Tuesday’s Headlines

19 comments

1. Speaking of TTC fares can anybody explain to me why I can buy 4 tokens for $10 and 8 tokens for $20 from a machine but not a person?

   Brad Ross’ twitter says he’s “Looking into it” but nothing has happened. What needs to be looked into exactly? Why can a machine do something a person can’t?

   I had 2 guests over from out of town a little while ago and they wanted to make a couple of round trips. At Union they could buy 4 tokens from a machine with no problems, but at Dupont they were forced to buy 5 at a time from a person, giving them 1 token they didn’t need. People who live at stations without token machines must buy at least 5 at a time for $12.50

   If the TTC is really trying to improve customer service, let us buy 4 at a time at every station. It’s absurd that you’re allowed to at some stations but not others.

2. Re: JM

   I think the reason the TTC makes you have to buy in multiples of five from a person is because that’s how many at a time the automatic dispenser puts out that the booth attendant uses. You’re not buying from a person actually, but from a machine, although it’s a different machine from the one that that sells 4 for $10.

   If the TTC let you buy four at a time, what’s to stop people from wanting 3 or 2 at the same low, low per token price? Also, consider that it would take more time for an attendant to count out four tokens (or some other non-mutiple of 5) than it takes for the machine to spit out five. And the attendant could be unreliable and might miscount.

   Surely you can see that you are asking for chaos.

3. If Sandra Bussin is able to eradicate graffiti in her ward then the idea of roving councillors is looking appealing to me. Perhaps she could come over to Adam Vaughan’s ward. The Building at the NW corner of Spadina and oxford is a disgrace and typifies the area. Tagging is at epidemic levels in the area, and getting worse.

4. hey Glen, move to Utopia if you want a graffiti-less city (or which ever city Rudy Guliani is mayor of). While I’m no fan of graffiti tags, it hardly merits any commentary since the theories behind graffiti-broken-window concept is totally bogus. Ever been to Berlin or Hamburg in Germany? I have never seen so much graffiti — and in Hamburg I never saw as much wealth. In those cities people take tours of the graffiti parts of town. In the most culturally vibrant part of Berlin the walls are covered in spray paint. But the city doesn’t seem to falling apart either socially or economically because of an epidemic of graffiti.

   It is a part of city life and nothing close to be epidemic in Toronto. In fact, TO is much cleaner than Montreal and most American big cities. Just more doomsday talk from Spacing’s serial grumpy commenter.

5. Walk down Spadina from College to Queen and you won’t think Glen is overstating the graffiti problem. Every single building is liberally coated in talent-free tags made by little boys who don’t respect private or public space. But I guess the people who live and work in the area shouldn’t mind the squalor as long as it allows the cocktail class to play out their bohemian fantasies.

6. I am sure the residents of Hamburg are thrilled. Both with the graffiti and the tours of such. I heard that there was a movement in New York to bring back the good old days of the seventies also.
   Study shows messiness leads to behavior decline

   AP) — Does a messy neighborhood make a difference on how people act? It sure does! Graffiti on the walls, trash in the street, bicycles chained to a fence, all resulted in a decline in how people behaved in a series of experiments.

   A bit of litter or graffiti didn’t lead to predatory crime, but actions ranging from littering to trespassing and minor stealing all increased when people saw evidence of others ignoring the rules of good behavior, Dutch researchers report in Thursday’s online edition of the journal Science.

   In normal behavior most people try to act appropriately to the circumstances, explained lead author Kees Keizer of the faculty of behavioral and social sciences at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. But some tend to avoid effort or seek ways to gain for themselves.

   Things like littering an area or applying graffiti change the circumstances by indicating that others are not behaving correctly, which weakens the incentive for people to do the right thing.

   So the researchers were not surprised that people littered more in messy area, for example. But, added Keizer: “We were, however, surprised by the size of the effect.”

   Here’s an example.

   The researchers found a tidy alley in a shopping area where people parked their bicycles. There was a no-littering sign on the wall.

   The researchers attached flyers for a nonexistent store to the bike handlebars and observed behavior.

   Under normal circumstances, 33 percent of riders littered the alley with the flyer. But after researchers defaced the alley wall with graffiti, the share of riders who littered with the flyers jumped to 69 percent.

   They did a half-dozen similar experiments, all with similar results.

   While the study seems to deliver a negative message, Keizer pointed out that “it also shows that municipal officials and the public can have a significant impact on the influence of norms and rules on behavior.”

   In other words, keep public areas neat and people will be less likely to make a mess.

   The work is related to the “Broken Window Theory,” which suggests that urban disorder such as broken windows and graffiti encourage petty crime.

   This research doesn’t go that far, said Robert J. Sampson, chairman of Harvard University’s department of sociology.

   “It’s an interesting study, it’s very clever. And the results are believable within the limited bounds set by their design,” said Sampson, who was not part of the research team.

   But the results don’t show that disorder spreads to predatory crime, he said, what they show is that disorder increases people’s likelihood of committing (similar) acts.”

   In addition to the alley with graffiti, here’s how the experiments worked:

   Test Two:

   A fence partly closed off the main entrance to a parking lot. There was a narrow gap and a no-admittance sign that pointed out a new entry, 200 yards away. A second sign prohibited locking bikes to the fence.

   When the fence was clear, 27 percent of people heading for their cars ignored the no-admittance sign and squeezed through the gap in the fence. But after several bikes were locked to the fence in defiance of that ban, 82 percent of people going to their cars squeezed through the prohibited entry.

   Test Three:

   Flyers were placed under the windshield wipers of cars in a parking garage next to a market. A sign on the wall asked people to return their shopping carts to the market.

   When the lot was clear of shopping carts, 30 percent of drivers littered the lot with the flyers. But when a few carts were left in a disorderly state around the garage, 58 percent of people littered.

   Test Four:

   Two weeks before New Year’s Day researchers visited a bicycle parking shed near a train station and attached flyers to the handlebars. Under normal conditions 52 percent of the riders littered the shed with the flyers. Then the researchers set off fireworks outside the shed – which residents know is illegal in the period before New Year. Hearing the fireworks, 80 percent of riders littered the shed.

   Tests Five and Six:

   An envelope with money visible through the address window was placed sticking out of a mailbox.

   Under ordinary conditions 13 percent of passers-by stole the envelope.

   When the same mailbox was defaced with graffiti the percentage taking the money jumped to 27 percent.

   After researchers cleaned the mailbox, but messed up the area around it with litter, 25 percent stole the money.

7. Er, meant to post this here:

   Re: graffiti

   Toronto: Don’t do this asinine thing that NYC has done. Requiring spray paint, markers and etching tools to be purchased by an adult treats young artists like criminals. It is ineffective, too, as New York is covered with loads of ugly graffiti.

   Toronto’s policy on graffiti has seemed much more enlightened: have legal alleyways where people are allowed to express themselves in what has become a beautiful and legitimate form of visual art culture.

   The result in a city that has a zero-tolerance policy to graffiti like NYC: hastily-scrawled, ugly tags, everywhere.

   In Toronto: beautiful, carefully-painted murals mostly confined to hotbeds of creativity.

   The more you push on young people, the more they push back.

8. Kevin, I was in Manhattan for 4 days recently. The only graffiti I saw was three small tags on some store fronts in SOHO. I can see more tagging on one building on Spadina than what I saw in NY over four days. Perhaps you and Liisa would like to offer your home addresses so others can express themselves on them?

9. That is such a ridiculous article, Glen. Can you provide a link? I don’t find it very convincing. Researchers firing off fireworks to make their point? Planting money to be stolen and blaming graffiti for the rise? Talk about grasping for connections!

   The article starts of ridiculous: if bikes chained to fences are considered a problem like graffiti, then places like Copnehganen and Amsterdam must truly be suffering. Sheesh.

   There are much worse things that will keep people away from a neighbourhood than graffiti: poorly maintained streets and sidewalks, fast-moving traffic beside pedestrians, garbage bins and bags stacked haphazardly.

   You can ask any old white folks in a neighbourhood if they don’t like graffiti and you will get the answer you are looking for. But ask the young people snapping up condos on Spadina how much they hate the graffiti alley. Walk down it at lunch and its as busy as the sidewalks.

   But Kensington and Queen West are vibrant hubs in the city that do not seem to turning people away because there is graffiti. Its just one thing for ineffective city councillors to hang their hat on during an election year. Or for cranky suburbanites with a very narrow view of life in the city.

10. The original paper was published in Science.

    Here’s the abstract:
    http://ipoint.to/cj652o

11. Liisa,

    You can see the paper here…. http://www.rug.nl/staff/k.e.keizer/research. Here is a portion of you can’t get the full text;
    “In study 1, the setting was an alley in Groningen located in a shopping area and commonly used to park bicycles. In the order condition, the walls of the alley were clean (Fig. 1A), whereas in the disorder condition they were covered with graffiti (Fig. 1B). A standard prohibition sign (a round red sign with a round white center) with the text “Graffiti” pointed out the disapproved behavior. The sign was highly noticeable, and every subject entering the setting at least glanced at it. Participants (N = 77 in each condition) were all people who came to collect their parked bicycles. In their absence, a flyer with an elastic band had been attached to the handlebar of their bicycle. The flyer was white and thus very noticeable. It read: “We wish everybody happy holidays,” signed with the name of a nonexistent sportswear shop. The flyer had to be removed by the participant to easily use the handlebar. Because there were no trash cans in the alley, “not littering” meant taking the flyer with them. We counted throwing the flyer on the ground or hanging it on another bicycle as littering.
    The cross-norm inhibition effect of violating the antigraffiti norm on littering was quite substantial. Of the participants in the order condition (nongraffiti), 33% littered compared with 69% of the participants in the disorder condition (graffiti on the walls). The difference is highly significant [2(1, 154) = 20.367, P < 0.001]. In Groningen, littering is generally tolerated by the police so that the effect could not be explained by a guess on law enforcement, such as "if people haven't been caught painting graffiti, I will not be caught dropping paper."

    I must say though that it is curious that you would dismiss this, yet offer up with Queen and Kensington as examples. I would like to see your evidence of grafitti not having an impact. You have no clue on the impact because you can't make the comparison.

12. Right back at ya: just because you found one article — and one that makes over-the-top ridiculous assumptions — doesn’t mean you are right. I also think the developers wouldn’t be moving into these areas if they were concerned people would be turned off by incidental graffiti.

    I’m more inclined to believe what I see with my own eyes; that the streets and neighbourhoods of Kensington and Queen W are NOT affected aversely by graffiti. Maybe *some people* stay away, but if graffiti keeps them away they really don’t want to live or visit a dense and vibrant area of the city. When I have to walk on the roads of KM or Queen W because of the heavy pedestrian traffic, I think I’m comfortable stating that graffiti is not an issue. Like I said, poorly maintain sidewalks, garbage bins, excessive traffic are a much greater obstacle to a neighbourhood’s well-being. Graffiti can be removed with ease; bad urban design cannot.

13. Liisa,
    for the sake of brevity I provided you with one. One that you obviously refuse to read. I could provide you with links to many more but doubt if you would bother to read them.

14. Glen: considering your penchant for rambling, long-winded explanations on everything you hate about Toronto, brevity would never be a word associated with you.

    I read your links. They are piss poor examples. Litter is done by every kind of person — form old to young. The examples they use are of cultural and social wastelands that lump a variety of factors together and does not isolate them. Do you think there are multitudes of shopping carts lying on Spadina? Are people setting off firecrackers on Queen West?

    You can keep grasping to make a lame point.

    They did not focus on places with low incidents graffiti, which properly describes Spadina and KM and Queen W. They may be epidemic to someone who lives in a sidewalk-less part of the city, but for anyone with an ounce or urbanity in their lives the graffiti is much less offensive than poorly placed sandwich boards, gigantic billboards, and idling cars.

15. Uh, you missed an important editorial in the star on Bloor..
    http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/article/804033–bungling-on-bloor
    but that’s also sorta par for spacing it seems as you’ve tended to miss this entire major issue on our front doorstep and the implications of privatizing both our streets and our planning processes, in the case also including the evasion of the Environmental Assessment Act and the Places to Grow Act.
    This editorial also fails to see bikes, just like the design, and the process.
    And to think that just 18 years ago, there was thought/study of this route on wide Bloor being the best place in old TO for an east-west bike lane. Who would think that?

16. Liisa,the tone of your comments are reflective of you. By your remarks it is again obvious that you have either not read or understood the experiments that they performed. I don’t think you even realize that you have contradicted yourself. On the one hand you stated that Queen W. and KM have graffiti, but are not affected. The in your next post you say that both areas have a low incidence. Read Paul’s post earlier on.

17. Liisa, with your “don’t bother me with pesky science” attitude, you should consider a position on the Texas Board of Education. “Science” is, as far as I know, still a pretty reputable journal – if you want to dispute the methodology why not put forward some research of your own?

18. Re: graffiti.

    Like many people in Toronto, I have a garage on a back alley.  I am sick and tired of people tagging my property.  I don’t like having to repaint or clean off the graffiti on my garage.  My neighbours, that I’ve talked to about the vandalism, feel the same way.  When someone vandalizes my property, I do get a lot more upset than when I am forced to walk around a sandwich board or a badly placed garbage can on the sidewalk.  I get the same feeling when I see vandalized public property.  I guess I and my neighbours don’t have an ounce of urbanity in us.

    I don’t believe that artistically themed alleys or murals have reduced the amount of crappy ugly tags.   My eyes tell me otherwise.  Tour the alleys outside of Queen and King West.  Get up to Earlscourt Park at Lansdowne and St Clair and note all the lovely gang tags.  Check out the lovely scratchings on the new streetcar line.  Graffiti may be historically part of city life, but it is certainly not something that we have to ignore.   And frankly I could care less whether Germans get rich while tolerating it.  New Yorkers seem to be getting by fine doing the opposite.

19. MIKEB,
    Your situation raises an interesting point. There is the financial costs. You are made responsible for the removal of graffiti. Either directly, or if the city decides to order you to and you don’t comply, they can perform the work and add the charges to your tax bill.