Rules without Reason

Imagine if we still required these in our homes?

The other day, my friend James and I were out buying magazines and looking for a bar that felt like a coffee shop. I.e. I wanted to drink, but with comfortable seating and good lighting like at Starbucks. We were not successful, but it brought up the point, from some deep crevice in my mind, that it is required in Ontario that places that sell alcohol are required to sell coffee. This, of course, is some ancient provision that dates from the days we believed drinking some black coffee would sober you right up and you could drive home. What could be more insane? This is the equivalent, in my mind, of still requiring new houses to be constructed with coal chute doors for easy coal delivery. This requirement has obviously been long removed.

However, it got me wondering, what other rules are around that just don’t fit? This past week, I’ve noticed quite a few are still around.

Watch out for the cops while you hail that cab

In Ottawa and Los Angeles and many places in between, it is either illegal to hail a cab or for a cab to pick up someone off the street. Now, I don’t know how this affects things in LA, but in Ottawa, this is completely ignored. It’s not always easy to find one, but most every cab will stop to pick you up if you put your arm out. I’m sure there was some reason once upon a time for this, safety?, but that time has passed and no one even knows about it for the most part.

Similar limitations are artificially in place all over the place, including land-use planning. Minimum parking requirements coupled with aggressive transit-oriented development plans, for instance. Requiring a parking space with every ground-oriented home is another, despite many thousands of such homes from before this rule that function pretty well without it.

Governments, citizens and business need to work harder to identify these kinds of reasonless rules and eliminate them. And if libertarians, fiscal/pro-business conservatives and the like were serious about making government more efficient, they would spend their time finding these rather than attacking women’s rights and funding for education.

Inspiration from Prince Charles

I like Prince Charles. There, I said it.

There’s a very good overview piece in November’s Vanity Fair (print only) on his charities, causes and attitude towards his role as Prince of Wales and as future King. I for one take great comfort from the last paragraph of the article, reproduced below, emphasis my own:

One last question: Why does he do it all?
“The only reason is because I mind,” he says, in an almost somber tone. “I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t really mind. And I don’t know why I mind so much. But I always have done. So I can only assume it’s something that’s sort of inherent”

I think “I mind” has an elegant simplicity to it. Powerful and concise. Something to live by?

More from Vanity Fair here.

Maybe time for a new challenge

Stay tuned.

The ABCs of Walking Wisely

There’s much written and said about how suburbia and the associated mindset came to be in North American and general western society. However, nothing exemplifies the early exuberance, enthusiasm, and insanity as well as this clip found on the Pellinger Archives some time ago. As the title of this post suggests, it is called “The ABCs of Walking Wisely” and is a classic Sid Davis educational film, watch it here.

It’s about a ten minute piece – well worth the time.

Quick post: cited by Streetsblog

Just thought I would link to a comment of mine cited today at Streetsblog about Ed Fay, the most selfish idiot commuter in New York City, as it turns out.

See it Here.

Quick Thought

Has anyone else noticed that the Harper Conservatives appear to have abandonned their previous commitment to fixed election dates?

Am I just missing it, or is there no new fixed eleciton date?

Sore Loser

You’ve lost Norm. It’s to go fishing, permanently.

The Irrationality of Cash in Lieu of Parking

In a city with parking restrictions on major commercial office development that is investing in a new LRT system with a downtown subway, why are we still talking about cash in lieu of parking?

The theory behind it is that businesses that don’t provide enough parking spaces for their customers will push the burden onto the city to provide it, and should pay accordingly. EXCEPT, we’re also trying to encourage people not to drive when it is unnecessary and build a more urban community. How do you square these goals with a policy of punishing businesses operating with fewer parking spaces?

Getting rid of this tax on urban form would help reducing the imbalance of commercial viability between suburban and urban businesses and further discourage badly designed urban sprawl. The current policy only encourages more parking lagoons to avoid an unreasonable city fee.

Council was right to rule as they did, because there is no reason a restaurant in a dense urban neighbourhood should have let alone be legally required to have more than 17 parking spaces. If the city can’t lose the revenue, consider a new fee, a tax on parking spaces themselves. This would better capture the externality of providing suburban inefficient road, sewer and utility infrastructure, and encourage businesses to locate and design their buildings to allow more of their customers to reach them by foot, bike, or transit.

Insanity in Detroit

TEAR IT DOWN?

Not surprising, really, but have a look at this.

It would seem that some of the bright ideamen and women of Detroit City Council would like to see this glorious and historic train station face EMERGENCY demolition. Even as $8bn was put forward in the 2009 budget for High Speed Rail. Even as Ontario and Quebec move closer to funding a Windsor-Quebec City HSR corridor that could and would presumably connect to Detroit, even as Michigan itself proposes a $3.5bn midwest HSR project.

WHAT, WHAT are they thinking?

Even if this building were never to be used as a rail station again. Unlikely, but even then, why would you destroy one of the finest examples of grand railway buildings in North America? Detroit is a sad sad state of affairs, it would seem. Even outside GM headquarters.

Would they say the same today?

Just five years ago, I was a young naive first year student in POLI 211, Introduction to Comparative Politics. My professor, a former East German journalist, Dietlind Stolle, asked the class what they thought  equality should be mean. Was it equality of opportunity or equality in results?

The class overwhelmingly supported the former. My professor was taken aback.

Was my class simply a product of the highly successful times? Would this same result happen today at McGill? I wonder how I would have voted had I been an impressionable 18 year old political science major in 2009 rather than 5 years earlier.

Were we just drunk on economic growth, and has our expectation of government changed? I think it’s a question worth asking.