Glass Gallery at Caroline, where it turns and cuts a wide swath right across Waterloo Park.

It hasn't been decided yet whether rapid transit will be buses or trains. If trains, there will be dedicated and immovable rail lines down the center of main streets. Buses will not be much more flexible, because the region plans to build dedicated bus lanes with curbs down the middle of the street.

The route is also still up for grabs, but for uptown Waterloo it has been narrowed down to two options:

1. A loop that enters Waterloo from Kitchener on King, has one north-bound lane up King, turns left at Erb, runs on the north side of Erb to Caroline, crosses Caroline, and then runs beside the existing rail line through Waterloo Park.
Coming back south the transit would come through Waterloo Park, cross Erb-Caroline and run south on Caroline to Allen, where it jogs left and then right onto King to proceed back to Kitchener. The stops would probably be at King & Willis Way and at Willis Way & Caroline.

2. A two-way line down King Street from Kitchener, turning left either at the existing rail line near Waterloo Square or at Erb, and then proceeding across Erb-Caroline to run beside the existing rail line through Waterloo Park, returning the same way. There would be one stop, probably at King & Willis Way.

The stops are going to be larger than a regular bus stop (60 meters long and 3 meters wide), and may have some sort of barricade around them. There may also be an easement for transfer buses.

There are significant problems with each route.

Any route on King would change the entire ambience of Uptown. A raised rail line or curbed dedicated lane, each possibly with barricades, would have the following effects:
* It would hinder pedestrians from crossing the street. (The Region's response to this is that people shouldn't be jay walking.)
* It will make bike riding in uptown a nightmare.
* It will probably remove all street parking on King Street from William to Erb, meaning stores on King will have no immediate parking - and probably no places to drop off people from cars or taxis, either.
* The city will no longer be able to block King Street for the busker festival and other festivals. Even parades are in jeopardy.
* The many elderly people in Uptown who push their walkers or ride their scooters will have significantly more trouble crossing the street (even at lights).
* Long blockaded platforms will interfere with sidewalks and further hinder crossing the street.

Car traffic will also be significantly affected:
* King Street currently has four lanes of traffic; that will be reduced to two.
* Rapid transit will have priority turning left off of King, so may require gates to be put up where it turns. Gates will go down when a rapid transit vehicle approaches the intersection, just like a train crossing. This means gates on all four sides of the King-Erb intersection, or gates on King at the current railway tracks. Either would cause a traffic nightmare.
* If rapid transit runs along the north side of Erb, it will block one lane of that busy three-lane street. It will block cars that currently turn onto Albert Street.
* The Erb-Caroline intersection, already a mess, will get worse, and may also have to have railway gates.

The proposed routes will have other negative effects:
* The loop that includes a transit line on Caroline will be a nightmare in the narrow part of Caroline between William and Allen, and on the short Allen portion. The only way it will be able to turn at the Caroline-Allen corner and Allen-King corner is to use the parking lot at the Adult Recreation Center (ARC). In fact, it seems impossible that the corner of Allen-King can be negotiated without tearing down the ARC. (Regional employees have said that they can't run rapid transit down the middle of King Street, but must run it along the east curb, because otherwise the turn would be too sharp at Erb. If that is the case, rapid transit can't turn at the King-Allen intersection while the ARC stands.)
* The route down King that doesn't entail turning at Erb means that rapid transit will turn at the existing rail tracks that cross King near Erb. (Rapid transit will not run on the existing tracks, but will be a double-lane road or two rail lines beside them.) This will mean that we have to tear up part of the public square we are in the middle of spending millions to create. It will also put a wide, barricaded divide in the middle of the Waterloo Square parking lot.
* In every route plan proposed so far, rapid transit runs alongside the rail line that crosses through Waterloo Park. This is equivalent to putting a two-lane road alongside the rail line, and it will probably be barricaded. This will be an eyesore and essentially cut the park in two, as trains or buses whip through the park at high speeds.
* The loop proposal will mean that people will have to walk a significant distance to transfer to buses, which will further reduce ridership.

In every route currently on the table, rapid transit enters Waterloo from Kitchener along King. It exits Uptown Waterloo through Waterloo Park, stops at UW, stops at the UW R&T Park (north campus), stops at Conestogo Mall, and has a spur to the Waterloo Farmer's Market. These are the only stops. People who don't live near those stops could take the bus to them, but will likely drive and park. This route is very convenient for students (who get virtually free transit passes and who have strong legs) but are not at all convenient for most other Waterloo residents - many of whom have children or are elderly. But LRT is enormously expensive to run, and will almost certainly drain transit money away from traditional bus routes that go close to people's houses.

If Waterloo must be involved in the Region's rapid transit plans, there are alternatives, but they are not being considered. For example:

* Create bus rapid transit, and abandon the dedicated lanes when you enter Waterloo from Kitchener. Run the buses on existing streets without modification from Union north (to some street to be decided). Use regular bus stops. Within uptown Waterloo, run rapid transit like a regular bus. Have more frequent stops in Waterloo.
* Do not run rapid transit through Waterloo Park. Run it right up King Street to Conestogo Mall. Create a density node at King and Columbia.
* Do not run rapid transit to the Farmer's Market as that is a guaranteed money-losing route. The market is only open two days a week. Plus, transit is not the ideal way to carry home a bushel of eggplants. There is abundant good transit to the Kitchener Farmer's Market. In addition, the Waterloo Farmer's Market is not even within the Region of Waterloo.
* Alternatively, run rapid transit down Weber Street or Westmount Road, and bypass uptown Waterloo altogether.

There has been a highly questionnable public consultation process around rapid transit. Over the last year we had many public forums, but in each one we were told that rapid transit was a done deal and the only parameters to be discussed were route location. Also we were told that "details" like location of stops would be dealt with "later". (For Waterloo, they showed the stop location as a big circle on a map that spanned all of uptown.) Videos were shown of rapid transit systems in other cities - never mentioning that Waterloo Region is a fraction of the size of those cities, and transportation professionals consider that we have much too low density of workers (even in the foreseeable future) to sustain a rapid transit system. None of the side-effects, such as draining resources from the traditional bus system, were mentioned.

Rapid transit is not a project for the far future. The Region is fast-tracking it, and while we still don't know the details of the route through uptown Waterloo or the location of stops in uptown, we are told that the shovels will hit the ground soon. Apparently there is someone very powerful in the Region who sees this as his legacy project (Ken Seiling?) and refuses to accept any opposition. As soon as 2010, the successful small uptown core of Waterloo may be destroyed forever.

Do we need to find ways to make Waterloo less of a car city? Absolutely! Planning in Waterloo has been atrocious: we have far-flung subdivisions and industrial parks, box stores like our latest atrocity, Wal-Mart, at the north end of town, a general urban sprawl that makes a car almost mandatory. But the rapid transit proposal does not do one thing to address that problem. It will probably make car dependence worse as it siphons resources from existing bus routes.

Added to all its disadvantages, rapid transit doesn't provide a lot of advantages. It turns out that it's not that much faster than regular buses, because while it doesn't stop as often, it still has to maintain city speed limits. It provides potential for higher capacity of riders, but it strips away a lot of the flexibility of buses: if transit patterns change, we'll be stuck with the expensive route that is built initially. The only real solid advantage of rapid transit comes if it is rail transit, and that is that the trains will look really cool. That's simply not enough.

What can we as citizens do? Raise bloody hell. The city is going to decide how to respond soon, and while there is a lot of unease in City Hall about the plans, most residents don't seem to understand the changes that are about to come and so they aren't worried. It is not clear whether the city can stop the Region, but we must at least try.

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Toronto

I haven't lived in Toronto since 1995, and I've been sitting on the sidelines for a while listening to the national pasttime of trashing the Big Smoke. Albertans in particular seem to delight in schadenfreude at Toronto's expense: "Freeze in the dark eastern bastards" and so on. Even other residents of Ontario seem to enjoy heaping a little contempt on our biggest city.

The last few weeks I've been working in Toronto, subletting a loft in a converted toy factory in the new neighborhood of Liberty Village. A few minute walk from a streetcar stop, I'm also around the corner from the Academy of Spherical Arts (which is on Snooker Street), the new incarnation of Mildred Pierce restaurant, a Balzac's coffee shop, 24-hour grocery store, LCBO, and more. I don't even move my car except to come back to Waterloo.

Sure, there are some weird things. The traffic's crazy. It's congested and definitely dirtier than Waterloo. Toronto businessmen all seem to wear the same style of slip-on flat-toed shoe and the same shade pink shirt.

But great heavens, what a wonderful city! It's everything a city should be, with vibrant neighborhoods, a huge cultural scene, live-work mixed together, beauty, walkability. Added to all that, it's safe and it's friendly. I have been lucky to live and work in London, New York, Boston, Ottawa, Sofia and Dar-es-Salaam, and to spend time in a number of other great cities, but really, nothing beats Toronto.

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Waterloo's Student Ghetto

Residents living in an area near the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University are demanding that the city rezone their neighborhood. The reason is that so many houses in the area are rented to students that the area is a nightmare for the few families left, and yet it's not easy to sell their houses because they are not zoned for multi-person rental.

The real issue is not zoning. It is that - while many students are perfectly respectable neighbors - some of the students are insensitive drunken pigs. There is a great deal of vandalism around the universities, like wires yanked out of utility boxes and toilet paper and other garbage in trees. Some student houses have unmowed grass, chairs in the front yard, and beer bottles everywhere. Some students have loud, late parties. Many do not seem to understand garbage collection, resulting in garbage blowing in the street and on lawns.

Whatever else is done about zoning, the behavior of the bad students has to be improved. The university administrations, student organizations, city by-law officers and police all need to work on the problem:

- During orientation, students need some training in being citizens. Most are living on their own for the first time, and it is evident that many do not understand how to put their garbage and recycling on the curb. They also need to be told what the noise by-laws are and what the penalties are.
- There needs to be enforcement. If residents call the police about loud parties after 11 or rowdy behavior, the police need to show up immediately and they need to be effective. During peak partying times the police should patrol student neighborhoods, both to curtail loud parties and to prevent vandalism.
- The universities need to step up. Students should be penalized for repeated bad behavior, with a note on their transcript, with rustication/debarment, or with something else.
- Perhaps we should try something new. If landlords faced fines for egregious problems, they might make students pay a fine deposit (akin to a damage deposit) that students get back if there are no fines. Another option is for the city to fine the universities for the costs of cleaning up after students.

When I was a graduate student at UW I went to a couple of big parties at Sunnydale that were appalling: smashing of beer bottles against trees, trashing of townhouses, competing stereos blaring distortedly. There is a culture in this town that that sort of behavior is not just fine for students, but almost de rigeur. I've studied at other universities and that is not the case everywhere. I think the whole town has bought into some notion that if you're a student you should be allowed to get stinking drunk and keep everyone awake all night. There is a sort of implicit "boys will be boys" mentality that applies only to students.

I'm not suggesting these measures because I love law and order, but because there is a crisis in our town caused by the rowdy behavior of some students. The problem goes far beyond the so-called student ghetto.

We have a problem and we need to fix it. It's not fair to the residents of Waterloo, and it's not fair to other students.

Update: http://www.waterloochronicle.ca/news/ghetto

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On Toilets

Proposition: There is not enough public discourse about toilets.

Here's an example. When I think of the relationship Europeans have to their bodies, I tend to think of it as being more easy-going than in North America; I think of things like topless beaches and unshaved armpits. But a German colleague once told me about her first trip to the US. She said she was so horrified by the public toilets that it took her a long time to be able to use them. The reason? In Europe, public toilet stalls are little rooms with high walls and close-fitting doors. In North America, public toilet stalls are low cubicles with big gaps around the doors. There is a decided lack of both visual and auditory privacy.

Until she mentioned this, I forgot that at my first job in a big office building I had a similar reaction to the public toilets; and that I've noticed over the years that some of my colleagues never seem to go at work. I wonder if the way we build public toilets (which presumably are designed to reduce the time a cleaner has to take to mop the floors) has led to any public health issues. Do people become constipated because they don't like using them? How many hours of work are lost because of toilet design?

On the topic of public health, there's also some room for discussion of hygiene. Increasingly, we find our public toilets with autoflush (as well as motion-detector soap, water and towel dispensers), all presumably designed to keep us from spreading germs and bacteria. But toilet roll dispensers are often enclosed structures with giant toilet paper rolls (again, designed to reduce cleaning costs), and they frequently necessitate sticking ones hand up inside the thing to try to get the paper started. Does anyone ever clean those things? Does anyone ever clean the door handles inside the stalls?

Here's another toilet issue. Why do we find poop jokes so funny? I can still remember howling with laughter in primary school when someone poured raisins in the toilet, part of some long-forgotten joke. And yes, I tend to grin whenever I hear the name of Windsor MPP and the Minister Responsible for Women's Issues, Sandra Pupatello. The name is definitely part of why I like eating at Pupuserias. Last year I was on a committee tasked with coming up with a name for a new object-oriented software product, and we all repeatedly got sidetracked by suggesting names that had the acronym POO and POOP. It's hilarious. I'm not sure if the humor comes from poop being a forbidden topic (in the same way that people tend to laugh when someone swears on TV), or if it's a throwback to our adolescence. Or maybe, in the categories of humor, poop has its own place.

Finally, there is an interesting cultural difference in our naming of toilets. I travel a lot and have found that "toilet" is a universally understandable word, so I have fallen into the habit of using it, but it makes some people uncomfortable. In Canada we ask where the washroom is, but Americans have no idea what a washroom is. Americans tend to say restroom. When you think about it, both are kind of odd. But then, so is water closet.

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A Renaissance in Public Thought

There are a few people in this world whose work I admire so thoroughly that they are virtually my personal heroes. These individuals keep popping up in my blog in one way or another, and one of them is Jim Balsillie. For a while now I've felt badly about my references to Balsillie (who I like to call Jimbo) because I've only ever written, rather frivolously, about his attempt to buy southern Ontario an NHL team. The idea of the billionaire CEO of our local mega-company (BlackBerry-making RIM) trying to bring the NHL back to the bastion of hockey was so delightful and wonderful that I couldn't even take the idea seriously... and, as it turned out, neither could the NHL. (But we greatly appreciate his effort, all the same.)

However, I'm no hockey fan and my admiration for Balsillie comes from his other philanthropic work. I live practically next door to the think tank he founded, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), and I attend every public lecture I can get to. CIGI provides fabulous public lectures by scholars and diplomats on a wide range of public policy/foreign policy topics. Their noon hour series even throws in a free lunch. Frequently the lecturer will admonish the audience to spread the word about the topic under discussion, and frequently I write a blog entry about it. (For outreach outside of Waterloo, Balsillie also founded the Canadian International Council and the worldwide research exchange institute, IGLOO.)

CIGI, like the Waterloo-based theoretical physics think tank (Perimeter Institute) founded by Balsillie's RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis, has made public outreach a major part of its mandate. Not an afterthought - not some pamphlets or a banner - but a fundamental, first or second priority goal. And both institutions have put their incredible intellectual and creative resources to the task.

In an interview earlier this winter, Balsillie described his work to foster public debate: "We are off-the-charts blessed in prosperity and maturity and resources and quality of life. We have never been smarter, we have never been richer, we have never been technologically more advanced, and it's not just all about buying another car or buying another property. ...I'm thinking that there's going to be a renaissance."

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Planting Trees

I was out yesterday picking chestnuts from beneath healthy trees. Then I spent the evening peeling off the green shell to get to the brown seeds beneath. I got about 200 and today I'm going to plant them in bare areas in my community, along with other seeds I've gathered: wild apples, sumac, wild rose bushes, perennial flowers.

I had been thinking of buying saplings to plant. There were various reasons for not doing this. I live in an apartment and have no place to store them. It's a hassle to get permission to plant trees. Transplanted trees have a lower survival rate. Plus, I want to plant a lot and do not have much of a budget or manpower. All I'm investing is a couple of weekends and a few bags of composted manure.

I know that chestnuts grow well from seed because I used to live next to a chestnut tree and squirrels were constantly burying them in my flower beds. Some species of chestnut do not do well in clay soil and this is a clay-based area. I will seek out sandy soil but chestnuts may just not be the best choice. On the other hand, global warming is changing the dynamics of tree survival.

Wild apples seem to grow everywhere and again, my squirrel experience assures me that you can plant an apple and get a tree.

Sumac is supposed to be slow to germinate so I won't worry if I don't see plants next year. I don't know what to expect from the wild rose seeds: my rose bushes never reseeded themselves. Also, roses may require better soil than I will be able to find.

The key to guerilla community gardening is to plant hardy, drought-resistant varieties that can survive in the place you plant them. It's easy enough to get the information you need on the internet; or just choose something that is already growing wild on its own.

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