Obscure knowledge was once a kind of currency. To get it, you had to be in the loop. You had to know the right people to learn about the right bands. You had to know the right record stores to hear those bands.

via Why the Old-School Music Snob Is the Least Cool Kid on Twitter – NYTimes.com.

This article took me back to my 15 year old self. I grew up in pre-cable, pre-”liberalized” India where access to “Western” popular music was very limited, and class and income segregated. The top 40 stuff of the time was available as cassette tapes. Finding albums was almost impossible, most of the time, you got “Now this is what I call music” type compilations. The music popular and available as LPs was a mix of big names like The Beatles, ABBA,  and an eclectic mix of  Boney M, Osibisa, The Ventures, Uriah Heep? (don’t even ask). The popularity of these more off-the-wall choices was probably linked to their willingness to tour India and bring their records.

My mom was a huge Beatles and Cliff Richard fan growing up, catching it on Indian and Sri Lankan radio in the early to mid 1960s. As I cast my mind back to my parents’ collection, I see a bunch of Beatles LPs (The Red, Blue and Rock’n'Roll Double LP compilations), some ABBA, Boney M, Uriah Heep, The Ventures I didn’t have money to buy my own, and we didn’t really have too much money to spend on records anyway.

Which brings me to 15, my music tastes have stagnated, I’m occasionally listening to random mixes of music, done with ABBA, still liking the Beatles (I still like the Beatles!), but need more. Where can I find music that will move me? Well, there’s no internet, and no radio/TV playing anything other than Top 40 stuff (very rarely) or the Beatles. I don’t have rich relatives in the US to send me music either. In hindsight, I guess I could have tried short wave radio (which we definitely used a lot for sports), but how do you know what’s cool?

I was “rescued” by a friend, with whom I listened to a very scratchy recording one day. This friend was lucky enough to have an older brother who had access to music. The first minute of Black Dog changed my life! I “discovered” Led Zeppelin in 1988(9), and all the usual suspects soon after. I can’t even begin to express how I felt the first time I heard Bohemian Rhapsody. I know, right, what a lot of my friends from when I was older and living in the US and Canada  think of as the most clichéd over-exposed, un-cool songs set the cool kids of Madras apart from the rest.

Finding full albums of music of decent audio quality was another matter. We soon heard through word of mouth (probably the brother) of this magical small store in Anna Nagar, on the other side of the city. So, we took the bus out one day. Anna Nagar was a gridded sub-division, which for some reason confused people like me who lived in older parts of the city. We had an address, which led us to a house on a mundanely residential street, with a small sign board for the “shop”, only open evenings. We walk in, and, magic, it was many rows of LPs stacked and arranged alphabetically by band. You told the guy at the store what albums you wanted, gave him blank cassettes and money, and a week later (a long week later), you went back and picked up your magical tape. A 90 minute cassette could fit two albums, of course, so I always associate Led Zeppelin II with The Best of Cream (back to back).

Wow, clear LP transfers of music, I still remember all those little discoveries like the bass pedal response of Mitch Mitchell to Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze riff, and scratching “Excuse me, while I kiss the sky” on every desk I sat in for a couple of years.

I was also part of a crack school quiz team at a time when these quizzes were basically wank fests for people like us. We got quiz “masters” asking us obscure music trivia and playing songs from the 60s and 70s for us to identify and win the quiz shows. Looking back, our smug superiority was probably unwarranted This period was the peak of musical snobbery, limited access meet obscure knowledge! I hoarded, I judged, I laughed at people who listened to the wrong music, not a very nice 19 year old at all. We had no internet, but I had “discovered” that libraries were a great source of music books and my obscure minutiae quotient was off the charts. That strange intersection of my “discovery” of music and its scarcity was a magical and intense place.

Things changed. MTV hit India in 1993, and grunge showed up in Madras at about the same time it took  over the US. I could also hit up my US based sister for music, band shirts, merch. Stores started bringing tapes in (and CDs, though those were some shiny unaffordable jewels). But there was still that class-based division, and access was limited, though every year made the music more accessible.

Moving to North Carolina hipster heaven brought the rather unwelcome news that classic rock (oh, so my music has a genre?) was associated with middle aged white folk, and as uncool as it got. Oh well, it didn’t stop me from listening, but parties became a bit less fun. My music tastes expanded into the roots of all that rock, into blues, jazz, and funk.

As I understood the politics of appropriation and where all that music really came from, my attitudes changed, and I listen less. But those riffs still have a direct connection to a very emotional part of my brain. I will always be that uncool kid who knows every Jimmy Page solo in my head even as I cringe at the misogyny and racism of the lyrics and laugh at the bombast and obvious masculine posturing.

I am very glad that the internet has mostly erased the boundaries. The ability to listen to a song just by searching for it is life-changing. Yes, people will still judge, but it is harder and harder to hoard, and use scarcity as a filter. I love it. My relationship with the music has not changed. When I hear something I like, it is still such an intense emotional experience, especially when it links back to memories, the people I first heard it with, the things I did when the music was playing in the background, it’s lovely.

To end, another quote from the article…

Populism is the new model of cool; elitists, rather than teeny-boppers or bandwagon-jumpers, are the new squares. There are now artists who sell out concerts while rarely getting played on commercial radio

The Abstract

We study a prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both the number of laws passed and the average social welfare obtained. We also analytically find an ”efficiency golden rule” which allows to fix the optimal number of legislators to be selected at random after that regular elections have established the relative proportion of the two Parties or Coalitions. These results are in line with both the ancient Greek democratic system and the recent discovery that the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations.

Need to move those people from the bottom left to the top right

Good policy is supposed to maximize social gain. It is difficult for legislators to make good policy in the absence of personal gain, so everyone needs to be in the upper-right quadrant of the figure. The simulation works by denying any party a majority unless they can appeal to a number of independent, random actors. Since these legislators can’t be re-elected and have little to gain personally, they will make decisions based more on social gain than personal gain, and move things upward and right. The simulation also found that having no parties and complete independence conferred little advantage. The optimum was a little more than half of the legislature to be “independent” and “random”.

This is only a simulation. In practice, few people are independent and promises of future positions and future prestige will presumably influence independents to vote to preserve privilege rather than maximize “social good”. But the current system of a very small minority (1-2% of Canadians belong to a party) of people of a very specific kind passing policy based on diktats from the prime minister is not a good system anyway.

So, a senate that is part “elected” and part random would presumably provide the best outcome. A completely lottery senate would be a great, great improvement to the Canadian senate as it exists today. I am glad there’s some research to back my pet proposal.

via Washington Post – Study Says Pick some Legislators Randomly

My Mail

No particular reason to do this, I was just curious, and this article about the US postal service starting to solicit more direct mail (what most people regard as junk) customers just triggered me to post the results online. My perception is that the signal/noise ratio on my mail is very low, let’s see… The underlying data is in a simple google spreadsheet and the image is linked dynamically, so should always be current.

Update: I don’t have a red dot on my mailbox, no particular reason, just supporting my economy and increasing the GDP, perhaps? More seriously, I would like a green dot campaign, where unsolicited mail is not welcome unless I place a green dot on my mail box for all unsolicited mail, and an amber dot for not-for profit, advocacy, political and generally non-commercial mail.

Featured image is of a letter box from Nepal, from flickr user manc72 used under a creative commons licence.

Enloe had some interesting things to say about how wars never end in people’s minds, how “post-war” is a gross simplification, and that this memory is sometimes a problem. Enloe talked extensively about what happens when women push past their assigned war gender roles and start to organise and advocate. Cindy Sheehan came up frequently. Widowhood, a powerful war symbol which is supposed to be suffered in silence, can be a powerful unifying influence for collective organizing. Enloe talked about how ‘war widows’ in Iraq had organised to try and make conditions better for them after huge income and job losses in addition to partner loss (link is her book about it). Enloe talked quite a bit about how army systems actively discourage this kind of organising and public advocacy by the women of war, even using the spouses of army superiors and the army’s natural hierarchy to keep women in place. Enloe also, in the middle of telling the audience how army “spouses” are now discouraged from writing break-up letters to their active army mates, broke into an impromptu rendition of Dear John, gotta love that!

I had an issue that was half forming in my head during questions, so I did not ask it, and chatting with my lecture-mate on our walk back clarified my thoughts a little better. It is clear that war’s effects on people vary widely by nation, gender and class (three big ones, I’m sure there are many). So, it would have been interesting to hear a bit more about why gender identity and class identity rarely cross national boundaries to affect the conduct of wars, let alone end them quickly. Yes, people routinely bring up the suffering of fellow identity groups, whether they be women, or poor, or professor, or journalist, but gender is a really big deal as far as raw numbers go. Wars could not be waged successfully without the participation of many parts of a population that may have more in common with their identity groups across the “border” than with their fellow citizens. It is really important to think about the primacy of nationalism, and nation-state identity in actively subsuming other identities in a war’s cause. This is part, and design of the patriarchy of a war-based nation state. Few words are more incendiary than “traitor”. Of course, I am sure whole books have been written about this (side effect of knowing no theory, the tendency to assume that your thoughts are original and unique), that I might have to hunt down.

While Enloe exhorted the audience to think beyond borders at the beginning of her talk, describing the “Vietnam” war as the US-Vietnam war and how war casualties of the other war participants are rarely mentioned, she still could not shake her nationhood and American centricity off during the talk as successfully as she may have done in her books and theory. She had this interesting and useful device of writing some numbers on the board at the beginning of the talk and repeatedly referred to them through the talk. Most of these numbers were North American war casualties, which I found to be a bit limiting, considering her talk was delivering the opposite message on casualties. She exhorted us to refer to war titles by more location-neutral descriptors, like the US-Vietnam war instead of the Vietnam war, but she did not take the next step of habituating her audience to do that, repeatedly referring to the Iraq War (which one?), or the Gulf War (Which gulf, which war?). As she said, war titling is political, I would not be happy to go to a lecture and have to listen constantly to “the Indian mutiny” (or worse, the Sepoy Mutiny).

Prof. Enloe’s take away message on war was “Ask feminist questions, be realistic”. Yes I will, and not just for war.

Science Rides to the Aid of Oilsands??

Words fail me, oh Globe and Mail. Worst headline ever.

If the entire Alberta oil-sand resource (that is, oil-in-place) were to be used, the associated carbon dioxide emissions would induce a global mean temperature change of roughly 0.36 °C (0.24–0.50 °C)  However, considering only the economically viable reserve of 170 billion barrels reduces this potential for warming by about tenfold (to 0.02–0.05 °C), and if only the reserve currently under active development were combusted, the warming would be almost undetectable at our significance level.

The Canadian media has chosen to play up just the fact that on a global scale, the project will result in a small increase in global temperature, so the oilsands are okay to exploit.

Climate expert says coal not oilsands real threat – CBC

Other articles pretty much say the same thing,  Prof. Weaver’s quoted comments don’t help either:

“The conventional and unconventional oil is not the problem with global warming,”  ”The problem is coal and unconventional natural gas.” “One might argue that the best strategy one might take is to use our oil reserves wisely, but at the same time use them in a way that weans us of our dependence on coal and natural gas”

Weaver’s comments to the media posit this as an either-or, coal and natural gas = bad, oil = okay. Knowing him to be a very intelligent person, I suspect this is some selective quoting. Also, oil is primarily used to fuel transportation, coal and natural gas are used for electricity generation, so I am curious as to what Prof. Weaver is suggesting here as far as using oil reserves to wean us off coal use? Would the plan be to use all the money that we get from exploiting the tarsands to develop an electricity infrastructure that puts efficiency, reduced electricity use, 100% renewables first? I wish! I don’t see that happening. Alberta is currently powered mostly by coal, and if the Federal government is serious in its stated goal to phase new coal out (which is fantastic), then Alberta would switch to natural gas to fuel its tarsands exploitation, and that would not be okay either! Also, these infrastructures are all linked. A lot of BC’s natural gas and proposed big damaging dams like Site C are designed to fuel the tarsands. A province and by extension, country that makes most of its money by taking the resources it was provided for free, and selling them at great profit is not likely to want to transition away from that.

It was interesting that a few weeks back, Mark Jaccard, yet another prominent BC climate scientist (we are blessed) looked at the same issue and came to the following conclusion.

Canadian tarsands must contract as part of a global effort to prevent a 4 degree increase in temperatures and catastrophic climate change.

Vancouver Sun – January 26, 2012

So, is this Jaccard vs. Weaver?

Not really.

Is the Swart and Weaver message that simple? Are they actually saying that it is okay to exploit away because it makes no difference?

The media should start by reading the byline:

The claimed economic benefits of exploiting the vast Alberta oil-sand deposits need to be weighed against the need to limit global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions.

That’s how the paper starts. It then calculates global warming potentials based on reserves, current production, total “in place” (present, but not always exploitable) and shows that coal and natural gas are by far the greatest potential contributors. This is of course simply because we have much greater reserves of coal and natural gas, so their global warming potential is going to be huge. The paper makes no mention of rate of use, or whether it is humanly possible to use all that coal and natural gas, and what kind of population growth, and per-capita consumption that would entail.

Here’s a very important calculation from the paper that will be lost in the details. To limit temperature rise to 2 °C or less, the allowed, cumulative per person future carbon consumption is 85 tons of carbon. The per-capita carbon potential of the tarsands alone to US and Canada is 65 tons of carbon. So, by itself, the proven reserves (10% of what’s there) of the tarsands can eat up 75% of our allowed carbon budget, not so small, is it.

Here’s what Swart and Weaver have to say about trajectory:

The eventual construction of the Keystone XL pipeline would signify a North American commitment to using the Alberta oilsand reserve, which carries with it a corresponding carbon footprint

Here’s the last paragraph from the paper, another big trajectory argument.

If North American and international policymakers wish to limit global warming to less than 2 °C they will clearly need to put in place measures that ensure a rapid transition of global energy systems to non-greenhouse-gas-emitting sources, while avoiding commitments to new infrastructure supporting dependence on fossil fuels

Absolutely, 100% agreed, but this is not what the media message is at all, interesting.

So Swart and Weaver point out that we need to avoid commitments to new infrastructure promoting fossil fuel dependence, and that building projects like Keystone XL and the Northern Gateway signal a serious commitment to using the entire tarsands. The message in the paper is much more nuanced, and more measured than what’s in the media, not surprising.

I have long since come to the conclusion that this is not about counting of individual carbon atoms and their non-measurable global warming contributions, of course any single project will not tip us over one way or the other. It is about trajectory. To use two smoking analogies, the argument against smoking is not that the next cigarette will kill you, it is that smoking will kill many people in a population over a lifetime. More aptly in this case, the argument is that  Grand River Enterprises, a small Canadian cigarette concern, doesn’t contribute as much to smoking deaths as does Imperial Tobacco, so it is somehow different and okay.

Every major fossil fuel commitment we make is a commitment we do not make to reducing consumption, or increasing renewable use. Every foreign policy/domestic policy decision we take to keep our dollar high to get maximum revenue from the tarsands to shareholders (not the population) is a commitment to not building renewable infrastructure, or spending money on energy efficiency. So, trajectories count, and that is the underlying message from Swart and Weaver.

To finish it off, here’s the PhD Comics Science News Cycle, which is very apropos.

PS: Is Weaver and the Tarsands a good band name?

Update:

Joe Romm of climate progress responds to the paper here, thanks @softgrasswalker

And from comments, looks like Prof Weaver was on the CBC this morning, reprising his usual climate hawk self, will listen when they put the audio up.

Here’s Prof. Weaver in the Huffington Post commenting on the study. More about this when I don’t have work to do.

References:

I’ve already been inundated with a ream of people who have stated that rec centres, garbage pick-up, landscaping, etc, has always been done by the municipality. That may be true. What I’m asking is should cities and towns be doing that. For example, we know that rec centres lose money each and every year…

via Murray Langdons Comment

The role of government, whatever level it might be, is to maximise the welfare of the people it serves, not some of its people, but most of them. So, looking at government “costs” alone in deciding the role of government is dangerously incomplete. What you actually have to do is to total up the costs for government and the people being served by the government, and judge whether there is an overall benefit to a municipality providing a service. Trying to be pragmatic about it, here are some of the things I look at:

1. Is the good/service provided discretionary? Meaning, would I be able to live a reasonably satisfactory life without the service?
2. If the good/service is non-discretionary ( I need it for a satisfactory life), then does it show characteristics of moral hazard (if some people don’t participate, it affects everyone), and would the provision of the service benefit from risk pooling (it works better if we’re all in it together) and mitigate issues of adverse selection (people who need services most are least able to afford them)?
3. Is the good/service market amenable? (despite what free market fundamentalists may have you believe, Adam Smith did not think that every good/service could fit into a free market paradigm). If market worthy, is there any additional benefit to having a “public option”?
4. What parts of a good/service are a natural monopoly, and what parts are amenable to market based competition (highways vs. cars)?
5. When looking at costs and benefits, it’s not enough just look at direct costs like construction, salaries, etc, but also at more intangible measures like decision fatigue,(after a certain threshold, every decision you take degrades the next one) social capital (community relations, cooperation and confidence), creative capital (the ability to attract people to your community), environmental capital and so much more.

Immediately, dumping golf, recreation, and water and sewage services into the same pot makes no sense.

Let’s look at golf, it’s discretionary, and given the proliferation of golf courses in the area, a reasonably competitive good/service (disclaimer: I don’t golf). If Saanich stopped providing golf services, some people would end up paying more, but this would not affect a vast majority of people in the area. So, I wouldn’t shed a tear if Saanich’s golf course was privatised (I would be happier if it became a park, but that’s a different argument!).

Let’s look at recreation centres – Murray Langdon says this:

For example, we know that rec centres lose money each and every year. But we have examples of private recreation facilities, (in Langford for example) that are not only affordable but actually make money. For some reason, people assume that if it’s not run by a municipality, it will be expensive. Well, I have news for you. It is expensive and it may be because it’s run by a municipality.

I am confused, what Langford recreation centre is he talking about? (I don’t live in Langford, or hardly ever visit) The Westshore Parks and Rec Society runs the recreation centres, and it appears to be a joint effort by Westshore communities.

West Shore Park & Recreation is governed by the West Shore Parks & Recreation Society’s Board of Directors  Each municipalities contribution, through tax requisition, assists in the operation of the parks and recreation facilities.

Putting Langford aside, clearly, the public health benefits of increased physical activity make exercise a non-discretionary item (some may disagree!) Community based (whether run by the municipality or not) recreation centres have many benefits that are not measured just by their profit-loss statements. They are often the only option for family-centric, community centric (as opposed to individual centric) recreation. I can’t go to a private gym with my partner (real) and kids (hypothetical), and have all of us participate in  activities at the same time. My partner and I would have to schedule different workouts, then enrol the progeny in a separate swimming or soccer class, find/take turns in baby sitting, etc. So, not having community based recreation increases costs to society + government, while possibly (and not always) reducing government “costs”. The social capital of having community recreation centres, the public health benefits of encouraging exercise, I could go on, the intangible benefits are high. The YMCA, which I am a member of, is a non-profit community run recreation centre, and this model works as well.

Water and Sewer – These are non-discretionary, monopoly driven services not really market based. Construction, some maintenance, value added services, may be amenable to competition, but not the management, oversight and long-term stewardship. While the BC provincial government and various Federal governments have been trying to privatise various commons resources, third-party evidence points to no cost savings.

Here’s a test: Talk about BC Liquor!

The job of a public policy analyst is to consider the costs/benefits of the society as a whole. One does not read government balance sheets the same way one would read a corporation’s balance sheet.

Photo from GibsonGolfer Flickr photostream used under a Creative Commons License.

A species of sea turtle never before seen in B.C. waters arrived on Wickaninnish Beach this week.

Parks Canada, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and the Vancouver Aquarium worked together to confirm the event as the first-ever sighting of an olive ridley sea turtle in B.C. waters.

“B.C. residents can be proud to learn that we now officially have three sea turtle species in our waters,” stated a media release from the three organizations involved.

via Sea turtle found in Pacific Rim park.

I would quibble with “never before seen”, this is highly unlikely in the many years Canada’s indigenous have made their home on the ocean, and given that turtles tend to stray. It appears this female arrived nearly dead, and died of possible blunt force trauma, which can be caused by many things including propeller hits, boat collisions, etc. Also found, large bits of plastic inside her stomach, which is all too common.

So, farewell, dear friend, you strayed a bit too far north for your tastes, not as far as Alaska, but far enough.

• Harper lecturing Obama on playing politics is a bit rich
• The opposition is multi-faceted, not just based on the carbon footprint
• The opposition is widespread, and opposition is not tarsands specific, but against expanding fossil fuel in a world poised to warm at an ever increasing rate
• Tarsands oil is dirty oil, and no amount of lobbying can take that away
• Alterate pipeline routes such as Enbridge’s Northern Gateway are not going to be easy to construct given significant First Nations’ opposition

It was on the last point that Jeffrey Simpson’s otherwise useful Op-Ed degenerated into what can be charitably described (by a PR hack) as an “unwise choice of words”.

The route must traverse huge tracts of land claimed by aboriginals who, for a variety of reasons, don’t want a pipeline. Maybe they’re pigheaded. Maybe they don’t want to join modernity.

This is insulting and ignorant to begin with. Surely Jeffrey Simpson does basic research before he writes these columns, and google searches will reveal many many articles, including one in the newspaper that pays his salary that clearly explain the rational reasons behind First Nations’ concerns on pipelines. Simpson seems to have no trouble finding rational reasons to buttress other opposition claims. He says Nebraska’s opposition was due to the pipeline passing over environmentally sensitive areas. He also uses a Royal Society of Canada report judging Canada’s green house gas mitigation efforts as inadequate to make a larger point about the pollution caused by the tarsands and fossil fuels.

However, for First Nations’ concerns alone, he resorts to the irrational, tired and racist tropes of First Nations people being “pigheaded”, or “opposed to modernity”. What exactly is Mr Simpson trying to imply?

I was angry enough to dash a letter off to the Globe and Mail, which they promptly published, thanks folks.

Here’s what they published

Jeffrey Simpson’s column (Pipe-Altering Lessons – Nov. 16) offers some good insights into pipeline politics and government hypocrisy and states accurately that people are opposed to most fossil fuel expansion, not just the oil sands. However, his speculation on First Nations’ opposition to the Northern Gateway project as “pig headed” or not wanting “to join modernity” are offensive and misstate the valid concerns voiced by more than 60 indigenous communities. They are concerned about irreparable damage to the land and salmon migration routes and are well aware how little of the large profits made by energy companies accrues to the First Nations whose land these projects are frequently based on. Their reasons are well founded and well documented by many First Nations, including the Wet’suwet’en.

Here’s what I wrote.

Jeffrey Simpson’s Opinion, Pipeline-altering lessons offers some good insights into oilsands pipeline politics, government hypocrisy and states accurately that people are opposed to most fossil fuel expansion, not just the oilsands . However, Simpson’s speculation on First Nations’ opposition to the Northern Gateway project as “pig
headed”, or “not wanting to join modernity” are offensive and misstate the valid concerns voiced by more than 60 indigenous communities. They are concerned about irreparable damage to their land, and salmon migration routes. They are well aware that little/none of the large profits made by Enbridge and other oil companies accrue to the First Nations whose land these projects are frequently based on. Their reasons for opposing are well founded, and well documented by many First Nations including the Wet’suwet’en.

If Mr Simpson were a little less “pig headed”, or “more willing to join modernity”, he would fire up that marvellous modern invention, the web browser and look up wetsuweten.com. His unnecessary slurs take away from what is a otherwise a sensible and well written article.

They did leave out my rather snarky last paragraph

Pig picture from jm999uk’s flickr stream used under a creative commons licence.

“It’s pretty amazing — the level of fare evasion that was going on out there,” said Manuel Achadinha, president and chief executive of B.C. Transit.

http://www.timescolonist.com/Crackdown+transfer+cheats+pays+Transit+Greater+Victoria/5397957/story.html#ixzz1XwaH2ta3

Pretty incendiary. BC Transit’s financials from the September 13th Victoria Regional Transit Commission meeting reveal a small increase in ridership, and an increase in revenue (over plan) from passengers and advertising of $685K, YTD.

When BC Transit in Victoria changed its transfer system recently, it did three things:

1. Reduced its transfer window from 90 to 60 minutes, a 33% reduction. Now, I don’t know how much this is being enforced. I use a monthly pass, but anecdotal observation of bus transfer lengths indicates that it is enforced with varying levels of strictness (people watching is fun on the bus!).
2. Made transfers one way, so people running short errands can no longer use a transfer on the return.
3. Did away with the “letter of the day” system, and prevented people from banking transfers from previous days and times.

Now, the only cheats are the ones who gamed the letter of the day, not the ones who were using the transfer for short errands, who now pay double what they paid, or those stopping en-route to home and running a small errand in their 90 minute time window, now 60 minutes.

It’s obviously easy to parade cases of cheating, creating beautiful anecdata.

“I actually had a guy who had a glass case who had everything [all the transfers] alphabetical”

Right, the power of ONE! While a numerical estimate of $200,000 was provided for the cheating, it’s hard to tell what this was based on. It is disturbing that the Times Colonist didn’t bother questioning BC Transit on the methodology used, or the provenance of the numbers. It seems as likely to me that a shortening of the transfer window, and banning two way travel with a transfer could have increased the revenue per passenger from $1.47 to $1.52, a 3.4% increase. But that goes against BC Transit’s story.

I am sympathetic of BC Transit’s need to raise more revenue without bothering the car driving and property owning public with property tax increases. As a monthly pass buyer and property tax payer, I contribute in many ways! I suspect they noticed the reuse of transfers and saw it as an opportunity to raise revenue by tacking on unrelated transfer restrictions. We should be exploring more mobility tied solutions such as linking the carbon tax with transit funding, as these University of Victoria students are advocating. This is on the head of BC’s provincial government, which believes more in the optics of having a carbon tax in place and wowing environmentalists worldwide, rather than designing a system that works well.  Car drivers, think of it as paying a modest (really modest) toll to get people off the road so you can drive in peace! I would do it!

Photo courtesy Stephen Rees Flickr Photostream used under a Creative Commons Licence. Do read his blog as well, he always has insight to add to BC’s transit options.