Public Works looks at public space, urban design, and city-building innovations from around the world, and considers what Toronto might learn from them.

Photo by rosebennet.

On May 21, city council will decide whether to move forward with the possible construction of a casino/resort/convention centre/shopping complex in Toronto. The meeting is the culmination of months of heated debate and Simpsons memes: on the one side, citizen’s groups, councillors, and most of the local media wringing their hands and thinking of the children; on the other, the Brothers Ford, would-be casino operators, and lobbyists pitching glitz and jobs with a whiff of monorail.

It’s widely expected that the vote will put a stake through the heart of the casino idea, even though no concrete plan has yet been proposed (the MGM back-of-a-cocktail-napkin concept notwithstanding). Questions about land use, traffic, crime, social issues, and general tackiness are understood to have swayed enough councillors to ensure the idea won’t be pursued any further.

On the small chance that council does decide to permit a casino, however, there’s a whole other conversation we must have about how it could, and should, actually operate. Allowing a casino in principle needn’t mean allowing any kind of casino operation in practice. At least one other major city, faced with concerns similar to Toronto’s, allowed casinos, but only subject to a range of measures that constrain their day-to-day management and ensure that they work the way the government wants.

Legalized gaming had been debated in Singapore for years, and rejected. Hence it was a surprise in 2005 when the famously straight-laced city-state announced that it would introduce casino gambling as part of a strategy to broaden an economy largely based on manufacturing and finance—and not just a puny three million square foot facility like the one spitballed by prospective developers for Casino Hogtown. After considering several proposals,the Singaporean government approved two “integrated resorts,” massive sin palaces occupying over five million square feet each and incorporating Vegas-style attractions such as a permanent Cirque du Soleil facility, a Universal Studios theme park, and a host of celebrity-branded restaurants (including an offering from Toronto’s Susur Lee).

By any financial yardstick, the Marina Bay Sands and Resort World Sentosa have been successful since opening in 2010.

Hot Topics: A Toronto Casino?

In the two resorts’ first year of operation (and while they were still under construction), the city saw an all-time record number of tourist arrivals and a 49 per cent increase in year over year tourist expenditures. By the beginning of 2012, it was estimated that the two sites had created more than 60,000 jobs (22,000 of them directly) and were contributing between 1.5 and 2 per cent to Singapore’s gross domestic product. Even as business slowed in 2012 thanks to a sputtering Chinese economy and the resorts’ waning novelty, the impact on the local economy has remained huge. The effect is particularly notable considering that Singapore has gone head-to-head with regional gambling hub Macau, which is well-established and a four hour flight closer to the lucrative Chinese market.

So how did Singapore, a country where you can be fined for not flushing a public toilet and where corporal punishment isn’t just the name of a Schwarzenegger comeback vehicle, come to embrace gaming on an industrial scale?

Well, money, of course. But we’re talking about a place where, writes one academic, the new resorts challenged “core beliefs that run deep within Singapore’s society…that gambling was inherently evil, potentially detrimental to society” [PDF]. In 2005, some 30,000 Singaporeans signed an online petition opposing the government on casino gambling, a bold move in a country where the same party has been in power for more than fifty years and where political dissent may be viewed as dangerously anti-social.

In response, policy makers reframed the question: instead of asking whether Singapore should have casinos, they looked at how integrated resorts could be introduced while minimizing the feared social problems. The outcome was an array of regulation intended to mitigate negative effects on the community while still yielding the financial benefits of Vegas-style gaming.

Among the new rules Singapore implemented:

• Singapore citizens and permanent residents must pay a fee of of $80 (Canadian) for a single casino visit or $1,600 for a year of access (it’s thought that about a quarter of casino visitors are local). Fee revenues go to the Totalisator Board, also not a Schwarzenegger film but a government agency which funds social and charitable causes.
• Marketing aimed at local residents is prohibited, including advertising, loyalty programs, and free shuttle buses.
• People on social assistance or who have declared bankruptcy are not permitted in casinos. Individuals can self-request a ban, and families can also request that members be banned.
• No ATMs are allowed on casino grounds.
• The maximum floor space allowed for gambling is 15,000 square metres (161,000 square feet) per integrated resort (in each case about three per cent of the total, although gambling accounts for some 70 per cent of the revenue).
• In an effort to avoid associations with criminal gangs found in other jurisdictions (notably Macau) the law forbids the ownership or management of a casino by anyone who the government believes “has any business association with any person, body or association who or which, in the opinion of the Authority, is not of good repute having regard to character, honesty and integrity or has undesirable or unsatisfactory financial resources.”
• There are also significant restrictions on junket operators, who are paid commissions to bring in high rollers, and who drive much of the VIP traffic in other gambling hotspots.

The government continues to tweak the law. Rules were beefed up this year, raising the cap for fines on casino operators who allow entry to minors or “excluded persons” from $800,000 to a potential $160 million, and allowing the regulatory authority to specify the maximum number of visits that a deemed “problem gambler” can make to a casino each month.

How to Make Casino Gambling Less Addictive

Have the regulation been effective?

If there has been any major negative fallout from the new resorts, it’s not yet apparent. The government claims that problem gambling rates haven’t increased following the casino openings. And it appears that rather than sucking dollars away from local business, the resorts have created a mini-boom for Singapore’s hospitality industry.

Singapore has some similarities with the GTA. Both are affluent, culturally diverse regional centres with populations of around five and a half million people, and both can access a large pool of potential customers a few hours away by air.

Singapore’s solutions won’t translate directly, however. Attempts to exclude classes of individuals from gaming could be met with legal challenges. Traffic issues would be considerable here, given that Singapore has a much more advanced public transit network and an automated system of road user charges to combat congestion. There are also some significant differences in the role gambling plays in Canadian culture.

Nevertheless, the broad approach—ensuring the development process is guided by government and not casino operators—makes sense. Singapore spelled out a set of conditions to be placed on any gambling facility before considering specific proposals, and made licensing contingent on operators accepting any future regulation they might choose to impose.

Toronto has already set out a list of 47 conditions that a potential casino would have to meet (although they’re far less draconian in addressing social issues than those imposed in Singapore). However, unlike the Singaporean government, which isn’t beholden to any higher authority, Toronto is subject to the whims of Queen’s Park. This is why many councillors feel forced into a binary choice: that their only real decision is the yes/no question of whether to open up this question. If they do allow the process to go forward, they fear, they won’t have the capacity to direct the development process thereafter. Though the province has said it will listen to the municipalities, subsequent negotiations will largely be left to their creature, the OLG (“creature” in this case being not only the technically accurate term but also one that serendipitously conveys just the right tone).

Also, even if the province and OLG were to agree to include Toronto’s conditions in any negotiation, many of those conditions are sufficiently vague (“the casino will have an urban form that is designed to fit within its local context”) that there’s plenty of weasel room, particularly when the cash-strapped government is under pressure from a developer dangling bags of Yankee greenbacks and resistant to anything that might hinder efforts to hoover loonies from the pockets of hopeful punters.

Singapore seems to have found a trade-off that works, largely through its willingness to take a strong stance on regulating the casinos it has allowed. It’s an example that suggests Toronto could introduce casino gambling in a way that could be an economic and—don’t laugh—a cultural asset. But to get there, the province would have to let the City drive, or itself take on the task of regulating the facilities very strongly, and the prospective operators would have to sit in the back seat.

It’s hard to like our chances.

Image courtesy City of Pontevedra

Walkability matters. Between pollution, congestion, and the high cost of maintaining and driving a car, being able to get from A to B bipedally is becoming a big selling point for neighbourhoods, and even whole cities.

The basic requirement for walkability is simple: keep stuff close together. But the human mind is a strange thing, and the way we choose to interact with our world is often dictated by the way it’s presented to us. Thus, if you want people to walk, it pays to remind them that they can.

When Pontevedra, in north-western Spain, began to notice its city centre being overrun with automotive traffic, it took action. According to the city blog Polis, Pontevedra installed speed bumps, reduced speed limits to a crawl, and even banned motorized traffic in large areas of the city.

But the city also did something less dramatic: it made a walking map of the city centre designed after the subway maps found in many large cities. The Metrominuto map uses colour-coded lines to show the distances between points of interest, as well as the estimated travel time based on an average walking speed of five kilometres per hour.

To make the maps more user friendly, the city has installed wayfinding banners on the streets so pedestrians (tourists, in particular) can be sure they’re on the right track.

Toronto does pretty well walkability-wise, at least according to Seattle-based Walk Score, which uses its research to rank cities and neighbourhoods by how easy they are to get around by foot. We come in second among cities in Canada, behind cozy, compact Vancouver.

Pontevedra has a population of about 83,000 people, so mapping the main walking area is relatively easy. In Toronto it would be impractical—not to mention discouraging—to advise tourists that it will take them seven and a half hours to walk from the Toronto Zoo to High Park. But a series of area maps—the downtown business district, the Annex, Queen West West etc—would work well for this city of neighbourhoods, and wouldn’t be expensive to create.

Needless to say, Toronto is no stranger to pedestrian maps, notably those on the much-maligned Astral advertising pillars, which offer sidewalk stompers a view of the surrounding area along with the estimated walking distance to locations of interest. (The underground PATH system also has maps, although they can be difficult to decipher in the absence of above-ground landmarks. There’s a legend among PATH old timers of a family from Ohio who ventured underground in search of a men’s room and had to be rescued three weeks later, malnourished and disoriented, from a makeshift campsite in the TD Centre food court.)

However, the Pontevdra-style maps have distinct advantages (besides not being obscured by garish promotions for the latest telco gougefest). The cheerful familiarity and simplicity of the subway-style design is one. And then there’s the useful info about times between multiple destinations. Plus, this style of map is simple enough that it can be distributed in hard copy.

Something similar for Toronto might just encourage more people to take the city in smaller steps.

The truth behind the tales people tell about Toronto.

Photo by mmmighty_atom from the Torontoist Flickr pool.

Osgoode Hall, at Queen Street West and University Avenue, is an edifice of distinction. Home to the highest courts in Ontario and to the Law Society of Upper Canada, it’s one of a few rare old Toronto buildings that have staved off the lapping tides of urban uglification. The plaque out front describes it accurately, if immodestly, as “one of the finest examples of Victorian Classical architecture in Canada.”

Like any historical building, Osgoode Hall has its myths. Part of its stately charm is the cast-iron fence that surrounds it and the unusual “kissing gates,” which mimic rural gateways designed to keep livestock from wandering. Long-standing tradition has it that the entrances were installed for just that purpose: to keep itinerant 19th-century cattle from gumming up the wheels of justice.

Is the legend true? Architectural drawings by William Storm, who supervised the 1860 expansion that included the fence, actually referred to the gates as “cattle guards.” And they work: in 1950 a group of students attempted unsuccessfully to bring a cow through one of the entrances, which is the kind of thing students did before sex and the internet were invented.

Photo courtesy of the Archives of Ontario.

Consider also the classic Canadian memoir Yellow Briar: A Story of the Irish on the Canadian Countryside, which purports to be the reminisces of one Patrick Slater, boy émigré from famine-racked 1840′s Ireland. The book claims outright that the fence and its curious entryways were put in place to discourage intrusive livestock being kept behind a nearby tavern.

Cue scratching record sound.

It turns out that Yellow Briar isn’t a reliable source. After the book was published to considerable acclaim in 1933, it was revealed that the author was no exiled Hibernian, but an Anglo-Torontonian lawyer named John Mitchell, who wasn’t even born until 20 years after the fence went up.

Moreover, the area around Queen and University was near the centre of our nascent metropoplis by 1860, and should have been relatively livestock-free. And pre-1860 Osgoode Hall already boasted a picket fence, which if not as grand as the iron version should still have served as a sufficient obstacle to the average, non-opposable-thumbed bovine without sophisticated gate-opening skills.

Why the gates, then?

Mid-19th-century Toronto was a dangerous and unpredictable place, and even if cattle stampedes weren’t a risk, the unusual design would also have made it harder for herds of humans to storm the grounds. It had only been 22 years since the failed Upper Canada Rebellion, and a subsequent influx of poor, Catholic, and vehemently anti-Imperial Irish was shaking up the staunchly Protestant establishment. Brawls and full-on riots sparked by conflict between the new arrivals and Orange gangs weren’t uncommon.

Given that there are few things more likely to unite opposing mobs than a mutual contempt for the legal profession, it might have seemed wise to install gates at Osgoode Hall that would allow passage to only one rioter at a time, the easier to club and stack the miscreants in neat rows by religious denomination.

But the most likely reason for the unique entryways was simple architectural whimsey. The Victorians worshiped what they called progress; they were a society for whom the greatest expression of the common good was the razing of forest and field down to the bedrock, for replacement with mines and textile mills.

Nevertheless, they retained a nostalgia for the pastoral world they were so enthusiastically destroying, which manifested itself in wistful poetry, misty landscape paintings, and the occasional rural flourish on a building. The cow gates of Osgoode Hall were in all likelihood no more than an ornament to be contemplated by busy barristers dreaming of simpler times and greener places.

Public Works looks at public space, urban design, and city-building innovations from around the world, and considers what Toronto might learn from them.

Photo by tom cochrane from the Torontoist Flickr pool.

If you drive in Toronto, you already know the hassles: the perpetual gridlock, the widespread disregard for road etiquette, the unseemly interaction with lesser road users on bikes or in streetcars. And then, of course, there’s the always-looming question of where to park your two tonnes of chrome and hubris when you’re finally forced out of it.

Toronto doesn’t really lack pay parking, thanks in large part to the Toronto Parking Authority, which is responsible for around 17,500 on-street spaces, plus 160 parking lots under the Green P banner. What Toronto does lack is a more user-friendly way to manage all those spaces.

Geezers out there may remember when every on-street parking space had its own meter, and when parking garages had attendants who took your ticket and your money as you exited. This had the virtue of being relatively convenient for drivers, but less so for parking operators, who had to staff garages and drain change from thousands of parking meters.

Eventually garages started using technology that let them shed attendants by forcing drivers to walk to a ticket machine on exiting. For on-street parking, most individual meters have now been replaced with large machines—typically one every fifty metres or so—that dispense tickets to be left on dashboards.

This new system retains the inflexibility of being unable to change your parking time without returning to the vehicle, and it adds the indignity of having to walk up and down the street like a common pedestrian.

These days, however, technologies exist that dispense with that nuisance and also eliminate the need for motorists to race from hair appointments or heart surgery to top up their meters. These new systems allow people to purchase, add, or reduce parking time remotely, via their phones.

The technology isn’t even particularly new. The system most widely used in North America (including 13 Canadian cities) was originally developed by Verrus, a Vancouver-based company, back in 2001. (Verrus was acquired by U.K. internet payments provider PayPoint in 2010, and now operates as PayByPhone). Originally, registered users would call a number identifying the space where they were parked, and payment would be made with a credit card number on file.

With the advent of the smartphone, it’s now possible to do all this stuff online. Some cities will even send text messages to let users know when their time is almost up. (Remote-payment systems also provide parking enforcement officers with real-time lists of those who’ve paid online, which presumably allows them to ticket overdue vehicles with up-to-the-second accuracy. This is not advertised as a feature.)

Users pay a fee of 25 cents per transaction on top of the normal parking charge.

So why don’t we have this in Toronto? In fact, Impark, which operates some 60 lots, mostly in downtown Toronto, has the service available at some facilities. However, Green P, in spite of advertising campaigns that imply a puzzling belief that parking spot selection is based on brand loyalty rather than price and location, has yet to introduce anything similar.

It’s unclear why not. Back in September of 2011, Councillor and current TTC chair Karen Stintz came out in favour of adopting some kind of remote payment for parking. City council voted to have City staff look into the matter. Since then, there have been no public announcements on the topic. (Stintz and the Toronto Parking Authority had not yet responded to our questions about this by publication time.)

Remote parking payment is a good idea, and one that has been thoroughly tested elsewhere for more than a decade. Is it time to reopen the discussion?

Public Works looks at public space, urban design, and city-building innovations from around the world, and considers what Toronto might learn from them.

Photo by JeffStewartPhotos, from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Last month, Santa Clara California became the first US city to offer free outdoor Wi-Fi access to all residents.

The service isn’t encrypted, and the speed is less than that of a 3G phone, so it’s not suited to doing your banking or streaming HD movies. But it beats spending the day at Starbucks with a laptop and a cold latte.

Wireless is now as ubiquitous, and almost as necessary, as basic utilities like water or electricity. Providing universal access across cities, either through government funding or through some form of public-private partnership, may be an idea whose time has come.

Toronto has toyed with the idea of free Wi-Fi in the past. In 2006, Toronto Hydro Wireless launched the One Zone network, which provided service in the downtown area. There was a free period, but it only lasted six months. Although Hydro claimed success, the idea never really caught on. In 2008 the system was sold to Cogeco, which still operates it as a subscription service.

In 2009, Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong (Ward 34, Don Valley East) became an unlikely champion of free-to-users web access. His idea was based loosely on San Fransico’s 2008 Free the Net program, during which cloud-computing firm Meraki Networks provided Wi-Fi throughout the city, with a focus on low-income areas. But Minnan-Wong’s proposal never gained traction, and Meraki’s California experiment in public internet shut down quietly several years ago.

Besides San Francisco, other efforts elsewhere have been abandoned. Last year, Seattle gave up on municipal Wi-Fi after nine years of commissions, reviews, and testing.

In Philadelphia, a 2004 plan to blanket the city with Wi-Fi collapsed when, in 2008, Earthlink pulled out and sold the partially built-out network to the city. Under financial pressure and meeting intense resistance from powerful cable and wireless companies, the Wireless Philadelphia initiative is apparently in limbo. Its website is now offline, with no forwarding address.

In spite of this history of early enthusiasm followed by high-profile failure, things may be looking up for municipal Wi-Fi networks. Wireless technology is more mature than it was in the mid-aughts, and cities are adopting it internally, for business purposes, which might make it easier to roll it out to citizens.

It may be that the notion is unlikely to find active support under Mayor Rob Ford’s gravy-obsessed administration, but with municipal elections a bare year and a half away, it remains an idea worth exploring.

Public Works looks at public space, urban design, and city-building innovations from around the world, and considers what Toronto might learn from them.

Photo by Danielle Scott, from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

In the effort to find the $2 billion a year Metrolinx says will be needed to build enough new transit infrastructure to keep the GTA from permanent traffic disaster, the rubber has finally hit the road.

On March 18, the Toronto Region Board of Trade released a report recommending four revenue-generating measures: a one per cent regional sales tax, a levy on commercial parking, a regional fuel tax, and the conversion of existing high-occupancy lanes on expressways into toll lanes.

On Tuesday of this week, Metrolinx saw those four recommendations and raised the Board of Trade seven more, including highway tolls, transit fare increases, and property tax increases.

And Mayor Ford diverted himself from shouting “pants on fire” at the Toronto Star long enough to make a gagging sound and mutter some shrill irrelevancy about a casino.

There’s little enthusiasm for paying for transportation initiatives. A poll in March suggested that more than half of GTA residents don’t support the revenue tools proposed by the Board of Trade, with the highest level of opposition coming from older, suburban non-transit users who support Rob Ford.

Nevertheless, Toronto’s gridlock disaster is only going to get much, much worse for everyone, no matter where they live or how they get around. And notwithstanding our collective preference not to pony up personally (“Why should I pay for people who are too lazy to drive?”) we, the people, are always the ultimate source of funding for public works.

The key need is to enhance the public understanding of how we’ll all benefit from transit investment, regardless of whether we drive a Suburban in suburbia or jam ourselves daily onto the petri dish of cultural and bacterial diversity that is the TTC.

There is a template. In 2008, residents of notoriously transit-averse Los Angeles voted in favour of Measure R, a 30-year, .5 per cent increase in the local sales tax, earmarked specifically for transit projects. The new tax allowed the city to borrow against future revenues and shift 14 new projects into gear. (Angelenos have their limits, though. A vote last year to extend the tax an additional 30 years failed to meet the required two-thirds majority by .06 per cent)

A case study from Northeastern University on the Measure R campaign looked closely at what allowed it to succeed. It found that the structure of the campaign and the players were critical.

Move LA, a coalition of environmental, labor, and business leaders headed by former Santa Monica mayor Denny Zane, played a pivotal role in building widespread support for the initiative. Move LA is funded by private and corporate donations.

Also, the official “Yes on Measure R” campaign, which explained and promoted Measure R to the public, was able to raise $4 million in only two months, with 80 per cent of that attributed to the work of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Advertising spending was focused largely on cable and radio spots, to reach a broad audience.

Measure R also benefited from the LA Metro Transit Authority’s pre-existing Imagine campaign, which solicited public ideas and feedback on potential transit projects. It’s credited with helping to boost popular support for the proposed tax.

And there were a number of other things that contributed to Measure R’s success.

The proposed plan behind the tax had to be widely known, and it had to be popular. The plan’s architects accomplished this by bundling public transit investment with road improvements, to ensure all regions and parties perceived some benefit. Frequent polling allowed the campaign to monitor the public mood and respond to it.

Even more critical was collaboration by stakeholders from different groups, which, among other things, attracted attention from politicians.

But what the report really drives home is the role played by leadership: that of Zane, of Mayor Villaraigosa, and of others within the community.

Toronto has some leadership of its own. The Greater Toronto Civic Action Alliance has mounted a “What Would You Do With 32?” campaign to drum up support for funding Metrolinx’s transportation initiatives (the name of the campaign is a reference to the average 32 minutes that better transit would supposedly save each resident every day). Former mayoral candidate Sarah Thomson is promoting the one per cent sales tax solution through her Toronto Transit Alliance.

Still, all the sound and fury has yet to translate into meaningful public support or political consensus around necessary transit-funding tools. To date, politicians at all levels, while acknowledging that something must be done, have been terrified of offending voters by promoting any specific type of funding (except for our mayor, whose objections seem to be based less on fear and more on ignorance and general contrarianism).

Toronto has advantages over Los Angeles when it comes to transportation issues, in particular wider acceptance and understanding of how public transit can make a city livable. But we need our leaders to worry less about their jobs and think more about our future.

Public Works looks at public space, urban design, and city-building innovations from around the world, and considers what Toronto might learn from them.

Image from the New York City Mayors’ Office Flickr page.

With the advent of this Information Age and the proliferation of mobile devices, the public pay phone is often viewed as an anachronism, as obsolete as the porn theatre or the library.

However, a contest run by the City of New York that challenged entrants to bring the pay phone concept into the 21st century produced ideas that could keep some version of the classic public amenity on streets for years to come.

New York organized the contest as a way of generating fresh ideas before the service contracts on the City’s supply of 11,000 pay phones come up for renewal in 2014. There was a need to determine if the phones should be maintained, and, if so, how they could be made useful to a population that is almost entirely digitally independent.

All entries to the Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge were judged by a few criteria, quoted here directly from the contest’s website:

• Connectivity: Ability to connect New Yorkers and enable communication, including for safety and emergency purposes.
• Creativity: Originality, innovation and quality of idea.
• Visual Design: Including visual appeal and user experience.
• Functionality: Flexibility, versatility, scalability, accessibility and sustainability.
• Community Impact: Support of local residents, businesses and cultural institutions.

Applicants were also asked to consider ways for the new phones to generate revenue for the City.

The winning entry, called NYFi, came from the architectural firm of Sage & Coombe. The NYFi looks like a 10-foot-tall, two-sided smartphone (a smaller version is proposed for neighbourhoods or historical areas where payphones are not currently allowed) with a thin profile, for aesthetic and practical reasons.

It features an open Wi-Fi portal, as well as a touchscreen with a variety of apps to let users perform urban-type functions like calling cabs, adding money to their MetroCards (which are transit fare cards), checking maps, or even making phone calls. In commercial areas, the default screen would be advertising until touched. Open infrastructure would permit the addition of new apps over time.

The contest winner isn’t necessarily going into production. It will, along with the contest’s other top finishers, be taken into consideration as NYC narrows down its specs for the replacement project.

If NYFi or a close relation does get implemented in New York, it would be nice to see Toronto replace the broken-down eyesores on its streets with something similar.

Public Works looks at public space, urban design, and city-building innovations from around the world, and considers what Toronto might learn from them.

Houston, Texas, wants to make recycling easier, and they just won a million dollars to do it.

There was a time when no one recycled. Everything we were finished with—from rotting acid-drenched batteries to the marrow-sucked remnants of your KFC Tuesday shame-fest—went to the local dump to rest forever, or until unearthed by alien archaeologists digging through layers of fossilized Huggies to figure out what the hell happened to the species that created all this mess.

Now we know better, of course, and depending on where we live, we separate our tossables into different combinations of glass, plastic, organics, and so on, and then ship off some portion of them to be processed and reused.

But for all our good intentions, separation sloth and uncertainty about what goes where ensure that items that could be in the recycling stream wind up in landfills instead.

The reverse is also true. In Toronto, it’s estimated that around 20 per cent of what’s dropped in blue bins has to be rerouted to a dump. Materials in the wrong stream have to be removed and redirected at recycling facilities, which costs time and money.

Now, the city of Houston is preparing to use technology to address this flawed human link in the green-disposal chain. The idea is untested, but was judged viable enough to score a million-dollar prize in the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge, which asks cities across the United States to come up with “innovative ideas for solving major problems and improving quality of life.”

The Houston plan is to build a state-of-the-art recycling plant that will use technology from mining and other industries to free residents from confusing, onerous trash-sorting. Instead, machines will do it for them. The concept is being called “cost-neutral” (the City is looking for a public-private partnership to build the actual facility) and proponents hope it will raise the amount of trash diverted from landfills from the the city’s current 14 per cent to 75 per cent within a few years.

If things proceed as planned, in the future there won’t be a need for Houston to rely on the intentions or intelligence of human beings. Houstonians will be able to throw everything into one bin, and the magic garbage robots will take care of the rest. And the idea isn’t pie in the sky, according to Houston mayor Annise Parker’s press-release writers, who observe that the relevant scanning, sorting, and shredding technologies are all ready in use in the resource extraction industries. It’s just a matter of combining them in new ways, they say.

The program, with the egalitarian monicker “One Bin for All,” is essentially a more sophisticated take on what we have in Toronto, where residents are only asked to separate trash, recyclables, and organics (versus dividing into cardboard, plastic, glass, and other subcategories) and where we all ready divert almost half of our waste away from landfills. However, Toronto still requires about 50 workers to manually pick out contaminants from the recycling and direct them back into the crapstream.

Besides the obvious advantage of less garbage in the landfill, more efficient sorting would mean fewer garbage truck miles, resulting in a reduction in CO2 emissions equivalent to the output of about 5000 cars. It would also put more money into city coffers, because recycled material can be sold off.

Will it work? If it does, the largest city in America’s oil state may look greener than Toronto.

Public Works looks at public space, urban design, and city-building innovations from around the world, and considers what Toronto might learn from them.

We’re used to the proliferation of smartphones, smart TVs, and smart refrigerators in our private lives, but intelligent technology is also changing the way we manage public space. Chattanooga, Tennessee is installing thousands of wirelessly networked LED streetlights that reduce crime while improving energy efficiency.

Atlantic Cities reports that the City initially installed the futuristic LED lights as a response to gang problems in downtown Coolidge Park.

Individual lights can be brightened or dimmed as needed, meaning criminal activity can be spotlighted. The system can be controlled from the inside of a squad car on the scene. After 350 lights were installed in the park in 2012, crime rates plummeted. Officials were sufficiently impressed enough to order another 27,000 lamps from Global Green Lighting, the supplier, for use around the city.

Because the streetlights are hooked up to Chattanooga’s city-wide Wi-Fi network, they offer other benefits. Brightness can be manually adjusted from a central office, rather than with light sensors or with timers. And the lights can be set to flash in a tornado, or during other emergency situations.

The new lights are also able to automatically report malfunctions to the central office, greatly reducing the need for maintenance checks. They can even tally their own electricity usage and send it directly to the utility company without the need for a meter reading.

The combination of LED lamps and the wireless control capability is expected to save the City about $2.7 million a year.

City officials also point to potential future uses of the combination of Wi-Fi and physical infrastructure (i.e., lamp poles), such as adding other wired tools like cameras, or even air-quality sensors that could alert police to the presence of meth nearby.

Apart from a slight sense of creeping Big Brotherism, the new smarter lights and related innovations present mostly positives, and may well be the way of the future.

Could Toronto be an early adopter?

Don’t hold your breath. Apart from dropping $20 million on the lights, Chattanooga has spent the money to roll out that previously mentioned state-of-the-art, city-wide Wi-Fi network (presently for use by municipal agencies only), which is key to leveraging the new technologies. Traditionally, Toronto has taken a conservative approach to spending money up front to gain benefits down the line.

The truth behind the tales people tell about Toronto.

Model fallout shelter, Queen’s Park Crescent and College St., July 1960. Courtesy of the Archives of Ontario (C 5-2-2-47-3).

There’s a story about a secret fallout shelter at Queen’s Park, supposedly constructed during the Cold War to save the provincial government from nuclear annihilation. Was it real—and could it still be operational?

Well, no. But the tale isn’t that far from the truth.

Many people today don’t realize just how fearful of atomic apocalypse everyone was in the ’50s and ’60s. It wasn’t all ironic-with-a-nervous-giggle like last year’s Mayan apocalypse, or even a fill-the-tub-with-drinking water-just-in-case situation like Y2K. The Cold War was a continent-wide panic attack in slow motion that lasted for more than a decade.

And while school kids were being taught to duck and cover under their desks, (presumably to avoid the trauma of seeing the blast that would incinerate them), sturdy underground shelters were being constructed for the political leadership that would cheerlead survivors into rebuilding civilization once the radioactive dust had settled.

In Canada, the most well-known of these shelters was the so-called “Diefenbunker” outside of Carp, near Ottawa. Nicknamed after Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, the hideout was a poorly kept secret even as it was being built in the late 1950s. Essentially a huge concrete box buried in gravel, it was designed to keep several hundred select federal officials safe from Communist aggression, up to and including a near-miss from a 5 megaton bomb (about 350 times the size of the device that made Hiroshima famous).

This Costco-sized supercrypt was for the elite feds only, of course. Lesser public servants would have been expected to ride out the hostilities in basic fallout shelters or remain on the surface, mutating quietly in preparation for future careers fighting chainsaw death matches at Thunderdome.

The City of Toronto had its own mini-Diefenbunker, located under an old farmhouse outside of Aurora. The Metropolitan Toronto Emergency Preparedness Centre couldn’t withstand a nuclear blast, but the underground 35-by-60–foot concrete shelter would have shielded occupants from fallout while they coordinated a response more effective than leaning out the door and shouting “Everyone OK?”

It’s not clear precisely who would have fled north had hostilities broken out, but most likely the group would have included the mayor, a few key minions, and some military personnel. (Toronto’s mayor during the most dangerous years of the Cold War was Nathan Phillips, who came out ahead by becoming the namesake of the place where Gord Martineau spends his New Year’s Eves, rather than the man who presided over the reduction of the city to glowing rubble.)

With the other levels of government prepared to hunker down, it’s not surprising that the provincial pols would have wanted some of that sweet bunker action.

Now, this is where we’d do the big reveal if we hadn’t already told you that there’s no shelter under Queen’s Park, but since we did we’ll just say straight out that the provincial hideout was way out in Trenton, Ontario. Intended to accommodate the premier and other officials who didn’t rate the federal bunker but were too important for Aurora, it housed two large generators, as well as supplies and amenities sufficient for a prolonged stay underground.

None of the above bunkers were ever used for their intended purpose, of course. The original Diefenbunker is a museum, Aurora’s is a private residence (although it’s expected to be opened up for Doors Open Aurora next year), and the Trenton facility has had its entrance bulldozed over.

So why the myth of the Queen’s Park shelter?

Even on cursory examination it’s unlikely. Toronto would have been an attractive secondary target for Russian bombers flying over the pole to the Eastern U.S., and with the provincial parliament a stone’s throw away from the likely Ground Zero, there would have been no basement deep enough to prevent legislators from becoming shadow puppets.

Most likely the idea came in part from a model fallout shelter set up briefly at College Street and Queen’s Park Crescent in 1960, as part of the government effort to convince the population that a post-nuclear-war lifestyle could be fun—like camping, only with Geiger counters instead of transistor radios and cholera instead of s’mores.

The appearance of an apparent bunker right next to the legislature, along with the general understanding that governments were wily enough to have some plan to survive the coming apocalypse, probably led to the widespread belief that there was a hidden pleasure dome of bottled water and corned beef hiding under Queen’s Park.

But there wasn’t, and isn’t. And if the missiles ever do fly, our MPPs are going down with the rest of us.

Public Works looks at public space, urban design, and city-building innovations from around the world, and considers what Toronto might learn from them.

Image courtesy of STM.

Loyalty programs are a big deal these days. From coffee-shop punch cards to drug stores aggregating your history of shameful purchases in return for free shampoo, everybody wants to give something back to the customer. And of course, they also want to keep the customer coming back.

Now, Montreal’s transit authority, STM (Société de transport de Montréal), is launching a loyalty program for transit riders. Currently in pilot under the name “Apollo,” the plan offers special deals and discounts from merchants and cultural organizations to participating holders of STM’s fare-payment option of choice, the Opus card.

STM’s program differs from other loyalty programs in that rather than accumulating points for rewards down the line, participants can derive instant benefits, using their mobile devices.

Users provide basic data about likes and dislikes, which is then funnelled into a system built by STM and its technology partner, SAP. The system has the ability to recognize where a rider is on the transit system. As a result, merchants can make on-the-spot personalized offers based on a rider’s stated preferences and geographic location (recognizing privacy concerns, the system is firewalled to ensure that no specific customer can be identified by the marketing group).

For example, if you’ve identified yourself as a doughnut aficionado, you might exit the subway and get a text offering a free coffee at the Timmy’s down the street. (If there isn’t a Timmy’s down the street, you’re not in Canada.) Or, if your falutingness is a little higher, you could be presented with opera tickets at a discount.

There are also potential transit-oriented benefits. For instance, program participants can be rewarded for using transit more frequently, and they can receive real-time “premium information” about congestion on the system so they can change their routes accordingly.

STM hopes the plan will drive increased ridership and bring in new money from business partners. The partners benefit by reaching a large group of targeted customers likely to use their services. And users, of course, get info and offers designed to gratify instantly.

The program is currently in testing with about 20,000 users, and is expected to roll out to a broader group sometime this spring.

While a program like this might be nice for the perpetually cash-strapped TTC, Toronto is hamstrung by the fact that the Presto card and other 20th-century forms of payment won’t be rolled out across the subway system until the end of this year, and patrons will continue depositing tokens into streetcar and bus fare boxes for some time after that (presumably while doffing their fashionable beaver-pelt top hats to the genial conductor).

Moreover, the payment technology used in Montreal isn’t the same as the stuff used here, so it wouldn’t be a matter of just moving some code down the 401.

But at the very least, this is the kind of program that bears investigating. And now would be a good time to start.

A virtual grocery store in Philadelphia. Photo courtesy of PRNewsFoto/Titan.

Sick of beef jerky and Skittles for dinner, but too tired for shopping after work? What if there were a service that let you order your groceries while commuting, so you could have them delivered when you get home?

That’s what online grocer Peapod is doing in the United States. Last year they set up virtual grocery stores at stations along the SEPTA commuter rail system in Philadelphia in the form of billboards that replicate supermarket shelves full of selected consumables.

Commuters with smartphones can download the Peapod app and scan the bar codes of appealing comestibles for later delivery. The app itself offers a much wider variety of products to choose from.

The service is convenient for people who’d rather not spend their precious leisure time food shopping, and of course Peapod benefits from a captive market of consumers woozy and starved after a day at the office.

Less than an year in, the idea has been successful enough to be rolled out to subways and commuter rail lines in seven other U.S. locations, including Boston and Washington, D.C.

Peapod isn’t the first company to offer groceries on the go. In 2011, Home Plus, the South Korean subsidiary of British supermarket giant Tesco, began selling virtual groceries in the Seoul subway. The idea took off, with the company reporting a 130 per cent jump in online sales in the first couple months after the launch.

Online grocery shopping is already well established in Toronto, so implementing this would be a matter of some enterprising retailer working out the details. One minor caveat: although GTA commuters would probably jump at the chance to order baguettes and butter chicken lasagna while waiting for their rides, the present lack of Wi-Fi or cell service in our subway system would limit the snack surfing to the above-ground parts of TTC and GO stations. But the TTC is working on bringing cell service to subway platforms, so this idea could get easier to implement in the not-too-distant future.

CORRECTION: February 28, 2013, 11:45 AM Due to an editing error, the photo caption in this post originally stated that the photo was taken in Chicago. That is incorrect, and has now been fixed.