Showing posts with label automobile. Show all posts
Showing posts with label automobile. Show all posts
Friday, January 13, 2012
There was no green thing back then
I figured I actually do quite a few things the way they were done in the "earlier days". So if I can survive the old fashioned way, why can not every else too, no matter their age?
Thursday, December 29, 2011
The New Year is coming
Do you believe in New Year's resolutions? I don't. I just hope next year is better than this year.
One must not think that the residents or the city of Kitchener knows when and how to clear snow and ice off sidewalks (and streets). I don't care too much about the streets right now because I don't commute by bus and so far the roads cleared simply by having cars driving on them but the sidewalks matter - to me at least. I don't think to too many other people because most Canadians keep their ass attached to a (heated) car seat during the winter so what do they care what the sidewalks look like. Argh! Two days ago it first rained, then snowed fairly wet snow. Clever people would have gone out that evening and cleared the slush off their sidewalks before it could freeze. And they would have burnt off a lot of turkey calories at the same time! But nobody did. So yesterday my daughter and I stepped out the door and after my first step I thought, "oh shoot, ice!". By that time my daughter was already lying flat on her back, slipped in the ice (no, we did not have to go to ER). Poor baby, she will not be walking much outside this winter. Salt seems the most common "tool" in the fight of winter here in Kitchener and I don't like it. The slush sticks far too well to the stroller. Never mind the puddles we leave behind every time we go into a shop or other building - stop starring, I am not going to clean it up. Get out the snow shovels and sand., they are much more effective and better for the environment. But I have not seen any yet.
So, I got a little book for Christmas called Life Lines. One of the first ones is, "We own nothing, everybody rents." It's true, especially when it comes to our planet. I received an email today from CPAWS asking for donations and listing their achievements for this year. I am not even happy about the achievements, even though I probably wrote letters to lots of MPs telling them to help protect this or that space or area. But the tarsands are still there, still operating, still expanding. No change. Kyoto, a disaster - Canada, the big loser, bailed out. F*** this. The Canadian government ought to be jailed for it. Or have above phrase tattooed onto their foreheads. Do they really not get it? No they don't. That's far more than embarrassing.
Oh, and the worst, last year at this time we did make donations to different environmental organisations, this year we are far from it, low tide in the bank account due to a dead job market. Instead, we have the prospect of taking our building management to court over our windows. Hey, there's a new experience looming! When it rained inside our bedrooms the day we moved in we were told this problem is new. Recently I found out leaking windows have been an ongoing issue and the windows were apparrently repaired last spring. With no improvement obviously! Our building management is well aware of the problem, it has been contacted by our superintendents verbally and by us in writing at least twice. Nothing has happened. As soon as the temperatures dropped the outside window panes froze shut they were so wet. (Are they going to burst when too much ice accumulates?) The inside panes are daily covered with water and mould grows everywhere on the frame and surrounding area unless I clean it off every week. We think the windows do not comply with the local building standards. Neighbours have unsuccessfully tried to change the situation, with the management getting away with their poor maintenance. How can that be, I wonder?
I read an article recently from an engineer who wrote a letter to The Record suggesting Canada should produce pre-fabricated houses, just like they put up here everywhere but smaller, and ship them overseas to help with the housing crisis in poor countries. After all, Canada has plenty of forest to turn into lumber and it would help the economy. My quick thoughts on that: Safe the forest, and safe the rest of the world from these poor constructions called houses. Unless of course they come without windows. Maybe new houses like in all those ugly suburbs are better than the oldish apartment buildings we live in but then again I don't want to live in suburbia. That's for car-addicted people, not people like me who dream of giving their bike an upgrade and have fenders and other handy things installed. That is once I earn money of course.
Over Christmas we rented a small car and unlike in Edmonton we got one too. Wow! It was a Toyota Yaris and with the three of us, car seat, stroller, Christmas gifts etc. it was well loaded too. It worked well and still it was very fuel-efficient. We need more of those, the cars I mean, and rental agencies that rent them out.
One must not think that the residents or the city of Kitchener knows when and how to clear snow and ice off sidewalks (and streets). I don't care too much about the streets right now because I don't commute by bus and so far the roads cleared simply by having cars driving on them but the sidewalks matter - to me at least. I don't think to too many other people because most Canadians keep their ass attached to a (heated) car seat during the winter so what do they care what the sidewalks look like. Argh! Two days ago it first rained, then snowed fairly wet snow. Clever people would have gone out that evening and cleared the slush off their sidewalks before it could freeze. And they would have burnt off a lot of turkey calories at the same time! But nobody did. So yesterday my daughter and I stepped out the door and after my first step I thought, "oh shoot, ice!". By that time my daughter was already lying flat on her back, slipped in the ice (no, we did not have to go to ER). Poor baby, she will not be walking much outside this winter. Salt seems the most common "tool" in the fight of winter here in Kitchener and I don't like it. The slush sticks far too well to the stroller. Never mind the puddles we leave behind every time we go into a shop or other building - stop starring, I am not going to clean it up. Get out the snow shovels and sand., they are much more effective and better for the environment. But I have not seen any yet.
So, I got a little book for Christmas called Life Lines. One of the first ones is, "We own nothing, everybody rents." It's true, especially when it comes to our planet. I received an email today from CPAWS asking for donations and listing their achievements for this year. I am not even happy about the achievements, even though I probably wrote letters to lots of MPs telling them to help protect this or that space or area. But the tarsands are still there, still operating, still expanding. No change. Kyoto, a disaster - Canada, the big loser, bailed out. F*** this. The Canadian government ought to be jailed for it. Or have above phrase tattooed onto their foreheads. Do they really not get it? No they don't. That's far more than embarrassing.
Oh, and the worst, last year at this time we did make donations to different environmental organisations, this year we are far from it, low tide in the bank account due to a dead job market. Instead, we have the prospect of taking our building management to court over our windows. Hey, there's a new experience looming! When it rained inside our bedrooms the day we moved in we were told this problem is new. Recently I found out leaking windows have been an ongoing issue and the windows were apparrently repaired last spring. With no improvement obviously! Our building management is well aware of the problem, it has been contacted by our superintendents verbally and by us in writing at least twice. Nothing has happened. As soon as the temperatures dropped the outside window panes froze shut they were so wet. (Are they going to burst when too much ice accumulates?) The inside panes are daily covered with water and mould grows everywhere on the frame and surrounding area unless I clean it off every week. We think the windows do not comply with the local building standards. Neighbours have unsuccessfully tried to change the situation, with the management getting away with their poor maintenance. How can that be, I wonder?
I read an article recently from an engineer who wrote a letter to The Record suggesting Canada should produce pre-fabricated houses, just like they put up here everywhere but smaller, and ship them overseas to help with the housing crisis in poor countries. After all, Canada has plenty of forest to turn into lumber and it would help the economy. My quick thoughts on that: Safe the forest, and safe the rest of the world from these poor constructions called houses. Unless of course they come without windows. Maybe new houses like in all those ugly suburbs are better than the oldish apartment buildings we live in but then again I don't want to live in suburbia. That's for car-addicted people, not people like me who dream of giving their bike an upgrade and have fenders and other handy things installed. That is once I earn money of course.
Over Christmas we rented a small car and unlike in Edmonton we got one too. Wow! It was a Toyota Yaris and with the three of us, car seat, stroller, Christmas gifts etc. it was well loaded too. It worked well and still it was very fuel-efficient. We need more of those, the cars I mean, and rental agencies that rent them out.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Lost in the suburbs
is another episode of The Nature of Things from 2008. It visits Los Angeles, Vancouver, Toronto, Mexico City and hey, Portland, Oregon!
In order to facilitate Toronto's expansion some of the most fertile soil in North America had been covered with concrete and asphalt. Suburban residents cover 4 times more space than those living in the city.
L.A. is the "ultimate suburban wasteland" according to David Suzuki. The Fresno valley nearby that's threatened to be built up too provides more than 200 commodity crops and is one of the biggest food providers in the U.S. Farmers start to become the minority though and the urban population does not understand their lifestyle. Farmers work earlier, they also work later, and some of their duties are noisy and dusty. Although the soil and the climate are great the water for irrigation comes via pipeline from far away and required a huge financially investment by the federal government. Unfortunately, the municipalities decide what to do with the land and sacrifices it for construction that creates jobs. In one place in California "extravagant" people can even live in a suburb made for small air planes! The garage, the street, the parking in the front of the house are all designed to accommodate the wing span.
Vancouver has apparently an even higher car use than L.A. and an additional 30,000 cars enter the roads every year. But the city barely builds any new roads. Vancouver is so unaffordable for most people that they move into the suburbs which are designed for cars, or "extensions of highway intersections". "The sound of sprawl is the freeway roar," it was said but it has turned into ever growing congestion. Widening the roads and adding more highways has not and will not solve the problem. Maintaining 1 km of road costs $10,000 per year, and new roads cost more. This does not include the costs for police, accident services like health care, and air pollution. Presumably, there will be road tolls soon which will increase the cost of living in suburbs! Together with demographic changes the demand for large houses in distant suburbs will disappear over the next couple of decades.
Mexico City with more than 20 million people is an urban nightmare, sprawling tremendously. There's no more natural beauty & tranquillity, just cars & too much traffic, air and other pollution, and water shortage. The city is not human any more.
Portland Oregon has not stopped the sprawl but has made room for nature in the city. It started 25 years ago that the city tore up a freeway and put in a waterfront park, tore up a parking house and create a public space in the centre of the city, diverted money from road construction to public transport and built a light railway instead. City neighbourhoods revived and the growth was directed into more dense, already existing areas instead of adding on to the city boundary. A model suburb is denser, the houses closer to the sidewalk, a front porch faces the road instead of a garage, school and shops are in walking distance.In Portland people want to live there and don't feel forced to live there - that should be the goal of city planning. Some critics said that Portland's moves were a socialist conspiracy to get people out of their cars but in fact in was a conspiracy that brought people into cars in the first place.
Generally suburbs provide more affordable housing than the city centre, get you more space for less money. People think it is easier to start a family, it feels safer to raise children, suburbs have a perceived higher quality of living. But it's not actually that comfortable: commuting means sacrificing time and well-being, expose oneself to accidents, fuel & maintain the car, pay insurances. It's not affordable to the individual or the community.
Generally, cars have driven the sprawl. The deal has been that the private sector provides the vehicles -without any limits - and the government provides the pathways. But huge amounts of money (subsidies) go into supporting the car and even only a 10% of it would better be invested in public transit.
An initial problem is that wilderness and natural areas are often considered as land to be developed, as something that needs to change. Another problem is that the costs for infrastructure (water, sewage, roads, community services) are only partially accounted for in the price of suburban houses. The municipality that provides the infrastructure usually ends up with a debt that can't be recovered from taxes from the new residents. So they keep building hoping it pays off next time ... but it does not. Suburbs won't work forever.
In order to facilitate Toronto's expansion some of the most fertile soil in North America had been covered with concrete and asphalt. Suburban residents cover 4 times more space than those living in the city.
L.A. is the "ultimate suburban wasteland" according to David Suzuki. The Fresno valley nearby that's threatened to be built up too provides more than 200 commodity crops and is one of the biggest food providers in the U.S. Farmers start to become the minority though and the urban population does not understand their lifestyle. Farmers work earlier, they also work later, and some of their duties are noisy and dusty. Although the soil and the climate are great the water for irrigation comes via pipeline from far away and required a huge financially investment by the federal government. Unfortunately, the municipalities decide what to do with the land and sacrifices it for construction that creates jobs. In one place in California "extravagant" people can even live in a suburb made for small air planes! The garage, the street, the parking in the front of the house are all designed to accommodate the wing span.
Vancouver has apparently an even higher car use than L.A. and an additional 30,000 cars enter the roads every year. But the city barely builds any new roads. Vancouver is so unaffordable for most people that they move into the suburbs which are designed for cars, or "extensions of highway intersections". "The sound of sprawl is the freeway roar," it was said but it has turned into ever growing congestion. Widening the roads and adding more highways has not and will not solve the problem. Maintaining 1 km of road costs $10,000 per year, and new roads cost more. This does not include the costs for police, accident services like health care, and air pollution. Presumably, there will be road tolls soon which will increase the cost of living in suburbs! Together with demographic changes the demand for large houses in distant suburbs will disappear over the next couple of decades.
Mexico City with more than 20 million people is an urban nightmare, sprawling tremendously. There's no more natural beauty & tranquillity, just cars & too much traffic, air and other pollution, and water shortage. The city is not human any more.
Portland Oregon has not stopped the sprawl but has made room for nature in the city. It started 25 years ago that the city tore up a freeway and put in a waterfront park, tore up a parking house and create a public space in the centre of the city, diverted money from road construction to public transport and built a light railway instead. City neighbourhoods revived and the growth was directed into more dense, already existing areas instead of adding on to the city boundary. A model suburb is denser, the houses closer to the sidewalk, a front porch faces the road instead of a garage, school and shops are in walking distance.In Portland people want to live there and don't feel forced to live there - that should be the goal of city planning. Some critics said that Portland's moves were a socialist conspiracy to get people out of their cars but in fact in was a conspiracy that brought people into cars in the first place.
Generally suburbs provide more affordable housing than the city centre, get you more space for less money. People think it is easier to start a family, it feels safer to raise children, suburbs have a perceived higher quality of living. But it's not actually that comfortable: commuting means sacrificing time and well-being, expose oneself to accidents, fuel & maintain the car, pay insurances. It's not affordable to the individual or the community.
Generally, cars have driven the sprawl. The deal has been that the private sector provides the vehicles -without any limits - and the government provides the pathways. But huge amounts of money (subsidies) go into supporting the car and even only a 10% of it would better be invested in public transit.
An initial problem is that wilderness and natural areas are often considered as land to be developed, as something that needs to change. Another problem is that the costs for infrastructure (water, sewage, roads, community services) are only partially accounted for in the price of suburban houses. The municipality that provides the infrastructure usually ends up with a debt that can't be recovered from taxes from the new residents. So they keep building hoping it pays off next time ... but it does not. Suburbs won't work forever.
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