And the winner is ...

Message to Sam: please don't interpret this as a resounding affirmation of your leadership. Make this your last term in office, and use it wisely. Finish phase one of BRT. Please. No more studies and flip flopping. (Ooooo .... Maglev!). Stabilize our finances. Focus on core operations instead of glamorous projects. You don't need the photo ops anymore. Forget about the waterpark. If it's going to happen, it will happen. Take your $7m carrot and plant it into the community club garden (if that makes any sense.)

Oh lord ... Eye or the Tiger? Really? Maybe if you walked in to Norah Jones you wouldn't be out of breath.

Message to Judy: Sorry. You have not changed anything at city hall. This whole thing has been a waste of time, but the good news is you get to spend your pension.

To the people who voted to Harvey Smith: Come here. A little closer. A little closer. A little closer. *SLAP*

About the voting process: I actually had to stand in line. What the hell, am I in Afghanistan or something? I guess I shouldn't complain about a 2 minute wait. Pretty groovy new voting tabulators though -- like little portable garbage bins. One little niggle: when you mark your vote with the marker, it leaches through to the other side, so if anyone is paying attention when the sheet is fed into the garbage muncher you can see how someone voted (somewhat) by how the black marks line up.

Message to follow bloggers Brian, Curtis and Colin: Well done, all of you. It's funny ... it wasn't that long ago that Frogger's dalliance with CJOB resulted in a 100+ comment debate about a blogger selling out to the Main Stream Media or some damn thing like that.

Oh my God, Sam. Don't Stop Believing? Really?

Why I'm voting for Brad Gross

I have made up my mind. I am going to vote for underdog Brass Gross (that's "graas", as in "loss") in the Winnipeg mayoral election. Why? Glad you asked. I will tell you why, and will accompany my explanation with quickie doodles of each candidate:

Sam Katz
Sam has not earned my vote as mayor. His complete butchery of the rapid transit project alone might be enough to drive a voter like me away, but that's just where it starts. He didn't keep his word on Upper Fort Garry, the bus service to my neighbourhood has been cut in half under his watch, and our infrastructure deficit keeps climbing. His whole management system involves knee-jerk decision making without due process or diligence, meanwhile the city continues it's unsustainable sprawl into the surrounding farmland.

Don't get me started on the ugly sport coats...

Judy Wasy-whatever

Judy has three things going for her: 1) she's not Sam. 2) she actually took a position on property taxes. 3) she has a comprehensible position on rapid transit .. at least phase 1. However, at the same time she committed to by-passing the competitive bid process in favor of going straight to local co. New Flyer. In other news: the cost of New Flyer BRT buses just doubled.

That's the thing about Judy. She is going to spend money faster than my wife on a shopping trip in New York. The entire tax hike has been committed to infrastructure and policing according to her web site, which means that all of her other hare-brained ideas will have to get money from somewhere else. Where do these ideas come from anyhow? Who determined that there was demand for garden markets all over the city? How exactly are you going to create those and what happens if they're not successful? You could ask a dozen questions about every one of her ideas, but the only clear answer is that they'll all cost money. Remember: this is somebody who came straight out of the Provincial NDP: the party that overspent it's budget every single year and gutted our balanced budget legislation. I fear the day that a Judy administration has to negotiate a contract with a City workers' union:

Union Boss: we demand a 7% raise over two years.

Judy: 10%

Union Boss: Errrrr. Okay.

Judy: hey, this negotiating stuff isn't so hard!

Those are some of the reasons why I cannot vote for Judy. Or maybe it's because she's a woman, (not withstanding the fact that I voted for a woman in the last Federal election.)

Rav Gill

I am tempted to vote for Rav, simply because if I do not I am afraid he might turn me into a bat. However, I can't vote for Rav either. The campaign information on his website is so sparse that I have no idea what's he's planning on doing. For a fringe candidate who routinely gets neglected by the media, you would figure that he would have all kinds of detail out there for people to research on their own, but I guess not. It doesn't even list his promise of creating a gay village. Maybe that's because he realizes that it's a idiotic promise. I am sure that some other cities have gay villages, but were they created by politicians? Really? How do you do that anyhow? Give exclusive property tax breaks to homosexuals?

That leaves...

Brad Gross

Brad has a terrible website. The platform

on his main page looks like it was typed out over a coffee break with no prior thought whatsoever. Worse, the pages specific to each area of his platform like traffic, crime, and so forth, have no content whatsoever. He is obviously just doing this to increase his profile to benefit his real job as a realtor.

So why vote for him? Because in a campaign almost completely absent of vision and big ideas, Brad pushes the boundaries:

• solar powered street lights!
• move industrial areas away from the middle of the city!
• community centres run by university students!
• expel criminals! Ya, there we go! Not quite sure how you're going to do that, and I'm pretty sure it's a charter violation, but Ya!

Sure, most of the ideas miss the mark completely or are impossible to implement, but I like the idea of reducing the number of traffic lights and getting education taxes off the property tax bill. But that's not the point. The point is that if people vote for this guy with the crazy ideas, that might send a message to whoever wins that what we need at city hall is not rhetoric and fear mongering and waffling, but vision and bold thinking.

If I vote for Sam, then I'm rewarding incompetence. If I vote for Judy and she gets in, then I'll feel like I had a hand in the damaging policies and reckless spending that are sure to follow. Brad however is not going to win, so if I vote for him then I can rest easy knowing that I didn't contribute to the destruction of our city.

*all images © Me, whoever the hell I am.

Limited Ambulances

The Paramedics of Winnipeg union is taking advantage of the current civic election to push for more ambulances, with a snappy website and PR campaign. You can't fault them for that: more paramedics means more union dues and less work for each medic. It's in their interest to increase their base. Is it in our interest, knowing that the money for each additional ambulance has to come from somewhere else?

I was going home last Monday and

saw a firetruck rushing off to an emergency at a school on Archibald. There was an ambulance in the parking lot that had beaten them there,

and the fire fighters were casually strolling towards the entrance, chatting about something, knowing that they were not actually needed inside. Further down the same road on the same day, there was both an ambulance and a fire truck at an apartment building that was not on fire.

A couple weeks ago, the lady sitting behind me on the bus had a seizure. We called 911 and waited for help. The firetruck showed up first, and the ambulance later. There was another instance where I was playing ball and no fewer than 3 emergency vehicles showed up after a girl got stung by a bee. It wasn't even a killer bee. Just a regular one.

The point is that there is a lot of duplication and unnecessary effort in our emergency response system. This wastefulness doesn't sit well with me. Virtually every medical emergency, regardless of how small, requires two different teams to respond, because the fire truck might get there first, but only an ambulance can actually take somebody to a hospital. This is costly: Edmonton has 40 ambulances and spends $50m per year on that service. Winnipeg, with 60% the population of Edmonton, has only 18 ambulances but spends $44m on paramedic services -- almost the same amount (according to this editorial).

Our combined fire/paramedic system may produce quick response times, but it is a failure in terms of cost-effectiveness in my humble opinion. I agree with the paramedics union: we need more ambulances, but at the same time we need to end the experiment of combined fire/paramedic service and potentially make corresponding cutbacks to the fire service. We also need to work with the health authorities on reducing the time that paramedics spend parked at a hospital twiddling their thumbs as they wait to transfer ownership of the sick guy.

If we can make that procedural improvement, and bump up the number of ambulances a little bit, then we can have good response times while also saving money by cutting the fire fighters loose to focus on dumpster fires and other things that they are best equipped to handle.

***

Keeping on theme: here's a video from laid-back tunesters Ambulance Ltd. This one has a bit of a Lou Reed vibe to it. Ciao:


..

About roundabouts

I am pre-empting a different blog post to clarify something about traffic circles, in light of the accident earlier today that everybody is freaking out about. As of this moment there are 203 comments on the Free Press article about this traffic accident, so clearly there is a lot of misunderstanding and confusion.

I have only read a handful of the comments, but what many people are saying is that 'Winnipeg drivers' are too stupid to figure out traffic circles or that people need to be educated on how to use them. Even the Director of Public Works was on TV saying that "it's going to take a while for people to get used to them."

Wrong wrong everybody is wrong. The problem is not that traffic circles are too hard to figure out. The problem is that they're poorly designed. A properly designed traffic circle is a snap to use. I know because I drive through one all the time. The roundabout at Beaverhill and Lakewood in Southdale is well designed: as you approach it, the road is divided such that you are turned to the right and away from the approaching traffic. As you enter the intersection, it is clear well in advance if another vehicle is turning off or going around because of the design of the intersection and because the circle is large enough.

Consequently, it is safe and easy to use. There is no need to "get used to it." You just drive into it and yield to on-coming traffic. That's all there is to it. Everybody knows what a yield sign means, so no education is necessary. It is almost impossible to fuck up, unless you do something exceptionally stupid.

On the other hand, the traffic circles in River Heights like the one where the accident was today are different because they do not have any of the design elements of a good roundabout. There is no lane divider to separate the traffic exiting the intersection from the traffic entering the intersection, and the circle is so small that there is no time to read what other traffic is intending to do. Little surprise that the lady in the small white car was frozen at her yield sign as I approached the intersection this evening.

So yes, perhaps people need to get used to these roundabouts, but only because they're crappy roundabouts to begin with. The thing is that traffic circles in general are an excellent traffic control device, which is why they are used everywhere else in the world. To quote jpenns in the Free Press comments section:

The awful thing is that people will use this as proof that traffic circles are dangerous, disregarding the worldwide acceptance that they are safer, better on gas, better on cars, and quicker to get through than four way stops.

now ... back to my regular programming ...

*edit* related posts: graham 1 and 2; policy frog, dobbin,

City hall parties, bananas, and nuts.

If you read or watch the news and blogs -- and I think it's a safe assumption that you do if you've made it all the way to this little piece of internet real estate -- it's hard to escape the farcical goings-on in our civic election here in Winnipeg. If I try to link to all relevant posts and articles I will run out of links and have to buy more from Blogger, but a few recent examples could be found at Slurpees and Murder and Dan Lett's newest column.

I don't know about you, but everyone I talk to doesn't know who the hell to vote for because every candidate sucks rocks. Who-o-why can't we get somebody capable in office? Well, it may comfort you to know that inept mayors aren't confined to Winnipeg. Brian Kelcey has been doing a good job of covering races in other cities, unfortunately he has made me even more depressed by unhelpfully also pointing out competent candidates in other cities, like Jim Watson in Ottawa. That is why I was relieved to open the Maclean's web site and find this article: Canada's lousy mayors.

The author Nancy MacDonald talks about the “complete disaster” Larry O’Brien in Ottawa, “Dr. No.” Ric McIver in Calgary, as well as candidates in Mississauga, London, and Toronto. Winnipeg doesn't even make the list! Maybe we're doing okay after all!

... or maybe not. Nancy goes out of her way to find the loonies while avoiding any mention of the reasonable candidates. Plus I am quite sure that the only reason Winnipeg didn't make the list is because we're ... Winnipeg. The screwed up little town somewhere in the prairies that used to have a hockey team.

There is one interesting point that Nancy brings up however, and that is party politics at the civic level:

With a party system, mayors can whip their caucus into line, weakening narrow turf wars. Without it, that “how-does-this-affect-my-ward?” mindset, says Winnipeg councillor Jenny Gerbasi, can make it next to impossible to get mega-projects off the ground. “Council,” she says, “can lose sight of the bigger picture.”

Oh hey, look at that. She does mention a looney Winnipeg candidate. How did I miss that the first time? Anyhow ... it goes on:

Parties encourage accountability. If voters don’t think they’re going in the right direction, they can throw the bums out—as Vancouver voters did in 2008, returning an almost entirely fresh slate
...
cities have grown “way too big,” and the issues “far too significant,” to be left to the vagaries of individual candidates running on their own reputation and name recognition.

I have no idea if City Hall would function better with a party system, but it's hard to imagine it functioning any worse. Something to mull over.

*****

Separated at birth?


If Dr.Ruth were running I might actually vote for her. Maybe she could get the juices of revitalization flowing downtown, lubricate our licensing and bureaucratic processes, and of course: get hard on crime.

credits: I stole the Judy pic from James, and I got the ruth pic from here.

*****

This just in:
The Big Banana has a name

The Town of Melita made an error of judgment, in my view, when they chose the names for their giant banana statue and it's little bird side kick, selecting "Sunny" and "Breezy" instead of my far superior suggestions "Dildo" and "Peckerhead". Obviously Melita has it's own shortcomings in the council office.

Blog Action Day 2010: Water

As a blogger, I sometimes put in a half-assed effort to participate in Blog Action Day. This year I resolve to do even less.

I thought about it for a bit. Water. The theme to this year's Blog Action Day and the key to all life on earth. The stuff that I splash on my face after I exfoliate and before I moisturize. (Maybe should have kept that to myself.) What do I have to say about water?

Well for one thing, I grew up around water. A lake was right down the street from my house. I could see it from my front yard. Even if you don't live next to a lake, if you live in the same province that I do then you're never far from a fresh-water lake. We also have water in our wells, in our rivers, in our ditches, pouring over our hydro dams; and too often it's in our basements and flooding our fields. Lately, if we've had any problem it all, it's too much water. Some of it may be dirty, or loaded with phosphorus and algae, but nevertheless we have minimal water problems compared with most other parts of the world.

What do I know about these other parts of the world? I have cleverly managed to avoid dust-caked third world nations in my limited travels around the world, so I have no special insight. I do recall from when I was in Spain that there was a problem with scarce water being diverted from irrigation for farms to posh golf courses and retirement resorts for wealthy Brits. Spain is drying up, as are parts of the U.S. and many other places. Everybody knows this though.

My dilemma about what to write was solved when I came to the realization that "Blog Action" is an oxymoron. There are few things that are less "active" than sitting in front of a computer blogging. The idea I suppose is that people read blogs, and maybe ... maybe ... somebody reading a "Blog Action" post will actually take action of some kind. But I think more than anything else, it's a feel good thing: be a part of a community or movement and experience a sense of camaraderie and purpose that you don't normally achieve by typing on a laptop in a basement while wearing a bath robe.

Perhaps if I had some unique experience to talk about ... but I don't. I installed a rain water collection barrel this year, but sadly I never made use of it. I installed a low-flow toilet in my house, so I guess that's something. I don't water my lawn, but mostly because I don't really care what my lawn looks like. If it can't survive on it's own, then screw it.

I will certainly read other people's posts and see what they have to say. I may learn something or get a new perspective on something. That's fine. But I won't feel bad about my own pitiful contribution. If the topic were "Beer that tastes like water" then okay -- I would have lots to say -- but that's not the case.

for different, probably more enlightened, views from local bloggers: DriveGoddess, SMW, OneManCommittee,

City Hall: Buy this land

I don't normally pay attention to these things, but I happened to notice that Manitoba Hydro is selling surplus property on the north east corner of Kenaston Blvd and Sterling Lyon Pkwy. I suggest to the City that they consider buying this land, because eventually we will have a leader who recognizes that massive traffic congestion on a major thoroughfare is BAD and that accidents involving SUVs with IKEA furniture strapped to the roof is also BAD.

Inevitably that visionary leader, whoever he or she may be, will realize that this thing needs to be fixed, and will decide to do what should have been done in the first place, which will be something like what I suggested should have been done, which was to build a north-south flyover on Kenaston with on and off ramps, and have a controlled intersection with stop lights east of the overpass on Sterling Lyon, as shown here, thus allowing the majority of the traffic on Kenaston to flow uninterrupted past this gong show of Starbucks-fueled suburbanite shoppers.

If you're unwilling to do it properly the first time, then at least buy this land, sell off the bits you don't need, and keep the rest so that a future leader will be in a position to fix your mistakes.

*edit*

just to liven things up a bit, here's a photo I snapped today when I stopped for ice creme in Trehern. What a beautiful day!