Having never met her, I was surprised at how emotionally I reacted yesterday to the news of Mary Barrie’s death. I suppose it’s because Andy Barrie feels a bit like family. My thoughts and prayers are with him and Jessie today.
Mary is remembered here.
Editorial cartoon by Michael De Adder for Metro.
Since Google Transit launched in December 2005 it has been adding Canadian cities one at a time. That list has grown to include Hamilton, Ottawa, York Region, Montréal, Vancouver, Fredericton, and now, announced yesterday, Calgary. Canada’s largest city, Toronto, is conspicuously absent. That’s an embarrassment for the City and the TTC.
Google Transit is a service that works with Google Maps to help people plan trips on public transit (instead of just by car, as the first version of Maps did). A visitor to the site enters their start and end points, and Google gives them step by step instructions for reaching their destination (walk to the corner, wait for the 5:00pm bus, transfer to the subway, etc). The system uses schedule data to know when you need to show up at each transfer point, and to estimate how long the total journey will take.
Google reportedly provides this service to municipalities free of charge. All they ask is that those municipalities provide them with their transit schedule, stop and route data. Then Google does the rest of the work. For free.
Back in March 2006, then TTC chair Howard Moscoe gave reporters the impression that Google Transit was coming “soon” to Toronto, but days later a report from Chief General Manager Richard C. Ducharme was seriously lacking in enthusiasm for partnering with Google, even while noting that going it alone would cost the City $2,000,000.
In December 2006 I wrote TTC commissioners urging them to work with Google on transit routing, and suggesting (correctly, I think) that they’d be able to rapidly compile the data for Google using volunteers from Toronto’s enthusiastic transit and web development communities. Adam Giambrone’s office replied to let me know that they were “working on getting the TTC on Google Transit” and that “hopefully it will be up and running soon.” Interim Chief General Manager Gary Webster wrote to say that “the TTC considers the development of its information and communication resources to be a very important item” (try saying that three times fast) and that they had “participated…in some preliminary information gathering sessions with Google Transit project leaders.” Finally, he added that since “TTC staff are involved” he would “respectfully decline” volunteer help.
At the time of that correspondence, there weren’t any other Canadian cities on Google Transit. Now there are seven. When Hamilton was added three months ago, the Hamilton Spectator asked how it was possible that Hamilton had beaten Toronto in the race to get on the service. The answer? The city of Hamilton was “very co-operative” in the partnership, a Google spokesperson said.
After Hamilton was added, Mayor David Miller and TTC chair Adam Giambrone reaffirmed their desire to get Toronto on Google Transit, providing a target date of “mid-2009,” but the experience of the last three years suggests that the City is not taking it seriously and has been incapable of putting together an effective plan for making it happen. (Contrast this with bigger, more organized and resourced cities like, say, Fredericton, New Brunswick.)
Meanwhile, the TTC is still developing their own separate routing system (“Future home of Trip Planner,” ttc.ca currently declares in a randomly orphaned piece of text) which is off-schedule, costing us millions of dollars, and will arguably be redundant with the Google service (though at this point final judgment should be reserved until we can see both services in action).
It didn’t have to be this way. The fact that Google Transit was going to become a great partner was easily predictable, as was the fact that the TTC would ultimately mismanage their own very expensive alternative trip planner. The only silver lining is that we’re now, finally, hopefully, only months away from being able to plan transit routes online.
A recent essay by Paul Graham called Keep Your Identity Small has been read and shared by a number of people in my circle. I mentioned though a Google Reader note that I disagreed with the essay’s conclusions, and a friend asked me to expand. This post is the result.
Graham argues that the reason some conversations degenerate into useless arguments—most notably political and religious conversations—is because those topics “become part of people’s identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that’s part of their identity.” This means that the problem with discussing politics or religion isn’t with the topic itself, but rather with the “partisan” people who participate in a discussion. Graham explains that “you could in principle have a useful conversation about [politics and religion] with some people,” just not people who have a political or religious identity.
In his final paragraph and in a comment on his own essay, Graham even goes so far as to say that “the more labels” a person has, the “dumber” that person is, and that identity makes one “stupid.”
The foundational claims of the essay are demonstrably false in their extremism. While it’s obvious that some people who identify with a religious or political label are impossible to talk to, it’s equally obvious that that doesn’t apply to everyone with a religious or political identity. To claim that you can “never have a fruitful argument” about politics with someone who holds political beliefs is absurd. I have had many such conversations with conservatives, liberals, libertarians, devout atheists, fundamentalist Christians, etc. These conversations have borne fruit in the form of a greater understanding of (and sometimes a change to) my own identity and beliefs.
Even the strength of one’s identity is not necessarily a determining factor in whether or not that person is able to have a fruitful discussion. There are people with very strong political or religious beliefs (Desmond Tutu, Joe Clark, Bill Blaikie, Barack Obama) who are still constructive and flexible for the sake of good debate where others are rigid. (That does not mean they don’t hold strongly to their beliefs, simply that they are confident enough in their beliefs to have them tested and questioned from different perspectives.) Conversely, I have known people to be rigid and stubbornly argumentative simply for the sake of arguing, even though they’ll later admit, when pressed, that they didn’t actually believe in anything they were saying.
Graham is therefore not describing anyone and everyone with an identity, but rather people who are stubborn, rigid, extreme or fundamentalist in their identity. People in this category can have many labels or even none.
I regard the conclusion that it’s advisable to “keep your identity small” to be at best unproductive and at worst dangerous. I would rather surround myself with people who disagree with me and belong to different schools of thought yet are willing to respect diversity of opinion and belief than with people who have gone out of their way to try and not answer the questions “who am I, what do I believe in, what do I think is worth advocating and standing up for?” Those are the questions that define identity, and that drive individual and societal improvement and progress.
I therefore think it is more advisable to allow your identity to grow and flourish, but to keep it humble. Hold beliefs, but don’t stop questioning them. Find truths, but never stop seeking new ones. Create an identity for yourself, but never stop growing and evolving as you learn from the identities that others have created for themselves. Take pride in the communities you choose to belong to, and respect and admire those to which you do not belong.
And finally, in arguments, try to follow Graham’s advice on how to disagree, which I think is much more productive than his advice to keep your identity small.