Darcy Allan Sheppard, 1975-2009

 Fifteen years ago, on August 31 2009, Darcy Allan Sheppard encountered Michael Bryant on the most fashionable stretch of Bloor Street, between University Avenue to the west and Yonge Street to the east. What happened then depends on who you ask; according to at least one witness, Michael Bryant struck Darcy Sheppard with the front bumper of his car either deliberately or negligently, and then without trying to see if the person he had hit was all right as the law requires, had attempted to make off. At this point, Darcy Sheppard had latched onto the car, possibly to demand Mr Bryant live up to his responsibilities. Michael Bryant apparently responded by driving rapidly along the wrong side of Bloor Street attempting to shake him off. In the course of this action, Bryant drove so close to the street furniture he struck Darcy Sheppard against the street furniture, fatally injuring him.

Antisemitism: evaluating events in context

To go back to the beginning: antisemitism, animus against Jewish people for the religion they profess and the community they belong to, is absolutely wrong, as wrong as any other bigotry. Trying to excuse antisemitic actions or expression by claiming to oppose the policies of the current policies of Israel offends twice. Using Israeli policies as an excuse to target Jewish people make them scapegoats for policies they did not choose and often do not support. Antisemitic acts and expressions by those claiming to advocate a just peace in Israel/Palestine cast doubt on the sincerity of peace efforts while obscuring the hard reality: more Christians than Jews support the bad political and theological ideas behind efforts to subjugate, expel, or destroy the Palestinian people. 

None of this makes it any less important to report incidents fully and honestly.

Metal versus flesh

As a cyclist active in advocating for road safety and cycling infrastructure, I know very well the arguments for the inevitability of car use. Indeed, I personally have a somewhat sour perspective on the nature of these two arguments: our opponents seem to me to argue cycling is only possible when the weather is warmer than 22 degrees and cooler than twenty, for people who are younger than twenty-two and older than twenty-four, in the months before July and after June. I have certainly heard someone at a public meeting claim they could not ride a bicycle because they were over forty-five. As I recall, I was fifty at the time, and I still ride my bicycle at 67.

Beyond the excuses of age and weather, the other arguments against cyclists and cycling reflect the dark sides of our culture: the appeal to conformity, the association, now quickly fading, of the automobile with all things "cool" and masculine, or the risks of cycling, meaning, in too many cases, the prevalence of  violence on our roads, in the form of negligent or outright homicidal operation of motor vehicles.

Again with the modest proposals

A major impediment to systems to make traffic safer is resistance on the part of motorists. Like many other people, motorists tend to resist measures that could restrict what they see as their freedoms, even if they improve safety for everyone. The motoring public, which of course makes up a large proportion of the general public, will accept safety measures more willingly if these measures provide advantages for the drivers and owners of motor vehicles.

Police and Violence

 Justin King (Beau of the Fifth Column on Twitter and YouTube) recently noted, in a tweet, the lack of sympathy for police in an online forum for military and security contractors. After a gunman shot and seriously injured two Los Angeles Sheriff's deputies, he noticed a series of comments ranging from ironic to hostile, and it puzzled him.

I don't pretend to know the reason this particular community appears to have turned against the police, but I do know about some trends in police training. When I consider the notions of honour I observe among people in high risk occupations, and compare that with what I see in police training and police behaviour, I can see one explanation for the hostility in the series of tweets Justin King quotes. I may not have the right explanation, but I think my hypothesis fits the available information.

Watch any television show from forty years ago and compare it with just about any similar show today, and the change in police tactics and equipment will appear instantly. Where twenty or thirty years ago a pair of detectives might knock on a door, today's shows portray squads of officers in full body armour taking down doors with battering rams. Television may exaggerate, but it tends to track social change, and police behaviour has indeed changed. Radley Balko has written about this, calling the phenomenon The Rise of the Warrior Cop. In the most important sense, however, the dominant attitudes in police training and department policies make the police of today less truly warriors than the police of forty or fifty years ago. Driving a Bearcat or an MRAP and wearing a plate carrier and a tin hat does not make anyone a warrior. Trading a revolver for a Heckler & Koch rifle doesn't make anyone a warrior. One thing only defines a warrior: a willingness to die for something outside yourself. Warriors die for a principle, or for their friends, or their country. A generation of training and policy have combined to impress on police the idea they have a single duty: to go home at the end of their shift with a whole skin. In one particularly egregious case, in the United States, a municipality fired an officer for failing to kill a citizen, claiming he took an unacceptable risk by attempting to deescalate a confrontation instead of shooting. 

It is a commonplace to say the police have a problem with "bad apples", but I consider "the fish rots from the head" a more appropriate metaphor. Many of the issues with police behaviour arise from official policies and training, often with provincial or state and national support, and driven by promoters and influencers with an international reach. The result seems clear: much of official and unofficial police culture inclines officers to kill people in their charge rather than take the risk of making non-violent choices. It does not surprise me to see respect and support for the police have declined as well. 

Next steps

This morning, we celebrated a victory. We hoped, briefly, Doug Ford would respect this city, respect the law and constitution, and let the election, already seriously, disrupted, go ahead. By this afternoon, we learned to our distress he was willing to try to break a long and honourable Ontario tradition of respecting the constitution and the principle of judicial review, in order to enforce his will.

An open letter to MPPs

Doug Ford by Bruce Reeve

In a few days, possibly even less, you will receive a summons to Queen's Park to vote. Doug Ford wants you to invoke the "notwithstanding" clause in order to override a judicial decision preventing him from changing the size of Toronto's wards in the middle an the election already underway. You can do it, but you don't have to. You shouldn't.

The notwithstanding clause has always marked out a line, a line between the collective will and the rights of the individual. Until now, Ontario has always stayed on the side of individual rights. We have always had governments, and representatives, in this province who undertook to reconcile the desires of the majority with the rights of minorities. It made governing harder, but it should be hard. Members of the Provincial Parliament get offices and good pay and respect because you have taken on a difficult job. Make it easier by curtailing our rights and you lose that respect.

An open letter to progressive councilors

As a follow-up to my previous post on resistance to the provincial conservatives' agenda for our city, and the most effective way to resist it, I am posting an open letter to progressive councilor in the City of Toronto. This letter goes out to both those serving and those community members who aspire to serve.

Maybe my most unpopular post yet

I have taken made a number of unpopular statements in the city since my arrival at the beginning of 2002. This may be the least popular, partly because I do not much like what I have to say. Unfortunately, I think I have to say it, or someone does, because if I and other people do not say this, we may end up with a much worse situation than the one we now face.

Doug Ford has probably won this round.

We can still hope the courts decide the conservatives' reckless move to slash council violates the charter rights guaranteed to every Canadian citizen, but given the place of cities in Canada's constitutional order, it would take a bold court to make that decision.

Three modest proposals for the Toronto budget

Toronto has the lowest property tax rate in the Golden Horseshoe: the prosperous region stretching from Oshawa around the end of Lake Ontario to the Niagara River. We also have some of the best city services in Canada: services under increasing financial strain. Too many of our citizens have no homes. Some, and any is too many, die on the street every year. This is unacceptable; the city must fulfill its responsibilities, and that almost certainly means taxes have to go up.

Members of city council have suggested other revenue tools (read: new forms, more equitable forms, of taxation), but for now we have the old stand-by, property, or real estate, taxes. Since real estate taxes can and sometimes do have perverse and unfair effects, I present three modest proposals to make real estate taxes more fair, and to ensure the impact of the needed tax increase falls where it should: on those best able to pay.

Another modest proposal

By Guilhermeduartegarcia CC BY-SA 3.0,
via Wikimedia Commons

Almost exactly ten years have passed since Brian Ashton lamented the decision by the Canadian government to decline to submit a bid for Expo 2015 on Toronto's behalf. Today we s another flurry of efforts to promote a bid for the 2025 international exhibition. As before, press reports focus on the political and business leaders supporting the idea of a bid, with sometimes a quick note of the potential costs and the number of jobs "created". The reports don't address the environmental sustainability of the fair or of the changes to urban structure required for the fair.

How not to argue for the rights of cyclists

When cycling on streets and roads where motorists may have permission to operate their vehicles, cyclists have the right to decide our lane positions for ourselves. Human vision has a narrow acute range: the optimum resolution of our eyes covers just a few degrees. To cope with this limit, aviators train to scan the sky in small sections; without this training, surface motor vehicle operators focus on the road in front of the vehicle. Cyclists occupying the center of the lane have the best chance motorists will see and avoid us. Visibility plays a particularly critical role at intersections, and there cyclists riding to the side have the greatest chance of coming into conflict with motor vehicles.

There you have the safety case for cyclists riding in the center of the lane. It exists in tension with another safety imperative: separating traffic operating at different speeds, to avoid the need for sudden changes in speed and to minimize the consequences of an impact. Those two hazards: getting sideswiped by a driver passing too close and getting hit by a driver who sees us too late define the choices for cyclists. Taking all the risks and the known limits of drivers into account, it makes a lot of sense for cyclists to ride in the center of the lane when we don't have, at minimum, an adequate bicycle lane, and, preferably, a protected bike lane. Most of us who ride in North America can't count on bike lanes every where we go, or even most of the places we go. Most of us need to take the lane, and taking the lane serves us best when we do it without fear and without apology. At an absolute minimum, cyclists have, and ought to vigorously defend, a right to make our own choices about where in the lane to ride.


I ride in the center of the lane because I consider it safer. That covers it in three words: I consider it safer. John Forester and some of his supporters clutter the issue with irrelevant and frankly offensive detours from the single objective that matters: getting everyone from point 'A' to point 'B' alive and uninjured, notwithstanding the presence of two-tonne steel bombs.

Wait, what?

It looks like we started a trend.

Just over a week and a half ago, a driver came up Jane Street in West Toronto and managed to jump the curb and hit a small apartment building. The force of the crash threw the engine block halfway across the street, and shrapnel sprayed the fronts of buildings 15 meters away from the crash site, denting window mouldings and chipping stucco. The passenger of the car died, the collision damage made the building unstable and the city evacuated the residents.

One collision such as that makes sense: freak accidents happen. Then, a little less than a week later, another driver crashed into a convenience store at Harbord and Bathurst, in the middle of Toronto's downtown.

Just this week,  someone else drove an SUV into a building in the Beach, a neighbourhood in the city's east end. This time, the crash killed an occupant of the building: an elderly woman preparing for a morning dance class.

Really, Toronto motorists? Seriously? I get that some things come in epidemics, but driving cars into buildings? Some people really need to ditch the car or the truck and start riding a bus.

Seven reasons to want more people cycling

Every cyclist should want more people to get on a bike. Wherever, however, whenever you cycle, you should welcome two-wheeled, human powered company on the road. The reasons for wanting more cyclists include:

1. More cyclists means a healthier society. A huge body of evidence indicates that using a bicycle for transportation on a regular basis adds as much as two years to the average life span.
2. More cyclists means a happier society. Regular activity counters depression.
3. More cyclists means a smarter society. Regular physical activity, including cycling, improves alertness.
4. More cyclists means less local pollution from cars.
5. More cyclists means more provision for cyclists: everything from more bicycle parking to bicycle racks on buses.
6. More cyclists means motor vehicle operators expect cyclists, look for cyclists, adapt their behaviour to account for the presence of cyclists on the roads.
7. More cyclists cut into the sense of immunity that many motorists expect. In a community where the vast majority of people commute to work, leisure, shopping and even the gym by car, motorists know that other motorists will investigate and adjudicate any crash they get into. In a community where cycling plays an important role in transport, the motorist can expect that at least some of those who judge their behaviour will have no sympathy with those who choose to operate motor vehicles unsafely.

From error to error

A concerned student at University of Missouri
Photo by Mark Schierbecker (Own work)
via Wikimedia commons CC BY-SA 4.0 

Rod Dreher recently posted a web log entry in which he noted that the University of Missouri has fallen on some hard times. He attributes that to what he calls "craven appeasement" by the university of the protests that broke out at the university last fall. Mr. Dreher notably repeats the word "appeasement" twice and "cowardice" once, but does not allude to right or wrong, either in the ethical or the practical sense. He attacks the university, in other words, simply for an abstraction: abdicating authority.

The original charge of appeasement had a moral basis: the conviction, horrifyingly proved correct by subsequent events, of the wickedness of Hitler and the Nazi regime. At least in the case of the Munich agreement, the betrayal of the Czechoslovakian democracy compounded the immorality of appeasing Hitler. Whatever your opinion of the University of Missouri administrators, they did not commit anything like appeasement in this sense. If anything, the record of offences weighs against the powers that be of Missouri: whatever their faults, the student protesters do not carry the moral weight of one of the most inhumane slave economies on record, or of a terror state designed to keep African Americans "in their place". Nor did the protesters invent the carceral culture that has millions of Americans locked up for ideology and profit. Indeed, their protests against this plunder represent a genuine hope for renewing the American project.

Ride Line 9

UPDATED BELOW

A high pressure petroleum pipeline known as "line 9" runs through Toronto, roughly parallel to Finch Avenue for most of its length. Historically, the pipeline has carried crude oil from terminals on the East coast to the refineries in Sarnia. Enbridge, the owner of the pipeline, proposes to reverse the flow and have the pipeline carry diluted bitumen, tar sand, from Alberta to refine on the East Coast.

We know that the Earth's mineral resources will not sustain the kind of high energy, high consumption culture and lifestyle symbolized and enabled by the private automobile for much longer. Trying to keep on with business as usual, squeezing the last oil out of our planet, will come at a high cost to the world, to the living things on it, and to us and our cities. Line 9 goes right through some of the most ecologically sensitive and the most heavily settled part of Ontario. As the energy industry wrings the last drops of fossil energy from this planet, pipes such as line 9 carry more and more dangerous and corrosive substances.

Cycling culture offers an alternative to this ugly escalation of extraction, consumption, and waste. To demonstrate this alternative visually, I propose a bike not bitumen ride along the line 9 route, through some of the beautiful and diverse parts of Toronto. I tentatively propose it for the first Saturday of October: early enough to be warm for the ride. A Saturday one week after critical mass, should provide an opportunity for the greatest participation. An afternoon ride, starting at 3:00 pm, should take place in the light; the ride should take about two and a half hours at an easy pace.

The route I propose for this ride follows the route of line 9 closely, from Islington Avenue near the Humber to Leslie Street in the East.



For reasons of safety I am changing the ride start point to Jane and Finch, specifically Jane at the recreational trail crossing, just north of York Gate Mall (about a block North of Finch on Jane). Also, the ride will stop at Dufferin until 4:30pm, to give anyone who wants to join us after the Ice Ride a chance to do so there and then. 

These days, they come for the dictionary first...

Joe at Biking Toronto wants to ditch the word cyclist, and at first sight he seems to have a good argument. Goodness knows, with both the friends and enemies of cycling engaged in a demented race to pile more and more baggage onto this poor two syllable word, it should make sense to just chuck it and start over. Look at all of the attempts to define a cyclist: someone who wants to save the planet but won't bother to stop at traffic lights, an impoverished elitist, an altruistic member of a self-interested minority. Can we save this word? Do we want to save this word?

Speaking for myself, yes I do want to save the word cyclist. I want to cut the straps and let all the baggage fall off, but I want to keep the word. A cyclist can vote BQ, Conservative, Liberal , NDP, or Rhinoceros. A cyclist can obey all the laws with great care, or can proceed through the world making up his or her own laws. A cyclist can believe in capitalism, anarcho-syndicalism, or any other economic system; in representative democracy or absolute monarchy. A cyclist can love the planet, hate it, or believe it doesn't matter because the world will end next Tuesday. Only one thing makes a cyclist: the use of human-powered, wheeled transportation. Anyone who has used a bike reasonably recently can call themselves a cyclist.

The word "cyclist" describes those of us who ride bicycles with an elegance and brevity that the words "people who happen to ride bicycles" will never achieve; but I have two more basic reasons for not wanting to give up the word.

First, to the noisy minority that shows up in newspaper and blog comments after every story involving cyclists and whips themselves into a froth (and they do constitute a minority), the problem has nothing to do with words. I do not know what many of those people really object to, but they focus their venom on human-powered vehicles and those who ride them. Just as advocates for people with cognitive impairments gave up the word idiot, imbecile and retarded when these words each evolved from a medical diagnosis into a schoolyard taunt, if we start calling ourselves people who happen to ride bicycles, we'll start to read abuse directed against PWHTRBs. These days, before they come for the communists or the trade unionists, they come for the dictionary. Let us not kid ourselves: the ultimate target has nothing to do with the words we use, or even the actual technology that moves us. They want our freedom.

This brings me to my second point. Some years ago, on a visit to the ancient seaport of Marseilles, I encountered a young street tough who asked me for money. When I had none to give him, he snarled "Juif". What should I have told him? The truth? Je ne suis pas un Juif would hardly have sounded dignified. In the end, I had no good (verbal) answer for him and just treated his comment as a stink in the air, not worth acknowledging. The point for us: when someone attacks us, it may seem to make sense to separate ourselves from the kind of people we think our accusers must really dislike. But that kind of denial preserves neither our dignity nor our rights. If we propose to drop the word cyclist as a way to distance ourselves from those dirty lawbreaking anarchists, we might as well forget it and preserve our dignity.Maybe I see myself as better than cyclists who ride badly, arrogantly or confrontationally; maybe I don't. But to many of our opponents, just riding a bike makes me just the same as all the cyclists they criticize. Maybe we need to debunk their stereotypes, but we sure shouldn't surrender to them.

Safe in traffic: no one way

In his autobiographical Life on the Mississippi,Mark Twain writes of setting out as an apprentice to a Mississippi river pilot and expecting to learn the river, and finding out that instead, he had to do something harder: learn to read the river.

Working out the correct lane position for riding a bicycle likewise requires reading the street. The linked video (above) from the League of American Bicyclists, and even more the associated discussion, contain many claims about "the" correct lane position, one commenter going so far as to argue that a study from the UK establishes the correct lane position for bikes, worldwide. To his credit, the researcher concerned say he makes no such claim.

I would argue that no one rule works for lane positioning, even in a given city. In Toronto, the situation changes all the time. A ride on Queen Street at 1400 (2pm) on a week day, with parking in place, takes place in a very different cycling environment from a ride at 1700, with the parked vehicle removed (we hope) and large numbers of commuters filling the street. At any given moment, the cues that predict motorist behaviour, from the sound of engines to the configuration of their vehicles, allows a cyclist to decide when it makes sense to pass, and when it does not, how far into the lane to ride to keep the drivers passing at a safe distance, when to ride in the kerb lane and when not to.

It takes much less time and effort to learn to read the street than Mark Twain needed to learn to read the Mississippi, but it does take some effort and attention. Precisely because novice cyclists need time to learn the skills of reading traffic, bicycle lanes make sense: they allow new cyclists to observe traffic from a cyclist's eye view and a protected position on the road. But neither bike lanes nor any single technique offers a solution to bicycle safety: that comes primarily from education and enforcement directed at motorists, the operators of the really dangerous vehicles. The best safety measures cyclists can take for ourselves depend on observation and learning.

Time, space, and the suburbs

Last week I saw a movie at the Cineplex Odeon Queensway, a huge multiplex in Etobicoke. I have often enjoyed two pieces of sculpture on the property: a metal canopy by Jean McEwen entitled Between Heaven and Earth, and a soaring spiral tower (I don't know the artist's name or title) that has a weird resemblance to Tatlin's Monument to the Third International.

On this visit I noticed something I hadn't seen before: a row of beautiful old maple trees lining the parking lot to the northwest of the theatre. They were evenly spaced, with trunks I would guess about two metres around, and generous , spreading branches. From the leaf shape I think they were some less common type of maple, maybe mountain maple or striped maple.

I found it intriguing to speculate about who had planted them in such a regular way, and why. Had this row of maples lined the driveway of some vanished farmhouse? Unlikely, since there was no answering row of trees. Were the maples planted by some enlightened factory-owner to provide shade for picnicking workers at lunch? More likely, especially since this was, I believe, an important area for defence industries in World War Two. Or were the trees planted by the municipality to line a street, now swallowed up by the entertainment complex?

In any case, the trees provided a graceful link to an earlier time, a puzzling yet powerful reminder of the existence of the past amidst an instant landscape.

My second experience, somewhat related, occurred today. I visited Woodbine Racetrack (again, in Etobicoke) for the first time, accompanied by young lady, in order to watch the races and bet on the horses (we bet $40 and won $32, not a bad price for an afternoon's entertainment for two). The race track forms part of a very large complex. The building that houses the stands is a large, modern facility, impressive in many ways, with its horse-themed photomurals and super-efficient staff.

However, in some ways the building's slickness made it seem more like a mall--one felt this especially in the food court. It didn't have exactly the kind of rakish excitement that I associate with horse races in old Hollywood movies.

What fun then, to step out of the sliding glass doors, and find just the kind of simple, uncomfortable, outdoor stadium seats that one might see in a 1930s drama. The racetrack designers made a conscious design, in this part of the facility at least, to stick with tradition. We sat down, felt the cool breeze and we knew that our horse was going to win!