[PHOTO] Waiting at Wellesley

The midnight crowd at Wellesley station was starting to get tired waiting for the next train.

[URBAN NOTE] "Tunnel Visions: Bay Area Rapid Transit"

Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton has an extended post up taking a look at u>Bay Area Rapid Transit, the San Francisco and Bay Area's rapid transit network. From the description--vintage 1970s, with all that' decade's boons and ills--it sounds like it'd be a fun network to ride. (Recent mass protests over police shootings notwithstanding.)

Generally speaking, public transit systems operate in the background of life. Aside from a few freaks and weirdos like me, people tend not to take much note of them beyond knowing how to use them to get from point to point. In much the same way as the electrical infrastructure or the water supply system, they tend to be an invisible but necessary component of the modern city, remarked upon at length only when there's a perceived problem. It can be argued that a well-run transit system is one that stays out of the headlines.

There's that, and then there's BART (pronounced "bart"). That's Bay Area Rapid Transit, the regional rapid transit system serving the San Francisco Bay Area. Unlike other transit systems, which make big news when trains get derailed or budgets get cut, in the recent past BART has had the dubious privilege of wide-ranging media coverage as a result of shootings by its police force and attacks against its website and the shutdown of cell phone coverage to frustrate protests. It stands apart from the crowd.

My experience with the system wasn't enough for me to really understand how well the system's run, since it's not nearly as friendly to hop-on, hop-off travel as most city transit systems - I had to plan out my BART journeys to a degree that I've never experienced before while riding rapid transit. Still, it was enough to demonstrate the degree to which BART stands apart from the other systems you'll find across North America. Created to replace the privately-run Key System, an interurban streetcar system that served the cities of the East Bay into the 1940s and rattled across the Bay Bridge into the 1950s, today's BART almost seems like a product of a 1970s view of the future.

Go, read.

[URBAN NOTE] "Sidewalk cyclists face crackdown"

I agree entirely with the thrust of the changes to police biking described in Bernard Weil's article in the Toronto Star.

Moves to keep bicycles off sidewalks have been in the works for months, but they are too late for a Toronto pedestrian who died this week after being hit by a cyclist.

Nobu Okamoto, 74, was struck by a 33-year-old cyclist on Finch Ave. W. near Sentinel Rd. on Aug. 4. The cyclist remained at the scene and was fined, police said. The fine for cycling on the sidewalk in North York is $3.75.

Had the accident occurred downtown, the ticket would have been $90 as bylaws still differ across the city more than 10 years after amalgamation.

“It’s an anomaly that’s been allowed to fester . . . it doesn’t make sense,” said Brian Patterson, president of the Ontario Safety League. “We have to have a working set of regulations that are consistent and fair.”

Patterson said cycling on the sidewalk has become “a huge issue” in cities across the province within the last five years. But the laws governing it are inconsistent and moves to update them have been slow.

“There isn’t enough teeth in the law,” said Sgt. Angelo Costa, the traffic sergeant in 31 Division where the incident occurred. “All I can do is stop a cyclist, he has to identify himself to me and I can give him a ticket. There isn’t anything else . . . that’s going to change his behaviour.”

If bikes are ever to be integrated into Toronto's transit strategies, they and their drivers have to be integrated into the legal surround for transit. This, naturally, includes civil and criminal sanctions for bad driving, and the enforcement of laws against said.

Cyclists cannot be charged with dangerous driving under the Criminal Code — that offence only covers motorized vehicles.

It's a matter of equity. Is the large non-biking majority of the Torontonian electorate going to support the enfranchisement of bikes if they and their drivers get to do whatever they want?

But no, the short-sighted Toronto Cyclists Union is opposed to it.

“We really ought to consider whether the (Highway Traffic Act) is stringent enough on penalties for carelessness, and that goes for cyclists and drivers,” said Toronto Cyclists Union advocacy director Andrea Garcia.

She said she supports increasing fines for sidewalk cycling, but only if they are accompanied by measures to make roads safer for cyclists, such as more bike lanes.

“A lot of cyclists will tell you that they feel extremely unsafe on the road and therefore they choose to bike on the sidewalk,” she said. “That ends up creating a second set of problems.”

If you can't bike safely, don't bike at pedestrians' expense with the excuse that you shouldn't have to compromise your behaviour. If you can't find an alternative route, don't bike. (Or bike, and be a prick.)

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On Canadian Irish and an Ontario Gaeltacht

A Globe and Mail article by Susan Krashinsky, "A tongue-twisting labour of love in Canada's Gaelic-speaking community" touched upon one of Canada's Celtic-language communities.

A point of nomenclature, first. The word "Gaelic" is non-specific in general use, potentially referring to both Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic. Of the two, the Scottish is the most common; Wikipedia's article "Canadian Gaelic" refers to Scots Gaelic, a language that--thanks to immigration--was so concentrated that it was arguably Canada's third-spoken tongue with quarter-million people across Canada with sizable enclaves across Canada, including in a Gaelic-majority Cape Breton Island. Irish, concentrated in Newfoundland, has had a much lower profile,for reasons I can only speculate on. (A concentration in Anglophone urban areas as opposed to more self-sufficient rural areas, maybe?) Canada's Scots Gaelic is just dying out; Canada's Irish variants seem to have diappeared a century ago.

But now, some language activists are trying to change this by creating an actual Irish-speaking territory, the "Permanent North American Gaeltacht"

[A] small community is drawn here, to a small patch of land in a tiny Ontario town where Gaelic acts as a lifeline to their history, their culture and to the Emerald Isle itself. This is the Canadian Gaeltacht (gail-tuck), a word that signifies the little pockets of Ireland where Irish is still spoken. These 62 acres contain the first Gaeltacht outside of Ireland, where they’re fighting to keep the language alive. Kian, who as a baby spoke some of his first words in Irish, represents their best hope.

“He’s our native speaker,” says Kian’s mother, Melinda, who drove here with her family from Rossie, NY, for the third year in a row. Ms. Ely’s husband, Bob – the Irish one in the clan – has been speaking nothing but Gaelic to Kian since he was born, while she speaks only English.

“People like to connect with their roots. There’s a sense of pride in that identity,” says Sheila Scott, one of the founders of the Canadian Gaeltacht and assistant director of the Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute at the University of Ottawa.

In 2006, Ms. Scott and her husband, Aralt Mac Giolla Chainnigh, pooled their money with that of other contributors from Canada, Ireland and the United States, and bought the land in Tamworth, an area about 30 km north of Napanee, settled originally by Irish immigrants fleeing famine.

Nobody lives here permanently, but the Gaeltacht has language weekends, an arts festival, and each year a sort of Irish-language summer camp for adults – one week in August when participants gather for language classes, Irish dancing, music and games of Gaelic football. Because the land does not yet have any buildings, most people pitch tents.

“I grew up without running water. This is no big deal,” 76-year-old Bridget Guglich says, pointing to the tent she has been sleeping in all week. She is from County Mayo, but in half a century in Canada, she lost the Irish tongue. She has been studying for eight years, and coming to the Gaeltacht every year since it opened.

It might be easy to laugh off the quirky group that converges on an empty field to camp out and learn a language many people would consider to be in its death throes. There has been a vibrant movement to protect Gaelic in Ireland since the late 19th century. Today, Gaelic is taught in schools, and families often send their children to a Gaeltacht during the summer.

“People are looking more and more to the language as something very central to the Irish identity,” Mr. Mac Giolla Chainnigh says. “…When people are here in Canada, they can’t go to Ireland any time. They can’t just go to the Gaeltacht. We have something here now. ... That’s very special.”

This holiday camp won't bring Irish back as living language, in the sense of being a language of education and government and public life as it is in Ireland, and likely not even as a family language. This holiday camp is creating a space where knowledge and use of the Irish language is esteemed where none existed before, it does seem to be succeeding in its limited goals. It'll be interesting to see how the community develops in the years and decades ahead, I think. Why not a holiday language?