Urban Living

HRM wants to get more people to ride the bus: this is not the way to do it. They're already bad, and commuting to work in a car means you have air conditioning and your choice of music, and you aren't cramped in with strangers and people that haven't washed in days or weeks. There's also no need to put up with rude, arrogant idiots who think their bags are entitled to a separate seat.

It's been a year and a half now... so what does gas price regulation actually cost us? Media reports over the last year would have you believe somewhere between 0.9 and 2 cents per litre.

I've become more familiar with the Halifax -> Amherst -> Moncton -> Fredericton corridor over the past year, and there's lots to bug me about it. Merely crossing over the NB/NS border makes me wonder:

Why are gas prices so much higher in NS?

This post is inspired by actual events.

To those fools driving cars who expect that distant pedestrians will step into your path while you're still racing towards them:

reality check!

Give some damn indication that you're going to stop or slow down so that they can make it. No doubt they value your legs. Do you value your own? Put yourself in their place.

Don't burn up to the crosswalk, then screech to a stop and yell impatiently for the pedestrian to hurry up. If you look like a homicidal madman, you will be assumed to be one.

A while back my apartment complex got a new parking lot. It replaced one that had degenerated into weed-ville and pothole city.

When the lines were first painted in the blocks of spaces, the individual parking spaces were fairly wide, and had plenty of room to park a vehicle without worry about hitting other cars with the doors. The number of spaces? 13 per block.

That didn't last long.

Almost immediately, the old lines were scraped off (not a fun process to listen to...) and repainted. The new parking spaces, surprise surprise, were narrower than the old. Spaces per block? 15.

Licensing cats in HRM will be about as difficult as herding those same cats would be.

Picking up the paper this morning, I was hardly surprised to see the torrent of criticism targeted at Nova Scotia (and NS politicians in general) that we're backwards country bumpkins. One of the Chronicle-Herald columnists, Steven Maher, suggested that (among other things) that the bid was cancelled to maintain 'good graces' with the elderly in the province, and that the Commonwealth Games bid was unpopular only with the elderly. Nothing could be further from the truth.

And I'm glad that the politicians in their gold-gilded towers realized it, too. With so much wrong in this province (not to mention the debt), I'm at a total loss as to why dumping almost two billion dollars into a Commonwealth Games bid was even considered.

Sword-swinging fool, apparently. Donald has more details and also a comment from a CTV journalist looking for cell phone video.

Chock up another use for my new 'WTF' category.

Update: More facts are coming out. See the link above for more.

So, Nova Scotia Power's magic-bullet solution to the problem of outages during natural disasters is to cut down all the trees within 20' of power lines. Besides Halifax's reputation for being the 'city of trees', I find this suspicious for several reasons.

The first was clearly stated by one of the NDP MLAs: Trees absorb CO2... and what do NSP's power plants produce? You guessed it.

The second is that trees save a boatload of money in electricity costs, due to the cooling they provide to urban areas. This is cooling that would otherwise be made up by costly air conditioning. Hmm.....