On Roads and Government

I am a jerk sometimes, no doubt about it. Does this fact bother me? Not a chance, I am who I am and at least nobody ever needs to wonder where they stand with me, I'm a crappy poker player and that is all there is to it. But having just sent in paper work, not for the first time, for a city approved and issued garbage can, and having just paid my water bill, and still saving up for that dreadful day when the city realises they should charge me back property taxes for almost a year now and counting. I think I am entitled to rant about the horrid condition of the roads in this city except, someone much wiser and better with the words than me already did just that. Specifically John Barber in today's Globe and Mail.

I am going to reprint the entire column right here becuase I strongly suspect that the links I have above will move, as they have many times in the past. It is a good column and worth reading.

Huge road-repair backlog needs hole new approach
March 11, 2009 Globe and Mail by John Barber

Free advice to any and all potentially serious, undeclared challengers to Mayor David Miller in the upcoming election: It's the potholes, stupid.

Any candidate who understands that will be on target to make a big dent in the socialist hegemony at city hall - and not just because fixing potholes is always the simplest, most popular offering on any municipal menu. In Toronto today, their proliferation is the visible legacy of an intentional policy to spend money on everything but roads - especially transit.

Prepared carefully and served hot, a campaign to eradicate Mayor Miller's scandalously growing road-repair backlog could be the most successful gambit since Mel Lastman sold an unaffordable municipal merger for no money down.

You could call potholes neglected infrastructure if you want. Or little political gold mines. Taken as a whole, our crumbling roads say it all about city hall - revealing its priorities in the most dramatically negative light possible.

Here is this crazy do-gooder fruitlessly trying to save the world while he lets the roads go to pot. And if you don't buy it, just read what the long-suffering transportation department has to say.

When Mr. Miller took office in 2003, transportation officials calculated the unfunded cost of bringing city roads to an acceptable standard at $155-million. A year later, the backlog price tag had grown to $235-million. Faced with outrageous demands from the transit system, city hall abandoned a half-hearted attempt to pay it down in 2006. Today, officials report, Toronto roads need $320-million of maintenance for which there are neither plans nor money available.

Last year, council authorized an extra $10-million a year in debt financing to address the backlog. Its only effect will be to prevent it from growing to $600-million by 2018, according to officials. Even with the extra spending, the backlog is expected to grow to $540-million by then. Spend an extra $20-million a year, they say - three times the current budget - and the backlog will remain level at $320-million.

I ask you, citizens: Is that good enough for Toronto? And I say no, Toronto deserves better. We must arrest this pernicious decline with a sweeping public-works program to break the back of the Miller backlog once and for all.

Here is where the political mind runs rampant: special non-union work crews with "Mayor Barber Backlog Buster" patches sewn on their crisp, neat uniforms. Billboards advertising the new pothole-repair hotline. A whole new paradigm at city hall. Balance in transportation. Blah blah blah.

Like I said, it's pure gold. But to be credible, a potential backlog buster would have to budget real money rather than promising, as previous losers never failed to do, to fund big initiatives by finding elusive "efficiencies" in other city operations. This is where the conventional challengers always fall down. The eventual winner will be the one who promises to spend real money to achieve real results.

If Conservative Stephen Harper can suddenly flood the national economy with borrowed money, why can't a local right-winger do something similar, albeit on a far smaller scale? The money Ottawa and Queen's Park are currently spending on commuter parking lots in the 905 would be enough. But because the city can't raise user fees to cover road repairs - as it is doing to fund a massive, $500-million overhaul of the entire water system - it won't do them.

And because people who are most likely to support a backlog-busting mayor are the same ones who would object most loudly to raising the debt to do the job properly, such a candidate will remain a dream.

Well as the potholes are rapidly supplanting the drivers as the most terrifying of the many obstacles to biking to work I had to reply. I sent my favourite columnist in the Globe an email, not really expecting a reply.

From: Michael J. Cole
Sent: Wednesday, March 11, 2009 11:28 AM
To: Barber, John
Subject: Re: Huge road-repair backlog needs hole new approach

I just read your column, its always been my favourite read in the paper.

I just wanted to add, that as an avid cyclist, who rides to work across Queen Street even when it was -27 in February, the Potholes are a bigger problem for me than they are for cars.

Potholes contribute to gravel, and as anyone who uses a road bike will tell you, gravel is about the fastest way to ensure an accident. Potholes also cause tube failure which at best is a pain to repair on the side of the road and at worst, on a busy road could cause a fatality. Finally potholes are dangerous to cross, the loss of stability going over uneven ground, for example south side of Queen Street just west of Church, right hand lane. Some cyclist is going to get killed there one day and as far as I can tell nobody seems to give a damn. High time somebody stood up to His Blondness and asked when we were going to get the roads repaired. I wonder if John Tory is willing to take another stab at it, I would even vote for him if he promised to fix the roads.

Remarkably Mr. Barber responded:

From: Barber, John
Sent: Wednesday, March 11, 2009 12:09 PM
To: Michael J. Cole
Subject: Re: Huge road-repair backlog needs hole new approach

Thx for the note! My Colleague Dr Gridlock, who knows his potholes, adds that because they form where water puddles they are more common at side of road & thus a greater hazard to cyclists.

Well I voted for Mayor Miller, twice, and you know what, I am beginning to wish I had not. Anyway I still think, actually more so now than ever before, that John Barber is about the greatest reporter in my daily read. Thanks Mr. Barber!

On Getting the Question Right

Recently I was asked to give advice to someone on what type of bike to buy, specifically Mountain or Road bike. Now to me personally the answer is obvious, Road bike of course! But seriously, what is an appropriate bike? Well here is what I said:

For type of bike you have to ask yourself a very critical question. Do you want to horse around in the mud, go for distance, speed, triathalon, or some combination? Once you know that it is easy to identify what type of bike is appropriate. (Of course nowhere is it written "thou shalt only have one type of ride". Actually I have three types, and I know guys at the club who have many types of bikes in their basement.)

How seriously do you want to take this because that answers the question, what sort of budget are you looking at?

What area of the city do you live in? - you want to join a club close to home.

Start with that, once you have those questions answered I can suggest a club close to home and probably a decent bike shop, or ten.

Well the person replied a few days later,

my budget is about 2500-3000 but hopefully the lower end of that. ive gone to two bike shops, gears in mississauga and cyclemotive on bathurst at queen near my place.

i havent really had a bike in ages. i am essentially looking for a bike that i can use on weekends for training/fitness and maybe after work or early mornings depending on how zealous i am. i was thinking road bike "LAST WEEK" until i came across a cyclocross bike at cyclemotive made by argon 18. the reason being i feel like it it may be more "practical" ie can take more of a beating and allow for a longer season. do you know much about them. i would only consider them if they would be able to handle the same rigors that a road bike can handle. also, i dont want to be limited on the type of workouts/distances/comfort of the bike.

Now if you read the email very closely you can find out the he did answer two questions. Our guy lives near Queen and Bathurst, so no problem, send him to Dukes and he joins the Lapdogs. We also know that we are steering him towards a pretty decent bike... but what kind? Well he never actually answered the most important question, a question so important I even identified it as the very critical question. The question that really enables us to find out the answer to his question, should he go Road or Mountain, or, to his credit, something else entirely. He never told me what he wanted to do with his bike.

In re-reading what he wrote I realise now that he did try, sort of, in a really poorly articulated sort of way to say kind of what he wanted. Except that he came up so short that the effort was not even worth hitting send on his email client.

In order to figure out what a person wants it is critical to determine what they see themselves doing. I did not need to ask if I should get a road or mountain because I've always been a crazy distance nut. But suppose hypothetically I were to buy a new bike today, better yet, consider the example of where I was a year ago. I was an inline skater, I loved going as far as possible, Mississauga! Oakville! Burlington! I used to bike on an old Italian steel frame road bike and loved it. So for me the answer seems pretty obvious, I was, and very much am an endurance freak. Okay no sweat, get a road bike. Specialized Allez would be logical, and actually the bikes I looked at first, but then I saw a Roubaix with a better groupo (105 vs. Tiagra or Sora on the Allez) and well the rest is history. Now suppose I loved turning up mud and going off road into the pastures, well obviously I would never have taken up inline, but also I would be getting a Cross or Mountain.

But based on what our guy said my response was in retrospect dead on the mark: from what I read, my honest impression is, you want a shinny bike that looks pretty in the store.

Not the best way to gain a friend, but I have always subscribed to the notion, better an honest enemy than a dishonest friend. So I suppose the moral here is, don't elect me to any political office, I will cause too much trouble as I would be a horrible politician. But then that is hardly news to anyone who knows me, I hope.

On Gotham

Lesley wanted to see a Chinese friend who is traveling across America and happened to be in New York for the week so we took Friday off work and Thursday evening hightailed for The Big Apple.

We stopped briefly in Rochester, to visit a friend of mine who lives there and had ribs at a local restaurant. Now Rochester is an economically depressed town, has been for years. The problem is Kodak and Xerox never saw the writing on the wall and the arrival of digital imaging brought massive job cuts to two companies who had both planted their corporate headquarters there. The people who live in Rochester are never at a loss to point out the flaws of the United States and given Rochester's liberal political bent the anger directed at Washington and Fox news was, for years and in the case of Faux News still is, palatable.

I made an observation while we were at dinner with several Rochesterians which I am going to repeat because well I am somewhat proud of what is rather obvious. I am a conservative, I believe we need to conserve our environment and natural resources. We need to ensure our governments run sensible budgets so that when times are tough there is money for rainy days. I believe in mixing religion with politics in that we, society, as embodied in Government, look after the least fortunate among us. I like government that is too small to tell a woman what she can and cannot do to her own body, or what two men, or women, who love each other can do in their own home. Yes you heard it here first, I'm a certified Republican... in the school of Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. (For those of a trivia inclination the former Junior Senator of Illinois is of the same school of political thought, which may partially explain why I think so highly of President Obama.)

The evening we arrived we went for a walk down Broadway towards Times Square. I saw a couple paintings in a store window. The one on the bottom had Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Regan and both Bushes gathered around a table playing cards. The one on top had Jackson, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton doing the same thing. With the exception of Lincoln and Roosevelt I wanted to kick the bottom painting, of course in the top painting was missing The President so the store owner was willing to sell it to me for half price but I was not interested.

The next day we went first to Katz's deli on Houston Street. If ever in need of a heart attack in a meal Katz's has the advantage of Montreal deli without the lunatic Montreal snobbery. Yes there is a New York snobbery, but at least here it is justified, this is after all the greatest city in the world! (Sadly Katz's also has New York prices, $15 for a pastrami sandwich, is a far cry from food for the poor, which is what deli is supposed to be.)

I should point out at this time the reason I am slamming Montreal snobbery here is simple. When we got to Katz the waiter upon learning we were from Toronto, told us that the previous day he had served some Montrealers who told him Torontonians don't know how to tip. Now I have to wonder if the waiter said that to extract a better tip, but on the assumption that what was said is the truth, I have to ask, why do all Canadians hate Toronto? I mean I can understand the disgust with Quebecois, including Montrealers, but really, what did Toronto ever do to the rest of Canada? Last I checked we never had a Neverendum, we don't mind paying into equalization when things are good, all we ask is when things are bad we get something back to help us through the tough times, maybe a new subway? Or what about some road resurfacing? Apparently that is too much to ask for.

Anyway after Katz Lesley and I went to the Tenement Museum at 97 Orchard Street in the Lower East Side. The visit to the museum was a chance to see how harsh things really can get. (It was also my second trip to the museum, last time was in 1997.) It is a mind boggling thing to think that only four generations ago as many a family of eight or nine might share a space of 350 square feet, plus some room may have been sublet and dad might run his garment business right out of the bedroom. (Of course this was a step up from the sweatshops.) I would like to say the quality of life has improved thanks to cheap energy, but I fear the sweat shop has simply relocated, not gone away. Even more remarkable to me, although I never had family who lived at 97 Orchard Street, it occurs to me, my grandfather on my father's side grew up in conditions not all that different from the people who once lived in the Lower East Side.

We only had a chance to spend the day in the city but I still managed to see quite a few cyclists, actually hundreds of them. And bikes were parked everywhere. Bikes make a lot of sense in New York City, for one thing, parking is free for a bike, a car might pay as much as $50 per half hour plus a 18.75% city parking tax. Then bikes never need to worry about being caught in the traffic for which the city is so well known. On the other hand, the road surface quality in New York is appalling, it makes Toronto look good and don't even get me started on the miserably incompetent taxi drivers in New York. In a contest for worst cab driver, Toronto and New York loose!

On Comments, redux

The following is from The Globe and Mail, until it is moved the original can be read here.

Disagree with me, but don't be cruel by Judith Timson

‘Peeeeyoooook!” Or “barf” if you prefer. Or “almost tossed my breakfast.”

Schoolyard taunts that my children gave up around Grade 6, when they learned how much more devastating real grown-up wit could be, have found a new life on the Internet through reader posts on various media websites.

Puerile insults such as these can easily be shrugged off. Commentators should be thick-skinned. But the anger, the rudeness, the personal insults and the basic unwillingness even to engage in civil disagreement over real ideas is growing at a disturbing rate all over the Internet.

American author David Denby, in his recent book-length essay Snark, laments “a strain of nasty, knowing abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation – a tone of snarking insult provoked and encouraged by the new hybrid world of print, television, radio and the Internet.”

The result, Mr. Denby writes, is “an enormous audience that enjoys cruelty as a blood sport.”

This cruelty is highly addictive. There's a high-school tinge to it. Take the brutish message I recently received from one reader: “You must be some lonely, desperate and (judging from your pic) old frumpy broad with wrinkles. Gross me out or what.” The guy even signed his name.

Or all the hoo-hah over red-carpet fashions at the Oscars. We now can vote on every celebrity's outfit, giving the thumbs down to, say, Reese Witherspoon's oddly strapped dress – what was she thinking? The stars primp all day, but we ordinary citizens, overweight and in our bathrobes, have the triumphant last word. Nothing harmful in that, is there?

Not really, except that merciless judgment on what, on a human or global scale, are relatively unimportant matters, is everywhere. The putdown mentality of the reality show is the major cultural ethos of our time, whether you're an obscure PTA president whose speech is mocked online by other parents, or Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who was savaged last week for his inept response to President Barack Obama's state-of-the-nation speech to Congress.

Never mind that Mr. Jindal's message – an ideological rant against government helping anyone – deserved to be skewered. His unfortunate Mr. Rogers singsong-style message was quickly compared to a hilariously pathetic television character – Kenneth the page – on the comedy series 30 Rock.

Now, his credibility as the GOP's bright new answer to Mr. Obama is in tatters, slain by one of the biggest Internet dragons of all: viral ridicule. (Rick Mercer did the same here for former Canadian Alliance leader and now Conservative cabinet minister Stockwell Day when he initiated an online campaign to change Mr. Day's first name to Doris. The response was overwhelming, and many people never took Mr. Day seriously again – although maybe they didn't in the first place.)

It's everywhere – the smackdown, the bitch slap, the takeout. The message is clear: Make a mistake in this climate and you are toast. You can convincingly argue that public figures and commentators are fair game. But even Tina Fey, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's comic nemesis, and the creator and star of 30 Rock, made mention of just how devastating the Internet haters can be when she accepted her Golden Globe with a tart message to her online deriders: “Suck it.”
So now we come to the difficult part. What to do about it? Mr. Denby, whose self-consciously arch book was ironically panned in many places, argues this isn't about censorship.

He's right. In a democracy, you err on the side of freedom of speech even if the message is insulting, rude and empty of any real content or idea. Not to mention misspelled and ungrammatical. But there's nothing wrong with insisting on a basic level of civility in the postings. On many media websites, including The Globe and Mail's, there is a way to flag a comment to the editor's attention if you feel it has veered into libel or hate. However, any further vigilance requires significant oversight at a time when media outlets are economically strapped and low on staff as a result.

And many of them, initially thrilled to have a lot of traffic on their websites, are now frantically dealing with hate-mongering (the CBC has been accused of allowing anti-aboriginal slurs on its website), racism, misogyny (almost a given if the news is about a prominent woman) and even ageism as readers, fuel-led by what seems to be a volcanic supply of anger, have their say.

We may have to ruefully recognize the democratization of opinion that the Internet has wrought. It's no longer the privileged purview of paid commentators to opine from on high (or down low). It's a free-for-all. Under the guise of anonymity, and with the ease of clicking “send,” anyone can have at anyone.

My plea to all Internet commentators is to at least step up to a certain level of wit and discourse when you publicly disagree, and to challenge the source of your own anger before you spew it at someone else.

But I don't think that is going too happen any time soon. People out there are having way too much fun to stop the hate.

On comments

I have been cross posting my blog entries on my Blog and The Beaches Cycling club, hey if I take the time to write something, might as well expose as much of the rest of the World as possible to my deranged thought"processes", why should Lesley have all the fun?

Normally I am not entirely confident anyone actually reads what I say, I get so few comments I often wonder if I should just give up. So recent feedback was especially gratifying. But what I also want to point out is what amh said. In particular, that the bike lane on Eastern Ave. was established to prevent the invasion of Walmart.

Now understand I watched The High Cost of Low Prices and I am as disgusted by corporate America as the next angry socialist. The greed that drives Wall Street - and Bay Street, is appalling, particularly in light of a recession inducing credit crunch caused by greed in the C level offices. But it does seem inappropriate to me to use bike lanes as a mechanism for traffic or even worse, commercial development control. Ultimately, if used inappropriately, the non-users, or in this case car drivers will just drive right along the unnecessary bike lane, and then who knows, they might start driving in necessary bike lanes as well.

So in short, while I think bike lanes are a good thing generally, I think there needs to be more moderation in the application of such things. (Then again nothing about cars is moderated so maybe an excess of bike lanes is a good thing?)

Anyway I came across something in the Huffington Post that I found so interesting I am copying and pasting it here, but the original article can be read here.

The late Edward R. Murrow, the most respected name ever in broadcast journalism, were attracting attention — especially Murrow who with his movie-star good looks, could have been a matinee idol, but, fortunately for us and the world at large didn't. A keen mind and a way with words led him to radio and then to television where I was privileged to be associated with him as the director of his and Fred Friendly's winner of just about every award in broadcasting — "See It Now" — as well as producing and directing his year-end specials and his coverage, 56 years ago, of Queen Elizabeth's coronation...the kinescope of which (film recorded off the tube before video tape burst on the scene) was edited by the two of us during what was then an eleven-hour trip across the Atlantic on a chartered British Airways trans Atlantic propeller-driven airliner stripped of a couple of dozen or so of its seats and replaced with what were called "movieolas" to edit what were called "kinescopes" (film recorded by cameras focused on the screen) ready to be aired when we touched down in Boston. Why Boston? We were in a race with NBC to be the first on the air with footage of the Coronation and landing in Boston and airing it from the airport instead of from a studio, gave us a head start.

[...]

Today, the TV techs are virtual wizards at getting us on the air in a flash — even from the moon — which is nothing short of amazing. What is also "nothing short of amazing" is how much unadulterated drivel finds its way onto the tube.

Leave it to Murrow to say that without using television to teach, illuminate and inspire "it is nothing more than wires and lights in a box."

- Don Hewitt

I wish there were more journalists like Ed Murrow and fewer like Judith Miller.

On Cryogenics

According to the Wikipedia article "In physics, cryogenics is the study of the production of very low temperature (below –150 °C, –238 °F or 123 K)". According to Environment Canada the temperature in Toronto today was in fact not cryogenic, a balmy 259K. Except I observed liquefied Helium rolling down the street and up the sides of buildings, which tells us it was no warmer than 4.2K or -269 °C. Okay it was not that cold, but it was cold!

Now I am a firm believer in the importance of layers, I had five layers around my core, four layers around my arms, three around my hands, three on my feet, one on my legs, even my face was covered in what Lesley has charitably described as a bank robber mask, something Louis Garneau calls an Optimum but the rest of us call a balaclava, under the helmet. By the time I got to the office I thought I was going to loose body parts from the cold. Breathing was an agonized process of taking in a mouthful of liquid oxygen. I believe my metabolism was already running at full blast just trying to bring things to a sane temperature prior to assimilation in my lungs, needless to say, hammering meant slow, in this case a steady 15~20km/h.

Under such extreme conditions one might think that maybe caged killing machine operators might exhibit an iota of decency? Alright, enough sarcasm, of course drivers were as oblivious as ever. At one point I was doing my thing, on Queen Street heading West just past Jarvis, making sure to take up the entire right lane when without even looking some person (no I will not say what I think of their staggering lack of competence behind the wheel of a motor vehicle) just... attempted to swerve, at very low speeds into my lane to get around a street car, and almost hit me, until I yelled at them. Before anyone tries to play a devils advocate here, I should add I was not behind the car when he went to switch lanes, I was right beside him, he, or she?, tried to change lanes on top of me! I got the license plate but realized that unless I got a good look at the driver I would not be able to point at them in court with certainty and say"that is the (insert favorite nasty adjective here) who nearly killed me".

Other than the usual lunacy of North American automobile drivers the commute to work and home was, in many respects, wonderful. I lost count of the number of street cars (trams) I passed, but it was more than four on the way in and at least six or seven on the way back, the roads were dry and clear and the potholes were, well they were the other thing, besides the cars, that make cycling less than perfect, but considerably better than any other option out there.

Anyway the City of Toronto, probably as a traffic control measure, put in a bike lane on Eastern Ave. from around Carlaw to Leslie. This bike lane frustrates the morning rush hour drivers and does no good for cyclists, since it is not connected to any other bike lane and only runs for a few hundred meters. So I am going to propose something that makes an awful lot of sense to me. Open up Eastern to cars as it used to be, and add a bike lane to Queen Street. Queen has never been a good through road and with all the street cars, pedestrians and cyclists who already use it... well maybe it is time to acknowledge the facts and move on. But slowing cars on Eastern when nobody even uses that bike lane, and I should know, its only marginally inconvenient for me to use it and even I don't, well it makes the people who plan traffic in Toronto look no wiser than the people who make use of the planners work, namely the drivers.

On Saddle Height

I noticed recently that the saddle on the Coppi was dropping lower and lower, every few months I would raise the saddle and then over a few weeks it would drop back down. On Saturday when I went to Biseagal they put some goo in the seat post tube to keep the seat post at a fixed height, yet by Wednesday it was clear the saddle was dropping again.

So yet again, Thursday this time, I took the Coppi to Biseagal and we measured the diameter of the seat post tube. Now I should add this is the same seat post and tube that I bought the Coppi with (used) in 1994. The seat post tube has a diameter of 26.6mm but the seat post is 26.4mm and that 0.2mm (200 micrometers) is enough to cause the drop.

Well I traded in my seat post for a black one that is the 26.6mm and now the seat is up to a good height, and it makes a really big difference, all of a sudden going into the drops does not feel so awkward and spinning fast is a much more natural sensation.

I have to admit on reflection the Coppi always felt faster whenever I adjusted the seat post, for example, when I attached the pedals or when I replaced the bar tape, now I realise, the problem was as much as anything the saddle height. The moral here is that having good equipment might make you feel good about what you own, but if it is not setup properly you just won't get the sort of advantage that bad equipment set up properly can provide.

So I guess the big summary here is spend that extra time and get sized correctly.

Friday, the day after the saddle height fix, there was a steady wind from the west which makes the ride to work (I live east of the office) rather difficult. On the other hand I lacked the will power to obey the 50km/h speed limit on the ride home. It was a race, Michael on the 15 or 20 year-old steel frame on his fractional horse power legs vs. the internal combustion engine in your typical one or two ton killing machine. Hardly a fair match, but I sure gave those oblivious operators of their killing machines a good run for their money. In one section of Queen street between Parliament and River I was passing cars going at speed. I strongly suspect that if I chanced to look at the driver I would have been met with jaw drooped incredulity.

If only I had indexed gear shifting, holy smokes, I could beat the cars climbing hills as well as in the flats. I guess there is another moral tale here, cars suck, but we already knew that.