Answering Your Google Searches!

“does the go train go to niagara?“

No. As of this writing, the GO Train only goes as far around Lake Ontario as Hamilton.

On the other hand, the GO Train is always coming to Niagara. I’m surprised it didn’t come up in the plot (such that it was) of The da Vinci Code. The plans are really that old. GO Transit is always just around the corner for Grimsby, with St Catharines and Niagara Falls not far behind. (March 2008, July 2007, May 2004, our mayor even has a $1000 riding on it)

It’s easy to moan about the perpetual lateness of our collective GO Train, but I think Niagara residents have to understand the gargantuan task GO Transit and the province face. They can barely keep up with demand in the GTA proper, let alone find the resources for expansion. It takes trains or buses (which take time to manufacture) tracks and stations (which, at the moment, are a problem in Hamilton) and money (which has been in short supply lately).

If Ontario is serious about all this talk of smart growth, we will get our trains and buses. In the meantime, why don’t we figure out a better way to get from St Catharines to Niagara Falls than an hourly transfer at Brock University? Anyone up for some Regional transit?

I beg to differ

From an editorial in a Sun Media paper:

The LCBO established a “social responsibility” mandate in 1993, and uses the price of its products as a tool for controlling alcohol consumption.

The implication is clear: The average person can’t be trusted to drink responsibly if the price is set too low.

In other words, the government knows what is best for you, and will impose its will by charging more for the products it sells.

This hike in the price of beer is just another way for the government to social engineer the behaviour of the citizenry, and that should not be the role of a democratic government.

This most sensational evidence to disprove the notion that an average person can be trusted when confronted with low prices is the now-infamous trampling of a Walmart shopper on Black Friday.

In all seriousness, increasing the price is a straightforward and effective way do discourage consumption. There’s nothing new or sinister about a government changing the tax structure (which is essentially what a price change at the LCBO is) to change people’s behaviour. We do the same thing with tobacco products. This is just the flip side of tax breaks for things we want to encourage, like saving for retirement or buying energy efficient light bulbs.

On the predicted collapse of the US

Let me just say, on behalf of all Canadians, that you can keep Montana. We don’t want it.

Valkyrie

It’s not bad. (It’s no masterpiece either.)

Even though the ending is no secret, I was on the edge of my seat for the last half of the movie.

In all, an agreeable way to pass the afternoon.

(IMDb)

A Bandwagon Worth Jumping On

Phoenix just opened its first light rail line. When Phoenix takes anti-sprawl measures, it makes you sit up and pay attention. For a sense of scale it is about the same length as the proposed Eglinton LRT.

Hopefully a crosstown trip on the Eglinton LRT, being partly undergound and considerably more expensive, won’t take 1.5 hours. I’m not saying they need to build a subway under Eglinton, but sensibly spaced stops and signal priority are a must.

UPDATE: Apparently that’s 1.5 hours roundtrip, as The Transport Politic reports 50 minutes end to end. That actually strikes me as fairly impressive, considering the distance.

Vermont has a coast!

You learn something every day. It sounds dull, but I am genuinely excited about this revision to my knowledge of American geography.

Good death

“Euthanasia” come from the Greek for “good death.”

If worst comes to worst, letting the Big Detroit Three fail gently might not be catastrophic.

Stephen Gordon put job hiring and job loses in a handy graph which shows the context in which possible job losses exist. He writes:

The most credible worst-case scenario of a collapse of the Detroit Three involve job losses of the order of 150k. (The estimate of 500k from the Ontario Manufacturing Council that made so many headlines is not credible.) Losing 150,000 jobs is certainly not good news, but in the context of an economy in which almost a quarter of a million jobs are lost every month, it’s fair to wonder just how big of a deal that is. If those losses were spread across a few months, they would hardly show up in that graph.

Having said that,

I don’t want to be misunderstood here: notwithstanding these considerations, the short-term consequences of an immediate, catastrophic collapse are severe enough to justify spending public money in order to prevent it. Hiring rates are not yet strong enough to absorb that kind of shock.

Frankly, I’m not sure I should even be allowed to have an opinion on the auto bailout. (What do I know?) But for what it’s worth, I’m not comfortable with propping up the automakers any more than is necessary to reasonably contain their collapse. I’m not rooting for the death of GM or Ford, but it’s not as if they were healthy during good times.

Also, have I professed lately my love for Worthwhile Canadian Initiative?

Feeling guilty about buying Chinese?

Don’t feel bad! From the Economist’s Free Exchange:

[...] what good is innovation in America if it merely creates jobs for China?

Greg Linden, Jason Dedrick and Kenneth Kraemer answer that very question by looking at iPods. They tally the number of jobs and wages associated with the production, development and distribution of all Apple iPods in 2006. Apple (an American company) invented the iPod, but they, and the intermediate goods they require, are mainly manufactured abroad. So other than enjoying more music, have Americans benefited from the creation of iPods?

The answer is yes. The authors found iPods employed 41,170 people worldwide. About 27,000 of those jobs went overseas, but most of those were the low-wage and low-skill jobs involved in production. Only 30 Americans had jobs involved in iPod production. But 13,890 jobs were created in the engineering or retail sector. These Americans earned $753m from iPods, while overeases employees earned $318m. Americans earned more because Apple kept the high-skill jobs (the R&D side) at home and sent its manufacturing abroad. But America’s lower-skill workers also benefited, mainly in the retail, non-professional sector. These jobs earned American workers more than $220m.

The moral of this story? You’re better off selling iPods than trying to compete with Chinese manufacturers (and better off still if you come up with new things for the Chinese to manufacture).

Antipodean Ontario

This quote is, admittedly, out of context:

New South Wales likes to think of itself as Australia, but it isn’t. Back in 1887, the redoubtable Henry Parkes even proposed that the colony of New South Wales change its name to Australia – a move not unexpectedly opposed (and ridiculed) by the other colonies.

But the sentiment persists. The former prime minister John Howard was a typical Sydneysider (an early Victorian term for those who lived on the Sydney side of the Murray). He professed not to recognise state identities or loyalties; we are, after all, simply Australians.

The arrogance and insensitivity of such attitudes are deeply ingrained, and they are not without significance in that ongoing conundrum of our elusive national identity.

If you read the article in full, it quickly becomes apparent that New South Wales is not Ontario’s southern doppelganger – in it’s politics, and particularly the recent commandeering of the local “Tory” party, it is more like Alberta.

But let’s not worry about the details; it’s the trends that matter. Here in Canada, we don’t give enough thought to Australia (and I’m sure they return the favour). We may have more to share than we realize.

(via cityofsound)

High-speed Commute

From the Toronto Star:

Written by a team of civil engineers at the University of Toronto, the report estimates the total cost of infrastructure work at up to $27.5 billion. But they say their recommendations address the two most pressing issues today – global warming and global recession.

The report proposes 560 kilometres of high-speed electric track that runs from Toronto north to Orillia, east to Peterborough and west to a corridor that includes Waterloo, Hamilton and Niagara Falls. It would take at least a decade to build and cost anywhere from $4 billion to $20 billion, depending on the route and technology chosen.

The rail system would help create a high-density “mega-region” by improving transportation and attracting what the report calls well-paid “creative” jobs, such as those in aerospace, finance and telecommunications.

“A high-speed rail network knitting Ontario’s cities together could revolutionize the province’s role within the continental and global economic systems,” it says.

Called Infrastructure and the Economy: Future directions for Ontario, the 30-page report was delivered Thursday to economist Roger Martin and urban theorist Richard Florida, appointed by Premier Dalton McGuinty to chart a course to economic prosperity. Its recommendations will likely form part of the final report to the premier, expected in February.

I think the merits of this proposal might be a little hard to grasp because it doesn’t fit our preconceptions about transit in the GTA. When we think of transit as having a discrete hierarchy of layers which operate at different speeds and prices (e.g. buses, then subways, then GO trains, then airplanes), we usually consider high-speed trains to be a replacement for airplanes. But in this case, we’re essentially talking about high-speed GO Transit.

Without discarding the possibility of a high-speed line at least to Montreal in the east (for which there is almost certainly strong, immediate demand), these high-speed commuter lines around the GTA are worth considering.

This spring I visited the Toronto Zoo with some friends. We got on the subway at Islington, got on a bus at Kennedy, and discovered that Scarborough was a lot bigger than we expected. We were on the subway at least 45 minutes and God-knows-how-long on the bus. It might have been possible to take a GO train for part of our trip, but the poor service on weekends and non-Lakeshore lines generally makes this difficult to coordinate.  I’m not suggesting a high-speed GO train from Islington to the zoo, but our little (long) adventure illustrates the difficulty of moving around the city, even with the subway. And we were only crossing the 416! Imagine trying to get from Richmond Hill to Brampton.

Realistically, I don’t expect trains travelling at 400 km/h between Toronto and Waterloo. But even trains running at an average of 200 km/h would perhaps halve the travel time, far outperforming a trip down the 401. I have to wonder, what speeds does Metrolinx have in mind for trains on the future electrified lines (like Lakeshore).

By effectively collapsing space in the GTA we can mimic a denser region without physically moving our downtowns closer together. I’m looking foward to seeing the final report which this high-speed commuter proposal (presumably in modified form) will be a part of.