Vancouver Vs. Warsaw: trains, planes and automobiles edition

It’s hard for me to imagine a city that is harder to get around than Vancouver. Partly this is because I haven’t lived in too many cities and partly it is because some 19th century dolt didn’t foresee the rise of the automobile and the growth of the city and decided to build the city’s core on a hard-to-reach peninsula. If Surrey were the core it would be much easier to get around. But then you’d have to go to Surrey.

Whatever the case, as a trip to Stanley Park yesterday showed, Vancouver traffic is hell. It’s bus system is decent but curbside parking means the buses are slower than a kid who’s been dropped on his head one time too many. They also don’t have the same variety of routes as, say, Warsaw, where nary a street is untouched by the city’s bus system.

Vancouver’s Skytrain system has more stations than Warsaw, but the trains are positively puny by comparison, indicative of a smaller number of users. Unfortunately, the aforementioned geography of Vancouver means that the most used stations are packed at the end of the lines. Ideally, of course, you would like the centre of the line to be the city centre, as in Warsaw.

Of course, Vancouver will soon complete its Canada Line, which will extend Skytrain service to Richmond and the airport. Contrast this with Warsaw, where commuter’s to the city’s Prague district on the other side of the Vistula river cannot take the metro. Drivers must instead navigate clogged bridges (like in Vancouver). Mass transit commuters can take (relatively fast) trams or buses.

To reach Warsaw’s outer limits from the city centre, one should expect to spend about 45 minutes in the metro and/or on the bus. To cross the city north-south would take (I’m really guessing) about 90 minutes. East-west I really have no idea but on a bus, I would guess about 100 minutes.

In Vancouver, to get anywhere from downtown will take you about an hour, if not more. From downtown to Port Coquitlam last week at about 3 p.m. it took about 80 minutes. It usually takes me about 40 minutes on metro and bus to get to my home in Central Vancouver.

An unlimited monthly transit pass in Warsaw costs about 75 zloty (about $30). In Vancouver, a one-zone, limited pass costs about $75 (about $75).

Verdict: Warsaw, but mostly due to Vancouver’s unfortunate (albeit, beautiful) geography.

Resurrected

Well, this seems to be as good a time, and as good a place as any, to start writing on this blog again. I’m a little worried that my current job is so lacking in creative opportunities that I’ll slowly turn into Joey from Friends (or, almost as bad, start wanting to watch Friends).

One is self-serving; to a story of my own that I wrote for Okanagan Life magazine. The story was tricky to write, considering there was still snow on the ground when I visited the farm in early April. As I write in the piece, it didn’t exactly look like the garden of Eden. But the couple who showed me around were very nice and the concept quite interesting. I don’t know if it’s possible to grow the world’s food organically or with such practices; but they are clearly more human than mass farms. Still, to get back to old-fashioned farming, I think we’d have to get back to old-fashioned numbers of people, which would require something none of us want to live through.

That said, perhaps we have to better use the land we have next door, the acres and acres that are used as large front lawns and empty space. Local food isn’t just a trend after all; it’s also a response to the need to cut down on the distance our food travels.

The other link is, I suppose, tragic. Unfortunately, the headline is just too juicy to pass up:
Accused in lesbian axe-murder trial acquitted

The headline is completely accurate. Hardly sensational. And yet, I imagine that the copyeditor who wrote it giggled like a mad hyena while typing the words. And how can you resist reading it?

On a somewhat related note to the resurrection of this blog. I am now living in Vancouver. If you like what you’re reading and need someone to write, tutor or give travel advice, contact me via the email address listed on my contact page.

Thanks!

True north strong and (relatively) nuclear apocalypse free

One day, possibly, Canada will become the new chosen land; the place humans flock to find safety and a stable living environment. They may not even care about the cold.

At least that’s the conclusion Guardian journalist Tanya Gold came to after several days spent trying to survive a hypothetical apocalypse in Britain. Britain!

Still, I would hate to deprive you of the entertaining article, in which the urbanite Gold rips the head off a pheasant. Now that’s entertainment!

I am (vaguely) confident I will not starve. But there is one other thing I am sweating over: nuclear power stations. Professor Alan Weisman wrote The World Without Us, a description of what he believes would happen to Earth if we all vanished. I call him. He says I am right to worry. Why? Because most nuclear plants are water-cooled. Water, he explains, in a dry, calm voice, needs to circulate around the reactors, or they will explode. If there were no humans to operate it, the plant would shut down automatically, and the water would be cooled with diesel fuel. For about a week. Then the heat from the reactor would evaporate and expose the core. “It will either melt down or burst into very radioactive flames,” he says. So what would you do, Professor Weisman? “I would probably go to Canada,” he says. “There aren’t many nuclear power stations in Canada.”

The Safety Dance

While the sun is no longer setting at three o’clock, it still gets dark quite early here, given the fact that we are further north than Edmonton (don’t worry, all the snow’s gone here and the temperature is hovering around five degrees). Living so far north during winter, and not having a car, means I’ve been spending a lot of time walking in the dark. Often Magda is with me, but sometimes I’m alone.

And yet, considering we live in a densely populated area of a large city, I feel very safe. This is not extremely surprising. While Warsaw’s eastern district of Praga is known to be a little violent, elsewhere there doesn’t seem to be much threat of robbery or crime. It’s certainly easier to do the ol’ safety dance here than in Salford, Manchester’s grubby little brother, where I lived for a few months in 2005.

And yet, Salford and Poland seem to have one thing in common: an emphasis on security. In the UK, I lived in a student housing complex with a guard’s gate and 24-hour security. If you tried to LEAVE the wrong way the security guards acted like you had offended them personally and all but threatened to throw you in jail. Thankfully, we have no such guards here but our door includes two locks, one of which has two seperate deadbolts.

Elsewhere, we were instructed to lock the door behind us; not only when we were leaving but also after we entered the house. Even out in the forest at Mazury, locking the door is a must-do. For someone who for long stretches of his life hasn’t seen the need to lock the door behind him after leaving home, much less, when he is home, the focus on security is a little strange and alienating.

Even Magda, who, in Canada, prefers to lock the door at night has been taken aback. Still, we have been conforming to the norm, locking the door when we leave (and sometimes when we return) home.

Granny ghettos

Wherever you look in Warsaw, you’re liable to spot an elderly man or woman trudging along the sidewalk or sidling onto the subway, cane in one hand, grocery bags in the other.

Observing this, Magda pointed out today that there seem to be a lot of old people out and about in Warsaw, more than back home in Vernon or Kamloops. I’m not so sure but there does seem to be something there. As compared to Warsaw, in Vernon, which has a very healthy (if that is the right word) pacemaker-per-capita ratio, the elderly seem less visible.

Why? I have a couple theories. One, there are simply more pedestrians here, ourselves included, than back home where more people drive. More pedestrians mean more old pedestrians. My second theory, I think, is more interesting and perhaps worthy of further investigation.

In Warsaw, the elderly seem to be rather spread out. The hundreds of apartment blocks provide plenty of housing (some reasonably priced, some not so much) for the elderly all around the city. Those apartment blocks are also home to young families, teenagers, professionals and kindergartents.

In Vernon, however, elderly populations are very much confined to certain neighbourhoods. Granny ghettos, if you will. They live, play and go for walks within their closed communities, in their courtyards and, in downtown Vernon, between their apartment buildings, the Schubert Centre and Safeway. The result is a more age-homogenized population.

It is also, as Tom Lancaster, the man in charge of Vernon’s OCP, told me a couple years ago unhealthy for cities.

“You need the vibrancy of youth, you need the vibrancy of children, you need the whole spectrum and I think for a long time we’ve developed cities where we segregate people of the various age groups,” said Lancaster.

“It doesn’t work. You’ve got to mix all these things together to the point where older folks are no longer walking down the street and are afraid of the youth because they don’t live by them or youth are not going around making jokes at the expense of older folks or you don’t have people complining about the noise of young children bouncing a ball on the street.

“It’s ridiculous,” Lancaster said of gated age-restricted communities. “Part of life is all the different age groups and we need to wrap our minds around that.”

There be fish in those waters

Great story in the Kelowna Capital News by Kevin Parnell on rainbow trout in Okanagan Lake. Just don’t try and get steamrolled by a speedboat:

When you look at the gong show that is boating on Okanagan Lake, it’s tough to picture an angler sitting in an aluminum boat, trolling his lure or fly. There’s just not that much room.

But in the shoulder seasons of early spring and late fall, when the cigar boats are locked up for another season, there is some excellent fishing to be had on Okanagan Lake.

Rainbow trout weighing upwards of 10 pounds are not out of the ordinary. Twenty-pounders plus are said to lurk in the clear, cold waters.

“It’s a tough lake to fish but it can be very rewarding,” said Rod Hennig, the owner of Rodney’s Reel Outdoors, a fish guiding service that has been in operation for three years.

Denis Seto-who?-chi

I can’t spell his name and, before looking him up, wasn’t sure what position he played. All I knew about Denis-I-mean-Devin-let-me-check-this-again-Setoguchi is that he’s a young kid playing for the San Jose Sharks who has put up good numbers so far this year. Oh and he also went undrafted in the Black Press hockey pool, at the bottom of which my name is currently placed.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. After coming in second-last (or possibly, last – my memory may be a little biased) in my first year, I learned from my mistakes and finished in the money last year. I would have had a good chance at winning if it were not for a little thing called the re-draft where, halfway through the season and for a fee, participants can pick up players who were not selected earlier in October.

Last year it burned me but this year, with my team toiling in last place after being picked apparently by a consortium of Morning Star personnel who apparently weren’t up to date on Marian Gaborik’s back problems, the redraft could save my entry fee. As the last placed team, I will be able to pick first.

If I want to. As I look at the standings, I’m 17 points out of LAST place and – shudder – 73 points back of second place. (A public inquiry should be launched into how Scott was allowed to pick up Dan Boyle in the eighth round). Setoguchi has 32 points, 31 more than Gaborik. With his addition I would climb to – let me check – 16th place. That puts me ahead of – let me check again – Graeme. That is, Morning Star Sports Reporter Graeme Corbett who, if memory serves me right, finished behind Tim Horton in the last office pool.

The more I look at it, the more I reflect on the fact that the $10 I could spend on the redraft can by me eight 500 ml beers.

Bottoms up.

On Ignatieff

Several years ago, in my last year of university I took a political science course, the main topic of which was foreign intervention and the different theories revolving around when it should be employed.

One of the texts we read was written by Michael Ignatieff who, before he turned to Canadian party politics (or at least, before he turned back to politics) was an influential Harvard academic and sometimes-journalist who wrote about when foreign intervention was necessary.

I found it hard to recall Ignatieff’s precise doctrine before reading his wikipedia entry. This sentence from that entry, though, meshes with what I recall learning three years ago in that class:

Critical of the limited-risk approach practiced by NATO in conflicts like the Kosovo War and the Rwandan Genocide, he says that there should be more active involvement and larger scale deployment of land forces by Western nations in future conflicts in the developing world. His position has come to define modern liberal humanitarian interventionism; Ignatieff distinguishes his approach from Neo-conservativism because the motives of the foreign engagement he advocates are essentially altruistic rather than selfserving.^[13]

The next sentence, it bears keeping in mind, points out that this view led him to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Whether for political or academic reasons, Ignatieff has since repudiated his support, but it goes to show that his foreign affairs views can lead to negative results. Still, the fact that Ignatieff has the potential to become Prime Minister of Canada is reassuring after reading this story about a massacre in the Congo, where war has taken millions of lives over the past decade.

In little more than 24 hours, at least 150 people would be dead, most of them young men, summarily executed by the rebels last month as they tightened their grip over parts of eastern Congo, according to witnesses and human-rights investigators.

And yet, as the killings took place, a contingent of about 100 United Nations peacekeepers was less than a mile away, struggling to understand what was happening outside the gates of its base. The peacekeepers were short of equipment and men, United Nations officials said, and they were focusing on evacuating frightened aid workers and searching for a foreign journalist who had been kidnapped. Already overwhelmed, officials said, they had nointelligence capabilities or even an interpreter who could speak the necessary languages.

The story illustrates the need for an overhaul of how the United Nations, and the world, tries to protect civillians and end conflict in war-ravaged countries. Ignatieff, were he to become Prime Minister, would be uniquely positioned to play a large part in turning the United Nations into a more effective peace-keeping institution. Of course, it may be impossible to do so and, even if he were to head an overhaul of the UN, the results may not be particularly desirable. But something needs to be done and Ignatieff would at least be internally motivated and interested in playing an active role in foreign affairs.

Given that many politicians come to power by focusing on local issues first and foremost, the emergence of a politician with real foreign policy credentials both in academia and, on the ground, as a journalist could do some real good.

And this coming from someone who was glad to see the Liberals defeat him at their leadership conference two years ago.

The three Rs

Every time I throw a bottle or crumpled up box in the garbage I get the heebie-jeebies. In Canada, it costs you money to throw away bottles and is at least frowned upon not to recycle one’s cardboard boxes and the like. Here, there don’t seem to be many options for city dwellers who want to recycle. Like in England, the common course of action is to simply dump them all in the same bag as one’s food clippings and plastic waste and throw it on top of the dumpster.

Not everywhere though; at one home where we stayed for a week or so, the garbage can had seperate compartments for composting, paper and waste. Of course that home, like another we stayed at, had a garden and thus space for a compost pile. Most houses in the city don’t have such options and there is no blue bag program here. (Of course I’m not sure if even Kamloops has implemented such a program yet. Whenever I talk about the program to non-Vernonites, I’m constantly surprised to realized that Vernon is actually ahead of the curve on something.)

In Germany cans and bottles include a deposit in the price, like in Canada. That idea hasn’t yet hit Poland so until we find some place to take our bottles, were adding to the giant trash heap.

All of which raises some questions. I’m an environmentally-concerned person as it is, but I don’t always think about the environment as I go about my day-to-day activities. Sometimes I pollute more than necessary, sometimes I waste energy because of sheer laziness. I did the same back in Canada. Partially because of this, I’d been of the opinion that there needs to be pocket-book incentives to get people to act environmentally responsibly.

But, if I so compulsively want to put cardboard into a seperate bag that does not benefit me financially, what does that mean? Sure I think it’s important to recycle, but given my willingness to waste in other facets of life, it surprises me how buil- in my urge to recycle a milk jug is. The reason, I think, is pure habit.

Squishing a milk jug and putting it in a bag is now a habit nurtured by years of repetition but also by recycling cans and bottles. Slowly the habit expands and you begin adding more to the bag just because it’s there and easy to use.

How this applies to the larger world and specifically the battle against climate change I don’t know. But using sheer force of habit to encourage change is something that needs to, and I know is, being considered.

This also reminds me of a theory out there that people can be “nudged” to do the right thing through minor public policy urgings.

From Slate:

The real trick to understanding how to approach Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, the new book by Cass R. Sunstein and Richard H. Thaler, lies in recognizing the limitations of your inner Homer Simpson. In the authors’ view, your whole brain is a civil-war zone between your “automatic system” (the rapid, intuitive, reptilian part) and your “reflective system” (the slow, deliberate, self-conscious part). Behavioral economists take the position that snap judgments formed by your Homer Simpson brain are often quite terrible ones, which go on to have enormous consequences in your financial, physical, and emotional life. Like Homer, we use all sorts of mental “heuristics” or cognitive “rules of thumb” that are flawed, which is why we pay for magazine subscriptions for years after the three-month “free” trial ended (“status quo bias”) and why we buy lottery tickets (“unrealistic optimism”).

The last prorogue perogy post

Since people continue to search for perogies in the hope of finding out some information on Parliament being prorogued (notice the difference between the words), I might as well actually say something to my misguided audience.

One, as I said elsewhere, go to a real news source and get your information there. Blogs are where people with too much time on their hands and no training or pretence of fairness spread misheard rumours, false accusations and wild conspiracy theories to gullible people. (Yes, I know there are some good blogs out there – I read a couple myself – but there is no doubt in my mind at least that blogs do a substantial amount of harm to public knowledge.)

Still, the fact that Stephen Harper wildly accused the leaders of the three opposition parties of signing their document without a Canadian flag present when, in fact, there were three Canadian flags visible behind the leaders shows that maybe it’s not just blogs contributing to confusion.

No matter. If you are still reading and really want my take on this, here it is: Stephen Harper finally really showed his creepy Mr. Burns side and paid the price when the opposition leaders grew some cojones and stood up to him. Then he backed down somewhat and the Liberals, not realizing they are creating problems for themselves, didn’t take the opportunity to stand back, cast a gloating grin and say “we told you so.” Instead they kept pushing and now who knows what’s going to happen. Thankfully Dion will be gone soon and King Harper may be feeling some heat from his caucus.

Either way, we won’t have an election in the next few months – if the government falls the coalition will take over – so Canadians don’t need to make up their minds about who deserves the blame. We should just watch it with a sad smile, cast a pox on both their houses and hope the marketplace of votes brings some sense to Canadian politics.

The best blog out there is that of Adam Radwanski at the Globe and Mail.