Would you like some spare change?

It was sort of a New York moment.

I was riding the subway, in Toronto, last night at about 9:45 pm. Westbound on the Bloor line, the train had just left the St. George station. Then I hear a gruff woman’s voice behind where I’m standing. She is yelling, “Change! Change!” As I turn around, she is shaking her hand, palm up, with a handful of coins in it. She jingles them under the nose of a seated passenger. “Change?” He mumbles, “No, sorry.” She does it again to a woman sleeping and slumping in her seat. The sleeper continues her slumber, unmoved. The begging woman proceeds to poke the sleeping woman, who is startled awake, looks up to see this scruffy woman asking for spare change. She shakes her head no and goes back to sleep.

The woman turns to me, holds up her hand showing me all the coins and yells, “Change?” I reply, “No thanks.” She moves on.

About half way down the subway car she raises her voice even louder, announcing, “Ladies and gentlemen I’m very hungry. I haven’t eaten for three days. I am living on the street and it is very difficult for me. Please help me, I need money to buy some food.”

A woman reaches from behind me, dumping a handful of coins into the begging woman’s hand. There was no “thank you”, no “God bless you”, no reply, nothing. The begging woman turned away, stood in the middle of the rumbling and rocking subway car and looked through the change in her hand.

To the shock and grins of various observers, including myself, she picked out the pennies and dropped them one by one on the floor of the subway car. Then she dropped a couple of dimes and nickels. She hung on to everything quarter or larger. I looked back at the woman who had given her the handful of coins. I’m not sure what I was looking for; closure to a strange anecdote, perhaps. She looked ashamed.

Ashamed for giving a disturbed, probably homeless woman money? Or ashamed for thinking of getting up and picking up the unwanted nickels and dimes? Not sure.

The strange occurrence reminds me of a trip to New York City in the late 1990s. This was before Giuliani “removed” all the street people. I recall being impressed with one man’s sign: “Need money for booze, drugs and hookers.” I thought it was great because he was being honest; that there was something so urbanely kitchy about it.

So I gave him a handful of pocket change, while a friend snapped a picture (of which I no longer have a copy). The man with the sign then proceeded to pick through all the change I had handed to him and handed back all the Canadian money (which had mixed in my pocket when I had entered the US).

I suppose now even beggars can be choosers.

Found this on the net, thot it was appropriate. "Help me - I am a disabled clone war vet. Need $$$ to build death star."

Beta-fish, free to a good home

This special, scaled friend, once the centre-piece at a guest table at our wedding, has been living with my best man. Alas, the introduction of multiple felines into that household has ousted the sociable swimmer.

Going by the name of So-Crates, he comes in his own bowl, with gravel, food, and requisite water-treatment chemicals. He is also big and colourful, and can aid in the reduction of stress through offering his companionship.

He requires little work and effort in the way of cleaning and feeding. Consideration should be given for households with cats and dogs; this could be trouble for our water-bound hero. Support for So-Crates and his adoptive family will be provided by Marta's Pet Shop and family (basically myself and A).

Please reply in the comments if you are interested in sharing your home and family with So-Crates. Sushi restaurant operators need not apply.

Flexible infrastructure

As I wrote the post about B-Society and the advantages of business and society running in an early and late shift, I thought about the competition for space in our commuting infrastructure. I have so often been stuck in traffic based on volume. Three lanes of bumper-to-bumper line-ups, waiting to get ahead by inches, and then there is the three lanes that take traffic in the opposite direction, empty. Wouldn't it make sense to use a lane or two of those to ease on the unidirectional heavy flow?

The centre lane on Jarvis Street in Toronto, from Queen Street to Wellesley Street, can be either a northbound or southbound lane, depending on the time of day and rush-hour requirements. This is sort of what I'm talking about, except on a much larger scale. I'm actually imagining the centre cement guardrails on the major highways of our city being shifted over to increase the number of lanes for traffic in one direction, and reducing it for the opposite direction. Actually, true express lane segments of major North American highways can be operated as reversible flow facilities or bi-directional facilities. This means that the centre section of the highway can be used for one direction in the morning and the opposite direction in the afternoon.

With a limited quantity of on-line research, I have found a major infrastructure building project in the US that is pursuing a similar theme. There's an expressway in Florida that is putting in a major capital investment in building a second level, 3 lane express, segment on the median of an existing highway. It is intended to be reversible for morning and afternoon rush hours.

What Toronto needs is not so much the investment in concrete building, but an initial investment in understanding where the problems are, when they happen, and how the existing infrastructure can be used to ease the pressure.

A flexible system of transportation arteries, enabling non-time-bound infrastructure of city transactions, would waste less time, use less fuel and encourage more productivity. Furthermore, this type of innovation would be adapting the system to the people who are the users; rather than forcing people to adapt to the system.

The city we love to miss

Liz Clayton has written a great little essay about Toronto from the late 1990s through mid-2000s, over at the Spacing Toronto blog. It reminds me that Toronto is a city that I love to miss. I like to travel and tell others in other places, and other travellers about Toronto. I like to be one of Toronto's ambassadors. I enjoy coming home to Toronto. Either after a short trip, back to comfortable, known places and landmarks. Or after longer trips, to return to see what has changed and what's stayed the same.

There are some great memories in this fine city.

The tyranny of early rising

There is a movement that is trying to change the way the business world perceives night-owls and late risers. There has for a long time been a general 9-5 working society in modern western civilization. However, now more than ever before there is recognition that some people are early risers, happy to slot their 8 hours of work in from 7-3 or 8-4 or 9-5, etc.; and there are also late risers, who might work just as hard and efficiently, but from 12-8 or 2-10 instead. This was me during and immediately after my undergrad degree at the University of Toronto. However, as I joined the regular business world, I adapted my sleeping and waking patterns to fit the 9-5 regime.

According to the research described in this article from today's Globe and Mail, circadian rhythms which are delayed from the normal early rising society are not necessarily based on laziness or bad choices of how one spends their time (at night), but on genetic predisposition. There is a gene called Period 3, and 3/4 of our society has the long form of it, which causes them to wake early enough to work from 8-4 -ish. The remaining quarter of the population has the short form of this gene, which causes them to be night owls, and wake later in the day.
With this recognition, businesses need to change to enable some people to start later and finish later, and not penalize those who have trouble adapting to "regular" working hours. The movement pushing this education on businesses is called B-Society. It refers to those with the long form of the gene as A-people, and those with the short form are called B-people. While the movement started in continental Europe, which can be noticed from the style of English used on their web site, it has since moved to Canada, and the rest of the world.

The second of the 10-Commandments of B-society states:

"We are calling for an uprising against the tyranny of early rising, and for a better world where a diversity of daily rhythms is acknowledged and respected, giving us the opportunity for a better quality of life, more productive working time and major socioeconomic gains once we no longer take up the same space on the same roads at the same time."

As populations grow, business hours expand, information technology enables easier world-wide communication and telecommuting, I think it makes complete sense to expect businesses to happen in shifts. It simply does not make sense for so many people to be competing for the same subway seat or highway lane at the same time, but for only a moment. Why not encourage an afternoon/evening shift? Ease the use of time-bound bandwidth, spread the valleys and peaks out, and have a constant running society.
I can think of at least one person who, upon reading this will be signing himself up to be a card-carrying member of the B-Society. Are there any others?