Double Blind

Apparently the Canadian government, in its infinite wisdom, is considering the outright banning of drop-side cribs.

For those of you without babies, basically a drop-side crib is a crib that has one side that can lower (and rise back again). The reason for this is that it is considerably easier picking up and dropping off your baby into the crib with the rail down than it is up. My baby, for example, sleeps in a drop-side crib. I have no intention to change the crib since it works fine.

There was a huge recall of cribs performed over the past couple years because of the “discovery” that if you assemble the crib incorrectly, or abuse the hinges and parts that guide the drop-side rail up and down, you can create a gap between the mattress and the railing. If the gap is positioned strategically, and your baby obliges by going head-first into the gap, it creates a suffocation/strangulation risk. Apparently a few babies died in the USA this way (out of the 1.5 million cribs apparently subject to recall) and as a result Canada followed with the recall and is now considering an outright ban since none of the major retailers are selling drop-side cribs anymore.

Talking to a very, very close relative who is an expert about this matter, apparently all of these cases were due to customer abuse of the product (e.g. installing wrong parts).

The end-result of this insanity is that parents will have worse products available to take care of their babies.

I can see why companies are very hesitant to get into the baby product market since it is conceivable that out of the 300 million people that live in America (and the majority of them parents), at least one of them will find a way to injure (or kill) a child with it. The subsequent legal risk is far too expensive to warrant a small-scale venture. I would also estimate that embedded insurance costs into the baby consumer products are depressingly high, relative to other industries.

Just to give you more examples of consumer recall stupidity, look no further than Health Canada’s database of consumer recalls.

I will take the first two examples I saw, freshly recalled at September 30, 2010:

Inflatable Balls sold with various Fisher-Price products

The valve on the inflatable ball can come off, posing a choking hazard to young children.

Fisher-Price and the US CPSC have received 8 reports of the valve coming off inflatable balls in Canada and 46 similar reports in the United States. The reports include 14 incidents of the valve being found in a child’s mouth and 3 reports of a child choking on the valve. There have been no reported injuries.

Health Canada has not received any reports of incidents or injuries related to the use of these products.

Approximately 125,000 of the recalled products were sold in Canada.

In the United States, approximately 2,800,000 of the recalled products were distributed to stores.

46 reports of 2,800,000 products means that you had a 0.0016% chance of having a valve falling off, presumably due to excessive ripping (and a pair of scissors would help). To give you an idea of the scope of that, ICBC’s 2007 traffic collision statistics had 417 road users killed. In 2007, there were 3,007,702 licensed drivers or 3,852,365 licensed motor vehicles (of BC origin), or a total population of 4,310,000. This worked out to 0.0097% on population.

Looking at the data (which both are subject to their various biases) you had a six times higher chance dying (not just getting injured) in your car than having your baby ripping the valve off this product.

I guess no more inflatable balls for the babies!

Here is the second recall notice:

Trikes and Tough Trikes Toddler Tricycles

The recalled trikes have a disc-shaped or D-shaped pretend plastic ignition key that sticks out of the trike, about 7cm (3 inches) in front of the seat.

A child can strike, sit, or fall on the protruding ignition key, resulting in serious injury including genital bleeding.

Fisher-Price and the US CPSC have received 10 reports of incidents resulting in injury, where young girls fell on or against the key. Six of the incidents required medical attention.

Health Canada has not received any reports of incidents or injuries related to the use of these trikes.

Approximately 150,000 of the recalled trikes were sold in Canada.

In the United States, approximately 7,000,000 of the recalled trikes were distributed to stores.

10 reports in 7,000,000 is ridiculously tiny. You can also infer the specific nature of the injury with the lack of males getting injured on this toy, which is not terribly appealing since it suggests that they were letting their kids onto the toy naked.

Anyhow, you get the idea. Just look at the recall database and you can realize that the insatiable demand for a risk-free society is making life miserable for the other 99.999% of people that know how to throw away drop-side cribs that have broken parts.

I had earlier posted about the futility of the new red light cameras that are being installed by the province. Most amusingly, a Karin Basaraba from ICBC did a copy-and-paste job of some talking points.

I still assert that red light cameras have no traffic effect (either positively or negatively) and their primary function is one of revenue collection and political optics, rather than the purported reason of safety.

As a new data point, the Los Angeles City auditor general released a report on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the red light cameras. Specifically:

Specifically, an experienced traffic officer reviewed in detail images of the paper
forms for all collisions of record that were classified at or near every PRLP
intersection over the specified period. This new LAPD analysis showed mixed
results: 12 out of 32 intersections had worse collision results in the six months
after activation of PRL equipment compared to the six months before activation.
Four had no change, and the remaining 16 noted a reduction in collisions.

Exhibit 4 provides a summary of LAPD’s more detailed analysis.
We reviewed the process and methodology LAPD used in their analysis, and
found it would provide more comprehensive program information than had
previously been reported.

However, it should be noted that since the total number of collisions was so small
at most intersections, the results may be rendered meaningless. Most
intersections had fewer than five collisions before or after activation of PRL
equipment. Therefore, a difference of one collision either way could make an
intersection look much better or much worse. Also, since some locations
included in the program were not those with the greatest potential impact for
improved public safety (as noted in Finding #1), the reduction in total collisions
would not have been maximized.

… the other not-so-surprising finding is that overall collisions in Los Angeles have declined because there are less people on the road (due to increased fuel prices).

Also the report states that collision metrics used are not proper forms of measurement – ideally you will be able to use collisions per million crossings to create a rate, rather than using an absolute measurement which does not take into account a lot of external factors.

There are all sorts of amusing statistics in the report, but another one is that throughout 2008 and 2009, 67% of the red light violations were for “rolling right turns”, where you do not come to a complete stop before making a right turn at an intersection. The report states that these types of violations are significantly less severe than going straight through an intersection on a red light, but states that the fine amount is the same ($446 in California).

Anybody reviewing unbiased evidence will come to the same conclusion – red light cameras do nothing for safety.

Over the past half year, a person named Jennifer Bingham has been making some headlines with respect to the transit service (primarily provided by bus) that the city operates.

She gets into the nitty-gritty operational details of the system and makes some recommendations with respect to routing, and states “building a schedule that coordinates with the major institutions in town would be a simple task”.

Unfortunately it is not that simple.

For better or worse, for a transit system to be functional, it must service the majority of users, rather than one-off cases. I disagree that a transit system in Chilliwack should be “comprehensive”. Instead, it should be servicing a few select routes very well, instead of trying to go for geographical coverage (e.g. sending a bus up to Promontory is very inefficient).

Also, I do not believe the city in its present state of development should have a comprehensive public transit service. People purchasing their own private automobiles appears to be quite a functional solution.

In the report, there was no demand-side analysis, mainly asking the question “Who would use the service?”.

The answer is whoever doesn’t have access to a car. This would typically be students (University of the Fraser Valley students / School students) and seniors. Most other people would have a vehicle. This is very unlike the Vancouver analogy, where a lot of transit users still keep a car – they take transit because it is a pain in the rear end to get to the downtown core. Right now, Chilliwack doesn’t have that factor with respect to inter-city public transit.

Then, the next question is, “What is their destination?”.

In the case of students, it will be from their residence to UFV/School. Most school students will live relatively close to the school in their catchment area, so concentrating some routes to the two UFV campuses (soon to be consolidated on the southern side near Keith Wilson Road) should be a specific target for ridership.

In the case of seniors, typically it is to commercial centers, and/or the hospital or medical services. Thus, concentrating to the Cottonwood Mall area, and the Hospital area would be a destination for a route.

There are not too many employment-related areas in Chilliwack that would reach a critical mass for transit – most people that work use a vehicle.

How do you catch passengers? Such busses must go through the Yale-Vedder Corridor (the only real north-south backbone of the city), and the (relatively) denser populated northwestern downtown. Complicating the matter is that there are very few places on Vedder Road that have an extra lane or slice into the curb to allow buses to park to pick up passengers.

Looking at the existing routes, they could use tweaking, not an overhaul.

I do not see the vision of “The bus will be hailed as the fastest way to get across town and will become the preference to driving once established.” of having a chance in the next couple decades. The only jurisdiction in BC where you could cite this quotation is for transit users to downtown Vancouver – and this is because there is the scale and density to make it a much more viable option, in addition to skytrain.

Using a large city transit mentality for a smaller city like Chilliwack will result in nothing but wasted money since buses are inherently slower than using your vehicle. Even if we lived in a dream world and there was two billion dollars to spend on a high speed “skytrain” type link down Vedder/Yale Road, I do not think you would achieve significantly more ridership than you have today.

The other problem with this entire analysis is that obtaining real data has been difficult to obtain, despite doing some moderate amounts of Googling and examination of relevant websites (Chilliwack, BC Transit). For example, I can’t even tell you how much the City of Chilliwack contributes to the transit system. I can’t tell you how many riders currently use the system. Lack of such basic information makes analysis a little difficult.

I would suspect that a concept such as “Zipcar” would result in less of a financial loss in Chilliwack than the existing transit system.

Justin has an excellent post (with examples) about how people that do not make careers out of certain professions (i.e. film-making) are able to produce professional-quality material.

(Just as a parenthetical note, the first example video Justin posted is why I stopped playing Counter-Strike back in 2002 [aimbots], and I think this was the last “real” computer game I spent a lot of time playing… ahh, the youthful days!)

This also rings with Anthony’s theme that knowledge advances generally do not come from “professionals”, but rather it is amateurs that have done the advancements.

As people here know, I do not write here on Double Blind to get a whole lot of page views. It is usually by accident that I write something that gets on the top of Google momentarily, before fading back into (thankful) obscurity.

Unfortunately, for the past year or two, the following has been the search terms people have been using to get to this site (this is up to September 22 of 2010):

Suffice to say, when I initially became the big hit for the various CMA (Certified Management Accounting) search terms I never expected to be deluged by people that were trying for the designation to comment on my site. At first it was amusing, but then it because to be a bit of an administrative chore pruning the comments.

It also became depressing since a lot of the commenters were asking questions that made me realize that most people that were Googling the above terms probably shouldn’t have been in the program to begin with. Knowing how lax CMA’s program is, they’ll probably get through.

A couple years ago, I had expected the CMA association itself to start taking some sort of action to get a higher pagerank, but the organization’s communication department seems to be woefully behind the times when it comes to online presence (in addition to having a rather difficult to navigate site). I figured it was time to cut the cord and let others monetize the traffic – undoubtedly the spammers will do what they do best.

Robert Rapier is a very good energy analyst – by virtue of being a chemical engineer, he is already above 98% of the competition compared to most others that speak about the issue.

In particular, pay attention to his comments about so-called “renewable energy”, which is not entirely true when you consider that fossil fuel inputs in these “renewable” sources is around 75%.

Physics-wise, you are not going to find liquid energy replacements for gasoline that have nearly as many positive attributes – it is a dense form of transportable energy and all other alternatives, at present, have huge negatives.

(Edit: Helps if I include the link! It is here.)

I had written about reviewing the Chilliwack Downtown Land Use and Development Plan nearly 4 months ago, and finally got to clearing it off my reading queue.

My thoughts have not changed much from my original post. Without an influx of capital, the “dilapidated” nature of downtown Chilliwack is likely to remain.

In order to revitalize the core, two types of capital are required in order to have any effect: monetary capital, and intellectual capital.

Monetary capital is the easy part – the City of Chilliwack is already providing some: for example, $1.3 million for the Empress Hotel, which was subsequently put out of its misery with its demolition. In its place, however, the City cannot make the same mistake it did with permitting the higher-density condominiums just east of the core (e.g. the now-infamous New Mark, which has seemingly been the staging ground for half the narcotic retailing industry in Chilliwack).

The problem is that the City cannot afford to buy and demolish most of the downtown core, which would be desired, so there has to be private investors involved to help save the day. Unfortunately, most of these property owners see the writing on the wall and realize that any additional capital investment is very unlikely to have a good yield, so any steps taken to revitalize the entire core will be a very slow process. The City has already given property tax easements to businesses in the core in order to spur the capital end, but it is not nearly enough.

The other vital capital ingredient is what I call intellectual capital – basically there needs to be a critical mass of people that live and work close to the core to give the place a sense of “community”. One has to stop and think as to what superior characteristics a downtown Chilliwack core would offer in terms of intellectual capital than downtown Abbotsford, or downtown Langley. It is very difficult to conceptualize how the city can draw in the proper intellectual capital that would create the underpinnings of a stable and balanced population that you would typically see in downtown Vancouver, or even around Metrotown.

At the very minimum you would need to see companies offering decent-paying jobs to people locate to downtown Chilliwack. It cannot just be one or two firms, it needs to be a whole microcosm of businesses, and it needs to be spontaneous, and it needs the correct mix of residential presence and intellectual capital to pull it off.

You can start to appreciate why revitalizing a stagnant downtown core in a middle-sized suburban municipality is such a difficult task.

In the plan itself, you have the following section in “Economic Context”:

The downtown plan area currently has a total of 287 businesses: 253 of these are commercial uses, and 34 industrial uses. This comprises 19% of the city’s total licensed businesses. Over the last eight years, the downtown has lost 175 businesses. This trend is one of the most important issues this plan seeks to address by focusing commercial uses in strategic locations, improving the design quality and pedestrian orientation of downtown commercial areas, encouraging mixed use buildings, and more generally by increasing the downtown population and therefore customer base for local businesses.

This has cause and effect mixed up. This paragraph implies that by increasing the population, you can increase the customer base for local businesses. The problem with this assumption is that you are not going to get the right customers (e.g. New Mark again!).

The plan should instead state that by encouraging labour-demanding businesses in the area that this will induce residents to live around the area. The primary metric that you would use to gauge success is whether you have higher property values closer to downtown Chilliwack, or whether you have higher values south of Highway 1.

You can almost make an argument that reducing the number of residents around the downtown core would be beneficial.

There is also another problem dealing with timing – urban planning is not a commutative process! It is very, very path-dependent and the order of development that occurs will have a huge impact on the end result. Unfortunately, optimizing the process to revitalization is nearly impossible because the process itself is highly chaotic – a static plan does not address the dynamic elements of revitalization.

Brilliant post.

Here’s your next billion-dollar Internet startup idea. If it sounds like the dumbest idea in the world, remember that you didn’t think of Twitter.

That’s about what I think of Twitter as well.

I notice that Rail for the Valley is touting a report which was covered in the Chilliwack Times.

The only problem is that the report (attached here), while containing a lot of interesting information, is biased. The report is designed to look independent and authoritative, but it is not. When you actually try to click on some of the other publications on their site, at first glance they appear to look like an engineering consulting firm, but they appear to be instead an advocacy group for rail transportation.

Quoting their “Conclusion” section (PDF page 55), they have written the following:

22.1 Conclusions
You need look no further than the Fraser Valley newspapers to gauge the support for re-establishing the Chilliwack to Surrey Interurban.
Courtesy of Rail for the Valley:
[eight quotations from various local newspapers]

Citing quotations of media reports is not proper analysis. It makes the mistake of the fallacy of argumentum ad populum – i.e. if others support it, it must be correct.

The report’s information concerning the details of passenger stations, trains, infrastructure, etc., is an interesting read on how, hypothetically, something could look if they were to implement the project.

I do believe when it comes to costs, however, they are underestimating them. An unplanned (operating) cost will be what it will take to get BC Southern Railway to give up trackage rights for a passenger service. I also believe that the planned upgrades and such are not as easy as it may seem, but unfortunately I can’t pinpoint where the big risks will be. Presumably this is what a real study will be for.

I also believe the train speeds (citing Chilliwack to Scott Road Station in Surrey) as 90 or 98 minutes is unrealistic given that the West Coast Express’ Mission to Downtown Vancouver is 69km and is 73 minutes, with 6 stations. Station stops are a big drag on performance, and 17 stops from Chilliwack to Scott Road will not result in an average 60km/h service. Two hours seems more reasonable. Considering the big competition is Highway 1, a two hour trip from Chilliwack to Scott Road, and then another 40 minutes on Skytrain is not going to be a very compelling offering.

The fundamental problem with the proposal is that the train route is not convenient – it meanders significantly from Chilliwack to Langley (page 58 in the PDF). Building track from scratch will make the capital costs prohibitively expensive.

Ironically, Rail for the Valley has its best business case supporting passenger traffic from Langley City to Surrey.

The best analogy that we have at present is the West Coast Express (69km from Mission to Downtown Vancouver). In 2009, the WCE had operating costs of $17 million, and revenues of about $15 million, and transports 2.6 million people per year (annualized about 7,100 per day, noting this does include weekends which the WCE does not operate in). It has been, relative to other Translink services, a fairly good venture economically. Apparently the WCE had about $120 million of capital costs (and they are pouring another $28 million into ancillary projects, such as more trains and platform extensions and such), which is roughly $2 million per km.

Calgary’s light rail (which is not a direct comparison to the proposed rail) had a capital cost of about $15 million per km of track, but this was in the middle of the city, and involved a lot of track-laying.

As I have stated before, the numbers are such that you can’t immediately dismiss the idea. I do not like the proponent group’s evangelism for the issue, but the West Coast Express analogy would suggest that the idea is worth investigating with caution.

I guess the big question is: “Would I take a train going from Chilliwack to Scott Road Skytrain even if it was free?” – right now my answer is no, and I would suspect many others (that have a car) would say the same. I do not think the line would receive nearly the same revenue response as the WCE. The reason why the West Coast Express is so successful is because it takes you right into the middle of downtown Vancouver and it has optimal track location. It seems to me that having more employment in Surrey and/or Langley City will be required in order for a rail service to be financially viable.

It would also seem probable that the best way for Translink to proceed with this, if they were seriously interested in the route, is to purchase BC Southern Railway outright (and thus not have to deal with the messy issue of obtaining trackage rights). But we all know what happened with BC Rail… so the political chances of this happening is zero.

Also, it should be pointed out that the Greyhound offers a 1-way ticket from Chilliwack (near Superstore) to downtown Vancouver for $14.61 currently.

Looks like the government of Finland is once again taxing sweets.

Wouldn’t surprise me if a Canadian jurisdiction tried this. It’s just a matter of time before anything of politically incorrect value (e.g. sugar -> obesity; salt -> high blood pressure; meat -> shorter life, higher carbon footprint; etc.) will be taxed in the name of whatever health fad of the day.