Sustainable Commuting: the Bicycle

Here’s my latest contribution to blogTO entitled Sustainable Commuting: the Bicycle, excerpt:

“The bicycle is the most efficient means of human-powered transportation, meaning it can travel the most distance with the least amount of energy exerted. Invented in the 19th century, bikes take up very little space, they're quiet, and they don't pollute. In Toronto, there are few faster ways to get around the city. Safety, however, has always been an impediment to potential cyclists with our lack of bike lanes and the "door prizes" that Toronto drivers periodically hand out.”

Photo “Bicycle Race” courtesy of Tony the Misfit on Flickr

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Clean Energy – Circa 1970

Sketch it! is a fun section on The Urban Country where we feature random napkin sketches from our resident sketch artist and writer, George Pechtol (Against his will).

Today’s sketch features what we thought was clean energy in 1970.

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Finding Mecca in the Toronto Islands

Birds are chirping and the water splashes as I look at the horizon to see the Toronto city skyline contrasting the nature that surrounds me. In the heart of the city, a mere harbour away from the CN Tower, the Toronto Islands provide a Mecca that feels a world away from the automobiles, pollution and the noises of the city.

Instead of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a cottage that requires you to sit in your polluting automobile for 3 hours each way, I can walk to the harbour, jump in my kayak and arrive at this summer getaway in 20 minutes or less. Did you know that the Toronto islands comprise the largest urban car-free community in North America?

Watch this not-so-dramatic video played in double-speed of me “escaping” the wilderness of the Toronto islands to reveal the Toronto skyline:

The Toronto Islands consist of Centre Island, Algonquin Island, Olympic Island, Forestry Island, Snake Island and Ward’s Island (depending on which map you look at). Ward’s Island is actually connected to Centre Island, but we can just pretend it’s its own island.

In the video below, you can enjoy the silence with me:

There are 262 homes on the island. Homeowners own the structures but the city owns the properties which are leased to the homeowners on a 99-year lease. In an effort to prevent bidding on homes that would result in only the wealthy living on the island, Toronto Island Community was setup in 1993 to oversee sales of homes on the island. They use a lottery system to provide an equal opportunity for everyone to own a home on the island. When a home goes up for sale, if your name is pulled, you can purchase the home for the value of the structure (typically $100,000 to $150,000) plus the value of the 99-year lease (approximately $40,000 to $57,000).

If you purchase a home on the island, you’re obligated to live in the home for the majority of the year and you can’t rent it out. That would be fine with me; take a look at how beautiful this house is:

These pictures remind me of Algonquin Park:

If your name doesn’t get pulled for the island homeowner lottery, you could always buy a houseboat and dock it at Centre Island like this family:

This picture could have been taken on a Muskoka lake, but in reality it’s a home on Ward’s Island:

Beautiful sailboats docked at the Queen City Yacht Club:

Heading back to the big smoke:

Next time you’re thinking about driving hundreds of kilometers to find your natural Mecca, consider renting a canoe or kayak and exploring the Toronto islands. Nothing relieves stress better than being out on the water in a human-powered-boat and few things are more rewarding than finding nature without stepping foot in an automobile.

Check back in for more details on my 2-week Toronto to Montreal kayak adventure later this summer.

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The Future of Online Advertising

Dictionary.com's new homepage layout captures what online advertisers have been struggling with since the beginning of the Internet: to advertise effectively without impeding users.

Newspapers have been coping for years with the decline of print circulation. Most people get their news online and newspapers haven’t been able to generate the same level of revenue with their online readers.

Some newspapers (such as the New York Times) use a “paging” system in their articles, forcing the reader to browse through multiple pages to read an article. This generates more ad impressions, which in turn generates more revenue. Nonetheless, the New York Times still faces tough times ahead, mounting tens of millions in losses and hundreds of millions owed in loans. The Huffington Post asks the question “What Will We Do If the New York Times Tanks”.

It’s not as if the New York Times is losing readers. In 2000 the Times’ circulation was around 1 million, while they now enjoy approximately 15 million unique visitors each month. The issue with online advertising is that advertisers aren’t willing to dish out the big cash. Google AdSense for example pays when a user clicks on an ad, but actual ad impressions without clicks generate very little ad revenue.

My friend Nariman brings up a great point when he says “My eyes are trained to ignore ads; I don’t even see them anymore”. How often do you actually read the little Google “AdWords” advertisements? I know I rarely notice them.

Does anyone actually look at those ugly horizontal banner ads that some sites still use on the top of the page? Not likely.

That’s why websites are trying to seamlessly integrate ads directly into the layout of the page instead of using polarized ad “sections”. The new Dictionary.com layout is a brilliant example of how an advertisement can be integrated into the site and still be unimposing to the user.

Recall the early days of Flash when advertisers would pop up an ad in your face that forces you to click “close” before you can see the content on the page. If a website does this now, I’ll immediately leave the site because I feel violated.

The new Dictionary.com is next to impossible to ignore, but it’s actually visually appealing and it integrates nicely into the layout and overall design of the page. Could this type of advertising solve the problem newspapers are having with generating revenue?

If a newspaper can figure out how to integrate an ad into the page layout of a newspaper without imposing on the user, then advertisers would be willing to pay much more for ad impressions and it just might solve the cash crunch that newspapers are currently facing.

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Fallen Leaves as Sustainable Food Packaging

McDonalds could learn a thing or two from the Chinese about sustainable food packaging.

This delicious dim sum dish consists of steamed glutinous rice filled with chicken, mushrooms, sausage, scallions and shrimp. It’s called “Nuo mi ji” in Chinese (Mandarin) or “Lo mai gai” in Cantonese and it’s nicely packaged inside a lotus leaf wrapping. Although the Chinese have been serving this dish for a very long time, in modern times it illustrates an interesting opportunity for sustainable food packaging. I can’t think of a better way to package food than to wrap it inside a fallen leaf. Where I live at least, leaves aren’t going away anytime soon and nothing is worse than seeing 16 bags of full of fallen leaves inside those big orange plastic garbage bags headed for the landfill.

When it comes to fast food, there is absolutely no reason that a visit to a fast food chain should result in any waste whatsoever. In McDonalds’ 2008 Corporate Social Responsibility report, it claims that it has “been thinking and acting green for more than thirty years”, boasting that in the 1990’s, it “eliminated 300 million pounds of product packaging by redesigning items and reducing materials used.” Although this may be true, this is more of a testament to its wastefulness and poor packaging prior to the 1990’s than anything else.

It’s 2009 right now and when you walk into a McDonalds and order a single hamburger, you’re given by default a large bag containing the fully-wrapped burger and a pile of napkins, even if you’re eating in. You actually have to specify that you don’t want a giant brown bag (albeit one with interesting quotes from Olympics athletes scribed on it) and that you don’t need any napkins. After your meal, you’re presented with a single trash bin where you’re obliged to throw away the bag that was used for all of 30 seconds to transport your food from the counter to your seat, 20 feet away. And what do you do with the perfectly recyclable cardboard container that your burger was served inside? You have 3 choices: You can throw it in the trash bin, the garbage bin or the waste bin. Even to this day, there is no recycling container in McDonalds (in Toronto locations I’ve visited anyway).

Again from the Corporate responsibility report: “Our approach considers a product’s entire lifecycle. It starts with where we source our materials and the design of the food packaging. Finally, we look at “end of life” options such as recycling and composting. Why not make it sustainable from the outset? That’s the goal with our packaging.”

Wouldn’t it be great if that sentence wasn’t just a load of fluff? Wouldn’t it make you feel good if the pimple-faced McDonalds employee handed you a hamburger wrapped inside a lotus leaf or even at minimum some form of recyclable wrapping?

A friend attended a conference recently and was introduced to a company called Verterra who uses fallen leaves that would have otherwise been burned to create party-ready dinnerware (a fancy name for disposable plates/utensils). They use a process of applying steam, heat and pressure to create the dinnerware, and their products decompose after only 2 months. Here’s a fancy diagram that shows their process:

For some odd reason (wink wink) they fail to mention that their products are produced in India and shipped overseas so that we can enjoy our wasteful lifestyle. I suppose it’s a forgivable omission since a picture of a dirty ship in their fancy green diagram traveling halfway around the world probably wouldn’t sit well with prospective customers. I’m not one to support any kind of disposable dinnerware regardless of its composition, so this company wouldn’t earn my business anyway. But putting Verterra’s imperfections aside, the very fact that they’re using a natural, sustainable resource to create products that were historically unnatural and unsustainable is a step forward and opens all sorts of opportunities for other companies to follow suit.

The day that I see an influential fast-food chain like McDonalds using truly sustainable packaging is the day that I will start attending church, because if this were to happen, then there must be a God.

All Photos by James D. Schwartz / The Urban Country (With the exception of the Verterra diagram)

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Urban Motor Home

The Urban Motor Home challenges the conventional SUV to a duel

Life in the city is easy without an automobile; it’s healthy and refreshing to commute to work by foot, and I can travel most places I need to on a daily basis fuelled on peanut butter and jelly. There are however special occasions when having a car can be both convenient and advantageous.

Meet my Urban Motor Home: This 1998 Acura 1.6 litre has very low emissions and fuel efficiency comparable to a typical hybrid vehicle. It took a fair amount of time to pack everything aboard for this year’s first Algonquin Park camping trip, but I was finally able to strap on our 2 bicycles and kayak successfully without compromising one another. Although the weather isn’t as favourable as I’d hoped (high of 8 degrees Celsius on Sunday), we’re still planning to make the most out of this trip and welcome the summer in style.

Who needs an SUV when you can squeeze everything you need to into a low-emission compact automobile? Making the most out of small spaces makes life more interesting and you learn to appreciate things more when you have less.

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Carpooling with Twitter

While driving on the highway yesterday I had a thought. Wouldn’t it be nice if there weren’t so many cars on the road with so many empty seats?

 

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could easily find someone heading to the same destination as you to carpool with? Well Twitter could be the tool that makes this a reality. Who would have guessed that twitter could help us reduce our impact on the environment?

Several friends have asked me what the point of twitter is and why should they care. I typically respond by telling them that twitter is a good tool to share little tidbits of information with people with common interests.

“But Facebook already does all that”, they respond.

Facebook is useful for sharing information with people you already know, but Twitter makes it easy to share information with people you don’t know and you don’t need to expose personal information about yourself to your “followers”.

I find that twitter is currently good for exposing something interesting you’re doing, sharing details about a conference you’re attending, sharing an interesting article you just read, or sharing something interesting that you witnessed.

There are more useful applications of twitter that will surely surface in the future, and I think twitter would be a good candidate to coordinate carpooling.

Sure there are sites out there already dedicated to carpooling, such as carpool.ca or carpooltool.com or ride-share.com. But it would be much more convenient if for example, you tweet:

jamesschwartz Driving from Toronto to Montreal May 15th for the weekend #carpooling

Somebody else could do a search for “Toronto + Montreal + #carpooling” and they would see that I’m driving to Montreal (Don’t get too excited, I’m not actually driving to Montreal; this is just hypothetical).

It doesn’t get any more convenient than this; especially with twitter’s compatibility across hundreds of devices.

I did a quick search on twitter and at least one person has used twitter for this purpose:

“quin_tessential: . out of town friend needs ride to SF from Hollywood this Sunday. Anyone down for a #carpooling with a cute Swede?”

There’s of course some risk involved in using twitter to find carpool partners, but you could use twitter to leave feedback on your carpooling partner in the form of a “tweet” so that other people can see your feedback. They would simply search for “@jamesschwartz #carpool” to see what others are saying about their experience carpooling with me.

There are many possible uses for twitter, and we’re sure to see its usefulness expand in the future as it evolves to become a more mature method of communication in today’s high tech world.

Photo courtesy of jerryjohn on Flickr

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Medical Marijuana: Rights over Reason?

In May 2005, legal pot smoker Steve Gibson was asked to leave the premises of Gator Ted’s restaurant in Burlington Ontario.

Since then, Gator Ted’s owner Ted Kindos has been battling Gibson; mounting tens of thousands of dollars in court legal bills with his business on the line.

Gibson received a medical certificate to smoke marijuana in 2004 to help ease the neck pain he experiences as a result of a 1989 accident that occurred at his job in Mississauga. Gibson has been living off a disability pension since.

After the confrontation in 2005, Gibson went to the Ontario Human Rights Commission, claiming he was discriminated against because of his disability. Gibson won against bar owner Kindos, who was only acting on complaints from his patrons.

Kindos was prepared to settle the dispute and pay Gibson for “pain and suffering”. In the agreement, he was also obligated to train his staff on human rights code and post signs in his restaurant to show his customers that legal marijuana users are welcome.

It wasn’t until the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario warned Kindos that serving a patron who possesses a “controlled substance” is a violation of the liquor license act that Kindos decided to fight back.

As stipulated in the Ontario Liquor License Act as a condition of liquor sale licenses in section 45:

“The licence holder shall not permit a person to hold, offer for sale, sell, distribute or consume a controlled substance as defined in the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (Canada) on the premises or in the adjacent washrooms, liquor and food preparation areas and storage areas under the exclusive control of the licence holder. R.R.O. 1990, Reg. 719, s. 45 (2); O. Reg. 247/02, s. 17; O. Reg. 24/04, s. 1.”

Kindos and Gibson are  now scheduled to go back to the Ontario Human Rights Commission in a series of hearings that start on June 8th.

Kindos is looking to settle the dispute without being forced to violate the liquor license act and Gibson just wants to be treated like a regular cigarette smoker.

Did common sense just go up in smoke?

Is this really a violation of Gibson’s rights? Don’t regular patrons who pass through the front door have a right to not be exposed to marijuana smoke as well?

Doesn’t Kindos have a right to decide what’s best for 99% of his patrons?

At the end of the day, Gibson just wants to be treated like any other smoker. That’s why he’s fighting this, right?

We can only take his word that this is the case and that he’s not fighting Kindos for the $20,000 settlement that he was originally asking for.

Surely this can’t be about money, can it?

Couldn’t Kindos move the “regular” smoker section further away from the door and then allow Gibson to join the regular smokers?

When I asked Kindos whether he considered this option, the Gator Ted’s “Webmaster” (who has intimate knowledge about the case) told me that this wasn’t a feasible option given there’s a grocery store to the left, another restaurant to the right, and a parking lot out front.

In a complicated world where drivers are battling cyclists for the roadways and Hollywood stars are battling news agencies for twitter followers, this marijuana story seems so trivial.

But one man’s neck pain is another man’s pain in the neck, and this one will be settled in the courts.

Photo courtesy of Kesneme on Flickr

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Cherry Blossoms & Unexpectedly Friendly Geese

Spring is in full swing, summer is nigh, and the cherry blossoms in Toronto’s beautiful High Park are a sight to see. We cycled to the 398 acre park along the Martin Goodman trail to see the beautiful Japanese trees blossoming.

The sun came out periodically, though there was overcast most of the day.

A family of Canada Geese were crossing the path when we arrived:

The baby Geese were adorable. This little one was having trouble opening his eyes:

He let me get within 2 feet of him without any concern:

This goose was taking a nap and didn’t mind that I was mere inches away:

When the sun was hiding behind the clouds it became chilly, so the 6 little goslings tucked themselves under their Mom’s wing to keep warm:

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