BRT Primer

See the draft London, Ont. Transportation Master Plan at Smart Moves Open House.

Taking the bus in London, Ontario, can be a nasty experience --- or so I've been told. I usually walk, or ride my bike, or drive my car. Like the majority of Londoners, for longer trips I prefer my car to the bus.

One of the few experiences I've had with London Transit was when my car died while downtown and I tried walking home. Not quite halfway home a bus pulled up and stopped. I was taking a breather and just happened to be at a bus stop. I explained I didn't have any change and was just taking a break from a long hike home. The driver looked at the sweating, panting, old geezer standing at the open door to his bus. He ordered me to climb aboard.

I thanked him. My failing, old heart thanked him. I climbed the stairs onto the bus and slumped down in the first seat. The very next day, I dropped off my fare at the bus terminal on Highbury Ave. I may not take the bus regularly but I think London Transit is a fine operation thanks to that driver's kindness.

Now, the London Transit Commission (LTC) is going to try and win not just my respect but my business. The LTC is unveiling the new Transportation Master Plan (TMP) May 16 in the Carousel Room at Western Fair. The promise is to put BRT at the core of  the latest proposal for curing London's mass transit ills.

What is BRT?

BRT stands for Bus Rapid Transit: a bus service providing a level of service comparable to rail when it comes to frequency of service, capacity, quality and reliability. Ideally, BRT accomplishes all this with greater flexibility and lower capital investment costs.

Knowing very little about BRT, I googled the topic and discovered the Valley Transit Authority (VTA) of Santa Clara, California has posted an excellent primer on BRT design, complete with guidelines. If your are going to the May meeting at Western Fair, take a look at the VTA posted report detailing their take on BRT.

An articulated bus used by the VTA, Santa Clara, CA on their valley rapid BRT system.

The BRT idea sounds good but note that valley rapid is still in its infancy. It is still being evaluated. This is an ongoing story as far as Santa Clara, CA. is concerned. We will just have to "stay tuned" to learn the outcome.

There is a BRT system in Ottawa, ON. You may be interested in the post Myth vs. Reality: Has Ottawa "BRT" Provided Light-Rail Service at Much Lower Cost? This article supplies more links if you want to dig even deeper. Keep in mind this info comes from a source that is not wowed by the BRT approach as followed in Ottawa.

A BRT line in Cleveland, Ohio has gotten mixed reviews.

I find it interesting that Cleveland, Ohio has a working BRT route. I believe it was Randy Richmond of The London Free Press who made a derogatory comment about Cleveland in one of the articles in the ongoing LFP series on improving London. I thought his remark was not only unnecessary but unwise. When looking for inspirational ideas for improving one's community, one should never flippantly write off another community.

Of all people, I should think reporters should keep open minds.



Grand Rapids, Michigan is one my favorite Rust Belt cities. It has had a tough go of things over the past few decades but the city has kept its spirit. The Heritage Hill area is quite remarkable and well worth a visit. Check the Internet and find a bed and breakfast in one of the old mansions.

Grand Rapids is giving serious consideration to a BRT route. The above video was done by a chap from Grand Rapids who went to Cleveland to see BRT in use.

Toothpaste for young children is fluoride-free

Toothpaste for young children is fluoride-free: Safe if swallowed.

When the fluoridation debate flared in London some time ago a columnist for the local paper, The London Free Press, told all those opposed to give their collective heads a shake. Even though I would not have counted myself among those opposed, I still gave my head a shake. When all settled, I found myself on the other side of the argument.

I'm not terribly frightened by the prospect of drinking fluoridated water. I used it to make my morning coffee without giving a moment's thought to the fluoride in my brew. So, why do I now side with those demanding the cessation of the fluoridation of London's water?

Well, a lot of folk are very concerned and I don't believe in upsetting folk without a good reason. Fluoridation does not seem to be a good reason. For all the talk about the clear, dental health benefits, it is impossible to track down the multitude of studies which supposedly back up the health claims.

If you want fluoride, and I do, brush with the stuff, slosh it about your mouth in your mouthwash, and when done spit it all out. The brief contact of fluoride with your teeth at these times is most certainly of greater benefit to your teeth than the water ingested over the day.

Read what the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care has posted on the Web in regards to reducing dental caries through the addition of fluoride to drinking water:

"Current studies of the effectiveness of water fluoridation have design weaknesses and methodological flaws . . . The magnitude of the effect [reduction of dental caries in the population] is not large in absolute terms, is often not statistically significant and may not be of clinical significance. . . . Canadian studies do not provide systematic evidence that water fluoridation is effective in reducing decay in contemporary child populations. The few studies of communities where fluoridation has been withdrawn do not suggest significant increases in dental caries as a result."

Right upfront I will admit to editing the above. But the fact remains that we do not have statistically significant evidence backing up the claim, a claim made even by the Ontario Ministry of Health itself, that "dental decay [rates] are lower in fluoridated than [in] non-fluoridated communities."

And a careful reading of the literature contains warnings for even believers in the value of the topical application of fluoride, folk like me. Under the headline, Acute Toxicity, the ministry warns: "Fluoride products such as toothpaste should be kept out of the reach of children since toxic amounts could be ingested via these sources." Adults are told to use just a pea sized amount and spit it all out when done.

When the ministry admits "the optimal level of 1.0 ppm was chosen, largely on an arbitrary basis . . .", one's confidence in the ministry numbers can waiver. It does not help that in the States the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have lowered the recommended level of fluoride in drinking water to 0.7 ppm. This is much lower than the "arbitrary" Ontario number.

Why did the Yanks lower the recommended level? "Water is now one of several sources of fluoride," they tell us. "Other common sources include dental products such as toothpaste and mouth rinses, prescription fluoride supplements, and fluoride applied by dental professionals." They give a lot of the credit for the significant decline in tooth decay in the U.S. over the past several decades to not only fluoridated water but to fluoride in toothpaste.

So why get your neighbour's knickers all in a knot forcing them to drink fluoridated water? Take advantage of all the alternatives and get the stuff out of coffee, tea, soup and everything else made with tap water. This is 2012 and not 1940. The time for adding fluoride to our municipal water may have passed.

No. 14 going on a hundred million (or more)

Thonet chairs in bentwood have their design roots reaching back into the 1830s.

My wife wants a new kitchen. Me? I'd just replace the worn flooring and get on with life. My wife's a fine cook. I doubt a new kitchen will improve her cooking. It certainly won't help the bank account.

The new kitchen is being designed as I write. Graciously throwing in the towel, I jumped on board. I immediately began searching the Internet for a new dining set. My search took me to the Thonet chair company. If you are like me, the name will ring no bells, but one look at the chairs and you will be flooded with memories.

I knew these bentwood chair designs were old but I had no idea how old. Nor did I realize that these chairs were once on the leading edge of innovative furniture design.

I believe this is the original No. 14.

It seems a German-Austrian cabinetmaker by the name of Michael Thonet in the 1830s began experimenting with bent wooden slats and glue for making furniture. After years of trial and error, he produced his No. 1 chair, winning a bronze medal at the 1851 World's Fair in London for his Vienna bentwood chair. He continued to improve his design and at the next World's Fair in Paris in 1855 he took silver.

Thonet was hitting his stride. In 1859 he created chair No. 14, possibly the first chair designed with factory production in mind. His unique chair went on to take the gold medal at the 1867 World Fair. On a roll, by the 1930s some 50 million No. 14 chairs had been produced by the Thonet factories.

If you've ever bought a piece of inexpensive furniture, the low price partially a result of it being delivered in pieces ready for assembly, you can thank the long gone Michael Thonet and his "chair of chairs."

Coat stand, Cafe Daum, Vienna, 1849.

The Thonet factory could cram 36 disassembled chairs into a one cubic meter box for shipping around the world. Each chair required only six pieces of wood, two bolts and a few screws. The design was ingenious.

If you want to move millions of chairs, Thonet made as many as 400 thousand chairs a year, you've got to have more than a neat design; You must be a superb promoter as well. Michael Thonet was both. He demonstrated the strength of his design by throwing No. 14 from the Eiffel Tower during the Paris World Fair.

In the early years of the 20th century, Thonet chairs inspired a number of other designers to create similar shapes in an easier to bend material: metal tubes. These designers included: Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, Mart Stamm, Miese van der Rohe, and Czechs Ladislav Žák and Jindřich Halabala.

In 1929 a French subsidiary was created to make the tubular steel furniture designed by Breuer, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. The Thonet Bros. company was making furniture history. Pablo Picasso, Lev Tolstoy, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and Salvador Dali are among the famous owners of Thonet made furniture.

The back of No. 18 now has two extra supports.

I found Thonet chairs are available from a showroom in Richmond Hill, Ontario north of Toronto. My wife and I made the two hour trip but my wife was not impressed. We're buying a Shaker inspired design made by some Pennsylvania Amish and sold in Birr, Ontario north of London.

 The "modern" Wassily Chair designed by Marcel Breuer in 1925.

My wife is letting me buy two No. 18s to appease me. Both will look good with my Wassily Chair which was long ago banished to our basement.

Is an egg for breakfast worth this?

The New York Times published an opinion piece today entitled: Is an egg for breakfast worth this? The piece brought back memories.

Years ago an egg farmer outside of London, Ontario was in trouble with the egg marketing board if memory serves me right. I wish I could say what the problem was but I can't. I recall so little I'd have a tough time finding the story even if I visited the public library. The London Free Press library could probably help me, if they still had a proper library at the paper, but they don't and so that option is closed.

What I do recall from my visit to the egg producing operation was the condition of the barn. It was hellish. Small cages, crammed with egg-laying hens standing on a coarse wire mesh, slanted so eggs would roll outside the cages for easy retrieval.

I'd been in filthy barns before, so the strong odour of the place did not come as a shock. What did surprise me was the condition of the hen's clawed feet. Forced to stand on a heavy gauge wire, their feet were calloused and misshapen. The farmer told me that sometimes the growths on the bottom of the chicken's feet would grow around the wires and he would have to take a sharp tool to cut the feet free.

When I told the editors what I saw, they told me this wasn't news; this was simply egg production.

I spent time on farms as a young boy. I knew that at one time this wasn't the way egg-laying hens were treated.

It's location, location, location!

This map showing B&Es adds weight to the claims of a senior LFP editor.

Today, The London Free Press crime reporter Scott Taylor told readers they have a one in 60 chance of being burglarized. Taylor tells us that last year there were 2,900 reported break-and-enters in London, a city with roughly 170,000 households and businesses. A little simple math and Taylor calculated his one in 60 number.

Back when I was still working at the newspaper, I used to give a senior editor at the paper a ride home from work. He lived in the southwest end of the city. One night we chatted about home break-ins. He told me his neighbourhood was very quiet and very safe with very few break-ins. He claimed that crooks were lazy and liked to burglarize homes either near where they themselves lived or near a main road. I gathered he thought crooks were so lazy that they didn't even want to drive too far off the crime beaten path. They like easy access.

If the editor was right, where you live in London will modify your chance of being burglarized. Using info and maps posted by Neighbourhood Watch I looked at Southwest London, the editor's neighbourhood. Then I looked at an area east of the core.

I have to admit that what I found didn't leave me all that surprised. When I worked downtown at the newspaper, the cars of employees parked in the company lots were regularly burglarized. For some years I lived just west of the core and break-ins were not uncommon. My one daughter lives in what is known as EOA, the East of Adelaide neighbourhood. She has had her home broken into as have some of her neighbours.

This is not to say there are no break-in in the southwest. There are. But the your chance of being burglarized in the southwest end of town are not as great as for those living in some other parts of the city. If you live beside a pedestrian walkway joining two streets, I believe your chances of being burglarized go up. As the editor said, crooks are lazy and like easy access. It seems both urban planners and urban burglars like walkways.

Some neighbourhoods and some home locations are definitely more at risk than others. When it comes to the burglary game, the dice are loaded.

During the same period as above, the editor's neighbourhood had no B&Es. None!

Newspapers have short memories

Newspapers have always had short memories. When the pressing demand is reporting today's news, it is hard to find the time to report yesterday's news. So the fact that reporter-poet Randy Richmond doesn't recall the city's previous vision for Reg Cooper Square comes as no surprise.

Yet, it is interesting to take a moment to reflect on the forgotten, but rather recent, past. The London, Ontario, downtown is not what it once was. No surprise here. Most downtowns across North America are not what they once were.

London, like hundreds of other communities, desperately wants to revitalize its downtown. The vast majority of Londoners live outside the core, work outside the core and shop outside the core. Why cities devote so much energy to their downtowns to the detriment of their suburbs is a puzzle.

Today's big idea on how to breathe more life into London's core is to take a fully functioning apartment building, along with the aging city hall beside it, and let the University of Western Ontario take over both. The apartment building would become a student residence, while the city hall would become a major component in a university campus growing in the centre of the city.

Centennial Hall, the third important building sitting on the edge of Reg Cooper Square would also fall into university hands.

To hear these plans discussed, one could be forgiven for thinking that no one had ever had any imaginative ideas about the area. But that's not true. The city planning division put forth a Downtown Design Concept some years ago. The study promised to "encourage new development . . . that will accentuate the Downtown's positive aspects and contribute to its functional success."

This plan had depth. It was the result of work done by the consulting firm Wallace, Roberts & Todd. The well known firm prepared the design concept and proposed guidelines for the Downtown. And what has happened since the release of the report? As far as Reg Cooper Square is concerned, nothing? Unless, you count continuing decay.

Was CBC's the fifth estate attack on Oxycontin the whole story?

This is an important additional note posted Feb. 3, 2019. Please read first.

An update on the role of opioids in the management of chronic pain of nonmalignant origin: The fact that opioids can improve the key outcomes in selected patients with chronic nonmalignant pain should not be ignored. A whole range of very serious long-term risks and consequences are, however, beginning to emerge, such as addiction, tolerance, OIH, cognitive disorders, and suppression of the immune and reproductive systems. Much more research is needed regarding the long-term consequences of opioid therapy.
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The Myth of Drug-Induced Addition. Source: Parliament of Canada

Sunday night the fifth estate looked into addiction problems associated with OxyContin, one of the most popular pain relief medications in Canada. The CBC program had a singular point of view: Oxycontin is a highly addictive, potentially deadly narcotic, over prescribed by doctors influenced by the drug manufacturer's erroneous claims of safety.

No big argument there, but is the fifth estate giving us the whole story? As a simple blogger writing from home, it is impossible for me to say. That said, I'm well into my 60s and worked for more than three decades in the media. I saw a lot of one sided stories and learned that many media stories making it into the top ten list had good hooks and played well at first, but, in the end, had little staying power. A lot of drug related stories fall into this slot: Think of the crack babies scare.

W. Joseph Campbell writes: "As I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the crack baby scare was a media-driven myth based more on anecdote than solid, sustained research." It turned out to be, as the New York Times put it in 2009, “the epidemic that wasn’t.' "

My years spent closely working with reporters have left me suspicious of one sided stories. Canadians, the CBC tells us, will ingest possibly 10 million grams of oxycodone, the active ingredient in OxyContin, for pain relief in 2012. That's a lot of oxycodone. With numbers like these, surely there must be something good to be said.

On the growing Oxycontin problem, Campbell quotes the words of a lawyer-politician, the Florida attorney general, who said: "I’m scared to death this will become the crack-baby epidemic." Which, of course, proved to be mostly an epidemic of media hype.

A little more googling turned up this positive story from Karen L. Simon:

I suffered for 20 years with an arthritic hip while being miss-diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. I finally got a doctor who cared enough to order a plain hip x-ray and I was able to get hip replacement surgery.

After the operation, my surgeon said that the femur head was half gone. Without pain medication there is no way I could have had any, I repeat, any kind of life. I was on pain medication for 20 years and went off with no withdrawal symptoms.

Your continued reports on pain medicine abuse simply make it harder for chronic pain patients to get adequate pain medicine. Believe me that if you suffered from pain 24/7, you would require medication. Please, please report on some other better subject.

Ms. Simon is not alone in singing the praises of Oxycontin. Very little searching will turn up hundreds of positive testimonials. What I found very interesting in Simon's story was she claimed to have used pain medication for 20 years without suffering severe withdrawal. Is this possible? The short answer is: Yes.

Let me quote Richard Pacheco of the Harvard Law School, who as a third year law student he wrote a paper on the use and misuse of OxyContin.

"The physical dependence associated with some drugs can be treated by gradually reducing the dosages of the medication to the point where a patient is drug-free and has no withdrawal symptoms or craving"

You may believe Pacheco or not, but be aware that media scare stories to the contrary there are many who agree with Pacheco. And, of course, many who do not.

Still, there are areas of agreement, right? For instance, OxyContin is highly addictive. Some of my quoted sources claimed OxyContin pills when crushed and then snorted or swallowed resulted in  almost immediate addiction, much like heroin. Crush it, snort it, and be left immediately needing to do it again and again. Bing, bang, boom and the addictive boom engulfs the unsuspecting user.

I've read this claim before and alarm bells went off. Immediate addiction, an interesting concept seeing that addiction involves a recurrent failure of control and a continuation of a behaviour with significant destructive consequences. 

It is a lot like reporting something is the first annual. If something has only been done once, it cannot be annual. Many "annual" events fail to be held again and many folk taking "immediately addicting" drugs do not develop an ongoing pattern of abuse.

I can hear the protests to this line of reasoning already. Fine. But a reporter has an obligation to report the whole story and the whole story is that many do not believe in "immediate addiction."

Terms like addiction, dependence, withdrawal are not the neat, clear cut descriptive words many in the media would like us to believe. Read the following from the American Psychiatric Association (APA) discussion of an entry in the upcoming fifth edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

"The term dependence is misleading, because people confuse it with addiction, when in fact the tolerance and withdrawal patients experience are very normal responses to prescribed medications that affect the central nervous system," said Charles O’Brien, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the Substance-Related Disorders Work Group. “On the other hand, addiction is compulsive drug seeking behavior which is quite different. We hope that this new classification will help end this wide-spread misunderstanding."

I don't think the media understand that there is a large group of people who would argue that dependence, tolerance and withdrawal are all very normal responses to oxycodone based pain relievers.

One person, claiming to be a legal user of OxyContin, wrote on the Net:

"To keep this within limits I will not get detailed on the benefits of Oxycontin. As you can read on the other forums it works. I take 80mg 3x a day and it works great. Been on it for 5 years now and liver test done last month was excellent.

I am tired of the bad rap this medicine gets though. There are even sites devoted to its removal by people who have lost loved ones who abused the drug. While I feel for these people, no one told anyone abuse this wonderful drug. When taken properly this medicine works excellent with little to no side effects.

It is said that you become dependent on this medicine but it is meant for long term and a good doctor will bring you down properly. So withdrawals should be minimum. This is a true wonder drug."

Let's give the last words to W. Joseph Campbell writing one of his Media Myth Alert posts.

(There is) a tendency among journalists "to neglect or disregard the tentativeness that characterizes serious scientific and biomedical research, and to reach for certainty and definitiveness that are not often found in preliminary findings."

Journalists pushed too hard on thin, preliminary, and sketchy data, and extrapolated rather extravagantly from small numbers of anecdotes. It’s a pattern that tends to repeat itself, as journalists fail to take lessons from misreported drug scares of the past.

"What reporters need to do,” the inestimable media critic Jack Shafer has written, "is challenge their sources in criminal justice, medicine, drug treatment, legislatures, and the user community when they make assertions of fact."

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Some years have passed since writing the above post. I was wrong. This story has legs. In February of this year, 2018, Reuters reported OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP slashed its sales force in half and would stop promoting opioids to physicians. This after widespread criticism of the ways that drug-makers marketed potentially addictive painkillers.

Read: The Promotion and Marketing of OxyContin: Commercial Triumph, Public Health Tragedy. 

I still question the reporting on the opioid crisis but there does seem to be enough blame to go around. Producers, like Purdue, have been forced by the courts to accept some responsibility. Users have always had to shoulder some blame.

But the days of the media slipping by unscathed may be coming to an end. CBC Radio reported, "the media perpetuated the notion that Oxycontin was the problem, the (Canadian) government reacted, Oxycontin was pulled from the market, and the supply was throttled.

"But drug markets are complicated and the notion that a supply line can be simply cut off without something else emerging to take its place is naive." Hence, the appearance of fentanyl and carfentanil. According to Dan Werb, the role of the media is to provide context. The media must dig beneath the surface. Link: Media Coverage Is Making the Opioid Crisis Worse.

Think of Portugal and its unique approach to the universal drug problem. Read: Portugal’s radical drugs policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it? This is an in-depth report from The Guardian. We need more stories like this.

According to the article, one critical change was the shift in language. Junkies became known more broadly, more sympathetically, and more accurately, as "people who use drugs" or "people with addiction disorders". This was crucial. In North America we still brand folk as junkies. Maybe there's a story here for the fifth estate.
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Some interesting links:

What Percentage of Chronic Nonmalignant Pain Patients Exposed to Chronic Opioid Analgesic Therapy Develop Abuse/Addiction and/or Aberrant Drug-Related Behaviors? A Structured Evidence-Based Review (Answer: a very small percentage of patients at 3.27%)

Addiction to opioids in chronic pain patients: A literature review (Findings: the prevalence of addiction varied from 0% up to 50% in chronic non‐malignant pain patients, and from 0% to 7.7% in cancer patients depending of the subpopulation studied and the criteria used.)

Most Drug Overdose Deaths from Nonprescription Opioids (This seems to contradict a lot of other posted information but...) The claim is made that the opioid overdose increase had little to do with prescription painkillers such as oxycodone or hydrocodone.
  
Long-term opioid management for chronic noncancer pain. Reviewed 26 studies with 27 treatment groups with a total enrollment of 4893 participants. Serious adverse events, including iatrogenic opioid addiction, were rare. One caveat: This study is almost a decade old.

But all studies are not positive: A Review of Potential Adverse Effects of Long-Term Opioid Therapy: A Practitioner’s Guide.

• Increasing numbers of deaths are due to opioid overdose among patients prescribed long-term opioid therapy to manage chronic pain.
• Opioid therapy can adversely affect respiratory, gastrointestinal, musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, immune, endocrine, and central nervous systems.
• The higher the daily dose of prescribed opioid, the higher the risk of overdose and other significant problems such as fractures, addiction, intestinal blockages, and sedation.
• Physicians and patients are encouraged to weigh the full spectrum of medical risks against a realistic assessment of observed benefits for pain.

Yes, this is a complicated story. It is too bad that, for the most part, the media hates complicated stories.