[PHOTO] Inside a LCBO

Inside a LCBO
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

If you've ever wondered what the inside of a LCBO store--the only chain allowed to sell alcoholic beverages in Ontario, and its affiliates--here you go.

[LINK] Some Friday links

• At Acts of Minor Treason, Andrew Barton photographs Montréal's tunnlled Ville-Marie expressway and wonders why we can't do the same with the Gardiner, as well as noting that Toronto's skyscrapers keep growing..


• Daniel Drezner wonders if some regions produce more entertaining summits than others, and observes that Bush would have loved to have intercepted a North Korean ship carrying arms for Iran.


• Hunting Monsters considers the dark past, present, and likely future of the poor community of Hebron.


• Joe. My. God reports that the Indian government supports the decriminalization of homosexuality and reports that gay men in Guangzhou fought police when the latter tried to push them out of a park where they socialize.


• Open the Future's Jamais Cascio considers whether the "Social Transtion Stress Disorder" her created for a RPG system set in 2100, relating to an inability to tolerate rapid change, might exist now.


• Slap Upside the Head reports that the Alberta government has delayed the introduction of new school regulations notifying parents ahead of time whether gay themes appear in school so they can take them out.


• Spacing Toronto celebrates Pages Books, a now-defunct bookstore active for thirty years on Queen Street West until rising rents killed it.
  
• Strange Maps hosts a map showing FDR's vacation route.


• The Dragon's Tales Will Baird lets us know that new thinking suggests that the first farmers in western and central Europe weren't hunter-gatherers who picked up thee technology on their own, but rather that very unpopular migrants from southeastern Europe did. As well, there are international talks regarding the possibility of recruiting China as a participant in a project to build a massive new telescope.


• Torontoist's David Topping tackles the question of how to deal with bikes and concludes that more funding for bike lanes is essential, while Kevin Plummer reports on the Depression-era construction of the old Toronto Stock Exchange building.

[URBAN NOTE] Incomprehensible

I was walking past two men on the street while I was on my break, and I heard the voice of one of them rise in anger.

- You did it to yourselves, don't you see! he yelled.

- No.

- The underwear!

[DM] "South Korea's immigration future"

I've a post up at Demography Matters taking a brief looking at immigration in South Korea now and in the foreseeable future. Yes, there's going to be a lot of it.

[LINK] "Who Causes Cyclists’ Deaths?"

I'd like to thank mindstalk for pointing out to me (and doing a good job of reminding me about) this link to a Freakonomics blog posting analyzing the causes of cyclist mortality in Toronto.

When it comes to sharing the road with cars, many people seem to assume that such accidents are usually the cyclist’s fault — a result of reckless or aggressive riding. But an analysis of police reports on 2,752 bike-car accidents in Toronto found that clumsy or inattentive driving by motorists was the cause of 90 percent of these crashes. Among the leading causes: running a stop sign or traffic light, turning into a cyclist’s path, or opening a door on a biker.

This may be a plausible explanation for cyclists' casualties, but it doesn't touch on other factors, like the attentiveness of cyclists to the rules of the road. If the majority of cyclists I see just don't pay attention to road rules, or even basic politeness, how can that not contribute to accidents?

I like this note, taken from a comment at the blog.

We need to have an epochal shift in culture of both driving and cycling. Drivers need to realize that cyclists were on the roads first, that they are vehicles, and that two seconds of waiting behind cyclists until it is safe to pass are better than the consequences of ending the cyclist’s life. Of course, we need penalties for ending cyclists’ lives that actually ARE worse than waiting two seconds. We need to enforce the rules about passing safely, and about not assaulting the drivers of other vehicles (hitting your incredibly loud aftermarket horn as you pass me counts). We need to train cyclists on how to survive on the roads that are here in the first place, even before the attitude shift, because if bicycles don’t become commonplace they will never be looked for by cars.

[LINK] "The Anatomy of Misinformation"

I'd like to thank Jerry and Mike on Facebook for pointing me to this analysis of the Freakonomics post I linked to previously. To wit:

The chain of stupidity begins when cyclists see “Drive Out at Controlled Intersection” as the leading cause of injuries and incorrectly assume that this means the driver is at fault in all of these accidents.

But actually reading the report yields the exact opposite conclusion. A close reading of the report shows that the crash types are also associated with a table of “Possible Contributing Factors.” The most common contributing factor – “cyclist riding on sidewalk or crosswalk.” (Which also happens to be illegal for riders over 18 years of age.)

The blogger goes on to quote from the report:

A cyclist crossing a roadway from the sidewalk, even at a moderate speed, can enter the motorist’s field of view much more suddenly than a pedestrian would. Motorists scanning for pedestrians as they hastily negotiate an intersection may not expect to encounter cyclists in this part of the right-of-way.

Cyclists on the sidewalk may not be able to see approaching motorists until the last moment, or may mistakenly assume that motorists have noticed them.

In almost thirty percent of all collisions, the cyclists were riding on the sidewalk immediately prior to the collision.

The most frequent type of crash involved a motorist approaching or proceeding into a controlled intersection and colliding with a cyclist who was crossing the intersection in a perpendicular direction. Roughly half of the cyclists in this category were riding on the sidewalk and collided with the motor-vehicle within the crosswalk area.

Finally:

For the most serious category of crashes (Type 1), all of the crash types in Dr. Cavacuiti’s chart are associated with cyclist contributing factors more often than motorist factors with the exception of “Motorist Overtaking.” In that category, drivers are executing unsafe or improper lane changes in 16% of the crashes. However, cyclists are still at fault for some of these accidents too.

Overall, reckless driving only appears to be minimally responsible. For example, the highest percentage of motorists disobeying traffic signals for all crash types is 7.4% (under Drive Out at controlled Intersection – and disobeying traffic signals only appears in association with one other crash type – 2% for Motorist Left Turn Facing Bicyclist). To put that in perspective, for this same crash type, the biggest contributing factor was “cyclist riding on sidewalk/crosswalk” with 51.1% followed by darkness (18.3%), rainy weather (10.9%) and wet road surface (13.6%). In other words, contrary to Anon’s assumption, motorists aren’t running red lights, cyclists are riding illegally or unsafely.

In fact, of the top ten accident types on Dr. Cavacuiti’s chart, six don’t list any motorist contributing factors at all, and all but one of them have cyclists as the largest contributing factors to the accidents.

FYI.