I remember an announcement on CBC Radio’s Metro Morning sometime over a year ago. Back then Kirstine Stewart, CBC’s Executive Vice-President of English Services, announced that the corporation would be rolling out local radio programming, beginning with Kitchener-Waterloo. At that time my wife and I lived in a rented apartment in Kitchener and we were thrilled. As avid CBC Radio listeners we were excited about the prospect of getting a local CBC station. No more traffic out of Toronto and news updates that had little impact on our daily lives here in southwestern Ontario.

Today, the creation of a local station came one step closer to becoming a reality, but it’s a bit of a bitter one.

About a year later, my wife and I have bought a house and are now living a mere five minute walk from the Grand River in beautiful Cambridge. We love it here. But we’re disappointed with today’s announcement: that a new CBC station for Kitchener-Waterloo won’t include Cambridge or the townships.

Disappointed because if we were to take a breezy five minute drive we would be in Kitchener. Disappointed because we share a bus service, a mutually-accessible library system, a government, and two rivers. Disappointed because we’re all part of the same region and many of us identify as such. Disappointed because the University of Waterloo, arguably the hub for our region’s intelligentsia, now has affiliated campuses in both Cambridge and Stratford.

With transit initiatives bringing the whole region closer together, one has to wonder why a new CBC station would service only Kitchener-Waterloo.

But there is still time for a rethink. With a station launch proposed for the fall of 2012 there is plenty of opportunity for those outside of the official coverage area to have a say. I suggest getting in touch with Kirstine Stewart, Executive Vice-President of English Services or Susan Marjetti, the managing director of CBC’s Toronto and Ontario regions. I will be doing the same!

Susan Marjetti
Telephone: (416) 205-5791
Susan.Marjetti@cbc.ca

Kirstine Stewart
Kirstine.Stewart@cbc.ca

Don’t get me wrong, a local CBC station is great news for Kitchener-Waterloo but it could be greater! Those of us who feel a little left out in the cold need to have our say, so speak up! An expansion of the station’s mandate to the whole of Waterloo Region only makes sense.

In this video, our Penelope Lou performs a trick after her own particular fashion.

The dedication is to her dear Aunt Karin who knows a thing or two about dogs.

While cleaning out the basement today, I listened through a three-part series on CBC Radio’s Ideas called Dogs Themselves.

It tackles the way we’ve perceived dogs in the past and how we perceive them today; myths and confusions about dogs; and all kinds of anecdotal as well as scientific advice on training and getting along with dogs.

The series is very interesting and I’d recommend it to anyone who owns a dog or is looking at adopting one into their family.

Link: Dogs Themselves

Ah, the sweet scent of controversy and free speech.

Over the weekend I wrote a little article called Stop Riding Your Bike. It was an open letter to cyclists in Waterloo Region. As intended, it was controversial.

Because comments are spread out over this website as well as the Waterloo Bikes blog I’d like to respond to everything in this follow-up article. It’ll be much more organized that way, I think, and give us a chance to carry on this lovely debate and dialogue.

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An Open Letter to Cyclists in Waterloo Region.

Stop biking. Just quit it.

I’m talking, of course, to the select few who ruin it for the rest of us. You know the ones. They give all of us cyclists a bad name. They galvanize popular opinion against cyclists because they’re the ones, the terrible ones, who stick in peoples’ minds when they think of cyclists. They spoil it for everyone else: For those of us who stick to the rules of the road, who cycle safely and courteously, and who don’t do stupid stuff.

Cycling in this city is pretty safe, but when you mix up a bicycle with fast moving car and truck traffic you’re never going to be guaranteed 100% safety. In the same way that you drive in a car or a truck, you can still get into an accident, you can still be injured or killed because of any number of facts. It’s the same on a bike, only you’re that much more exposed and up against vehicles that are much larger than you are. We aren’t one of those enviably bikeable places like The Netherlands or Sweden, but we’re not doing terrible either.

However, conditions for cyclists are made a great deal less safe but the chosen few who I’m speaking directly to now. Those terrible bikers.

You see, if a select few people choose to break the rules of the road and ride unpredictably and unsafely, they not only enrage drivers (giving the rest of us a bad name) but they make it increasingly difficult for drivers to safely interact with cyclists. Case and point, if I am driving my car and have no clue what you, as a cyclist, are going to do as you approach me at a T-intersection where I have the right of way, something bad is liable to happen.

The rules of the road exist to make driving predictable; cyclists who don’t follow them make it more difficult for drivers to predict the actions of all cyclists.

So my solution, to those cyclists who think the rules don’t apply to them: stop riding your bike.

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In 1982, the brilliantly-named Institute for the Future, an agency under America’s National Science Foundation, published a study that was written about in the New York Times. The aim of the study was to predict what the North American household might look like in the future. Like most attempts to see the future, the predictions run the gamut from hilarious to naive to, in one particular case, down-right accurate.

For the most part, the article deals with some technologies that never really made it out of the starting gate back in the 1980′s: Teletext and Videotex. From what I can understand, this technology allowed a television screen to act as a kind of web browser, retrieving different “pages” that were broadcast by cable companies. In some cases, these pages could be stored and read later, in other cases it was up to the provider to decide what to show and when. It sounds like one of many precursors to the Internet. It also sounds an awful lot like 1984.

But, it’s the predictions that we’re concerned with, not necessarily the technology.

What the Institute for the Future predicted a society using Teletext and Videotex would look like is, in the end, a lot like what our society looks like today.

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One of the things I was most excited about when we decided to move back to the Region—aside from home ownership vs. renting, having a back yard, moving from 500sqft. to 1400sqft., having a deck and a BBQ, no coin laundry, etc., etc.—was the prospect of being able to bike to work.

In my excitement, I looked up the route on Google Maps and when I realized that it was a mere 9.79km, I was thrilled. After some experimenting in Toronto, riding down to the C.N.E. grounds and back to our apartment, I concluded that 10km would be an easy 30 minute bike ride, maximum. I was even more thrilled, taking a closer look, to see just what my route would look like. It looked beautiful. Winding, for the most part, along a nature preserve from Cambridge and into the Doon area of Kitchener. There were even some sections with bike lanes, a bonus!

So, instead of my normal 1-hour, gas-guzzling, car commute from Toronto to Kitchener I traded in for a 30-minute, completely carbon neutral, enjoyable bike ride.

And then sprained my knee.

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