OC Transpo keeps its friends close and its enemies closer

Some of my regular readers will remember my recent tangle with Ottawa’s Mayor, Jim Watson. The subject of our skirmish: Ottawa’s transit system. Specifically, the antiquated fare system that still relies on cash fares, paper tickets, or monthly passes which can only be purchased at select retail stores or a small number of [often overcrowded] transit service locations.

But have no fear, the future has arrived in Ottawa!

Sort of.

Some time back, Ottawa’s transit czars started braying about the arrival of PRESTO. PRESTO is a stored-value card system which you can reload online from the convenience of your own home like something right out of the early 2000′s!

Sarcasm aside, this is a significant step forward and I waited as information slowly trickled out about PRESTO’s arrival in Ottawa. Initially we heard May, which unsurprisingly slipped to June in much the same way that our buses seem to arrive late despite their unreliably named schedules. I took interest as I started seeing mounting brackets for the PRESTO card readers adorning bus interiors and eventually a rare reader itself.

The City began to trumpet the rollout of PRESTO with a splashy launch program offering free cards (normally $6) for the first 200,000 people to convert. That this launch release coincided with the announcement of another round of fare increases and the termination of the small but popular ecoPass service (an annual transit pass offered through/subsidized by employer payroll deductions) seemed to run against the fundamental basics of Public Relations logic, but finally date was set: June 10 cards would be released and in July the service would go live.

In the midst of this process Ottawa’s transit service experienced a major (and long overdue) management shakeup: senior managers were swept out and a fresh-faced outsider was installed. But the leaks in OC Transpo’s boat are significant and I do not envy the new team at the helm.

Like Watson they inherited a broken scow of a transit system in a city that bet big on buses in the 50′s (no doubt by many politicians whose pockets were lined by GM’s bus-mongers) and an urban plan (and the NCC shoulders much of the blame here) that deliberately advanced a low-density urban core girdled by bedroom communities within which the car is an essential king. Efforts are underway to reverse this half-Century of poor planning including a second run at Light Rail Transit (after the first one was horribly mismanaged), urban intensification, and even the resurrection and rebuilding an entire urban neighbourhood razed by planners in the 60′s (albeit, whether replacing Lebreton Flat’s once boisterous, low-income, organic diversity with cookie-cutter condos and planned streetscapes is a good thing remains to be seen this early in the project.)

These urban planning woes merely form the set-pieces for the disarray and chaos of Ottawa’s Wagnerian transit system struggles: articulated buses that threatened to snap in half, a laughably underused light rail spur line, a constant march of fare increases matched with never-ending service cuts, even a tragic shooting spree by a crazed employee exacerbated by a poisonous work environment. The cherry on top: the acrimonious labour relations between city managers and bus drivers that wracked it for years ultimately boiled over to a bitter, month-long transit strike in late-2008/early-2009 which stranded many and left a legacy of distrust in a system already vilified for poor service and a disaffected management. In a word, OC Transpo sucks.

But I want to believe. I ditched my car in 2011 and live near the city core adjacent to the heavily-serviced Transitway bus transit corridor that will eventually transform itself [someday] into a light-rail butterfly (if they can ever figure out a route alignment). PRESTO was a ray of light: maybe OC Transpo could reverse course, somehow pull themselves up by the bootstraps, slough off the heavy chains of the past and finally stand upright as a modern, efficient people mover that was customer focused. So I set an alarm on my phone calendar for June 10th so I could be at the vanguard of PRESTO hoping that somehow that shiny plastic card would restore my faith.

There were stumbles, mistakes (including a multi-million dollar contract with no legal review and exit clauses!) and further delays. Despite delays to the general release I managed to get a precious card…not through the original (now delayed) launch but through a much smaller fall-back plan: I am now a PRESTO card holder as part of OC Transpo’s Friends-and-Family pilot, offered to me by a somewhat forlorn PRESTO promoter at a transit station on the original June 10th launch date.

I dutifully registered my card online (paradoxically, there is no mobile PRESTO app despite PRESTO’s parent company Metrolinx’s $250 Million tax-payer-funded development cost and OC Transpo having a maligned iPhone application), loaded $10 onto the card (discovering, in the process, that it takes 24hrs for your balance to update even though the cash is sent instantly) and this morning I went to the bus station.

The bus rumbled up, its doors hissed open. I drew my card and tapped the contact spot below the glowing LCD screen and…nothing. The reader was frozen in a software-induced coma. The driver shrugged sheepishly and waved me on; on my return trip the bus wasn’t even equipped with the necessary hardware.

Somewhere software code is being sweatily debugged and hardware is being frantically deployed. And while engineers are scrambling to fix it, in this failure OC Transpo—and by extension the City of Ottawa—has ironically done something amazing: if ever so briefly, for a small number of citizens, Ottawa joins Portland as a transit utopia with the most public of public transit: free transit. OC Transpo PRESTO change-O!

I woke up this morning and like many Mondays (or mornings in general) it was a slow starter. I got my kid off to school, put coffee on, and settled in to check out my feeds and do some boot up browsing. Little did I know what awaited me on Twitter: Ottawa’s very own Mayor, Jim Watson (@JimWatsonOttawa) had some words for me and his Jimmies were definitely rustled:

@ALL_CAPS . Virtually all of your tweets are negative. Must be hard to be angry all the time—@JimWatsonOttawa

This was in response to a tweet I made the previous day (among others) wherein I griped about Ottawa’s public transit provider, OC Transpo, and my furtive attempts to find bus tickets:

Bus fare: $3.25 + $1.30 for a cookie I didn’t need to make change from a $20 + twenty minutes walking to two places out of bus tickets.—@ALL_CAPS

As Mayor, Mr. Watson is ostensibly in charge of transit policy for the city and OC Transpo is within his domain; it was nice to see that somebody was listening.

Complaints about OC Transpo’s service could fill many tomes, and Twitter itself is certainly full of customer beefs about planes, trains, and automobiles. Remove travelers grousing about airlines, buslines, and subway delays and there would be little left. Certainly as a Mayor, Mr. Watson should have developed a rhinocerous’ hide to deflect such criticisms [especially considering I never attributed this service failing to him or his policies.]

Now I am many things but ‘angry’ generally isn’t one of them: sarcastic—yes, funny—occasionally, useful—once in a while, but definitely leaning towards snarky optimism. Rather than retort I used it as an opportunity to further discussion and a number of people weighed in.

Ironically I rather like Jim Watson. He embodies a leftist, khaki-wearing vision for the city that I support. He’s pushing Ottawa’s beleaguered, long-suffering LRT system ahead, he’s pushed for better bike lanes in the core despite the inevitable opposition, and he’s even making progress with the terrible labor relations and management at OC Transpo itself. I live close to the core in Hintonburg and as a fan of urban design and planning and deliberately live in a walking neighbourhood; I eschewed a car last summer when my previous vehicle lease was up and now walk, bike, car share, or take the bus. My complaints about the systems are legitimate because they come from a user of the services and someone who is interested and invested in them being delivered more effectively. My beef about bus ticket availability is because I needed them to ride a bus system which is shedding riders.

Social media is an interesting thing and as a fairly active participant I like the fact that I can have direct access to people including policy makers and politicians. The Mayor of my city is dissing me before I even had breakfast. Me!—my mom will be so proud. This is better than jetpacks: this is technology and social media converging to raze social strata and level the playing field. It’s just Jim and I and our iPhones (well, I suspect he’s a Blackberry man) and I prefer that model of communication versus the approach fostered by other Canadian Mayors.

While I may not like what Watson had to say I do appreciate that the Mayor of Ottawa, surely a busy man, actually took the time out of his Monday morning to say something. And kudos that it is actually the Mayor saying what he thinks, not a PR hack or a regurgitated talking point approved by the City of Ottawa’s corporate lawyers.

Yes, politicians having unfiltered communication with constituents may lead to occasional scrapes but the occasional barb or faux pas is far more preferable than ivory towers and deep moats in a democracy. I’ll take a garrulous Mayor calling me out rather than a photo op, press conference or press release any day of the week; in fact, it’s pretty awesome.

I had high hopes for Google+ since I am not a Facebook user (more on that later). After the initial rush subsided I confess for the most part I found the level of engagement just wasn’t there: the content feels like a broadcast publishing channel for people (mainly marketing/social media/branding) to reach an incremental audience, or more likely, hoping to curry favour with Google in terms of search ranking. In a sense Google+ is like the ghost cities of China or tracts of big box stores on the fringes of new suburbs. It is shiny, modern, and new, but largely vacant and lacking the vibrancy of a true community.

While I pull some interesting posts and links from my other feeds the signal-to-noise ratio on Google+ seems low: the value is to the publisher (higher page rank, profile checkbox, another backlink) than it is to the audience. The content I find on Google+ tends to be self-serving to the publisher rather than them doing me a favour and pointing out something neat, novel, cool, or interesting. When I post something on Twitter or even Pinterest I do so because I actually find it interesting and hope someone else will do the same: Google+’s content feels like it’s designed for algorithms, promotion, or simply keyword slurry to fill the pipeline. Even though I’m in marketing myself there is nothing worse than an echo chamber filled with nothing but marketing messages.

I have long held the notion that people only have the time to dedicate to one network. Whether it’s Facebook, or Twitter, or Pinterest, or Reddit, it’s simply too hard to find the time to really cultivate and develop a valuable network once, let alone several times. For me that’s been Twitter, and while I’ve dabbled in others (LinkedIn, Flickr, Google+) I get spread too thin, find too much content duplication, or fall off for some of the other reasons I mentioned. Google arrived late to the social network party and people were already entrenched. It’s not really Twitter and it’s very similar to Facebook. It has some nice features but none are compelling enough to leave the security of an established network to go homesteading; if you break an axle on Google+ Trail you’re probably going to die of dysentery.

So for now Google+ will continue to be like the refrigerator when I’m hungry—no matter how many times I open the door to look inside there’s still nothing interesting to eat.

Lineup at TacoLot. Not pictured: a bunch more people off camera.

Sure, Hintonburg has seen explosive growth in eateries as of late: Back Lane Cafe (bistro), 1014 (tapas), a property-value increasing Bridgehead, an expanded Hintonburger (in a refurbed KFC, no less, to maintain hipster cred), the Hintonburg Public House, Burnt Butter (Italian fusion), Tennessy Willems (wood-fired pizza) and even a doughnut shop called Suzy Q’s (in Hintonburger’s old, albeit renovated, shack no less) join neighbourhood stalwarts such as Springroll House’s Vietnamese and Hino‘s Japanese. But a taco shop occupies a special, lofty perch in the foodie pantheon, particularly among the fickle Hintonbourgoisie and taco-starved Ottawa public in general.

A grand opening on Thursday drew a large crowd and much rejoicing commenced on Twitter. Having heard the news, and on account of living nearby and wanting to take advantage of the incredibly beautiful Summer-in-March weather as of late, I decided to walk over and check it out.

As I strolled I tried to deduce why the taco has become the new It food and what separates it from other similar contrivances in the gastronomic taxonomy—the wrap, the shawarma, the gyro, even Mexico’s own burrito. I could only conclude that the taco offers a cheap, meaty, spicy pick-me-up. It’s not a high-falutin food: it’s simple, honest, and based on my experience with itinerant taqueríacarts, perhaps a little dangerous.

While I pondered I closed the distance to The TacoLot, located in a cinderblock blockhouse on what was an old used-car lot. For local landmarks, this is directly next to the original Hintonburger/Suzy Q location forming a nascent Ghetto Foodcourt. The scene was pandemonium, with people waiting in line and milling about waiting for their orders. I thought grim thoughts but was pleasantly surprised that the order queue was orderly and processed very quickly, perhaps owing to the spare chalkboard menu annunciating the fillings du jour: chicken, beef, pork (I am told shrimp and the highly-prized taco arbiter, the fish taco, will also be offered later) [Edit: I have confirmed that there is a veg taco and also a salmon variety]. I ordered two pork tacos and a can of BlueSky cane-sugar cola and plunked down $12 for the privilege.

Choose your own meat adventure.

Order placed, I gave them my name and took a seat in the small collection of tables to wait. And wait. And wait. And wait in the hot sun painfully aware that despite Gino Vanelli’s sage advice, this former car lot offered zero shade for black cars…or taco shack patrons; some umbrellas would be nice. Luckily I had company but a good 25 minutes ticked by.

Now, I’m not the most patient person but today I was more sympathetic than usual: they had just opened and were clearly overwhelmed. However, despite the hungry throng they were moving through orders at a steady clip based on the rate at which other expectant tacoistes were collecting their paperboard takeout boxes laden with goodies. While I waited they ran out of chicken and I noted them pleasantly offering substitutions. The other thing that made the wait tolerable was that from what I could see, my patience would be rewarded.

Finally my name was called and I collected my prize. Served open, the soft-shell tacos are about 6″ in diameter and filled—although not stuffed—with carñe, pico, lettuce, and cheese. Thoughtfully a small lime wedge is included. Nothing left to do but roll up and eat.

Git. In. Ma. Belly.

After all this waiting I was quite hungry and I wolfed them down. The shells were soft and fresh, although as best I could tell are a flour tortilla (some debate has erupted over whether they have claimed house-made corn tortillas). The filling pork was in rough cubes—for some reason I was expecting pulled pork—which while tender and juicy was somewhat bland and under seasoned. I like my meat with a little more heat (#TWSS). Lettuce was crisp, cheese was cheesy, but the superstar was the pico. Bright, tangy, not too oily with chunks of cucumber, onion, quartered grape tomatoes (!), and the *perfect* amount of cilantro.

They were gone all too quickly. Which is a shame: although delicious the price is a bit prohibitive. I’ll be back but probably not too often.

• The Good—great tortilla (despite corn vs flour controversy), amazing pico, fresh, friendly service
• The Bad—spendy (for tacos), meat is a little bland, no condiments (hot sauce, jalepeños), no shade, some opening-week teething issues
• The Ugly—no complaints

UPDATED: Pics!

All this can be yours.

Movember is almost here. It’s my third year participating and my third year as team captain of The Movemberists. Last year we raised $6900 for prostate cancer research—that’s awesome. This year I’ve been training hard and you can see the fruits of my efforts in the picture above.

Movember rules mandate that I start Movember 1st clean shaven. That seems like a waste of a lot of awesome curly moustachery. So to kick Movember off I’m giving everyone a chance to own this fine piece of tonsorial work and do what you want with my mug: call it Fantasy Barber.

That’s right: you control the destiny of my moustache and choose how I shave on October 31st.

Here’s what you need to do:

1.  Make a Movember donation before noon (12pmEST) on October 31st.
2. Note the style or pattern you’d like me to shave my moustache into in your donation comment. The sky is the limit. Be creative.
3. If you’re the largest donation I will shave my moustache in the manner of your choosing, photograph it, and wear it as such as I conduct my daily business until Movember 1st when I shear everything off.
4. In the event of a tie bid: Moustache Thunderdome!!

Have fun and happy bidding!

Your humble moustache servant I remain,

Dave
Team Captain
The Movemberists

ps. There’s still time to join the team!

UPDATE!

12pm has arrived  and after a final tally Kim Horne is my moustache benefactor. Much to my relief she has requested the curly, Belgian stylings of Hercule Poirot rather than a more embarrassing Hitler or Passed-out-at-a-party-and-had-half-his-moustache-shaved-off-guy. I’ll will do my best to make both Kim and the esteemed detective proud. Off to shave. Pics to follow!

A big thanks to everybody who helped spread the word and donated—we raised $180 to get Movember started with style. The best part: we’ve got a whole month to raise even more.

AFTER PICS

I did my best with what I had and frankly, I am lacking in Mr. Suchet’s tonsorial prowess. The amount of moustache wax holding this together is truly terrifying and I can’t say I’m looking forward to picking up my son while done up as such.

Thanks again to Kim and everyone else who donated! Olde timey photoeffect to disguise lo-res camera phone snap.

Inspector Poirot?

I am sure that for a large number of users the sudden Klout haircut was little more than a trivial speedbump that has little effect on their online activity or network; at worst, perhaps, some might have felt a vague sense diminished self-worth as Klout’s external validation of their social media efforts evaporated. For those people the world still turns and maybe the ribbing about the stereotypical narcissism and self-absorption in social media is justified. People like to feel appreciated and Klout helped them feel that their online presence meant something to someone. However, there is a whole other class of social media users who use Klout for professional reasons. And those people were hung out to dry.

Like it or not social media has been infiltrated by the usual cohort of marketing, communications, and PR people that grease the wheels of the media machine [disclosure: I count myself as one of those weasely-weasels]. They buy ads, they promote brands, they increase awareness, and they foster communities that work both directly and indirectly towards corporate goals. This should come as no surprise to anybody. Like pretty much everything else in a business environment, the corporate bean counters need to measure things and to this end, many companies have flourished in the sunlight of social media, nourished by marketing budget dollars that need to demonstrate results. These companies have one thing in common: they all attempt to measure online activities and provide some quantitative basis for calculating the elusive Return On Investment (or, ROI in the acronym-heavy argot of business where words are time.)

Out of this field of companies that produce charts and graphs emerged one company that offered to explain social media success with single, easy number: Klout. People in social media like numbers—the bigger the better: how many friends, how many followers, how many likes, how many checkins, and how many +1′s you had became a way to assert your savvy. Klout was a great yardstick for hyper-social, type-A, extroverts who range over Twitter and Facebook: while gauche to directly discuss or compare numbers, a subtle sense of social media strata slowly formed, no doubt aided by tools like Seesmic that displayed a person’s Klout next to their profile (presumably to help determine if they were worthy of your attention).

Under the umbrella of influence [peddling?], Klout was able to co-opt brands to use Klout to promote their wares through people deemed influential enough to spread the word [and, in the spirit of disclosure, I've received plane tickets, hotels, a few meals, and movie tickets through said programs]. So Klout flourished and for a while, everyone was happy: the marketers got an easy number to demonstrate to brand bosses that social media spending was justified, the social media mavens got free stuff and bragging rights, and those who criticized such practices had a convenient target for their invective about the commercialization of social media.

But Klout was not content.

Their system has limits, the main one being that Klout’s scoring system is bounded by a top score of 100. As more people joined, more liquidity was created in the influence market. Scores floated upwards requiring occasional adjustments to relieve inflation-like pressures. Not everyone can be a top-tier tweeter and the Klout system requires scarcity: if everyone is highly-influential then nobody is influential.

Furthermore, that Klout’s methods and algorithm was unknown was troubling and cause for debate, demonstrably so after many revisions and seemingly arbitrary reassignment of Klout. Making the algorithm public would make it easier for spammers to game the system; or maybe it would expose the flimsiness of the premise and the small man behind the curtain furiously working the levers. We looked away not wanting to contemplate…for a while. Klout rejigged the scores of their black box algorithm several times without much incident, but maybe because previous tweaks largely kept scores the same (or lofted them even higher!) people remained complicit in a system we all felt iffy about.

However, this week’s round of changes saw most scores drop 10-12 points, triggering loud and immediate Sturm und Drang, with, ironically, the loudest wails hailing from the most influential quarter. And rightfully so.

Klout put itself in the position as the arbiter of influence, and the marketers, advertising, PR, and communications people latched onto its promise like Titanic survivors clinging to life preservers. They needed Klout to explain what happened to the bags of client cash stoking the hungry furnaces of social media campaigns. They needed graphs with trendlines showing incremental improvement, increased reach, and growing customer awareness. They needed a hero of social media metrics to help them fight against skeptical CEO’s and flinty accountants.

For a while Klout was that hero, but like the Pied Piper, that reliance carried an unexpected price. With the hooting and hollering today, maybe influencers (and the people who want to influence influencers) are realizing that maybe social media is more nuanced than a single number on a slide. And I think that realization is a good thing.

Social media is about relationships and the value of a relationship is not just about a quick flash and grabbing someone’s attention, it’s about building trust and assuring mutual benefit. Speaking to a well-connected friend a few years ago he told me he “didn’t get paid to make phone calls, he got paid because people would pick up the phone.” Social media is not about phone calls, it’s about the conversation. Maybe we need to rethink how (or if) it’s even possible to put a number on that.

Its million dollar price tag caused the usual kerfuffle over arts spending and the inevitable debate over what is art (apparently anything beyond Old Masters and Renaissance portraits doesn’t make the cut). I think it’s an amazing piece that creates tension: it appears unbelievably fragile as it reaches skyward searching for something like tree root searching for water.

The day was threatening rain and thunderstorms (not the best time to be standing at the base of a stainless-steel tower) and the angry sky worked as a nice backdrop and provided some interesting reflections and relief on what is normally a blinding reflection of the sun on its polished skin.

More info on One Hundred Foot Line by Roxy Paine.

Full picture on Flickr.

The following is excerpted from an email discussion between Stephanie Coleridge and I on the topic shortly after the announcement.

SC: I will not ascribe to the idea that Jobs’ departure spells the end of Apple. I’m concerned that from this point on if there’s a dud-product, people will point to Jobs’ resignation as the reason for the dud. But there were dud-products from Apple while Jobs was CEO [e.g. the G4 Cube]. There are exceedingly bright and visionary people all over the place; Jobs is not the only person who can be CEO of Apple.

After Alexander McQueen committed suicide, people wondered what would happen to the label he founded; 18 months later, Sarah Burton has taken over the design house and has more than adequately filled his shoes.

DH: Jobs’ main contribution to Apple’s success has been a vision of what computing should be and an unrelenting drive to produce amazing shit. I honestly think that any decently-sized tech company could do the same things that Apple does; the difference is no other company would go through the rigour of actually making products like Apple without a megalomaniac at the helm. I have worked for companies where engineers shrug and say “that’s impossible” or accountants claim “costs are too high”: companies that sacrifice excellence for expediency. These companies make banal devices with designs based on series of compromises rather than something that starts and finishes with what first seems like an unachievable idea.

The best comparison I can draw to Apple in the last decade is that of  NASA in the 60′s developing the tech for the Moonshot: smart people working in uncompromising ways. I’m not saying that Apple building consumer computing devices compares to the hard science and national prestige of the Apollo program, but both have a singular vision (whether Jobs or Kennedy) backed by near zealous goals and significant resources.

There are no committees at Apple—there is Jobs, who no doubt pores over things like an angry god before approving designs. Jobs cared deeply about some things, and more importantly, didn’t give a fuck about many other things (e.g. paying out dividends) which allowed Apple to rise from a nearly bankrupt company in the mid-90′s to supremacy today.

Tim Cook is a good business manager, and Jonathan Ives is a great designer. As long as there is some good tension between them Apple will survive, albeit they may lose some of the fierceness and singularity of direction. Apple may lose its way over time without a strong visionary at the reigns but things are safe for now: I suspect Apple’s roadmap and product development is well defined for the next 3-5 years and projects underway will continue relatively unabated. No plastic iPhones or MacBook Pros with multimedia buttons for a while.

Complex Numbers = No pants

You know when the writer and producer of a theatre production hands you a condom before the show that you’re not in for a run-of-the-mill Rom-com.

And certainly Nadine Thornhill’s Complex Numbers is anything but run-of-the-mill. It’s smart, funny, sexy, and geeky and has no fear treading deep into the confusing and taboo world of open relationships. Polyamory: check. Intraoffice romance: check. Analingus: check.

But it’s not all about sex, it’s about the people. And here Thornhill as Writer & Producer and Ken Godmere as Director deliver a piece that’s remarkably human whereas others may have been tempted to indulge in prurient exhibition. We watch mathematician/software developer Fiona (Stephanie Halin) and English academic Alex (J.P Chartier) navigate the dark, deep waters of an open relationship (with a little help from a course on the subject as voiced by Jenn Keay.) There are many rules but sometimes rules are broken. Sometimes with consequences.

The script is quick and clever, rapidly switching between intimate discussions about the fine mechanics of relationships to the minutia of mathematical algorithms with ease (and technical accuracy!) Staging is spare and simple and music provides a surprisingly effective means of setting the scene. Tim Anderson is excellent as Dan with great timing and delivery and Ellen Manchee as a female PHB (that’s Pointy-Headed Boss for non-Dilbert readers) gets some of the best laughs as Maggie.

The rapid-fire delivery could be a little smoother at times, and some of the scene cuts, while clever, could have benefited from a better timing. I saw Complex Numbers on its second of six nights so these quibbles can only improve as the cast and production gets into it’s groove.

Complex Numbers is never heavy but nor is it frothy. It’s a frank (perhaps explicit) exploration of couples and coupling and the irregular intersect between love, desire, and commitment. Like it’s namesake mathematical construct, Complex Numbers is comprised of multiple parts and dimensions that make it work.

Complex Numbers
60 minutes
Ottawa Fringe—Academic Hall
$12

Sunday June 19, 1:30pm
Monday June 20 9:30pm
Wed June 22 8:00pm
Thursday June 23 11:00pm
Saturday June 25 12pm
Sunday June 26 6:30pm

For information and tickets ottawafringe.com/complex-numbers