bennybox

Oh boy I could say a lot about the current FEDS exec elections at UW. I’ve been following it for some slc.com coverage. Can I be mean for a second? Henry Lim, I _really_ hope you don’t vote. He somehow manages to support each of the candidates I least desire to win. You gotta love the methodology.

Coming soon, my picks for exec positions, and my Sai Kit Lo conspiracy theory.

OK I never really cared about Feds but this time around, you gotta go out and vote for Sai Kit Lo. This guy’s the only independent candidate that has the guts to run by himself, and you gotta admire how he puts his money where his mouth is and spent some money on getting a professional website and pretty cool campaign posters. So for the Feb 14-16 election on www.feds.ca, I’m voting for:

President: Chris Ferguson (Team EZ Vote), because he has the funnest poster and has the same name as the poker player “Jesus”

VP-Admin and Finance: Sarah Beecroft (Team Lorax) because she is by far the cutest girl ever to run for office

VP-Education: Jeff Henry (Team Yellow) because he has the same last name as my first

VP-Internal: Sai Kit Lo (All For Students) because he has the guts to run as an independent

When your friend asks for your help, you don’t let them down. http://www.allforstudents.org/

Earlier this week, the City Council approved the second TTC fare hike in two years. A lot of people are talking about it. In particular, I like the post by Steve Munro, transit guy credited for playing a large role in keeping streetcars in service. Steve says that fare hikes are the lesser of two evils over service reductions. The hikes were neccessary due to the growing cost of fuel. I think we all wish that the extra revenue wouldn’t come out of the pockets of the riders, especially the ones who don’t ride enough to justify using a Metropass.

So now five adult tokens cost $10.50, and the cash fare is $2.75. That means a round trip will cost you $5.50 cash, and 10 tokens now costs you a Green Queen and a loonie. Royson James at The Star says this may be the tipping point - “the psychological barrier that leads to a bleeding away of riders”.

For supporters of public transit and the TTC, most will agree that ultimately, ridership is the most important number to watch. York Regional Transit has seen a 20% increase in ridership since launching VIVA last September.

The Star had a neat graphic that charted ridership over the years, with little points indicating fare increases and service stoppages. I thought I could do better, so I dug around for the data.

Methodology - I used TTC data from Mike’s Transit Stop, as well as data from Stats Can for inflation corrected fares. The values in the top graph were corrected to 1954 data as a base year, so we can see relative change. Fare data isn’t totally accurate - sometimes fares get increased in the middle of the year.

So my graphs show a couple relations.
# Red and green fare data show that fares have been growing much faster than inflation.
# There is a distinct relationship between Kilometres Travelled (should read “Kilometres Operated”, an indicator of quality of service) and ridership. The problem is improving service by two-and-a-half times increased ridership by about 30%. (This makes sense, long tail and power law theory suggests something like 20% of the routes see 80% of the ridership).
# Ridership peaked in around 1990, which was followed by a large fare hike. There was a subsequent drop in ridership, and probably the drop in service was a result.
# Ridership hasn’t returned to its peak, although service has.
# In 1954, the cash fare was 10 cents, or $0.76 in 2004 dollars.
# The second graph shows TTC operating profit, which have been negative since the early seventies. Yes, the TTC has been losing hundreds of millions of dollars over the past 20 years. Which is why government subsidies are so important, and why it’s hard for the TTC to stay modern in the public transit world.

Aside - Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent New Yorker piece is on the Power Law, or why graphs of the cost of managing homelessness and complaints against police officers are more like hockey sticks than bell curves.

The key numeric of the new fare prices, effective April 1, 2006 is the Metropass value. It takes at least 49.4 rides with tokens to justify buying a Metropass. Under the new scheme, it’s 47.5. By design, the number has been pretty much stable at 52 since the Metropass was introduced in 1980. So now that the Metropass is transferrable, it’s a better value. With 20-23 weekdays in a month, a lot of daily commuters should start buying their Metropass.

We remember seeing a community group that would ask store owners to have a discount for Metropass users, so to raise it’s value for consumers. Great idea.

The TTC hires UW co-ops, but I don’t think it’s a great career move to work for them full time.

And Mr. TTC people: Thank you for my shiny new (and lit!) bus shelter outside my house. After almost 24 years, I can now wait for the 53 Steeles East in style.

Oh yeah, and in fun TTC news, the police have cracked a $10million counterfeit token operation.

“45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks are tossed out yearly in China.”

It amounts to 15 million trees, with another 15 billion pairs of chopsticks exported. And don’t think that it’s China’s problem - at the current rate, China’s lumber resource will be consumed in 10 years. That’s frankly unsustainable.

Let’s forget that China’s economy is growing at an unprecedented and mathematically obscene rate. The government has been thus far unable to slow their growth to prevent the economy from crashing. The fact is that China is not relatively resource rich. Sure they have lots of landmass - but about 45 times the popultion density of Canada. Chinese farmers don’t live off massive acres of land, they grow food and raise livestock on something closer to the size of your backyard. But farm land is lost every day for new industry and China is already 40% of the world average in arable land per capity.

What does a resource starved economy do? It imports raw resources. Quite a few from Canada too. China loves us. Well, they love our rocks, our trees and our energy. Heck, they even use our “recycled” plastic waste to make Wal-Mart doorstops (we ship the plastics on all those empty cargo freighters seafaring back to China). How unsettling would it be if disposable chopsticks paved the way, or the Canadian forests rather? In Japan, where 99% of disposable chopsticks are imported, using Japanese trees for disposable chopsticks is illegal.

Does NRCan have a chopstick policy?

Here’s a neat idea. BYOC. Bring your own chopsticks. Encourage your local noodle hut to give you a modest discount (like a nickel?) for using your own cutlery, much like the discount you get for using your own mug for coffee. I haven’t heard of anyone that extreme in Canada, but it’s gaining popularity in China… apparently.

There’s a place in the University Plaza in Waterloo called “Lunch Box”, run by the guy who used to run Mr. Sushi. You get your meal on a styrofoam plate, with disposable chopsticks. Miso and tea is self serve in little styrofoam bowls. Obviously, chopsticks, cutlery and napkins are disposable as well. After a lunch hour rush, they’re throwing out at least two large garbage bags of uncompressed waste - I wonder what a waste audit on that place would yield. And the plaza landlord doesn’t offer recycling other than for corrugated cardboard. Customers drop off their cans and bottles in blueboxes in each restaurant - those reusables end up in the dumpster at the end of the day. I try to remember to bring my cans from lunch back to campus.

Kudos to Eugene and his sniper chopsticks.

Bring your own chopsticks. - [treehugger.com]
Say no to disposable chopsticks - [blog.bcchinese.net]
China’s Chopstick Crisis - [birdhouse.org]

DISCLAIMER - I’m using stats from three blog posts which don’t cite much of anything. So who knows about their validity.