[URBAN NOTE] Bicyclists versus drivers in Toronto

This story got front-page coverage in The Globe and Mail today, following fairly prominent coverage in various online and print media on previous days.

Wrapped in a white sheet, with a brown beard that hasn't been trimmed for days, Chris Kasztelewicz looks a bit like Jesus. And to many cyclists, the comparison is not inappropriate - Mr. Kasztelewicz has emerged as a symbol of two-wheeled suffering, run down by a taxi and maimed for life in a bizarre road-rage incident that has gripped the cycling community.

Mr. Kasztelewicz's right leg is gone, and his body is covered with scrapes and bruises. He has spent the past nine days in the critical care ward of St. Michael's Hospital in downtown Toronto, drifting in and out of consciousness and undergoing a series of major surgeries that have saved his life - but not his right knee and lower leg.

Mr. Kasztelewicz stared at his amputated leg yesterday, then fell back on his pillow, exhausted by his continuing medical ordeal.

"I just want to survive," he said. "That's what I'm thinking about."

Mr. Kasztelewicz also finds himself at the centre of a high-stakes legal drama. He is expected to be the main witness against cab driver Sultan Ahmed, who faces six criminal charges after allegedly running down Mr. Kasztelewicz with his rented taxi.

Mr. Ahmed, 38, was charged on Friday, and spent the weekend in jail. He is scheduled to appear in court today for a bail hearing.

The criminal case may be accompanied by civil action against Mr. Ahmed and other parties. Mr. Kasztelewicz was visited in hospital yesterday by David Levy, a Toronto litigator who is studying the case to see who may be held liable for Mr. Kasztelewicz's crippling injuries. "We're going to see where it goes," Mr. Levy said.

Mr. Kasztelewicz's case is seen as a watershed by the Toronto cycling community, which has spent years lobbying for bicycle-friendly changes that would make Canada's largest city a better place to ride.

"Toronto has the potential to be an extraordinary city for cyclists, but it was designed around the car," said Yvonne Bambrick of the Toronto Cyclists Union, an advocacy group modelled as the two-wheel equivalent of the CAA. "What happened here shows you the imbalance of power.'

This story caguht my attention because the intersection of Dovercourt and Argyle where the event took place is literally just down the street from my first Toronto address. As the article states and bloggers like this one argue, Toronto's very infrastructure is biased towards supporting cars and car drivers to the detriment of relatively more vulnerable bicyclists.

[URBAN NOTE] "Unearthing the Alexandra Site's Pre-Contact Past"

The latest Historicist posting at Torontoist, "Unearthing the Alexandra Site's Pre-Contact Past", examines at length the First Nations presence in Toronto history, through a mid-14th century Huron-Wendat village.

Alexandra Site village, as was common, was located on a small ridge overlooking a waterway—the now-diverted Highland Creek—that provided transportation and fishing and was surrounded by cultivated fields. Unlike some other villages, there were no palisades, suggesting that it probably wasn't threatened with extensive conflict. The various Iroquoian and other Aboriginal communities demonstrated a high level of interaction and appear to have shared ideas and similar cultural practices.

Beginning in the Early and Middle Woodland periods (1,000 B.C. to A.D. 600), the Huron-Wendat's advantageous geographic position allowed them to become increasingly involved in extensive trading from the Great Lakes to Hudson Bay, the Saguenay, and beyond. At the Alexandra Site, beads made of sea shells from the eastern seaboard illustrate just how far the Huron-Wendat trading network stretched. Much later, in the early 1600s, these established trade networks incorporated white newcomers, and the Huron-Wendat became indispensable middlemen in the French fur trade.

Statistics Canada recorded more than seventeen thousand people of First Nations background in 2006, but most of these people come from points elsewhere in Ontario and Canada as a result of the annihilation of the Wendat-Huron in the mid-17th century and subsequent diaspora. There's still a significant amount of continuity beween aboriginal and modern Toronto--as Plummer points out, Yonge Street was originally a pre-contact trail.

[BRIEF NOTE] The Map of Death

peters2006map
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

As reported here, some Pakistanis are afraid that the United States might be on the verge of partitioning their country, giving the Northwest Frontier Province and its Pushtun population to Afghanistan and establishing an independent Baluchistan.

A redrawn map of South Asia showing a truncated Pakistan, reduced to an elongated sliver of land, has sparked fear among military planners in Islamabad who think India and Afghanistan are "colluding" to destroy the only nuclear powered-Muslim nation with the US help, a media report said on Sunday.

The map, first circulated as a theoretical exercise in some American neoconservative circles, has fueled a belief among Pakistanis that what the United States really wants is the breakup of their country, the New York Times reported.

That notion, it says, may strike Americans as strange coming from an ally of 50 years but as the incoming Barack Obama administration tries to coax greater cooperation from Pakistan in the fight against militancy, it can hardly be ignored.

Pakistan, says the Times, is upset over the Indo-American civilian nuclear deal as also big investments made by New Delhi in Afghanistan.

In this context, the paper makes special reference to the Iranian border road which, it says, would ultimately provide access to India to Iranian port of Chabahar, circumventing Pakistan.

Besides, India has offered training for Afghanistan's military, given assistance for a new Parliament building in Kabul and has re-opened consulates along the border with Pakistan, it adds.

The consulates, the Pakistanis allege, are used by India as cover to lend support to a long-running separatist movement in Baluchistan Province.

This map is the map that accompanies American military author Ralph Peters's article "Blood Borders" in the June 2006 issue of Armed Forces Journal, purporting to show a stabler greater Middle East with frontiers redrawn on ethnic/religious/political lines. I fail to see how this could produce a stable arrangement at all, what with the need to engage insimultaneous partitions of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey (!) that, one assumes, are entirely uncontroversial and uncomplicated by, say, multiple identities.

Tiny Revolution has called this map a "map of death." As a brief scan of the news suggests, that looks to actually be the case.