Mock Turtle

I bought a bottle of the Hillebrand Winery Trius 2004 Cabernet Franc (VQA Niagara) this evening, partly on the strength of having enjoyed the 2002 version and partly because it was, er, conveniently available where I was buying the wherewithal for dinner.

J. nicely deconstructed (or perhaps reverse-engineered) the label as broadcasting a sort of sort of middle of the road, yuppie-ish, respectable-but-not-too-complicated vibe. Which is essentially what this wine is all about. It has a degree of interest — an attractive Niagara-red smokiness with a bit of greenness which isn’t necessarily a bad thing — but ultimately too much greenness (more raspberry-leaf than raspberry…) and a serious deficit on the palate.

I don’t regret giving this one a spin but at $14.95 and 13% there are better values out there.

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Could the communications team at the Toronto Real Estate Board be the worst in the city? Granted, TREB is the lobby group representing realtors, know most for erratic capitalization and repeated punctuation marks. And, OK, it’s hard to put out press release after press release about a deflating market after years of hyperbolic boasting about strength, robustness, and all-time records. But all that aside, the strategy behind communicating the June sales figures is bizarre.

The teaser message on the TREB website points out that while sales this June were down 18% from last June, last June was an all-time record. Fair enough. Then, in an effort to make the dramatic drop in sales even less shocking, TREB helpfully points out that June 2008 was not the first — second — third — or fourth best June on record, but the fifth. Is that really a point to recommend it?

The release itself is confusing because it tries to explain that the 2008 to 2007 drop in sales isn’t really so bad because the increase in 2006 to 2007 was so large. That would make some sense if 2008 was the, say, second best June on record, but the fact that it’s the fifth suggests there’s more backtracking than simply an easing off last year’s peak.

The release leads with the inevitable increase in prices, which has continued despite the double-digit decrease in sales (oddly, not mentioned until the sixth paragraph).

Sales of resale housing in the GTA were down 18% in June 2008 over June 2007. But, as the release points out, there was a 20% increase in sales between 2006 and 2007. So 2008 sales were down only 1% compared to June 2006. Um… great?

And here, more confusing comparisons without any conclusion to comfort you about the healthy, balanced GTA housing market:

In the City of Toronto, sales for the first two quarters declined 15 per cent to 17,370 from 20,574 in 2007 and down 8 per cent from 18,917 in 2006. In the 905 Region sales declined 12 per cent to 26,315 from 30,074 in 2007 and down 2 per cent from 26,880 in 2006. However, when you compare the first two quarters of 2007 with the same period in 2006, sales increased by 9 per
cent in the City of Toronto and by 12 per cent in the 905 Region.

Does the “however” really fit there? Do the 2007/2006 comparisons somehow negate the drop between 2008/2007? If phrased another way, I suppose they could provide useful context, but here, they really don’t: sales are down, but last year they were up. Huh.

Houses — don’t know how many, since TREB only releases inventory information when it’s in its interest, not when inventory is reaching rumoured all-time highs — are taking longer to sell, but according to TREB head Maureen O’Neill, that’s a good thing: “This has given buyers and sellers a little more time to make well-considered decisions.”

Where are the hot spots in the GTA, you wonder? Well, there’s Brooklin. Where? Brooklin, Ontario, population 15,000.

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Wonder how many additional house sales were needed in Brooklin to increase over 35% last year’s June sales — 5?

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(Crowds line marathon route, somewhere else.)

Though you may not have noticed, today was the day of Toronto’s second fall marathon, the Toronto Marathon.

As one might expect, Yonge Street and University Avenue were lined with spectators, and residents of neighbourhoods the marathon went through, such as Forest Hill and Rosedale, were outside with handmade signs handing out orange slices to the thousands of runners raising money for Princess Margaret Hospital and other causes.

Yeah, right.

That describes the support of citizens of New York and Chicago. It’s also true in Hamilton and Burlington. (There are some crowds, too, for the National Capital Marathon in Ottawa, but Ottawans turn out for anything sponsored by the National Capital Commission because, well, what else is there to do?)

Both the Scotiabank Waterfront Marathon and this weekend’s Toronto Marathon are largely devoid of spectators. Even in spots where a few people gather to cheer on a friend, they will generally conserve any energy and enthusiasm until the person they’re waiting for actually appears, not wanting to extend even the smallest sign of goodwill (clapping? cheering? smiling?) toward the many strangers who straggle by.

In Toronto, crowds of spectators are replaced by impatient drivers, who in spite of the good work of the city, the police force, thestar.com, all weekend newspapers, radio, TV, and probably some blogs on gas prices, are always surprised to learn that the annual marathon is on and honk in pointless frustration before turning and heading to the suggested alternate route.

So why doesn’t Toronto embrace either of the marathons the way so many other cities do?

It can’t be the street closures, because every city has street closures for marathons — there is nothing extraordinarily inconvenient about this.

It can’t be the weather, which was mild and fall-like today, and quite lovely three weeks ago. The hardy folk of Hamilton and Burlington gather alongside the route of the Around the Bay race in late March, not known to be one of the finest times to be lakeside in southern Ontario.

It can’t be entirely the location, since although both races spend some time on deserted and inconvenient roads, most of the runs are through neighbourhoods. With the intensification of downtown, for example, there are many thousands of people directly on the Waterfront marathon route for whom cheering would require nothing more than opening the window to the balcony, or stumbling downstairs to the Starbucks. The Toronto marathon runs partially down Yonge Street through North York and North Toronto, eventually wending its way up University, directly on a subway line.

One obvious problem is the fact that Toronto has two marathons three weeks apart. There is understandable confusion about when the marathon takes place. As well, instead of having one huge marathon, whose numbers can justify shutting the city down, we have two large, but not major marathons, attracting fewer visiting runners (marathons are significant draws for tourism dollars) and, perhaps, not as many elite runners as might otherwise come. Some streets are only partially closed down, with traffic in half the lanes, leaving only one side for spectators.

If you’ve come out to support a friend, and seen what a difference the crowd energy made to him or her, or especially if you’ve run in a race yourself, and appreciated the encouragement of some screaming strangers, you can appreciate why spectators are important participants in races. With more and more Torontonians running half- and full-marathons and joining running clinics, I’m optimistic that the culture may change.

Someday.

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It’s an easy target, but:

The Current on Friday morning had a long segment on roundabouts, hooked to Case Ootes’s proposal that Toronto should have some. There aren’t any at the moment.

The main interview was with the City of Toronto’s transportation manager, who discussed them intelligently enough from theory – he’s not responsible for any real ones, there being none in the city, and none really contemplated. Roundabouts are hard to retrofit into an existing urban landscape, since they’re so space-intensive. Not impossible, but the expropriation is expensive.

Usually, new roundabouts are installed as a traffic-control measure in rural and suburban areas, which brings us to Ontario’s busiest roundabout, right here:

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in scenic Ancaster, well within CBC Toronto’s listening area.

It’s sort of an interesting application of the idea, designed as a transition between an 80k rural highway, which many motorists drove at 100 km/h, and a 50k suburban arterial. Drivers were supposed to sharply cut their speed at a certain point, but not all of them wanted to. Signs and speed enforcement didn’t do the trick, but physical changes to the road actually did. Residents were resistant at first, but accepted it after it became clear it solved the problem.

Not far away in rural Ancaster, roundabouts may be the key to the life-and-death question of how to make Hwy. 52 less lethal. 52 has become very dangerous since it became connected to the new 403 extension for much the same reasons that Hwy. 2 was dangerous when I was growing up: a mixture of cars and trucks acting as if they were on a 400-series highway, school buses, pedestrians and slow-moving farm vehicles. Counting from the 403 extension opening in 1998, road deaths come to more than one per mile. You can read all about it here.

The Hamilton planners haven’t really solved it, beyond posting an oddball 70 km/h speed limit, but are proposing five new roundabouts in rural Ancaster, three of them on 52. I’d install them every mile and a quarter at each concession, but it’s a start. This may actually turn out to be the solution – physical changes to the road will always be a better way of controlling behaviour than enforcement.

There’s lots of room for them, as you can see. Here’s 52 and Jerseyville Rd., one of the proposed locations:

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Now there’s an interesting story, if the CBC ever wanted to do a piece on roundabouts – a well-established and articulate community group, planners who have studied the issue in detail, local residents who have watched the road for years – everything you need, really. Pity it’s so far from the end of the subway.

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