Cambridge: Getting Screwed and Dodging a Bullet

On her blog, Regional councillor Jane Mitchell completely poo-poos any concerns of Cambridge residents that LRT won't extend to their city. She describes Cambridge as a bunch of whiners who had terrible transit when it was their responsibility, who don't have the ridership to justify being in on Phase 1 of the LRT, and who make a habit of complaining falsely of unfair treatment by the Region.

I was embarrassed by the post and thought it was shockingly undiplomatic, especially as it was written by someone who's making decisions for the entire region. But in addition, it's wrong. This is not about being unkind to Cambridge; it's about materially disadvantaging them.

First - The LRT is not going to be much faster than the iXpress in travelling from Conestoga Mall to Fairview Mall. But for people going on to Cambridge, the LRT requires that people get off the train and wait for a bus - which means that for people going from Cambridge to anywhere in K-W, the trip will be slower and less convenient than iXpress. They are expected to contribute over a hundred million dollars - possibly several hundred million with expected cost overruns - for a transit system that is worse than what they have now.

Second - Imagine five years from now, when a company or individual is considering relocating to Waterloo Region. What signal do they get from the region's second-largest city not being on the main transit route? This isn't just about disadvantaging transit riders: it's about disadvantaging Cambridge real estate and property values and businesses. An LRT that doesn't go to Cambridge is far worse for Cambridge than no LRT at all.

In my research I have been talking to Cambridge residents, politicians and city staff, and what I hear is that they are well aware that they both have been screwed and dodged a bullet. Screwed in the ways I mention above, but dodged a bullet in other important ways. LRT would have messed up Water Street and the lovely, growing core of Galt. In addition, it looks like the municipalities are going to have to foot the bill for a lot of LRT capital costs: for replacing pavement, sidewalks and curbs that are torn up; for moving hydro polls and street lights; and so on. This was wholly unknown until Nancy Button was asked a question about it at the last Regional Council meeting. This could be tens of millions for each of Waterloo and Kitchener: I heard that Cambridge recently had to pay $2M for such capital costs when the Region built a roundabout.

Note: I like Jane Mitchell's blog a lot. I read it regularly, and I think she does us a service by being so candid in her writing. I wish I'd written a positive post about it before writing this negative one.

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Turmoil in the Middle East

This is just a sidebar, or metacomment, to the coverage of upheaval in the middle east.

I don't trust the coverage we're getting, because behind it I see a smirk - both from the people in the news rooms, and from our western governments.

Since September 11, 2001 - and before - the west has seen the Muslim states as their enemy, at least partially. Now that there are several popular upheavals against governments in those states, there seems to be a bit of smugness in our reaction. Oh, we genuinely care about the plight of people there: but we are also glad to see the comeuppance of these governments that formed oil cartels and stood against us and had the economic power to oppose our governments' worldview.

This reaction seems to be slanting our view of what's going on. I don't view the protests as primarily about democracy. I think it's more a matter of demographics.

Years ago, I heard a lecture by a demographer who said that in coming years (about now), the proportion of 18 to 25 year-olds in Arab states would result in social upheaval. He said that the proportion of young adults would be so high that they would face massive unemployment, and that historically that led to violence - and he said the only way to avoid it was to give them an outlet through emigration.

We don't hear anything like that in our current coverage. It's all about the dream of democracy. But what democracy? Toppling a dictator does not guarantee democracy. More likely it results in another dictator.

A few other thoughts:

• Fair elections cost a lot: $200 million and up. Can all these countries afford them? Is democracy sustainable?
  
• As Hannah Arendt argued, the political/economic system adopted by a country is only part of the picture: culture is the major factor. Changing the way the government is chosen is not always as much a game-changer as we assume.
  
• How much of all this is due to problems of countries whose economies are developing on the back of oil production? There are all sorts of things at play: a dominant industry that provides relatively little employment; the interference of oil-consuming nations; the ownership of the industry by giant multinationals; the potential for corruption; etc etc.
  

Rail transit will not solve urban congestion

I have another guest column in the Record today: Public will never give up their cars. It is printed along with an article by Tim Mollison of Tri-Tag: Rail transit an answer to urban congestion.

While I thank the Record for airing the debate, I'm not thrilled with the way they broke up my paragraphs in the print edition, which messed it up somewhat (the online version is the way I wrote it). Also, I object to the headline they put on my piece, as I neither say nor intend to say that the public will never give up their cars. I myself bought my first car at 40 and would prefer not to own one. A better headline for my piece would have been "Rail transit will not solve urban congestion."

However, reading my column again, it would have been better to put the last four paragraphs first, which would have clarified where I stand on transit. I want better transit; I want density; and I want a city that makes it easy to get around on transit - but from my analysis of the proposal, I think LRT will not only fail at achieving those goals, but will take us backwards.

Anyway, that's not the point of this post. If anyone is interested in the Jane Jacobs reference, I thought I'd supply it. She has a lot more to say about why LRT became a fad and why it's wrong. Luckily, parts of the book are available on Google books, here.

Here is the relevant excerpt:

[Paul Martin] told me that he intended to announce a program of federal grants enabling municipalities to install light-rail public transit. Now it was my turn to demur.

I told him that unfortunate experiences already showed that fixed transit routes were expensive failures when they were not preceded by evidence of sufficient demand. Underused routes not only are a drain on transit systems but are ill-suited as contributors to the needs and convenience of users. In the past, designers of transit systems had usually chosen to locate rail routes by observing which bus routes were most heavily used, a pragmatic method that worked well in Toronto and elsewhere. After it was apparently lost to transit engineers' memories in the 1960's, Toronto and a number of other cities, among them Atlanta, Buffalo, Detroit, and Chicago, tried rail routes justified by other goals and these have been unable to pull their weights, literally or figuratively. They don't have enough passengers.

I asserted that a prudent program to promote transit must be flexible enough to encourage experiments with routes, should that be what a city wanted to do, and possibly experiment with bus sizes, before settling on fixed rail routes. Why not specify grants for transit? I wondered aloud. Why specify from on high what form the transit must take?

... [Mr. Martin] pointed out that the mayors of every large city had asked for light-rail transit grants. I told him that I had attended the meetings where they arrived at this unanimity; they reasoned that asking for light-rail grants was politically more realistic than asking for other kinds of public transit equipment or more general transit help, such as grants for operating costs, the most desperate need in some municipalities.

Mr. Martin perfunctorily conceded that flexibility might be worth taking into consideration. Again I saw that our points of view were different. What he could contemplate as attractive bonanzas for clamoring cities and perhaps for complaining corporations producing rails and streetcars, I feared as foregone fiascoes.

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Heritage, Sense of Place, Identity, Culture

This is a picture from today's Record of a school that was torn down in Cambridge this week:


This is where I live (photo from Google Maps):


...so you can imagine why the loss of the school in Cambridge is very sad for me.

A decade ago, my building was saved by the skin of its teeth. After the original school closed it became an adult learning center, then offices... and then the building was condemned.

Developer Shawky Fahel bought the building and turned it into condos. But unlike almost every other historical condo development in the area, he preserved every aspect of the building that could be saved. He preserved the terrazzo floors in the wide hallways, as well as all the doors, stair railings, the little kid drinking fountains, even the original classrooms (although a couple were divided into two units). The birds-eye maple floors, still marked where desks were bolted to them a hundred years ago, were carefully numbered, pulled up, taken away for refinishing and then replaced. All the plumbing, wiring and heating ducts were replaced, but essentially the building was left its charming old self.

Compare that to the Seagram Lofts: only two walls were saved in each building, and otherwise the "lofts" are all new construction, with no historical materials inside. Or the Bauer Lofts, which is just an apartment building that happens to be built next to the old Bauer factory (which itself was completely gutted, with the only original parts being a little bit of the outside brick).

Further afield, sometimes we "save" heritage buildings in a way that doesn't save them at all. The old Toronto Stock Exchange on Bay Street, for example, was a designated building and so had to be preserved, but all that's left is the facade, swallowed up in a glass skyscraper with no attempt to even riff on the style of the original building. Of the fabulous old art deco interior with its pneumatic tubes and brass, nothing remains.

It would have been best if Uptown Waterloo had maintained enough families that the schools didn't have to close, but given the need for finding something else to do with the historic Alexandra Street School, this is about as good as it gets. (Thanks, Shawky.)

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Galactic Ruler Xenu Hires a Lawyer

There once was a guy who wrote sci-fi short stories for pulp magazines. Then one day he wrote this story:

75 million years ago, the earth was over-populated with 186 billion people, so its ruler rounded up most of the people and put them in volcanoes and blasted them with H-bombs. But their souls escaped, so he rounded up all the souls and made them watch movies that tricked them into believing they were gods or devils. After that the souls clumped up and invaded the bodies of the remaining people. The souls are still in us today, and the only way we can get rid of them is to join Scientology.

L Ron Hubbard wrote that story over 60 years ago, but the cult based on it is still in existence, and lots of nutty Californians are members. Actually, not that many - it seems that Scientology only has about 25,000 members - but when you think how ridiculous the story is that is (apparently) the basis of the entire faith, it really is a lot.

The Feb 14-21 New Yorker has a long, engrossing story about Scientology, The Apostate, and author Lawrence Wright does a brilliant job. I was glued to the page for hours. This is even more amazing given the awkward writing style which I am certain was caused by a team of lawyers scrutinizing every word to ensure that the aggressive Scientologist legal team couldn't find grounds to sue. In fact, that aspect of the writing makes the article even more engrossing: there are things not said, things teasing me from words I can just barely sense were removed.

At one point the author flies to California for an arranged meeting with the Scientology spokesman, but the guy plays games with him and utimately won't talk to him. A few paragraphs later, the spokesperson flies to New York to meet the author and his editors, and brings with him an entourage of two other executives and four lawyers, along with 48 binders of supporting documents. What did the New Yorker do to cause that about-face? An entire backstory lurks behind the tale.

In my lifetime, the three litigious heavyweights have been Brian Mulroney, Conrad Black, and the Church of Scientology. News articles about all three have had this awkward, overly scrutinized feel. I remember one article about Mulroney in the Globe & Mail (the article that broke the news of the envelopes of cash from Karlheinz Schreiber), which was almost unreadable - and the bombshell $300,000 figure was hidden in a paragraph near the end. The breakthrough of the New Yorker article is that the legal scrutiny actually made the article better.

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History's First Palindromic Scandal?

The Oda Ado.

The "New" Rapid Transit Proposal, Part 2

The proposal is here: Region releases report on Rapid Transit Implementation Options.

A few weeks ago, Regional Council voted to instruct staff to consider a bus rapid transit (BRT) option. The report presents 11 options, nine of which are LRT and only one is BRT. That option is a Cadillac version of BRT. It goes all the way to the St Jacob's Farmer's Market, which is further than the original LRT proposed route went. The entire route is on dedicated lanes built up with curbs: no parts of the route merge with regular lanes of traffic or use cheaper means of creating a dedicated lane, such as painting a diamond on the road.

Why did they do this? It seems obvious that the plan is to make BRT seem more expensive so as to tilt regional councillors towards choosing LRT. In other words, this report is just more manipulation, more obfuscation, more nonsense.

We need a real debate on this issue, with numbers we can trust and honest realistic options. We are not going to get that from our Region. We need an outside arbiter or consultant or board to come in and take over transit planning.

###

The "New" Rapid Transit Proposal

Only a few weeks after regional council voted to reconsider the BRT option, the Region has released its "new" transit proposal: Rapid transit implementation options.

Is it new? No. The report provides a dizzying array of 11 options, nine of which are LRT and one of which is "status quo" (AKA inflated estimates of the costs of not improving transit). Some of the options, such as the one to run LRT to St Jacobs' farmer's market, seem to be included just to set up easy targets and divert opposition from the main goal - to push through the original LRT proposal.

The report also sets up dates for new public consultation. If I had any expectation that the consultation would be any more honest than last time, when the region spent a fortune disguising a PR campaign as public consultation, I would make an effort to publicize these. As it is, what's the point.

But that, of course, is just the goal of this latest salvo in the war on Waterloo Region to force LRT on us against our wishes: confuse the issues, obfuscate the issues, wear us down. So, with a tired and heavy heart, I'll repeat a few of the reasons that the vast majority of citizens are against this crazed plan to put a train down our main streets:

LRT is a flawed transit plan that will be a costly white elephant that will bleed resources from useful transit routes, will provide inconvenient service, will create congestion on the roads, and will cause unnecessary increases in taxes.

As Jane Jacobs argues in her book Dark Age Ahead, "fixed transit routes were expensive failures when they were not preceded by evidence of sufficient demand." As John Shortreed recently showed, the demand forecast by the Region is wildly overstated. We do not have the demand sufficient to justify a fixed rail route. (I would provide a link for the Shortreed info but The Record is no longer posting certain anti-LRT articles on therecord.com, a devious tactic that should be stopped. I would be happy to discuss this with anyone interested in rectifying it.)

The report's claims that a BRT would quickly become overused are highly questionable. There are heavily used bus routes in Toronto that operate just fine with heavy use at rush hour. The report's overblown images of an endless line of bunched buses are just scare-mongering.

The LRT proposal is more about creating a flashy legacy project for departing politicians than it is about good city planning.

I am concerned that the ideology behind the LRT proposal is that the way to reduce car use is to artificially increase congestion by creating a route that disrupts traffic. That’s the only way I can think of to explain the route down King, the left turn across King at Erb Street, the disruption of intersections at Caroline-Erb and Caroline-William (in the latter case, the current map has the LRT running diagonally across the middle of the intersection).

In addition, the planned LRT would not be convenient. While the LRT will take away two lanes of traffic on our main arteries such as King Street between downtown and uptown, the stops are so infrequent that the area LRT serves will not be well-serviced. This type of infrequently stopping public transit is suitable for bringing people into downtown from the suburbs, but is not suitable for a transit line that is supposed to service the heart of the city.

If people find transit inconvenient they won’t take it, and then it will not reduce the need for roads at all.

The biggest convenience factors are frequency of arrival and total length of time of trips. Buses, which carry less people, run more frequently. Routes can be extended to require less transfers. And overall time on the iXpress route is similar between BRT and LRT. Meanwhile LRT, being an inflexible fixed route with large carriers, has less frequency and requires more transfers in the entire trip. It is much less convenient.

Buses can be short-turned (run in a loop over the busiest stops at rush hour). Buses can be moved between routes to suit demand. Buses can travel on different routes to avoid slowdowns when there are accidents or other disruptions on the road.

BRT could be an even cheaper option if the route was designated by painting diamonds on the road rather than building curbs around the BRT lanes. There could be a combination of the two techniques: buses could merge with regular traffic when going through Uptown Waterloo, for example (a proposal that was unanimously adopted by the Uptown Vision Committee).

Finally, the LRT route is overly favorable to the university of Waterloo. That helps the Region boost their ridership projections, but since university students essentially ride for free, it does little to help transit revenues. It does very little to meet the stated goals of the proposal, which is to lure commuters out of their cars and on to transit.

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Is Waterloo Square in Trouble?

Waterloo Square, lately known as "the Shoppes at Waterloo Town Square," is not flourishing. Nearly half the shops are empty or about to be (the good shoe store and Gizmos are both having closing sales). The remaining clothing stores are not the sort of boutiques that were envisioned as attractions; they're no different from an average mall-type store. The chocolate shop can't be doing well (I never see anyone in there). The "art gallery" and barely-open condo showroom are filler.

What's going wrong?

Some of the retailers believe that business never recovered after the front parking lot was turned into the Public Square. I like the public square and I like the policy to hide parking lots, but it may well be that visible parking attracts shoppers; after all, people flock to malls, where many people walk a long distance across the huge parking lots.

Another problem could be that the mall is just too small. After all, how many malls have barely 20 establishments, including restaurants? But we just spent a pile of money reducing it to a fraction of its previous size (it was not only cut in half, but the tower and basement areas were removed).

Perhaps the stores could be the problem - too expensive and not high enough quality. The vision for Uptown was independently owned boutique stores and gift shops. We haven't had many stores as high quality as Fudge's (which closed due to retirement).

I also wonder if First Gulf, the owner of the mall, isn't setting the rents too high. I wrote a business plan a few years ago for someone who was thinking of renting the coffee shop space, and when I crunched the numbers I saw how difficult it would be to survive with the rent that First Gulf wanted. (They may have lowered it after the space was empty for some time.)

An even more troubling thought is that perhaps Waterloo Square is a bellwether for the Uptown. Uptown has its share of failed or failing stores. Other than Words Worth Books, The Old Goat, Ontario Seed and Lily White, I'm not sure there's anything worth going to Uptown for these days.

Is anyone monitoring the situation, or doing anything about this?

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Molecular Gastronomy Part Two

A recent meal at Aphrodite Restaurant.

To save writing "This tasted super!" six million times, I'll say upfront that every bite was outstanding. This was one of the best meals of my life. It was performance art. It lasted over four hours, and despite the long list of dishes, it wasn't too much food - the courses were small, some only one bite - and it wasn't very rich. Also, despite what you might think when reading the details, nothing was gratuitous or gimmicky; everything made sense, was delicious, and was edifying.

Chef: David Faure
Address: 10 bd Dubouchage, Nice, France

The Revolution menu at 98 euros each:

Tangerine-vodka cocktail with dry ice (-78 degrees). Served in a round fish bowl steaming like a science fair exhibit, with a hollowed vanilla bean as a straw.

The virtual oyster ("A la recherche de l'huitre perdue"). On a bed of kelp, an oyster shell with what looked to be a raw oyster, but turned out to be eggplant and kiwi with a pearl made out of something in gel form. Also on the plate was a small glass of sea urchin mousse, and a tiny piece of buttered bread - we were instructed what order to eat it all in.

Nitro-Dragon of Vodka and green apple, curry wrong-smoked caviar, and Rai Faure cream. The waiter prepared them at the table, and made one for himself first to demonstrate. He dipped the Vodka/green apple espuma in liquid nitrogen and then put the result on top of the rest of the ingredients in a ceramic spoon. You slide the contents of the spoon into your mouth, where they create a sort of flavor-texture explosion. Then you breathe out through your nostrils, causing two huge jets of steam to shoot out your nose (like a dragon). Much giggling ensues.

The bread without bread. Long narrow strips of breadless bread are presented in a glass vase. One is a long strip of cooked parmesan cheese. Another is a strip that is akin to a big potato chip. I couldn't identify all of them.

Illusion of meat macaroni with duck liver. The meat-truffle macaroni was an extruded gel. It was served with peas, pea mousse, and some perfectly prepared, rare liver.

Warm spherification of liquid Pissaladiere, olive oil, oregano. Pissaladiere is a Nicoise specialty of pastry with caramelized onions on top. This rendition was a deconstruction of the traditional dish in liquid/gel form.

Texture and temperature. Ravioli of "sot l'y laisse" with roasted chicken juice (+70 degrees) and morel ice cream (-20 degrees). Morel ice cream is an AMAZING accompaniment.

Plume Iberique. Spanish pork, from the back of the neck, smoked with el Gringo, grilled green asparagus, peanut juice. This was served in an upside down glass dome full of smoke. When served, the waiter lifted away the glass dome and the smoke swirled around the diner's head. The meat was flash cooked in something very hot that caramelized the outside more than I've ever tasted.

Brie cheese ice cream, gingerbread, violet jam.

Sorbet. Made in front of us with liquid nitrogen (-196 degrees). The waiter took what looked like juice, combined it with the nitrogen, and whipped it with a whisk. It was amazingly creamy and lucious. The only drawback: the cold and acidity caused my tongue to hurt for a few minutes.

Virtual fried egg. Prepared at the table in a frying pan dipped into freezing liquid nitrogen, the waiter broke an egg into the pan (the egg was faked up) and it looked just like a fried egg - but it was a mango "yolk" with an unsweetened coconut "white". Cool trick and tasty.

Deconstructed dessert: wrong caviar or Irish coffee? The waiter ran up to the table an apologised profusely that he'd forgot to bring one of our first courses. He put down what appeared to be caviar, sour cream and blinis. But the caviar turned out to be irish coffee turned into tiny gel balls, and the whipped cream was unsweetened with an intense coffee flavor. (The blinis were regular blinis.)

Sweet morphing: The final dessert of the evening was a tray with a series of little things on it. One diner was chosen to serve, and instructions were given about the order and way to eat each:

• Green lemon sorbet sparkling lollipop - this crackled and popped in the mouth.
  
• Fruit jelly without fruit.
  
• Cornetto of strawberries and white balsamic vinegar.
  
• Wasabi chocolate with a tube of raspberry chok to spread on it.
  
• Solid "sex on the beach" - a tiny version of the cocktail, deconstructed.

Helium balloons to suck on and talk funny.

Here's Molecular gastronomy part 1.
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Square Head

On a recent trip to the south of France, I saw a lot of pragmatic, creative, effective transit infrastructure:

• Elevators and escalators all through Monte Carlo to move residents up and down the steep streets.
  
• Tunnels tucked away in congested areas to divert traffic underground.
  
• Underground parking tucked away all over the place. Seven levels of parking under the old town of Monte Carlo.
  
• A shopping zone in Nice with the street permanently blocked to cars (with an LRT running where the road was) but with lots of parking behind the stores.
  
• Many, many trains.
  
• Ferries.
  
• In Nice, rental bikes. (As I noticed in Washington DC a couple of months ago, these don't seem to be used at all. I know they're popular in Holland; I don't know why they seem to be a dud in some other places.)
  
• Buses running within and between towns that are so clearly marked that newcomers to the area can use them without trouble.
  
• Convenient parking everywhere: street parking and parking lots.
  
• Despite issues such as roads built by the Romans, narrow Medieval streets, huge amount of tourists, and a high cliff running through the densest areas, lots of cars moving well.

And this is off-topic, but here's an office building in Nice. God, I love France!

Alarmist statement

Letter to the editor written by my dad in today's Record.

Alarmist statement

Re: Light rail: ‘A failure to move forward will doom us’ – Dec. 11

Waterloo regional Chair Ken Seiling says that “A failure to move forward (with the ‘light rail’ project) will doom us.” This is alarmist in the extreme.

Seiling knows as well as anyone that the alternatives are trains or rapid buses, not trains or doing nothing. It is an honest debate and sensible things have been said in support of both alternatives. Trains will certainly run faster. On the other hand, any sensible version of the rapid bus alternative will cost less and provide a more flexible transit system. For example, if the claim that trains will be underutilized proved true there would be nothing we could do other than watch empty trains racing up and down King Street. If a similar problem arose with rapid buses, assuming they were not running on rails, we could adapt without paying a huge price.

To suggest that adopting buses rather than trains will bring “doom” is ludicrous. Ordinarily, Seiling comes across as a very competent administrator. In this present debate we are not seeing him at his best.

Larry Haworth
St. Agatha

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Ellsberg on Assange

This post was written by the Insititute for Public Accuracy.

News Release

Ex-Intelligence Officers, Others See Plusses in WikiLeaks Disclosures

December 7, 2010

The following statement was released today, signed by Daniel Ellsberg, Frank Grevil, Katharine Gun, David MacMichael, Ray McGovern, Craig Murray, Coleen Rowley and Larry Wilkerson; all are associated with Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.

WikiLeaks has teased the genie of transparency out of a very opaque bottle, and powerful forces in America, who thrive on secrecy, are trying desperately to stuff the genie back in. The people listed below this release would be pleased to shed light on these exciting new developments.

How far down the U.S. has slid can be seen, ironically enough, in a recent commentary in Pravda (that's right, Russia's Pravda): "What WikiLeaks has done is make people understand why so many Americans are politically apathetic ... After all, the evils committed by those in power can be suffocating, and the sense of powerlessness that erupts can be paralyzing, especially when ... government evildoers almost always get away with their crimes. ..."

So shame on Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and all those who spew platitudes about integrity, justice and accountability while allowing war criminals and torturers to walk freely upon the earth. ... the American people should be outraged that their government has transformed a nation with a reputation for freedom, justice, tolerance and respect for human rights into a backwater that revels in its criminality, cover-ups, injustices and hypocrisies.

Odd, isn't it, that it takes a Pravda commentator to drive home the point that the Obama administration is on the wrong side of history. Most of our own media are demanding that WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange be hunted down -- with some of the more bloodthirsty politicians calling for his murder. The corporate-and-government dominated media are apprehensive over the challenge that WikiLeaks presents. Perhaps deep down they know, as Dickens put it, "There is nothing so strong ... as the simple truth."

As part of their attempt to blacken WikiLeaks and Assange, pundit commentary over the weekend has tried to portray Assange's exposure of classified materials as very different from -- and far less laudable than -- what Daniel Ellsberg did in releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Ellsberg strongly rejects the mantra "Pentagon Papers good; WikiLeaks material bad." He continues: "That's just a cover for people who don't want to admit that they oppose any and all exposure of even the most misguided, secretive foreign policy. The truth is that EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time."

Motivation? WikiLeaks' reported source, Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, having watched Iraqi police abuses, and having read of similar and worse incidents in official messages, reportedly concluded, "I was actively involved in something that I was completely against." Rather than simply go with the flow, Manning wrote: "I want people to see the truth ... because without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public," adding that he hoped to provoke worldwide discussion, debates, and reform.

There is nothing to suggest that WikiLeaks/Assange's motives were any different. Granted, mothers are not the most impartial observers. Yet, given what we have seen of Assange’s behavior, there was the ring of truth in Assange’s mother’s recent remarks in an interview with an Australian newspaper. She put it this way: "Living by what you believe in and standing up for something is a good thing. … He sees what he is doing as a good thing in the world, fighting baddies, if you like."

That may sound a bit quixotic, but Assange and his associates appear the opposite of benighted. Still, with the Pentagon PR man Geoff Morrell and even Attorney General Eric Holder making thinly disguised threats of extrajudicial steps, Assange may be in personal danger.

The media: again, the media is key. No one has said it better than Monseñor Romero of El Salvador, who just before he was assassinated 25 years ago warned, "The corruption of the press is part of our sad reality, and it reveals the complicity of the oligarchy." Sadly, that is also true of the media situation in America today.

The big question is not whether Americans can "handle the truth." We believe they can. The challenge is to make the truth available to them in a straightforward way so they can draw their own conclusions -- an uphill battle given the dominance of the mainstream media, most of which have mounted a hateful campaign to discredit Assange and WikiLeaks.

So far, the question of whether Americans can "handle the truth" has been an academic rather than an experience-based one, because Americans have had very little access to the truth. Now, however, with the WikiLeaks disclosures, they do. Indeed, the classified messages from the Army and the State Department released by WikiLeaks are, quite literally, "ground truth."

How to inform American citizens? As a step in that direction, on October 23 we "Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence" (see below) presented our annual award for integrity to Julian Assange. He accepted the honor "on behalf of our sources, without which WikiLeaks' contributions are of no significance." In presenting the award, we noted that many around the world are deeply indebted to truth-tellers like WikiLeaks and its sources.

Here is a brief footnote: Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) is a group of former CIA colleagues and other admirers of former intelligence analyst Sam Adams, who hold up his example as a model for those who would aspire to the courage to speak truth to power. (For more, please see here.)

Sam did speak truth to power on Vietnam, and in honoring his memory, SAAII confers an award each year to a truth-teller exemplifying Sam Adams' courage, persistence, and devotion to truth -- no matter the consequences. Previous recipients include:

-Coleen Rowley of the FBI
-Katharine Gun of British Intelligence
-Sibel Edmonds of the FBI
-Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan
-Sam Provance, former Sgt., US Army
-Frank Grevil, Maj., Danish Army Intelligence
-Larry Wilkerson, Col., US Army (ret.)
-Julian Assange, WikiLeaks

"There is nothing concealed that will not be revealed, nothing hidden that will not be made known. Everything you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight; what you have whispered in locked rooms will be proclaimed from the rooftops."
-- Luke 12:2-3

The following former awardees and other associates have signed the above statement; some are available for interviews:

DANIEL ELLSBERG
A former government analyst, Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of the Vietnam War to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971. He was an admirer of Sam Adams when they were both working on Vietnam and in March 1968 disclosed to the New York Times some of Adams' accurate analysis, helping head off reinforcement of 206,000 additional troops into South Vietnam and a widening of the war at that time to neighboring countries.

FRANK GREVIL
Grevil, a former Danish intelligence analyst, was imprisoned for giving the Danish press documents showing that Denmark's Prime Minister (now NATO Secretary General) disregarded warnings that there was no authentic evidence of WMD in Iraq; in Copenhagen, Denmark.

KATHARINE GUN
Gun is a former British government employee who faced two years imprisonment in England for leaking a U.S. intelligence memo before the invasion of Iraq. The memo indicated that the U.S. had mounted a spying "surge" against U.N. Security Council delegations in early 2003 in an effort to win approval for an Iraq war resolution. The leaked memo -- published by the British newspaper The Observer on March 2, 2003 -- was big news in parts of the world, but almost ignored in the United States. The U.S. government then failed to obtain a U.N. resolution approving war, but still proceeded with the invasion.

DAVID MacMICHAEL
MacMichael is a former CIA analyst. He resigned in the 1980s when he came to the conclusion that the CIA was slanting intelligence on Central America for political reasons. He is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

RAY McGOVERN
McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years, whose duties included preparing and briefing the President's Daily Brief and chairing National Intelligence Estimates. He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

CRAIG MURRAY
Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, was fired from his job when he objected to Uzbeks being tortured to gain "intelligence" on "terrorists." Upon receiving his Sam Adams award, Murray said, "I would rather die than let someone be tortured in an attempt to give me some increment of security." Observers have noted that Murray was subjected to similar character assassination techniques as Julian Assange is now encountering to discredit him.

COLEEN ROWLEY
Rowley, a former FBI Special Agent and Division Counsel whose May 2002 memo described some of the FBI's pre-9/11 failures, was named one of Time Magazine's "Persons of the Year" in 2002. She recently co-wrote a Los Angeles Times op-ed titled, "WikiLeaks and 9/11: What if? Frustrated investigators might have chosen to leak information that their superiors bottled up, perhaps averting the terrorism attacks."

LARRY WILKERSON
Wilkerson, Col., U.S. Army (ret.), former chief of staff to Secretary Colin Powell at the State Department, who criticized what he called the "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal." See recent interviews

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

###

Setting Off a Bomb of Revolutionary Ideas

When WiliLeaks began releasing its latest batch of documents, 250,000 US diplomatic cables, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the act an attack on the US. Since then the US has been trying to find a way to prosecute WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange. There has been talk of using the Espionage Act. There is proposed Senate legislation targeted at Assange. The Justice department is said to be scrambling, trying to find legal grounds to get him.

The dubious Swedish sex charges appear to be part of plan - the idea being that once Assange is extradited to Sweden, it will be easier for the US to extradite him to American soil. Or maybe they're purely designed to discredit, distract and embarrass. Whatever the intent, the plan seems to be going off the rails a bit, with a Swedish police leak ironically providing proof that the charges are bogus.

But you have to wonder how clearly the Americans are thinking. If they manage to find a way to try Assange in the US, they provide a bully pulpit for him to communicate with the American people. Currently, most Americans dismiss Assange as an egotist, an anarchist, a criminal, a hacker. Even if American prosecutors managed to muzzle the man, journalists could find his voice in his published writings: his blog from 2006-2007, his articles, and a growing host of interpretations of his work.

I've been dipping into the Assange oeuvre this week, and even if his enemies killed him today, he has written enough to change the world. In fact, killing him could be the second most effective way to rapidly disseminate his thinking (not that I'm advocating it, mind you) - but trying him in the US would be the most effective dissemination method ever. That would ensure that his ideas are popularized in the country he is most targeting for change.

It's not that Assange's ideas are particularly new. I think he's brilliant, but it's not even that. He is very thoughtful, and he describes his theories in a compelling way. His importance is that he's inspiring. Assange's thoughts could form the basis of a powerful popular movement.

Assange doesn't just write about how to save the world, he writes about what it is to want to save the world. He muses about his personal valuation of idealistic activism over moral agency. He sometimes falls into a mystical way of talking, and even writes political poetry.

Assange creates new language for political analysis. Legitimate forms of government are described with the terminology of illegitimate forms, which allows us to be more objective about how they work, how they do bad things, and how to force them to change. He uses popular analogies to explain his thinking. For example, he compares the US government to a group of drug dealers in the TV show The Wire... and he does it very well.

Assange's goal is not regime change, but regime behavior change. It's not anarchy and it may just be doable. In fact, you might argue that if it's not done, the US will decline into an impoverished, despotic, desperate superpower that is ultimately the greatest threat to freedom in the world.

I can't claim to understand him yet. I'm not even sure if Assange sees the leaks as a way to force change in the behavior of governments, or whether he sees them as an end in themselves - an extension to freedom of information laws.

But I betcha we'll be hearing a lot more about what he thinks we should do. Jail is not the end of Assange; it's the beginning.

###

Rallies in the Square: A Suggestion

For anyone planning a rally in the Waterloo public square, I have a suggestion: invite participants to a post-rally event at a local establishment afterwards. Whole Lotta Gelato, Symposium, Jane Bond, the Huether - all would be great spots to meet for post-rally chat. It's good for you: organizers can join in and keep the conversation going. It's good for Uptown: all those establishments could use a boost, especially on a Sunday.

Whole Lotta Gelato, in particular, seems to be struggling a bit these days. They've added lots of new food items: cakes, soup, sandwiches, salads, breakfast stuff (along with their old standbys of paninis, gelato and coffee), and it's an advantage for groups that the upstairs room is often empty. (Plus they have a sort-of all-you-can-eat policy: they won't charge you beyond $13.)

###

Rally for Rails

Three local organizations held a rally for LRT today at the Waterloo public square. It was a well-attended event, especially given the temperature; one or two hundred people, I'd say, mostly students (not counting press and organizers). A number of people made (mercifully) brief remarks, including local politicians Ken Seiling, Carl Zehr, Angela Veith and Jean Haalboom.

I sat off to the side and listened, trying not to get in the way. I was struck by my agreement with almost everything that was said. The remarks mostly concerned what I would call motherhood issues, and I think there's broad public support for them: a cleaner environment, less congestion, less sprawl, and more efficient use of public funds.

That's all an argument for better public transit. The problem is that LRT is not better public transit.

You don't have to be a transit planner to know that good public transit is transit that people want to take: that goes to where people want to go and is convenient. In Waterloo, the LRT is convenient for people at the University of Waterloo and a couple of other groups (bedroom communities to the north, perhaps), but not so good for most residents. The proposed LRT doesn't stop frequently enough; the route does not benefit most of Waterloo; and taking it would involve too many transfers (unless you're going to UW).

LRT is not going to reduce congestion or create density nodes if people don't ride it; there are plenty of examples of expensive transit failures in North America, and the proposed LRT is likely to be another one. Insanely, some proponents want to create traffic jams in order to force people to take the LRT, but the carrot is a far more successful tool than the stick in transit planning, because if you make traffic impossible, people will just go somewhere else. Instead of working and shopping Uptown, they'll go to the industrial parks and big box stores on the outskirts of town.

LRT is poor transit planning in other ways, too. By running down our main street without stopping very often, it actually reduces our ability to get to places on our main artery. It disrupts car, bus and bike traffic while not providing alternative convenience.

The final nail in the coffin and biggest failure of the proposed LRT route is the left turn across King onto Erb that will cause traffic chaos in the Uptown - as well as the chaos it will cause at Erb-Bridgeport and Caroline-William in the Uptown.

The problem with the cost of LRT is not that it costs money: it's that it wastes money.

Students in support of LRT are quite cavalier about the cost to taxpayers. I'd like them to put their money where their mouth is and agree to the following. If this UW rail shuttle is to be foisted on the residents of Waterloo region, there should be:

• No more cheap transit passes for university and college students - they pay the full adult fare.
  
• Transit passes should be a compulsory ancillary fee for all students, guaranteeing revenue for the GRT/LRT.
  
• UW students should pay an extra fee of $10/month since the LRT services them more than any other group.
  

But better than all that, whether it's LRT, BRT, bus, streetcar or whatever technology, the route should be changed so that Uptown Waterloo is not so severely damaged. Bottom line: LRT cannot turn left across King in Uptown. Either it is circumvented to go two-way on Caroline, or - far better - we get a transit system that goes straight down King, creating density nodes at King-University, King-Columbia and King-Weber; and we get a route that has much more frequent stops.

And let me say again that not only do I live extremely close to the proposed Uptown LRT stop, but I work (and have worked for most of the past 11 years) near the proposed UW R+T Park stop. I am not only an alumni of UW but my parents were both profs there and I grew up on campus: I love UW. My opposition to LRT is not because of any personal inconvenience or dislikes: it is because LRT, as currently planned, is very, very bad for Waterloo.

###

Bus is Best – downtown is (and will be) too small

This post was written by John Shortreed.

• LRT will cost over 1 billion, local taxpayers will put up 500 million – for example grade separation at tracks in Kitchener is estimated at under 10 million – will be 30-40 million
  
• Bus Rapid Transit will be about half the cost of LRT and have lower operating costs
  
• LRT is a commuter rail system to bring commuters from Elmira – park at mall then go to downtown Kitchener – LRT will not intensify development in the existing cities
  
• BRT will intensify land use with more stops, will serve Sun Life (LRT has no stop there)
  
• BRT will serve Bauer Lofts (that’s right LRT has no stop at Bauer Lofts, 144 Park and new Red condos) Where LRT will have one stop, existing King St. Bus has 10.
  
• UpTown is one of three “Region and Provincial Growth Centers” but it will reach target population and employment before the LRT could be built
  
• LRT, a commuter rail system, has one stop between UpTown Waterloo and downtown Kitchener –LRT can not intensify development in the prime 2.5 km redevelopment area
  
• BRT is flexible, if there is an accident it can go around the accident, LRT sits there. Santa Clause Parade and Buskers only possible with BRT not LRT
  
• If a station is in the wrong place or more stations are needed (they will be needed), BRT can change cheaply as no tracks, curbs, LRT involves major expense.
  
• BRT would not have curbs and left turns into businesses on King would be possible, with LRT no left turns into Adult Rec Center from King St. north, or the 2 Funeral Parlors.
  
• BRT can be integrated into some Cross town routes without transfers, while all LRT connections are transfers
  
• Region’s ridership estimates are 2 to 3 times higher than ridership in Buffalo which has a better system, double the population and more than double the downtown employment
  
• With realistic ridership the annual LRT subsidy will be at least 10 million more than forecast and few ways to reduce it other than stop running the trains
  
• Transit expenditures have been increasing by almost 10% a year and revenue by about 2% with most of the new riders being University Students with passes (which is good)
  
• In 2011 Transit expenditures will be about 80 million per year (operating plus capital), with about 20 million revenue – overall return on investment is 20%.

And by 2031 cars will be more energy efficient than the LRT.

Why the World Needs WikiLeaks

Better Transit

People give me a certain amount of guff for opposing LRT but not proposing something to replace it. I feel this is an unfair criticism: after all, I'm not a transit planner or an urban planner. I have a pretty demanding job and other stuff on my plate. I can recognize a stinker when I see it but that doesn't mean I can come up with something better. (Also, I have tried to make proposals, such as in this article in The Record.)

Nonetheless, I get the point, and also (as I've said many times), I'm uncomfortable in this ever-negative role, so I've been putting a bit of thought into this. I've decided that someone with my skill set might contribute best to a discussion of transit development by proposing requirements rather than trying to propose routes or technologies or whatever.

At some point it would be good to start organizing the requirements into categories and priorities and so on, but this is more of a brainstorming exercise (and I'm open to criticism on all these ideas), so here is a very rough start.

Public transit should first and foremost service people who have no alternatives
That's people who can't afford to drive or who are unable to drive (due to being under age, elderly, physically or mentally unable, and so on). Serving those groups means understanding where they need to go and what their special needs are in using transit.

A bit of a puzzler here is where university students fit in. University students make up something like 20% of the population of Waterloo, and the current LRT proposal is designed to service the University of Waterloo more than any other group in town. In fact, we might as well call the LRT the "UW Shuttle". UW students tend to be quite wealthy, and transit is optional for them in that they could live close to campus and walk. (When I was a grad student at UW I never took transit simply because it was expensive; I always rode my bike or walked. But that was 30 years ago.) Also, university students get a cut-rate pass to use transit. I'm undecided about this one. I have noticed that the pro-LRT forces are overwhelmingly made up of people at UW.

Public transit planning must be part of overall transit planning
It seems that part of the LRT plan is to force people to take transit by making driving inconvenient. I can't see any other reason for running a GO train down our main street, putting railway gates in Uptown Waterloo, and so on. That's needlessly destructive.

Public transit should co-exist with other transit. That means that public transit should not foul up car traffic: in Waterloo, LRT/BRT cannot turn left across King in Uptown. It also means that there should be provision for parking, where appropriate, at transit stops; intracity transit should connect seamlessly with intercity traffic; and so on.

Public transit should be convenient and go to where people want to go
Any route down King Street must have frequent stops, especially in downtown cores. If the Region wants to build a rail line with infrequent stops, it can't go down King.

Public transit needs density to be successful...
...Which is why our regional sprawl doesn't have successful transit. A really good part of the LRT plan is the attempt to create density nodes. However, we need to look more closely at the actual locations of these areas of densification. In Waterloo, will the LRT do anything to create density? I don't think so. The proposed stops are:

• Uptown, which is booming without any assistance. LRT is actually a threat to the densification of uptown because it is going to make it a traffic disaster.
  
• University of Waterloo, which has stops at Seagram Drive, the main campus, and the R+T Park on the north campus. As that is all UW land and is planned development, I'm not sure what difference transit nodes make to its development. Will LRT cause UW to enroll more students?
  
• Northfield/Parkside - There may be some densification opportunity here. I really don't understand this stop. It's on a terribly busy road right by the entrance to the expressway. Is this a good place for a lot of development? I don't know.
  
• Conestoga Mall - Again, is this an opportunity for density? It seems to be booming all on its own.

Some of the Waterloo stops could use better transit service, especially Uptown and Conestoga Mall, but that's a different issue (and I don't think they will be well-served by LRT in any event).

But if anyone were interested in creating density nodes in Waterloo, the main transit line would not go to UW, but would go straight down King, making Uptown north of Erb more attractive; and have stops at King-University, King-Columbia, and on King north of Weber. Or something like that.###

Is LRT Dead?

When I read things like this, I'm sure LRT dead: "Mayor Brenda Halloran said she was surprised to learn how many people in Waterloo do not want to see a light-rail system going through the city. “The ‘no’ to trains, that surprised me. People are totally against having trains running up and down King Street,” Halloran said."

And this: "Jan d’Ailly, a two-term member of city council, said he was surprised to see public opinion sour on the light-rail system approved by regional council. “At almost every single door it is ‘no’ to LRT and that surprised me,” d’Ailly said."

Note that Mayor Halloran didn't say that people aren't willing to pay for LRT: she said they're telling her that they are "totally against having trains running up and down King Street." Opposition to LRT is not all about money. This is not something that's going to be fixed by rejiggering the finances.

When I read things like this, I think LRT is going to be rammed down our throats regardless of what the people want:

[Regional Chair Ken] Seiling let it slip that regional staff were trying to shave as much as $85 million off the cost.

Instead of the region’s original $235 million obligation, he suggested the total bill might be between $150 million and $175 million. And there may be new development charges to pay for it as well.

. . .

The original rail proposal required a regional tax increase of close to nine per cent to cover both operating and capital costs. Such a tax hike appears to be extremely unpopular. Seiling seems to think he will be able to get the new council to back a smaller tax increase of perhaps 5.5 per cent to 7.5 per cent. Why not ask voters directly by providing a plan?

We should also remember the current proposal is already a compromise. To save money, trains will only run from a mall in Waterloo to a mall in Kitchener. Cambridge is to get buses. So what will another $85 million in cuts look like? Cheaper trains? Fewer stations? Buggies for Cambridge?

Whatever cost-cutting manoeuvres the region adopts, it seems certain to result in a reduction in ridership and an increase in the tax subsidies necessary to keep it solvent. So as capital costs drop, operating costs may go up in step.

I'm also rather worried by this comment from Cambridge Mayor and LRT opposer Doug Craig:

What is happening right now is that the LRT debate has been deliberately submerged until after the election. The numbers regarding the 230 million dollar shortfall are being massaged, compromises on capital costs are being trimmed and in early 2011, it will in my opinion, be re-packaged and passed by the new council. The costs to all regional taxpayers will be significant because the operating costs will be 23 million dollars a year and the capital costs will exceed projected estimates. In other words, it's unsustainable.

As far as I can tell, Seiling has not heard one word of the thousands of arguments against LRT. He seems hell-bent on shoving this idea through. He is motivated by a passionate belief that growth in the region will overwhelm road capacity. What he doesn't get is that LRT will only help with that problem if people ride it. People won't ride something that is even more inconvenient than the current bus system - and LRT is much, much more inconvenient than the current buses. Further, the LRT as planned will greatly reduce road capacity and make traffic much worse. It will not solve the problem; it will greatly exacerbate it.

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LRT Round-up

To see all of my writing about LRT, click here. The list is truncated, but it provides most of the posts I've written on LRT.

Here are some highlights:

What LRT Will Do to the King-Erb Intersection

What LRT Will Do to the Erb-Bridgeport-Caroline Intersection

Jane Jacobs on LRT

Is this the region we want?

In addition, you might be interested in the 100+ letters to the editor against the Waterloo Region LRT proposal, as well as the dozens of articles published in local papers against it.

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We need other mass transit solutions

My column in the Saturday, October 23, Waterloo Region Record (link)

No: We need other mass transit solutions
Ruth Haworth

If the Great Light Rail Transit Debate has done nothing else, it has got our community talking about transit. In fact, transit may well be the issue of this election campaign.

In a recent election survey by Taxpayers for Sensible Transit (www.t4st.com), 95 per cent of responding candidates said they oppose Waterloo Region’s light rail transit proposal. It seems likely that the new regional council will vote against light rail transit and that will be the end of it.

But the survey had another, even more extreme result: over 99 per cent of candidates responded that we need to improve transit in the region.

If we’re smart, we’ll take what we’ve learned from the light rail transit proposal and debate, and use it to create a better transit plan that will serve our community into the future. I’ll take a stab at taking the arguments on both sides of the issue to see what they can tell us.

The main argument against light rail transit is that it’s unaffordable. The cost to Waterloo Region of well over $200 million is simply too much for local taxpayers to absorb — and typical cost overruns could make that burden much larger. There have also been criticisms that the service is too inconvenient. The long distance between stops means that riders would have to walk further and make more transfers. The distance from light rail stops to nearby attractions, notably from proposed light rail stops to the malls, also means that light rail transit would be less convenient than buses. And the inconvenience of light rail is not offset by any advantages in speed. Light rail transit, running on busy city streets and stopping at all traffic lights, is virtually no faster than what we have now.

By contrast, there’s a lot of room for improvement in our existing bus service, at much lower cost. If we want to woo people out of their cars and on to transit, the total transit experience must become more convenient. That means that the total time of trips is faster, with less transfers and more predictable schedules. We need more bus shelters and better snow clearance around them. And so on.

Another complaint about light rail transit is that it could cause major traffic disruption with plans such as railway gates on Erb Street in Uptown Waterloo. Transit should be integrated with, and respectful of, other uses of roads, including cars, bikes and pedestrians.

The region’s “Plan B” is rapid buses. The rapid bus proposal, which is to build dedicated bus lanes (with curbs) on a route similar to light rail transit, is almost as problematic as light rail. Like light rail transit, bus rapid transit isn’t rapid. The rapid buses are expected to travel at about the same speed as an iXpress bus. What’s the point of spending over $500 million on a single route that is already served, without greatly improving it?

In addition, the rapid bus plan has many of the same problems as light rail. By building physical barriers around bus lanes, we would be creating a route that’s inflexible and disrupts traffic.

Creating an entire route of physically demarcated lanes on major arteries may be a mistake, but we could use the idea in a modified form. We could create dedicated bus lanes in areas where congestion slows down buses, and we could do it affordably by painting diamonds on the road, a system which works well in Toronto.

A major argument for light rail transit was that increased growth in the region will require more capacity than buses can provide. There is a bit of a circular argument here. The region wanted to use light rail to create density nodes in downtown cores and then argued that the resulting large numbers of passengers would require a rail service to move them all. But if development continues to grow as it has been, employment will be scattered across many industrial parks and downtowns, and we can easily service those smaller nodes with buses. We should be identifying those nodes and improving transit service to them.

Another thing I’ve learned from the light rail debate is the importance of being fair to all parts of the region. How could we build such a large regional initiative that essentially excluded Cambridge for decades? If we’re serious about building strong commercial cores, we need to include the downtowns of Cambridge.

If we treated each downtown core as a transit hub, we could create express routes that link the downtowns of Cambridge, Kitchener and Waterloo, using the expressway where appropriate. Those linkages could also be extended to more intercity travel, with easy access to buses and trains to Guelph and Toronto.

Those are just some ideas. After we put light rail transit behind us, those of us on all sides of the debate should put our energies toward more productive and positive ideas to improve transit and our community.

###

LRT = chaos, says "No" side

LRT = chaos, says "No" side
570 News
October 21, 2010
link to article

Waterloo Region's plans for light rail transit are not without critics. As the region moved forward with the project, a group of business owners, professionals and everyday taxpayers formed into Taxpayers for Sensible Transit (T4ST).

The group's spokesperson, Ruth Haworth, calls the light rail plan a case of poor transit planning and poor city planning.

"The problem with this version of LRT is that it runs right through the busiest parts of our town but it doesn't stop very often," Haworth argues. "So there's one stop between downtown Kitchener and downtown Waterloo, for example."

Haworth also describes a scene of "traffic chaos" in uptown Waterloo, given the proposed route through the core. She uses the corner of Erb and Caroline as an example, saying railway crossings that will be used at the intersection will bring traffic in all directions to a complete standstill every three and a half minutes.
Haworth says planners have also put the cart before the horse, so to speak, when it comes to development. She says rather than lay down rail lines and expect development to come to the tracks, the region should develop commercial properties and add rail later to support them.

Haworth cites the new mega mall on Ira Needles as an example of poor planning. "(It's) out there off the transit grid. You (need to) think in advance and prepare in advance," Haworth insists. "I don't know why it is that we seem to have to have sprawl and city and regional councils can't do anything about it. That just doesn't seem right."

Price is another sore spot with T4ST, although Haworth is hesitant to use that as a rallying cry for fear the group's entire message will be lost among the dollar signs. That said, Haworth does not believe anyone in the region truly thinks the $790-million system is affordable. She points to a survey of municipal election candidates by way of support.

"T4ST just did a survey of all of the candidates for the upcoming municipal election and 95% of them said they would oppose it," Haworth asserts. "And that's because of the funding shortfall."

Haworth says T4ST is very supportive of improved transit in the region but she believes there are less expensive ways to go about it. Analyzing bus routes and perhaps even using smaller buses on less travelled routes so that no more "half empty" buses will be "rattling around our subdivisions" is one suggestion she makes.

But Haworth still bristles at the mention of light rail.

"I just know that if we throw all of our resources onto one route and it's a white elephant and it causes massive traffic disruptions, then that's not good."

###

Evolution of Communication

The Social Network is a very good movie. The Social Network is an especially interesting movie in that everyone seems to have come away with a different take on the Zuckerberg character. Many see him as a heartless nerd, but I thought he came off very sympathetically. He was driven to create something great, and his success was due to a single-minded commitment to his vision.

That vision was world-changing. Prior to Facebook, the paradigm for online communicaton was email. Email was based on the old business memo. Zuckerberg saw a different way for the world to connect. The reason he was able to succeed so amazingly (unlike many other social network products that fizzled) seems to be an early decision he made to let the users of Facebook determine what it would be, and then to provide the very highest quality for those features.

Thanks to Facebook, the paradigm of communication has changed. Instead of issuing memos we communicate in social networks, with our picture next to our writing and a mixture of broadcast and address. Many children use Facebook as their primary form of online communication. Who knows where it will go next.

Facebook isn't the whole story, of course. There's Twitter and texting and other variations. When historians look back at this period, they will be able to chart the rapid evolution of communication in these still-early years of the wired world. What we do now is nothing like what we will do in ten years.

There is also an evolution in how software products get created. So many of the most successful companies are newly formed, youth-run companies because the staid old companies don't seem to be able to evolve. Successful business is moving towards a much more customer-driven model, which is what Zuckerberg created as an intuitive, naive 19 year old who hadn't been taught how to "properly" develop software. Old businesses try to move towards the new model by adding customer usabilty to their development process, but that's like putting a bandaid on a broken leg.

The fact that Zuckerberg's first social network was a university site to rate the hotness of girls is not a minor point. He developed something that he thought was cool and that he thought other people would find cool, and then he tossed it into the sea and let other people pick it up. He then swam beside them, altering it according to their use of it. You couldn't do this so easily with a product that has to be released, but part of the new business model is creating a product that is fluid and adaptive. It may be why cloud computing or something in that direction is the necessary evolution of software. Downloads and upgrades and new feature lists are all so cumbersome and annoying. In five years we may look back on them as dreadfully archaic, like typewriters.

###

T4ST Press Release

October 15, 2010

Most candidates in Waterloo Region disapprove of regional LRT plan

Buses favoured by a wide margin, says survey by Taxpayers for Sensible Transit

Local grassroots organization Taxpayers for Sensible Transit (T4ST) today released the results of a comprehensive candidate survey ahead of the October 25 municipal election in Waterloo Region. The results show massive disapproval for the regional government’s controversial $819 million light rail transit plan.

T4ST, which favours improved bus service over the region’s light rail transit plan, sent out 168 email transit surveys. This covered all urban and rural mayoral and regional chair candidates plus candidates for city, regional and township councils. The overall response rate was 66 percent. Excluding township council candidates, the response rate was above 80 percent.

Asked whether they supported the region’s current plan, 95 percent of the responding candidates said no. Only one candidate supported the necessary tax hike of approximately 9 percent to pay for light rail.

“These results are crystal clear,” said Ruth Haworth, spokesperson for T4ST. “Voters in Waterloo Region do not want to pay for light rail transit. And the candidates have heard this message.”

According to the survey, 89 percent of the candidates do not support permanent traffic disruptions on King Street or other roads to facilitate a permanent rail line. And asked which form of transit was most appropriate for Waterloo Region, buses were the overwhelmingly popular response: 62 said the existing iXpress system should be improved, 30 wanted a new system of rapid buses and 21 candidates said light rail is the best form of transit for our region.

Haworth said this means regional staff should immediately stop work on light rail plans and begin examining improvements to existing bus service or rapid buses. “Over 80 percent of candidates want better bus service,” says Haworth. “Buses make sense for Waterloo Region. It’s time the region recognized this and switched gears on transit.”

Haworth added, “Our reply rate was very high and we have responses from all candidates in most urban races. This means residents can use our site as a voting aid no matter where they stand on this issue.”

The survey provided a comment section and received many interesting suggestions regarding ways to improve or alter the existing transit system in Waterloo Region.

The complete survey with all candidate responses is available at the group’s website: www.t4st.com.

For more information, contact
Ruth Haworth
Taxpayers for Sensible Transit
t4stgroup@gmail.com

###

Beware Oktoberfest

I was lured out to Oktoberfest events twice last week, once by free sausages
(yum) and once by free pancakes and sausages (alas, the line was too long). I had a good time at each event, but... there was the music. I enjoyed it at the time. I enjoyed watching the crowd bobbing up and down to polka time. I even enjoyed watching parents teach their kids the chicken dance.

But it's been over a week, and I still have the Pennsylvania Polka stuck in my head.

I made the mistake of emailing my brother about it, and he cruelly emailed back the lyrics.

Strike up the music the band has begun
The Pennsylvania Polka.
Pick out your partner and join in the fun
The Pennsylvania Polka.
It started in Scranton, it’s now No 1
It’s bound to entertain you
Everybody has a mania
To do the polka from Pennsylvania

I sing out of tune even in my head, and I really can't hit the notes on that last line.

I'm a little paranoid about ear worms because I once had Hail to the Chief stuck in my head for two years. That was a rough time. When the Pennsylvania Polka knocks around in my head I have tried displacing it by thinking of the scene where it's played in Groundhog Day, one of my favorite movies, but that has just made it worse.

A cautionary tale.

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What I Learned from the Transit Survey

As spokesperson for the anti-LRT group Taxpayers for Sensible Transit (T4ST), I was involved in running a survey about transit that included all candidates in the upcoming elections in Waterloo Region. While writing up the results I had to read the responses over and over, and developed some opinions that go further than the usual analysis. Here are my thoughts.

There's a bandwagon and everyone's jumping on it
We received responses from over 100 candidates, and the overwhelming response (95%) is that if elected they will oppose LRT. While knocking on doors, candidates have been hearing anger and opposition to LRT - I know this not just from the responses, but also because I've been knocking on doors and talking to people myself. The issue is going to sway a lot of voters (which is why our survey is so important). I don't know if any candidates say they oppose LRT just to appease voter anger over the proposal, but I do know that on June 24, 2009, every single Regional councillor - with the exception of Cambridge Mayor Doug Craig - voted in favor of LRT. That includes our mayors, who automatically sit on Regional council.

We need to be more concerned about fairness
As is evident from the responses of candidates in Cambridge, the proposed LRT is grossly unfair to Cambridge, essentially leaving it out of the plan for decades. In future, we need to ensure that our regional initiatives are more balanced.

If the LRT was really about beefing up downtowns, why did it go from a mall in Kitchener to a mall in Waterloo? Why not start by going from a downtown core in Cambridge to downtown Kitchener and Uptown Waterloo? Cambridge is bigger than Waterloo, for Pete's sake.

Elected officials should be open to public opinion
Some candidates chose to not respond to our survey because they thought the questions were too biased. This troubles me. Elected officials have to spend a lot of time listening to constituents on all sorts of issues, and the officials should have an open mind. All too often, citizens who make a statement to city or regional council are met with bored looks and zero interest. That's just wrong. We need representatives who listen to us, not get their backs up and freeze us out.

Saying it's a regional issue is a cop-out
Some candidates responded to our questionnaire by saying that they're running for municipal council and LRT is a regional issue, so it's not part of their mandate. I completely disagree. When something is going to have such a profound impact on the municipal landscape, city councillors should take a stand.

For example, I remain dumbfounded that Waterloo City councillors didn't examine the impact of the proposed LRT route on Uptown Waterloo. Examination of the Region's proposed route map shows three Uptown intersections (King-Erb, Erb-Caroline, and Caroline-William) that could become nightmares, and cross-town traffic on Erb could grind to a halt. (In the LRT plan, only one lane of Erb Street crosses King, and it is also a turning lane.) This would affect not only car traffic, but also buses, bikes and pedestrians. And the ensuing mess would almost certainly have a negative impact on the success of local businesses.

City councillors should also have been looking out for their constituents on accessibility issues. With an aging population who may need to rely on transit, there were significant issues such as the long distance between stops, the long distance from LRT stops to their target destinations (notably the malls), the linkages between LRT and bus transfers, and possible problems crossing the tracks with walking aids.

In my opinion the specifics of this LRT plan are bad, in part, because municipal politicians dropped the ball.

It ain't over till it's over
Many people believe that LRT is dead. After all, the whole plan was based on the feds and province paying for it, and they fell short by $250M. I agree it's unaffordable, but I have no illusions that it's over. Our Regional Chair, Ken Seiling, is still fighting for this like it's his life at stake. Sure we could vote him out, but (1) he has no real opposition and (2) he has enormous backing - I think he got about three-quarters of the vote last time.

What Cambridge Mayor Doug Craig said in our survey was, "What is happening right now is that the LRT debate has been deliberately submerged until after the election. The numbers regarding the 230 million dollar shortfall are being massaged, compromises on capital costs are being trimmed and in early 2011, it will in my opinion, be re-packaged and passed by the new council."

There are a lot of good candidates out there
I have been working on LRT for two years now, but I learned a lot from reading the comments of candidates. Many of the comments were thoughtful, insightful, and original - and I say that about comments on all sides of the issue. I was particularly impressed that within Waterloo, Kitchener and Cambridge, almost every candidate responded. What we need more than anything is a truly open, community-wide discussion about how to improve our public transit. I think our local candidates are up for the job.

For the results of the T4ST survey, see www.t4st.com.

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Find Out How the Candidates Feel About LRT

The T4ST election survey asked candidates in Waterloo Region some questions about transit. We got fabulous results - over 100 responses, representing almost all of the candidates in Waterloo, Kitchener and Cambridge. (Response rates were lighter in the townships, where it's not such a burning issue.)

The responses were really interesting. I expected the results to be overwhelmingly anti-LRT (and they are), but I didn't expect all the thoughtful, insightful comments - reflecting all sides of the issue. I learned a lot from them.

There have been other transit surveys sent to candidates in this election, but ours is by far the most comprehensive.

So check it out: www.t4st.com.

Update: Someone just sent me this link, showing that all the current regional councillors except Doug Craig voted in favor of LRT. ...just something to think about while reading the responses. (link)

Update: The pro-LRT group TriTag also did a comprehensive survey. It's more comment-based. Check it out: TriTag transit survey.

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Barrels

Oktoberfest is set to begin again, and with it our annual barrel race (Saturday, 10 am, Waterloo Public Square). This will be the first year we've had the barrel race since we lost our last barrels. The remaining ones were purely ceremonial, piled in a pyramid in front of the CIGI building (formerly the Seagram distillery) at Erb and Caroline. Last year City Hall said the pyramid was rotting and gave the barrels away. Now the spot is part of the new Balsillie School of International Affairs.

(A local theater group has started the Barrel Project to commemorate the barrel diaspora. "While the wooden slats and metal rings may be scattered all over the county, their memory remains..." I kid you not.)

All we have left of barrels is the name of the Barrel Yards development on Erb at Father David Bauer Drive. The Barrel Yards used to be the Canbar lands where whiskey barrels were made and stored. The land is soon to be a complex of apartments, office buildings, retail space and hotels... or at least it will be if reported water table issues can be resolved.

Canbar shut down in 1992, and I can clearly remember when barrels were part of the culture of Waterloo. When you drove down Erb you could see the barrels piled high.

The best part was that after Seagrams was done aging whiskey in them Canbar practically gave the barrels away. Cut in half, they were used in backyards all over town as planters.

If you got a fresh one it would still have whiskey soaked into the wood. When I was a grad student at UW, a popular party drink was called swish. We'd buy a barrel, add some water, let it sit a bit, swish it around, and voila - a large supply of half strength, nearly free, blecchy tasting whiskey.

My dad aged a batch of homemade peach wine in a Seagrams barrel once and brought the whole barrel out for a pig roast. The problem with the stuff was it was delicious and didn't taste nearly as lethal as it was. A large crowd of respectable people became completely blotto very rapidly. (I watched it all, completely sober, because that was my first day of work as a waitress at the Kent Hotel... once again, a story for another day.)

The distillery (and brewery) dominated Waterloo in other ways. All the time I was growing up in Waterloo, you could tell what day it was by the smell - and they were nice smells, or at least I thought so. Certain days of week we could smell the Seagrams distillery at Erb and Caroline, and other days we had the smell from the Labatt brewery (formerly Carling, and before that the Kuntz brewery) at King and William. Everyone had a different description of the smells: some days it was bread, molasses, oatmeal or Raisin Bran, and some days it was martinis.

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Travel Alert

The comments this weekend on Globe & Mail articles about the US State Department's latest travel alert are unanimous in claiming that it is a fraud. They opine that the government is warning Americans away from European capitals as a way to scare the public into voting for incumbents in the upcoming election and as a way to deflect public attention from more important matters, like the economy. Many express amusement that there will be less Americans in Europe creating queues at art galleries and so on.

Canada, the US, and other countries regularly issue travel alerts, and anyone who travels should get in the habit of checking them before buying tickets. They aren't a joke, they aren't political, and they carry repercussions in terms of whether you'll be bailed out if things go wrong. See travel advisories from the US, Canada and the UK.

The current travel alert for Europe does not warn people against going to Europe; it merely describes an ongoing threat and current concerns by European governments, and suggests that US citizens register with a US travel service. I wouldn't cancel a trip because of it, but it would cause me to keep my ears open for possible developments.

There are times when you can take advantage of non-existent but perceived threats. When Reagan bombed Libya in 1986, I immediately made plans for a European holiday. American tourists were terrified of terrorism in Europe that summer and stayed away in droves. I rented a car for three weeks and did a driving tour to French 3-star restaurants. I could walk in to establishments that normally required at least a year's advance booking, and they were grateful to see me. It was quite a trip - mired only by being doused with radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. But that's another story.

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Amalgamation, Negativity, Municipal Elections and my Teeth

In today's Chronicle, someone is quoted as regretting that there's no anti-amalgamation group in town.

Well, me, I'm opposed to amalgamation. I think it's a spectacularly stupid idea for Waterloo, for lots of reasons:

• Amalgamation has been shown to be expensive. Union contracts bump up to the highest level; there are virtually no cost savings; and so on.
  
• Waterloo property taxes will go up if we merge.
  
• I like our unique identity. Kitchener is a great place but is very different from Waterloo and vive la difference.
  
• Waterloo has an internationally known name. We should be building our brand, not diluting it.
  
• Merging with a city that's twice as big is tantamount to throwing away our self-determination.
  
• We already merge almost all the services that can be merged. If there are more opportunities to merge services (the only one I can think of is the libraries), then we can do that without amalgamation.
  

Crazy as it sounds, the main reason why some prominent Waterlooians are for amalgamation is that they think the city is currently mismanaged, and will be better run if it's part of Kitchener. They point to our chronic underfunding of the arts and library as key issues. But Jeeze Louise guys, if you want better management then vote for candidates who are qualified to do the job. If you have issues you want to influence, speak up - especially now, during an election campaign.

Despite my emphatic opposition to amalgamation, I can't get active in my opposition. For one thing, amalgamation has become The Beast That Will Not Die. It's like, every couple of years I hear someone say, "It's baaaack..." I am suffering from amalgamation fatigue. But even more than that, I have been working to oppose the LRT for two years now, and I'm sick, sick, sick of being negative. Fighting FOR something is so much more fun.

So what am I not against? Well this may be bucking the trend of popular lunacy, but I'm for fluoride in my drinking water. I think the anti-fluoride contingent is fueled by junk science, while the benefits of fluoridation are verified. I'm horrified by what has happened to my dentist, Dr. Harry Hoediono, for standing up for sanity and saying the simple truth. (People in this town play dirty: besides trashing his character, someone on the anti-fluoride side has now brought Harry up on charges for conspiring to spend money or some such thing.)

So why am I not out dressed as a giant tooth, promoting the cause of fluoridated drinking water? If I had kids, maybe I'd stand with Harry and brave the attacks of the pro-cavities crowd. But I don't, so I'm sitting this one out.

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Waterloo's Mayoral Candidates Kick Off Election 2010

Tonight's Waterloo mayoral debate could be summed up like this, from left to right:

Jan d'Ailly: I bring experience, leadership ability, and a proactive approach.
Barbara Halloran: I've done a super job.
Franklin Ramsoomair: Ummmm.
Dale Ross: Slash the budget!

Actually, Ramsoomair had some interesting things to say, but he was unable to articulate a vision for his mayoralty. In fact, his ability to articulate his ideas was a problem throughout.

Ross, on the other hand, articulated his vision all too well. He wants to cut spending. Really - that's it. When asked about specific issues, he repeatedly said he'd have to get someone to tell him what to do or form a committee. His plan is to put the city through ten years of extremely restricted spending in order to pay down our debt.

The questions were excellent. Neil Acheson was a great moderator - when he asked the audience to not applaud, it created a much better debate than most. One quibble: I was disappointed by all the answers about bylaw enforcement: they all focused on unmaintained lawns and noise complaints, without mentioning the vital accessibility issue of snow clearance.

Bottom line: This is a two horse race, between Halloran and d'Ailly. I approach elections like a hiring process, and look for qualifications, experience, intelligence and vision. To my mind, d'Ailly is the best choice. But I enjoyed listening to all four of them. d'Ailly and Halloran were both refreshingly candid, and d'Ailly in particular was very detailed and informative. Good job all around.

Upcoming debates:

• Wednesday, Sept 22 - Waterloo Ward 1 candidates, Hauser Haus, WMRC
  
• Tuesday, Sept 28 - Waterloo Ward 3 candidates, Community Room, McCormick Community Center
  
• Wed, Sept 29 - Waterloo Ward 4 candidates, Room 207, RIM Park
  
• Thurs, Sept 30 - Waterloo Ward 5 candidates, Room 208, RIM Park
  
• Tues, Oct 5 - Waterloo Ward 6 candidates, Hauser Haus, WMRC
  
• Wed, Oct 6 - Waterloo Ward 7 candidates (uptown), Hauser Haus, WMRC
  
• Thus, Oct 7 - Regional Council candidates, Adult Rec Center
  
• Tues, Oct 19 - Public school board candidates, TBD
  
• Wed, Oct 20 - Regional Chair candidates, TBD
  
• Thurs, Oct 21 - Waterloo mayoral candidates (Round 2), Hauser Haus, WMRC

More info on the upcoming debates: WaterlooVotes.com

Update: The Waterloo Regional Record is also hosting its own debates. For a list of times and places, see here.

Update: Rogers TV schedule of debates on TV on Karen Scian's blog

Update: You can watch videos of debates on the Record's Vote 2010 site.

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