A Toronto Star article about the TTC potentially axing the free parking benefit for Metropass holders caught my attention this morning. While the Star's online comment system doesn't encourage nuanced viewpoints (more on that later), the general outrage is understandable. This isn't a good idea, and it wouldn't be a good choice. Unfortunately the Star fails to point out the real reason why: lack of vision and support.
Note the info box at the side of the page:
BALANCE SHEET
Impact of ending free parking at TTC lots for Metropass holders:
Parking revenues (after increase): $5.5M to $7.5M
Reduced fare revenues as a result: $2.5M to $3.5M
Increased operating costs: $100,000
Net: $2.9M to $3.9M
Source: TTC staff report
What has happened here?
One, the environmental cost is wrongly excluded from the balance sheet. I acknowledge that the TTC has no mandate to consider the environmental impact of their decisions, and no authority to spend money to reduce such. Without free parking, a Metropass holder from the 905 might elect to drive into the downtown core instead of parking at Kipling, Downsview, Finch or Kennedy and taking the subway. Under a reasonable scheme for taxing pollution, the extra cost of gas or toll roads would outweigh the ~$6 for TTC parking. Mass transit would remain the more attractive option. Absent this incentive, observe that the TTC expects to lose up to $3.5M annually (almost 3000 full-year Metropass subscriptions) from the change; i.e. it is a net disincentive to ridership.
Second, I refer to the Hong Kong model again:
MTR Corporation has always been reliant on developing properties next to railway stations for its profits (although the rail lines are profitable themselves); many recently built stations are incorporated into large housing estates or shopping complexes.
Far from reliance, the TTC does no property development whatsoever; even hints at repurposing its lands involve their sale to developers who would retain any revenue. Consider the three Tridel Nuvo/Essex condominiums on the north side of St. Albans Road at Kipling Station. These >25-story buildings are nearly sold out; 1 bedroom + den units are already being resold for over $230,000. A fourth building is planned, and you can be certain this is not because Tridel is losing money on the first three.
An identical building, owned by the TTC, could fit in the South Lot at Kipling. A fraction of the revenue from rent or residents' fees could fund the simultaneous building of a 3+-layer parking garage (above or below grade) on the North Lot; with a net increase in parking spaces. Further, a majority of the residents/tenants would certainly be Metropass holders who would not use parking spaces — because they could walk directly into the station — so free parking could be maintained for Etobicoke and Mississauga commuters.
However this sort of win-win-win-win-etc. proposition is only feasible if someone will fund the capital cost of the new building on the South Lot. The province of Ontario provides little money for this sort of project, and the federal government offers none. This is what I consider when voting in provincial and federal elections: who is likely to make this sort of positive change possible?
There is general agreement that a world food crisis is occurring. Biofuel (especially ethanol made from corn) has borne a large part of the blame. I'm not convinced that it overshadows other factors — speculation, water scarcity and the effect of the price of oil — but it certainly allows for the most vivid imagery.
Once again I am reminded of a passage from Dune. The titular planet is mostly desert, dry to the point where water is currency and windtraps are constructed to harvest airborne moisture. Two characters talk about trees planted brazenly outside the mansion of the ruling Duke:
The way the passing people looked at the palm trees! She saw envy, some hate... even a sense of hope. Each person raked those trees with a fixity of expression.
...
"Those minds," he said. "They look at those trees and they think: 'There are one hundred of us.' That's what they think."
She turned a puzzled frown on him. "Why?"
"Those are date palms," he said. "One date palm requires forty litres of water a day. A man requires but eight litres. A palm, then, equals five men. There are twenty palms out there—one hundred men."
And in a CBC article today, a statistic from the Sierra Club which I hadn't previously heard:
...it takes five hectares of cornfields to produce enough ethanol to run a car for a year. The same land could feed seven people for a year.
Reality being naturally less dramatic, the hungry people are on other continents, and we are spared being "raked with a fixity of expression" as we climb in our sedans and SUVs for the morning commute. If we experienced those glares directly, I don't doubt our behaviour would change much faster.
Carrying on from the previous post...
Though we can't simply dismiss Carl Sagan's universe-architects in Contact by saying 'a π is a π is a π,' it's still true that the task of creating a universe is inconceivable, given that we hardly understand what our universe is and how it came into being. Another inconceivable endeavour is the building of a Dyson sphere—a structure completely enclosing a star so as to capture all its radiation on the inner surface.
But of course as soon as 'inconceivable' is aired, someone's going to bring up that Princess Bride quote: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Is it possible to build a Dyson sphere? Less than a hundred years ago, it would have been inconceivable to build the International Space Station (ISS). Go back another few centuries and the Three Gorges Dam would be inconceivable. Prehistoric man would doubtlessly have regarded the Great Wall of China as a feature of the landscape, unable to believe it had been shaped by human hands.
Superficially this is an issue of technology, but another aspect is intriguing: the non-technical resources required for these 'inconceivable' projects. This dovetails neatly with one theme of a Leadership course I'm taking this term; that engineers increasingly require leadership qualities and become useless without them as the world shrinks.
Major engineering efforts are also major leadership challenges. Examining the ISS or Three Gorges, the sheer number of people involved both directly and in support (mining and refining raw materials, fabricating parts, feeding and clothing the workers, etc.) is as stunning as the products. Many large projects rely on existing structures to get their immense workforces moving in the same direction, but this isn't always possible.
Take for example the new Airbus A380, an aircraft so huge one might say it's inconceivable that it could ever leave the ground. It's been hampered by years of delays, not because it is technically infeasible, but simply because there was no existing human structure necessary to engineer a redundant and multiply-failsafe electrical system containing over 500 km of wire. Creating such a thing for the first time was bound to be problematic. The ISS has been threatened by the variable political will behind some of its member agencies. These are not issues of technology, but of its application.
Returning to Dyson spheres, consider the scale of such an enterprise. It's probable that there are not enough people (or engineers) now living to complete such a project in a millenium, even if the technology were available. Assuming (very generously) that humanity continues to grow without eliminating itself, and manages to free itself from the Earth before the heat death of the Sun, we can hypothesize that the necessary technology would, in time, become available. Complete stagnation in the sciences would probably coincide with the failure of the species.
Then wondrously consider: what sort of human structures would be required to build Dyson's sphere? How would billions of people be motivated to work on a project that might span even an extended human lifetime? To speculate on such questions is the purview of some very interesting fiction, including Frank Herbert's Dune series that I return to again and again. Religion seems to be a likely candidate structure, and that's where I ended my train of thought: it is inconceivable that 'engineering' could entail fashioning entire religions simply to ensure a project is completed.
...Isn't it?
I was trolling (in the conventional sense) through Wikipedia today, reading about the Oort cloud, cosmology, and various superstructures and -voids in the Universe.
I also read about the shape of the Universe. For anyone without a math or science background, this is should be as baffling as I found it to be at first. More easily grasped is Gauss' Theorema Egregrium, which has to to do with curved surfaces, for example the surface of the Earth. The Theorema describes a characteristic of flat maps that anyone can observe: when displaying geographical features, flat maps distort shapes, distances, or both. If you've ever noticed that Greenland appears larger than Canada on some maps, you can appreciate what this means.
More precisely, Gauss's results mean that the curvature of the Earth (or any other surface) can be determined by measuring some angles and distances on the surface, and that this determination is unique in some sense. If you draw a triangle on a curved surface, you can see that its angles do not add up to 180°. Now, the crucial point is this: the same principle applies to space. Space has a curvature which determines the relation of distances and angles within it.
I find it's best to just accept that without trying too hard to picture it.
Anyway, the 'Shape of the Universe' article discusses the ramifications of the space curvature of the Universe. If a parameter Ω is not exactly 1, then space is curved and some interesting things happen: the Pythagorean theorem (a2+b2=c2) becomes false, and the value of π varies.
This brought to mind the galactic architects of Carl Sagan's Contact and the concept of a message from God in π. Interestingly enough, that article states:
Any intelligence, working in any universe—no matter what the characteristics of its particular "space-time fabric"—must deduce the same value of π, presuming they are able to think of numbers at all, and that logic is not a property of the Cosmos.
If we're very particular, we can argue that this statement is false without the qualifier, "when Ω=1."
I seem to be pushing my usual word count, so I'll continue my thoughts in another post.
