Checking the numbers twice on HSR

German ICE3 Train - © Wikimedia Commons

The last week has been a flurry of news. The next federal election is off to a start, a friend is nominated for the Green Party in Calgary-Centre, Canadian big city mayors are calling for a national transit strategy, and other exciting things.

Today, the Green Party of Canada released it’s HSR policy. Now, I’m onboard for HSR, at least as an issue of long-term connectivity between Canadian cities in relatively dense urban corridors. I believe that, in the long run, we are eventually going to have to do this as the price of energy goes up (which will drive up the absolute cost of train travel up but drive it down relative to driving to taking the plane). Like any megaproject which requires vast amounts of public spending, it will require a lot of planning and due process.

As soon as I read the GPC release, however, I knew that something smelled fishy. Let’s take a look.

Primer: Federal Politics and Canadian Cities

If you are like me, you probably caught Wednesday’s Globe and Mail article elucidating the positions of Canada’s big city mayors regarding the Federal role in urban infrastructure funding. It’s a good time to talk about it, with the hints of an election coming up. And I’ll make this clear: this needs to be an election issue.

In this article I’ll provide, with as much brevity as I can afford, what Canada’s political parties seem to be thinking regarding the subject.

How Google Profiles lost my seal of approval

There’s been a bit of news recently going around lately regarding attempts by Google to spruce up user profile pages through Picasa photos. This was rather expected, since social media is one of the areas that Google has struggled with (for example, see what a failure Buzz is). I use Picasa web albums right now as a small online storage space for my photos, but I’m very much on the fence about whether I’m willing to dump money for expanded storage or just get another HDD or two. Might honestly have to look into some kind of backup system that is a little more robust — who knows when my current drive is going to fail me and I’ll lose all my photos, and work… again.

Hell, I wonder that about this blog. At any time WordPress could undergo some massive failure and all of it – gone. Sometimes I wonder if that would be for the best.

But I digress. What caused me to go wide-eyed with surprise was something lurking under the surface of these profile changes. And it is certainly not typical for me to rant about Google.

What was hiding behind the curtains… can be found after the skip.

Calgary Historical Boundaries: 1884-2007

Following up after the release of the municipal boundaries for cities and towns, I have a new file up on the Data Project. This one contains all the different boundary changes for Calgary right from it’s incorporation as a town in 1884 right up to the last annexation in 2007. This file is mostly complete — I have purposely left out a small annexation in 1974 that, as far as I can tell, is merely the addition of a right-of-way that didn’t add any noticeable area to the city.

The file is based off of the History of Annexation map from the City of Calgary website.

Data Project: AB Municipal Boundaries Update

As the title says, I’ve updated the AB Municipal Boundaries on the data project (see the sidebar). Gone is whatever folder used to be there, the new file is directly under Alberta Municipalities.

For now, all that I have in there is the complete set of cities and towns in Alberta. I’ll add other types of municipalities later on, such as villages and M.D.s/Counties. The majority of the reference material comes from the town websites of individual towns, as well as of surrounding counties and the Municipal Government Board Boundary Search.

The variations in the presentation of municipal land use information I found could make a good topic for a later post. For now, I will just say: there are towns who seem to think it is acceptable to substitute brochure maps for legal documents. Hate, hate, hate, hate.