A Place to Grow

Downtown St. Catharines is designated an Urban Growth Centre by the province. Being hemmed in by the Greenbelt, it’s just as well; the city has run out of room for any more single-family detached homes. Future residential growth will have to come from the core anyway, so it’s good to have support from a higher level of government.

The city’s Downtown Creative Cluster Master Plan is now available online [pdf]. Hopefully, present and future city councils pay attention. I’ll admit, I skimmed most of the 119 pages, but what I read made sense.

Some recommendations from the plan:

Improve the streetscape. Widen sidewalks to accommodate pedestrian traffic. Plant trees. Use articulated paving stones. Good stuff like that.

Greater quantity and quality of public parking. The car rules in St. Catharines and cannot be ignored. The Carlisle parking structure needs to be rebuilt, and the lower-level parking lot needs a better connection to the rest of Downtown.

Respect heritage buildings. For example, the west end of St. Paul Street, with it’s three-story, nineteenth-century brick buildings, is safe from the wrecking ball. Buildings at the east end of the street that were constructed more recently, and with less concern for pedestrians and other unprofitable frivolities, are ripe for redevelopment.

In short, the plan says the basics are in place for Downtown’s future, but it’s going to take a lot of work to get a vibrant and livable finished product.

(More at the Standard.)

I was never good at math

From a Nanos poll of Ontario voters, as reported in the St. Catharines Standard:

Ontario – Libs 45, PC 30, NDP 14, Green 10

Male voters – Libs 40, PC 30, NDP 11, Green 10

Female voters – Libs 41, PC 25, NDP 15, Green 8

Shouldn’t the male and female numbers average out for the province-wide numbers?

Stop-Loss

In the spirit of Paul Ford’s Six-Word Reviews of SXSW (“A truly great band name wasted.“), here is my shot at a six-word review of the movie Stop-Loss:

Less filler please. End cops out.

On the whole, it was an enjoyable way to spend 113 minutes. There were some moments were the characters seemed less like soldiers and more like feuding teen-aged girls, but besides this it was less like usual MTV fare than I had feared.

The movie’s politics are pretty safe, given President Bush’s low approval rating, but are hardly radical. I don’t consider myself radical either, yet I found the ending unsatisfactory. Don’t worry, I won’t spoil it for you.

The selection of movies in theatres right now is pretty weak, so if you’re looking for something that isn’t outright terrible, Stop-Loss is a safe bet.

A third bullet that could have gone in the previous post, on why GO needs to come to Niagara Region (at least on weekends):

The environment stroke gridlock.

It’s lovely to read about local issues in other blogs.

A Modest Proposal

Off the top of my head, there are a couple good reasons for bringing GO Transit from Toronto to the Niagara Region.

1. Hitching low-growth urban centres like St. Catharines to Toronto and Hamilton without paving over all the farms in between.
2. Bringing tourists and their precious dollars quickly and cheaply from Pearson to Niagara Falls and Niagara-on-the-Lake.

But at the same time, there aren’t hordes of people clamoring to commute to Toronto every morning. There might be after the service is implemented, but the first months to years might be slow. People have to see the connection as reliable and bearable enough to change jobs or changes modes of transport, and that’s not something most people take lightly.

Rather than pegging our GO hopes on a bus to Hamilton, work on which is moves glacially at the best of times, Niagara Region and the province should negotiate GO service throughout the region. There’s no reason GO Transit must remain a Toronto-centric service.

Right now, city-to-city transit in Niagara Region is just a collection of one-off deals for each route. So, for example, St. Catharines runs a bus to Niagara College in Niagara-on-the-Lake, and both Welland and Niagara Falls runs a bus each to Brock University in St. Catharines.

It has been suggested that the region develop an integrated transit system, but this was met with resistance. Integrated transit would make travel across the Region simpler for passengers, but setting one up from scratch would require expertise and capital that the Region doesn’t have.

So why not ask for GO buses to run between Niagara’s cities? We are just as much a part of Ontario as the GTA. Affordable, reliable service between cities grants mobility to the less affluent and the environmentally conscious.

…

I can’t finish this thought because the radio is distracting me, but I’m going to publish anyway because I think I’ve made my point.

Anything else is ego.

The National Post wants to know: Is Feist Still Indie? Worse still, they ask it smugly, because they are the first people to come up with that clever question.

Three out of five hipsters agree, she is not.

But scroll down; and an anonymous poster knows better:

“Anyone who cares whether or not your (sic) ‘indie’ certainly isn’t indie. If the music is good, listen to it, if not, don’t. Anything else is ego.”

The indie music scene is truly a vicious place. It breeds thousands of endearingly quirky bands with their unconventional instruments and organic argyle sweaters who are pretty much designed for an iPod commercial. But as soon as they make a buck, the bloggers, graphic novelists, and Web 2.0-ers (or whoever decides which bands have cred) tear them to pieces.

“Oh, my mother likes Feist! I threw out her record before she got to ‘four’ in her iPod ad.”

Musicians don’t have to be poor to be good. Even though most corporately-backed music is engineered to be inoffensive pablum, popular success should not preclude indie credibility.

[photo] “Feist 11/26/05” by toniluca

Another confidence motion passes.

Does anyone pay attention anymore? The media might try to infuse each confidence motion with some drama, but I’ve tuned it out.

I suspect the Tories could get away with repealing gay marriage and the ill-prepared Liberals would support the motion to avoid an election. And nobody would notice.

Mrs. Public: “There’s some kind of protest going on downtown.”

Mr. Public: “Oh, that’s probably just the Tibetans again.”

HOVERCRAFT!

A Toronto company has proposed to revive the marine crossing between Toronto and Rochester. Hover Transit says it can have – get this – a hovercraft up and running for $10 million.

Presumably $10 million is just to prime the operational pumps, because that’s about how much the City of Rochester lost trying to save the last Lake Ontario crossing, The Breeze catamaran.

If Hover Transit gets the go-ahead, both cities will have to sink some serious money into promoting themselves on the other side of the lake. I can’t speak to Toronto’s image in Rochester, but Rochester is not on the radar in Toronto.

At 75 minutes for a crossing, the hovercraft would bring Toronto and Rochester closer together than Rochester and Syracuse or Toronto and Waterloo.

Ideally, the federal governments would play some role in keeping this border crossing viable. We don’t usually expect a bridge to pay for itself entirely with tolls because the economic benefits more than outweigh the cost of building and maintaining the structure. The same principle should apply to this hovercraft.

Hovercraft transit frim makes bid to revive Toronto-Rochester ferry – Globe and Mail

Rochester Ferry Revival – Eye Weekly

[photo] “Hovercraft arriving – 3” by fidothe

The Old Patagonian Express

I am reading Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express in short sittings between classes and over lunches. I found it in a used book several months ago, but my free time being what it is, I am still 75 pages from the end.

Theroux takes a series of trains from Boston to Argentina. While the sites and cities between Point A and Point B do not escape his scrutiny, the focus of the book is on train travel. From the relatively comfortable Mexican train and its cutlery smuggling staff to an antique locomotive in El Salvador, the essense of each journey is recorded such that you can imagine yourself travelling shoulder-to-shoulder with the locals.

As you might expect, Theroux has a dim view of airplanes – at least in relation to travel literature. I include the following quote partly to illustrate this point, but also so you can see how absorbing his writing is:

There is not much to say about most aeroplane journeys. Anything remarkable must be disastrous, so you define a good flight by negatives: you didn’t get hijacked, you didn’t crash, you didn’t throw up, you weren’t late, you weren’t nauseated by the food. So you are grateful. The gratitude brings such relief your mind goes blank, which is appropriate, for the aeroplane passenger is a time-traveller. He crawls into a carpeted tube that is reeking of disinfectant; he is strapped in to go home, or away. Time is truncated, or in any case warped: he leaves in one time-zone and emerges in another. And from the moment he steps into the tube and braces his knees on the seat in front, uncomfortably upright – from the moment he departs, his mind is focused on arrival. That is, if he has any sense at all. If he looked out of the window he would see nothing but the tundra of the cloud layer, and above is empty space. Time is brilliantly blinded: there is nothing to see. This is the reason so many people are apologetic about taking planes. They say, ‘What I’d really like to do is forget these plastic jumbos and get a three-masted schooner and just stand there on the poop deck with the wind in my hair.’

But apologies are not necessary. An aeroplane flight may not be travel in any accepted sense, but it certainly is magic. Anyone with the price of a ticket can conjure up the castled crag of Drachenfels or the Lake Isle of Innisfree by simply using the right escalator at, say, Logan Airport in Boston – but it must be said that there is probably more to animate the mind, more of travel, in that one ascent on the escalator, than in the whole plane journey put together. The rest, the foreign country, what constitutes the arrival, is the ramp of an evil-smelling airport. If the passenger conceives of this species of transfer as travel and offers the public his book, the first foreigner the reader meets is either a clothes-grubbing customs man or a moustached demon at the immigration desk. Although it has become the way of the world, we still ought to lament the fact that aeroplanes have made us insensitive to space; we are encumbered, like lovers in suits of armour.

Now that I have hopefully whetted your apetite for train travel, check out Mark Smith’s top train trips (and their affordable alternatives) over at The Guardian.

Krugman Jumps on the Grain Train, Falls Off

Back in December, The Economist led with an analysis of the challenges and posibilities presented by rising global food prices. Its case was that the likely long-term rise in food prices means government support for farmers in rich countries can be drawn down without putting those farmers out of business. Developing countries and their rural poor are poised to benefit from these changes, and the prosperity that comes with increased food production will boost the import of other goods from rich countries. Everybody wins (except for the urban poor, but they are already less poor than their rural compatriots).

And now Paul Krugman is writing about the “food crisis“.

I’m glad Krugman has written about the rising cost of food. His audience is probably wider and less exclusive than The Economist’s. General knowledge of the trend and its origins is necessary for political change in a country like the US. Here, he does quite well. Krugman outlines the rapidly-developing world’s growing taste for meat, and he points out the folly of turning corn grown with oil-based machines and fertilizers into “green” ethanol.

His excellent exposition is followed by an unsatisfying conclusion:

“What should be done? The most immediate need is more aid to people in distress: the U.N.’s World Food Program put out a desperate appeal for more funds.

We also need a pushback against biofuels, which turn out to have been a terrible mistake.

But it’s not clear how much can be done. Cheap food, like cheap oil, may be a thing of the past.”

Yes, feed the starving. Yes, end the silly, counterproductive ethanol subsidies. But The Economist presented a much more complete and satisfying answer: Export value-added goods to developing countries instead of cheap grains, and let those countries grow their own food at realistic prices.

[photo] “tea crop” by angela7dreams

[mp3] “The Cost” by The Frames