Richard Florida, the “Creative Class” guy, argues that Toronto is the heart of a new megalopolis (think Wash-NYC-Bos) that stretches west to London, ON, east to Quebec City, and south to Buffalo and Rochester. He argues that megalopolises are the real economic engines throughout the world.

One thing he mentions is bizarre to me - that Torontonians view their city as second-rate. I can tell you that Toronto is as world-class as a city can get, and Buffalonians are blessed to live so close to it. Even if you never go. Because with the strong Canadian dollar now, and our comparatively low sales taxes, Ontario plates have become ubiquitous throughout Western New York, but I haven’t crossed the border since early July.

The heart of Florida’s Globe & Mail article:

All of this convinces me that place, not statehood, is the central axis of our time and of our global economy. What it means for Toronto is simple: A mega-region needs to think and act like a mega-region, not like a bunch of separate cities with empty space between them. For instance, Tor-Buff-Chester needs regional investments in transportation – a real high-speed rail line between all the cities, for instance, and one that crosses borders. Mega-regions benefit from global hub airports like Toronto’s Pearson, New York’s JFK, Chicago’s O’Hare or London’s Heathrow. Direct flights from Pearson to Asia are a major plus for the entire mega-region. But the best way to get around one is not by plane or car but by fast rail. Europe has this one figured out.

Fixing the border problem will be key. As an American and frequent traveller to the States, I know that much of the problem is generated by Homeland Security paranoia of American authorities. But the mega-region needs to pro-actively figure this out. There’s lots of coverage of long lines of Torontonians trying to get to Buffalo to take advantage of the strong loonie. But huge amounts of trade go through those borders, and the ability of business travellers to get quickly from one destination to the next is critical to economic success of mega-regions. Tor-Buff-Chester needs fast, safe and efficient border crossings. It needs to be a priority to show the rest of North America how it can be done.

Both the Canadian and the US governments have been playing games with cross-border travel since 9/11. Certainly we need the borders to be protected, but let’s not kid ourselves. For every 60-minute delay at the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge, there’s an unmanned border crossing between northern New York/New England and Quebec.

Florida hit the nail on the head with the high-speed rail idea. A MagLev or TGV type train traveling on a dedicated track at speeds of well over 150 MPH could whisk you from Buffalo to Toronto in less than an hour. Rochester’s high-speed ferry was a literal Failboat, but extension of high-speed rail means that Rochester is a little over an hour away. It’s currently about a 3-hour drive from ROC-YYZ, and about 2 hours from BUF-YYZ.

Either way, it’d be an easy commute, when you compare it to people who trudge two hours to Manhattan from places like Port Jervis or the Poconos.

The only thing, however, that would truly open up what Florida calls the Tor-Buff-Chester to joint development as a megalopolis would look a lot like the EU’s Schengen border regime.

Citizens of the EU do not have to submit to formal passport controls when crossing intra-EU borders. Instead, the member states executed a treaty whereby the border controls of the EU itself are harmonized and strengthened. Not only that, but member states are able to temporarily re-establish individual border controls when necessary, and their police powers are extended:

The agreement also includes consent to share information about people, via the Schengen Information System. This means that a potentially undesirable person cannot ‘disappear’ simply by moving from one participant country to another as each country will know the same about the person’s background. Previously, a criminal with police in hot pursuit would be safe once they managed to cross the border, but under the agreement, police from one nation can cross national borders to chase their target for up to 30 km (’hot pursuit’). The officers either have to wear their uniforms, or their vehicles have to be marked as police vehicles. The officers may only use their weapons for self-defence.

It’ll probably never happen because the political will in the US and Canada will probably never exist, but if the two governments could reach an agreement to ensure that all visitors to the US and Canada are subject to identical scrutiny, and that information about possible terrorists and other undesireables can be shared between the governments - i.e., Homeland Security and Immigration Canada work on the same playbook - we could allow for free movement between the two countries.

Until that happens, the megalopolis of the future - stretching from Lake Erie to the St Lawrence River - will have a barrier down its middle.

Florida also maintains a blog at the Globe & Mail, so you can comment here.

Campaign stuff is generally covered here, so I won’t go into it here.

I’ll post about the whole experience of running at a later date, but I can tell you that posting will probably be lighter than usual over the next several days. Finding 5 minutes to scan the paper or teh internets, and then posting something pithy here has become somewhat difficult. I might be twitting more than I’m posting. Soon, twits will be embedded in the site.

Almost there. Almost there.

Last night, I attended and participated in the Clarence candidates’ forum, sponsored by the League of Women Voters. Because Chris Collins was also there, some press showed up. There was Chrissy Casilio, daughter of a Clarence Town Councilman and occasional Bauerle call-screener there getting tape for WBEN. There was Scott Brown, following Collins around like an albatross. There was Channel 4’s Alysha Palumbo. I watched her story later that night. The only thing of interest?

Collins showed up but Keane didn’t.

Well, last week Fedup and Geek went to a candidates’ forum in South Buffalo, and Keane was there, but Collins wasn’t.

So, where was Alysha Palumbo in her red pantsuit reporting breathlessly for a full 3 minutes about Collins’ absence from that forum?

What can we learn from this? One of two things (or maybe both):

1. They had a scheduling conflict;

2. Collins realizes that going to South Buffalo to troll for votes is a non-starter, and Keane knows that going to Clarence to troll for votes is a non-starter. Home turf an’ that.

I have an idea for a news station: WBFD.

Bill O’Loughlin left not one, but two voice messages for a couple who apparently slighted the candidate at their country club. Something about O’Loughlin getting their retention pond cleaned out and all they did was send a letter! And “Bob” needs to get “Marilyn” to leave Bill & his wife alone because they only get to go out a couple of times a week. The candidate implores Bob to “get your spouse under control”.

To me, there is no better comedy than hearing the automated voice of the answering machine cutting off a nasty tirade. It happens on the Stern show all the time; you hear someone going off, followed abruptly by “to erase or forward, press one” is gold.

But O’Loughlin wasn’t quite finished. He called back and specifically informed Bob & Marilyn that they’re not high income enough for him to bother with, and that he doesn’t want their money, and he doesn’t want their vote.

Gosh, one would think he was Fed Up or something.

Here’s Apple’s ad for the iPod Touch.

It’s based on this ad, created by an 18 year old British kid, who posted it to YouTube:

Microsoft’s Zune used the same song in an ad last year. Compare the Apple ad to Microsoft’s.

HT TUAW

And he’s interviewing Clark campaign whistleblower Mike Mullins. Check it out on WBEN.

Buffalo lost its downtown retail.

Sure, there’s the food court at the Main Place Mall - which is a great way for kids to see what the early 80s were like, and there are - um - copy shops and an EZ Pass Center and stuff. But there’s no big draw to bring you downtown to shop, and hasn’t been for over a generation.

Buffalo Rising has this post which goes into some detail about the collapse of certain department stores in the 70s and 80s. It’s interesting from an academic standpoint: the pedestrian mall and Metro Rail have been blamed for the death of retail on Main, but the hastening of Main Street’s demise was due to a bunch of stores that quickly became anachronisms in last few decades of the 20th Century. Commenters then go off on predictable tangents about their opinions as to why Buffalo’s downtown shopping district died.

Who cares?

I have never lived in a community that was so obsessed with its past. We have lots of problems in the present. If we can think of ways to address them now, we can perhaps clear the way for a more improved future.

Here’s how one commenter characterized another’s “top ten” reasons why downtown retail died:

1) Blame the suburbs 2) Blame the whites 3) Blame UB 4) Blame big business 5) Blame the cars 6) Blame the politicians 7) Blame the state 8 ) Blame the suburbs again 9) Blame the whites some more… In other words, it is all a big conspiracy and always someone else’s fault. We don’t have retail downtown because we don’t have people downtown. We don’t even have a decent grocery store downtown (refer to the NEO post).

I am not saying that these things didn’t happen, but you fail to really evaluate the root cause of the issues. People left the city in part because of the cars, take a look at the reasons that people left the city, it wasn’t just to ‘escape the blacks’, it was to move to a nicer, planned community. They had control over their community, they were part of the community and didn’t feel as helpless as they did in the city.

I’m pretty sure that antagonizing suburbanites is not the best plan for bringing back downtown Buffalo.

Attracting people back downtown isn’t brain surgery, and it’s high time we looked towards the future and for God’s sake let the past rest in peace.

OTOH, we can file lawsuits to block new luxury condominiums on Delaware Avenue. That’s just like a welcome mat. Only uglier with more petty nonsense.

Chris Collins. Jim Keane. Two men enter…

Questioning by Kevin Hardwick and Bob McCarthy. If you have a question you’d like considered, leave a comment; the Professor will find it. (Starbuck?)

WBEN Sunday 10am - 12pm.

Also - check out Geek’s take on the WGRZ debate here.

The best way in the whole wide world to run a press conference is to have your own staff pose as the press. You’re guaranteed hard-hitting questions such as, “Are you happy with FEMA’s response so far?” and “what [does] it mean to have an emergency declaration as opposed to a major disaster declaration” signed by the president.

Think Progress has some video.

Go wish LC Scotty mazel tov.

Buffalo Bloggers, we’re dead last!

Only 2% of the population reads or contributes to blogs in some way, shape, or form. We’re tied for last with Pittsburgh.

Here’s some future stereotypes demographic information about bloggers:

Other Internet behaviors of bloggers suggest an attraction to user generated content.

Bloggers are more than three times more likely than all Internet users to download Podcasts, and more than twice as likely to download/watch videos online. Twenty-Five percent of bloggers download or listen to audio clips online as opposed to the 8 percent of all other connected adults.

Bloggers are also adopters of new technology. They are 76 percent more likely than all Internet users to be a part of household that owns a PDA, 54 percent more likely to have an
MP3 player and 37 percent more likely to have a satellite radio subscription.

“Bloggers tend to have a different relationship with the Internet than the average user.
They are more likely to advantage of its utility for standard household and personal tasks, such as email, shopping and online banking,” said Mr. Meo. “Given that they are contributing to the content of the Internet itself, it’s not surprising that bloggers are more advanced online than your average Internet user, and more tech savvy overall.”

Demographically, bloggers are young and hail from middle class families. They are 66
percent more likely than the national average to be between the ages of 18 and 34. Fifty
percent of bloggers are part of a household that has children under 17, as opposed to 41
percent of the total population. Bloggers are 20 percent more likely than the national average to have an annual household income between $50k and $100k per year.

Why is Buffalo so damn low down the scale?

The top cities for bloggers have tech savvy and youth in common. Thirty-seven percent of Austin adults are between the ages of 18-34; they are 20 percent more likely than the national average to be within this age range.

Ouch.

Note to Donn Esmonde:

The Buffalo Beast applied the “Lord Byron” monicker to Mayor Brown quite literally immediately after his election.

And who can forget this hilarious cover?

So, yeah - I think it’s safe to say that City Hall is a humor-free zone.

With the introduction of Ollie’s Bargain Outlet to the area, it was only a matter of time before the Christmas Tree Shops followed.

Get ready for incessant repetition of the jingle, “Don’t You Just Looooove a Bargain”.

She won. Click here to read about it. It’s interesting for anyone blogging or commenting on blogs, and acts as a caveat to the over-litigious.

HT Room Eight

Article here.

You have to read the whole thing at channel 2’s website, or better yet click here to see Josh Boose’s report on it.

It wasn’t funny when Anello made an ass of himself at the mic during a council meeting. It wasn’t funny when he resisted arrest and allegedly grabbed for the officers gun. It was funny when he was shown the next day in his shop wearing a neck brace and making veiled threats about suing the city.

Remarkably he wasn’t tased, bro.

The Airbus A380 superjumbo completed its maiden commercial flight yesterday, traveling 7 hours from Singapore to Sydney. It has capacity for 850 passengers, but carried only 450 on this flight via charity online auction.

I’ve seen photos and video of the A380 lumbering improbably into the sky, but when you have an aircraft that’s simply that huge, the possibilities in terms of on-board accommodations are endless. For instance:

“The most amazing thing is here you have two classes of economy, split over two decks, with stairs in between the two, which I think is a huge novelty for everyone.

“The plane itself - the space is bigger than anything you can imagine. I can look out the window to my right at the moment and I can see a wing that looks bigger than most ordinary planes.”

Hundreds of staff and passengers at Singapore’s Changi Airport watched it lift into the sky, snapping the moment with pocket cameras and camera phones.

Passengers paid between $560 and $100,380 to be on the inaugural flight.

“I have never been in anything like this in the air before in my life,” said a fellow passenger, Australian Tony Elwood, who traveled in a private first-class suite with his wife Julie.

Private first-class suite. That’s pretty cool.

But fear not, because there are only 165 firm orders for the A380 while Boeing boasts 700 firm orders for its upcoming 787, which promises economical long-haul flights in a modern cabin.

Buffalopundit.wnymedia.net is a citizen of Red Sox Nation.

Kathy Konst has called for the abolition of the Erie County Water Authority, and brought under administrative & legislative control.

“By the 1970s, local party bosses together with county legislators imposed a culture of direct political control over the [Water Authority],” he said. “From that time to today, both political parties share in the exploitation by providing patronage jobs and contracts to insiders.”

In response to Konst’s resolution, the Water Authority said Tuesday that it keeps oversight agencies, including the Legislature, informed and will continue to do so.

“We are confident our accomplishments over the last decade at cutting costs, improving service delivery, maintaining a very affordable rate structure, which is the second lowest in Western New York, and consolidating municipal-owned water systems prove that the [Water Authority] is the best way to provide water service to ratepayers of Erie County,” the authority said in a statement.

In recent weeks, the authority gave one of its commissioners, Robert J. Lichtenthal, a Republican, its second-ranking staff position, paying him $118,000 a year.

Then, in extending the contract for Executive Director Robert Mendez — who had served as campaign treasurer to former County Executive Dennis T. Gorski — the authority agreed to lift his salary above $151,000 by 2010 and protect his golden parachute if he is ever fired or resigns. The contract would not be as generous if

he were a county department head working for the county executive, similar to the officials who run the county-provided sewer services.

“Water delivery is no different than provision of any other service, and I think there should be accountability to the executive and legislative branches for these functions,” Keane said in a speech Friday.

Now if only we could abolish state authorities and bring some semblance of control, that’d be just swell.

Last night, I got to watch the Top Gear episode where the lads come to the US and eschew rental cars for $1,000 beaters. Jeremy picked up a 1989 Camaro with a 5-speed manual tranny. The Hamster picked up an aging Dodge pickup with 150,000 miles on it. James May grabbed an old yacht of a Cadillac, but was the only one to have air conditioning until Hammond and Clarkson smashed it up with grilling utensils.

Their tour took them north through Florida, and then into Alabama and Mississippi, ending up in post-Katrina New Orleans.

A while back, I posted some video of their Alabama “challenge”, where the object was to get the other “shot or arrested”. For example, May’s Caddy had “NASCAR sucks” painted on the trunk, and Clarkson’s Camaro had “Country & Western is Rubbish” along the side. Hilarity ensued.

But when they hit New Orleans, reality set in. At one point, Clarkson (who is not shy about the America-bashing) commented that he couldn’t believe that the richest country in the world would permit New Orleans to still look like a disaster area over a year after the storm hit. It was quite sobering.

Then I read this post by the Buffalo Expatriate, who is studying in Ukraine and posts about the US as “benevolent hegemon”. She recounts one of the post-WMD explanations given by the Bush Administration for invading Iraq:

if democracy and human rights are threatened by a murderous regime, we will militarily assist the people who want to be free from such terror even if the UNSC is unable to rally together and do something concrete about it. I’m not naive enough to believe that was the true intention of invading Iraq, but that’s what we purported to the rest of the world. Here’s the problem- while we are and have been fighting in Iraq under the auspices of freeing people who want democracy and peace for their country, Sudan and Burma have respectively been facing brutal government (sponsored) violence and repression. And we have done so little, that we hear the kind of resignation like in [a Time article she references]

In Burma/Myanmar/whatever it’s called this week, Monks - who are revered there - took to the streets to peacefully protest the abuses of a brutal, murderous military dictatorship that has ruled there for decades. Sudan isn’t even remotely on the radar screen of the average American, and Burma only because what passes for TV News in this country covered it for a week or so.

Conclusion:

If you couldn’t tell, I’m hoping to spark some debate on this so please open up- a debate on U.S. leadership and what all of these events mean in defining image versus reality.

Morality is a word that’s bandied about quite a lot in our current domestic politic. Morality in media, morality in sexual relations, the supposed immorality of homosexuality, morality and religion, morality and abortion, morality and stem cell research, morality and marriage. We’ve been bombarded with messages of morality that amount to little more than conflict.

In the meantime, our morality does little for a genocide in Sudan. Our morality can reach across the oceans to Iraq, but not to Burma. Not to Zimbabwe. Our morality does not permit the construction of 20th-century era flood prevention in the Mississippi Delta or the reconstruction of New Orleans. Our morality has permitted the federal government to commit torture and kidnapping in the name of freedom and democracy.

Part of what makes this country so amazing, and the target of love and ire throughout the world is what we stand for. We stand for freedom. We need to take that stand in more places than the former British League of Nations Mandate that’s got oil underneath it.

Did you catch this story in the Niagara Falls Reporter last week? There’s this follow-up this week.

As the kids like to say on teh internets,

A “New York minute” is an idiom meaning “very quickly”. An “Albany minute” should count for about 10 months.

Dan Gundersen, Eliot Spitzer’s nominee for upstate development czar at Empire State Development was confirmed yesterday by the State Senate.