[PHOTO] OCAD, Above

OCAD, Above
Originally uploaded by randyfmcdonald

This is what you see when you look up, above the park I shared yesterday, to see the several floors of OCAD projecting above a park-like void.

[LINK] "Techniques of the Counter-Revolution"

A Fistful of Euros' Jamie Kenny came up with a shortlist of techniques for those countries, most notably Bahrain and Libya I suppose, wanting to avoid collapse.

Never mind the martyrs. Given that ‘martyrdom’ had a catalytic effect on protest in Egypt and Tunisia, you’d have thought that other regimes would have taken care to handle demonstrators more gently. Not so, as events today in Bahrain have demonstrated and as shown in Yemen over the weekend. The issue instead appears to be control of the streets. Once the demonstrators in Egypt and Tunisia had it, they couldn’t be dislodged. So go in fast, early and hard.

Deny the revolution its focal point. That appears to have been the purpose of the raid on the Pearl roundabout in Manama. There have been reports of sporadic clashes in the city since then, but it’s hard either for reporters to get a handle on where or for demonstrators to find a place to assemble.

Get the countergangs in early. The protests in Egypt rapidly reached such a critical mass that the baltagiya lost their ability to intimidate. Indeed, they were defeated by physical force from the demonstrators. So they need to be used before that point is reached, as they are in Iran, Yemen and Libya.

Kenny's point about Libya deserves reiteration: "Libya’s the country to watch here. Ghaddafi’s new friends would drop him like a hot brick if if only for someone less embarrassing given half an excuse, and he’s still on bad terms with the Saudis and the GCC states, so no prospect of exile there. He’s the one actually at risk of ending his rule swinging from a palm tree, and that possibility is going to dictate his response to the local uprising."

[LINK] Three Toronto links, Ford and the TTC

Think of these three links as offering connections to riffs on a theme.

The Globe and Mail's Anna Mehler Paperny reports ("Toronto needs strong mayor with veto power, Doug Ford says") that, in a continuation of previous trends under left-leaning mayor David Miller, Mayor Rob Ford's brother and fellow councillor Doug and presumably the mayor himself want to establish a strongly centralized system of municipal governance.

“I believe in a strong mayor system, like they have in the States. The mayor should have veto power ... so he has enough power to stop council,” Mr. Ford said. “The mayor should be the mayor. At the end of the day ... the mayor’s responsible for everything.”

It’s been a tough transition for the Ford camp to shift from a highly partisan, highly successful mayoral campaign to the enforced diplomacy of governing, attempting to woo councillors and win votes on a 45-person council with no party system, in which the mayor has only one ballot to cast.

“You’ve always got that council. You’ve got to have your 23 votes to get it passed,” Mr. Ford said.

He’d like the mayor to be able to override council “100 per cent. … So the mayor has veto power.”

It’s a model that closely mirrors an American system, which favours strong mayors who wield more clout than what former mayor David Crombie called the “bully pulpit” and single vote on council. In some U.S. cities, a two-thirds majority of council is required to overrule the mayor’s desire.

“Mayor Daly, in Chicago” – Doug Ford noted, citing a role model of the Ford brothers, whose label business has close ties to the U.S. city. “He got things done.”

The elder Mr. Ford is also a fan of Mississauga’s Hazel McCallion, who has wielded significant political clout on her council despite being officially one vote of many.

“She runs a tight ship over there. … She’s got such massive support, they just don’t go against her.”

Steve Munro, meanwhile, really doesn't like the Fords' support for a privately-built extension of the existing subway system into relatively low-density areas of northeastern Toronto.

The expansion would be privately financed, but owned by the City with the cost to be repaid out of development charges and tax increment financing.

What is unclear at this point is the amount of development that would be needed along the extended line to actually pay for its construction without adding to the City’s debt, nor is it clear how much of the proposed Provincial and Federal contributions to the Sheppard LRT would be available for a Sheppard Subway project.

This scheme leaves a number of other projects up in the air including:

* the remainder of the Sheppard LRT’s scope from Kennedy (where the subway would veer south to STC) to eastern Scarborough and, possibly, to the UofT Scarborough Campus
* the replacement of the SRT as either an LRT line (part of any remaining LRT-based Transit City network) or as a BD subway extension
* the status of the proposed Eglinton and Finch LRT lines, although the former as an LRT subway hybrid seems fairly certain to be built

A long term plan to finance a subway using future revenues presumes that the money to pay for its construction, debt financing and developer’s profit will actually materialize. This begs the question of station location and spacing because there would be little development on land far from stations spaced widely as on the most recent extensions to the subway. Enough land and development potential must exist to pay for the subway over time, and the locations must be sufficiently attractive to would-be builders that they will pay a premium to locate their buildings on subway sites.

Back at The Globe and Mail, Marcus Gee is quite skeptical ("Sheppard subway extension: A quarter the stops for three times the cost") about the good sense of the Fords' plan.

The idea of a full-length Scarborough subway line goes back a long way. As early as the 1960s, transit planners were talking about the need for a crosstown east-west rapid transit line at what was then the northern edge of the city. In 1985, an ambitious transit-expansion plan, Network 2011, called for a subway line along Sheppard, initially from Yonge to Victoria Park and later into Scarborough. The line would link two growing suburban downtowns, in North York and Scarborough, and ease pressure on the existing crosstown line on Bloor-Danforth.

After several stops, starts and changes of mind – the typical pattern for Toronto transit – tunnelling got under way and the line finally opened in 2002, the first new subway since Bloor-Danforth in 1966. It took eight years to build and cost around $1-billion, but that money was only enough for five stops over 5.5 kilometres, ending at Don Mills station. Mr. Ford would add another seven stops over eight kilometres.

[. . .[

The Toronto Transit Commission says that subways cost about $300-million a kilometre to build, compared with $75-million to $100-million for the light-rail transit (LRT) envisioned under the Transit City plan that Mr. Ford has unilaterally declared dead. The total cost for the Sheppard subway extension would be $3.6-billion, not including $500-million for a possible new train yard.

That’s a big jump from the $1.1-billion cost of the planned Sheppard LRT, which at 12 kilometres and 26 stops would go further and serve more intersections than a Sheppard subway. Doing the math, swapping LRT for subway would mean about one quarter of the stops for three times the cost.

By the time it was finished around 2020, a Sheppard subway would gobble up about half of the $8.15-billion that the provincial government has promised for rapid transit, putting a big question mark over other important projects like the Scarborough RT replacement and an Eglinton crosstown line.

It is a lot of eggs to put in one basket, especially when it is not clear that there is enough demand to justify a subway along Sheppard. Estimates say about 3,000 riders an hour would take the Sheppard LRT at peak times, if it were ever built. Transit planners argue you only really need a high-capacity system like a subway when demand reaches 15,000 an hour.

The existing Sheppard “stubway” that stops at Don Mills carried 4,950 riders an hour at peak as of 2009, up from 3,700 an hour in 2003 but still a far cry from the up to 30,000 carried by the Yonge-University line today. The stubway carries fewer riders overall than the Spadina-Harbourfront streetcar.

Go, read all three.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton comes out in favour of very limited and careful funding of sports facilities by city governments. Cities need to spend on other things, too.


• Might cats be allies against Daleks? Bad Astronomy provides photographic proof.


• Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams revisits scientific papers demonstrating that most liquid water in the solar system may be located in ice moons and worlds like Europa and Enceladus, not on our Earth.


• Crooked Timber meditates on how popularity of the Birther ideology among committed Republicans may be less a matter of belief and more demonstration of said people's in-groupness. Insightful discussion follows in the comments.


• At Eastern Approaches, an author observes the very begrudging reaction given to the deported Meskhetian Turks by the Georgian government.


• GeoCurrent Events' Martin Lewis reports on the Toshka Scheme, an effort by the Egyptian government to use overflow water from the Aswan High Dam to irrigate some desert in Upper Egypt. The scheme's viability is open to question.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer is unimpressed by Stratfor's incomplete, unintentionally and dangerously misleading analysis of the situation in Bahrain.


• At The Search, Douglas Todd observes that Chinese-Canadians in Vancouver are more likely Christian than Buddhist.


• Slap Upside the Head isn't impressed by the Halton Catholic School Board's ban on specifically queer-oriented GSA as opposed to more general support groups.


• Science Not Fiction notes that progress has been made on creating an actual lagnuage common to humans and dolphins. More later.


• Finally, Towleroad observes the ongoing intrigues surrounding a possible .gay Internet domain.

[LINK] "Google Unveils Delicious Bookmark Importer"

Various of my del.icio.us-using friends glad to hear of this news given its problems with its own Yahoo.

Google has just rolled out a convenient new tool for importing your Delicious bookmarks to Google Bookmarks.

The simple importer takes your Delicious login credentials (or lets you use a one-click OAuth button) and imports all your bookmarks, preserving labels or tags.

Considering Google’s rather broad reach as a company, the importer is likely more than just a friendly bid for more Google Bookmarks users.

Bookmarks was launched in 2005, but it’s never been a huge hit — or a money maker — for the company. Last year, Google launched Lists for Bookmarks, a more social feature for bookmarking that put the product into direct competition with Yahoo’s Delicious. At the time, Delicious founder Joshua Schachter was still a Google employee.

However, what makes the Delicious importer timing so interesting is Yahoo’s recent decision to “sunset,” i.e., to sell, Delicious. As more startups and other web companies have promoted their own Delicious importers, a successful sale of the once relatively popular web service grows ever more unlikely. Google’s importer may be the nail in the coffin, in fact.

This could also affect Flickr, too. At least there's a way to import pictures easily to Google Picasa.

[BRIEF NOTE] On Team Phoenicia

The Internet compresses social networks wonderfully, enabling all sorts of unlikely connections to come about. One of these more unlikely connections comes via my Will Baird, a long-standing friend from Usenet's soc.history.what-if, who happens to be team leader for Team Phoenicia, one of the entrants in the Google Lunar XPrize to successfully land a mobile probe on the moon.

Team Phoenicia’s lander/rover combination will piggyback on a communications satellite launch to geosynchronous orbit as a “hosted payload.” From there, the lander will separate from the parent craft and make a burn to insert itself into a transit orbit to a direct landing on the lunar South Pole. The descent will be rocket braked, but will deploy airbags in a manner for final landing. Once the lander has righted, the vehicle will deploy a multi wheeled rover and a large fan shaped placard.

The rover will traverse the required 500m while sending back competition specification quality video. Once the first goal is finished, the rover will position to fully spin-up its flywheels. At that point, the vehicle will aim to traverse the remaining 4.5 km for the secondary prize and then function during the lunar night. The intent is to make it through a lunar night without halting operations.

Once the GLXP priorities have been accomplished, the rover will be made available for scientific work on a for-pay basis. While the scientific instruments will be relatively simple, it will be the first on the ground survey near the lunar pole.

The group's blog is here, with more background on the contest over at Wikipedia here.

Go, read, root!