Service is key to boosting bus ridership

For people who have grown up in a culture that highly values cars, the bus remains something of a mystery.

Like someone encountering a strange and confusing religion, the bus novice finds there are many secrets to be revealed. When does the bus come? Where does it go? How do I get on? How do I get off?

The fare box on one bus happily consumed my friend's $10 bill before anyone could stop her. We all looked down, embarrassed to inform her that the driver cannot make change.

Fortunately the transit learning curve is short. Armed with schedules and tickets and with key bus-check numbers memorized, passengers can navigate the city with confidence. This is fortunate since transit is going to figure more prominently in the urban and inter-urban streetscapes of the near future.

Hamilton's transit director recently revealed what most crowded bus riders already know, that "valid service demands far outstrip our available funding and our available capacity."

Targets for Hamilton's transit ridership predict that the transit's share of the daily trips made on all forms of transportation will double to 12 per cent by 2030.

While no one is going to force cars off North American roads, the way we use vehicles is likely going to change.

Even if you're not up on the current discussion on peak oil or the latest climate change disaster, it's perhaps time for us all to rethink our over-reliance on cars. Influential voices such as author Howard Kunstler warn that we need to "start thinking beyond the car." He's not talking futuristic helicopters or personalized jetpacks. "Need something to do?" he asks his readers, "Get involved in restoring public transit."

That Hamilton could be doing more is a given: the Transportation Master Plan shows expenditures on transit have been in decline for years, with a corresponding decline in local transit's modal share: between 1986 and 2001, the share of trips handled by transit went from 12 per cent to 7 per cent. In the same time frame drivers increased their modal share from 63 per cent to 64 per cent.

Hamilton is locked in a car-culture embrace that can only be described as unhealthy. Compared to 10 years ago, the average Hamilton resident uses 15 per cent more fuel for transportation.

Hamilton fares badly compared to 10 other Canadian cities in terms of per capita transit use (fourth lowest) and per capita annual fuel use (second highest). We also have the second highest amount of arterial and expressway lane metres, second only to Oshawa.

What's the Rush?

Rush and Shakespeare together, at last.

UNRAVELLING SPRAWL: coming to grips with growth and a tightening greenbelt

Throwing Stones

The CFMU Program Guide Sound Bites, Summer 2006. So many loves.

Beatles Blog

I went outside, belly full of Wellington County beer, to declare "the Beatles" the best damn band in the universe.

The sky yanked my head up.

"See the pretty clouds, white, with pinky-orange?"

They drifted from the west.

"Yes," I answered, "They are beautiful."

My head drooped, hair hanging in my eyes.

I dared say nothing about the Beatles.

*

The problem with analysis, the over-academic analysis of every little thing, is that if you analyzed the Beatles to a fault when they were 18, you would have wasted your time once you let them get to 30.

This doesn’t have to make sense. But freeze things as they are, they might not become what they will.

Clouds have a way of disrupting the music. When I went back out, the clouds had moved to grey and the neighbour’s music was too loud. And their screen door slams.

Rain flooded the basement, and my eyes itch with mould. I’ve switched from beer to coffee.

*

"...every study of the gods, of everyone’s gods, is a revelation of vengeance toward the innocent."(John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany.)

From the doorstep, 9:47 p.m. there is a darkness, an inky blackness in the west, but overhead, a deep deep twilight blue and clear enough to see the stars. A woman walks past, right arm swinging. Two bicyclists whirr down the hill. And of course cars, loud on the wet pavement.

"The Beatles were the greatest band in the universe," I whisper. But the universe pays them no mind.

Eating Local

Growing your own food will help you understand how you are what you eat. If you aren't into farming, however, you could at least eat the products of those around you who are. Here's why.

One of only two city-operated community gardens, the Dundas Community Garden site edges onto the wilds of the Royal Botanical Gardens' property, sharing space with nesting snapping turtles. And deer. It seems that the pesky deer are up to the task of clearing even the hardiest jerry-rigged fence, free to lop off the choicest bits, beans being a particular attraction.

We're the new gardeners on the block, though most of the green thumbs here have been refining their arts over a number of years. What strikes the newcomer is the way they've engineered immaculate defences against blossom-browsing deer, the meticulously staked- out orange plastic fencing serving, too, as the margins for a seasonal battle against myriad green invaders, unwanted plants otherwise known as weeds.

We payed $25 to rent our plot of land measuring six by nine metres, made a trip to Flamborough to buy seeds and a few tomato plants, and with some initial advice from a friend with years in the community garden trenches, we're digging and sowing. The sun beats down. Tomatoes, lettuce, peas, squash, zucchini, beans, cucumber and potatoes find homes. 

We're the only ones using a raised bed technique, which worries my seven- year-old. "I want to plant rows, like this," she points earnestly, indicating our neighbour's neat lines of pepper plants. The difference makes me a bit nervous too; being new and novel in the ancient art of farming may be pushing boundaries. Our idiosyncratic approach to planting becomes a public thing here-we're standing naked in the field, so to speak.

A neigbouring gardener strolls over to say hi and kindly offers us a tray of leeks for planting. While we talk, he gaze takes in our garden. I note a flicker of concern cross his face.

"You've got potatoes," he comments, in a tone that feels like he might have said "you have warts."

"Yes, but not too many," I quickly point out, feeling a slight pang of guilt. Another gardener had already mentioned the bias against potatoes that exists at the site; a bias, not against potatoes per se, but the dreaded yellow and black striped Colorado Potato Beetle.

Survival pits species against species, gardener against gardener. I can't help thinking that if our crops fail, there will be murmurs, averted glances. And somewhere in the depths of my consciousness, a grain of a survival instinct stirs-suppose we didn't have groceries waiting on the shelves? What if we had to feed ourselves?

"And while middle-class citizens, and workmen infested with middle-class ideas admire their own rhetoric in the 'Talking Shops,' and 'practical people' are engaged in endless discussions on forms of government, we, the 'Utopian dreamers'-we shall have to consider the question of daily bread." -Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread.

A few kilometers away under a late June sky, members of the "Hamilton Eat Local Project" are stooped or crawling, hand picking the last remaining crop of strawberries at an organic farm. The desire to engage the local farm economy in a hands-on way is reaping early-and juicy-rewards, but the fleeting strawberry season almost slipped by unnoticed.

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