[GTALUG] I’m obviously way behind in my reading: IBM owns Redhat

[Russell Reiter]

On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 2:16 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

> | From: Russell Reiter via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
>
> | the Prince Albert viaduct
> | which added the subway tracks under that bridge long before
> | there were subways in the area to connect those tracks to. That was world
> | class hometown capacity planning, in its day.
>
> The Prince Edward Viaduct.
>
> Sorry you are correct. I must have been thinking about the old have you
got Prince Albert in a can joke, with the punchline "well let him out he
can't breathe."


> I imagine that actual rails were not part of the original build.
>

In fact the rails were part of the original build; the engineering schema
provided calculations in carriage of the weight of the subway trains which
would run on them; live and dead loads are carefully calculated by
advanced capacity planning in constructions of both public and private
infrastructure projects. The PHY abstraction, if you will.

Subsequently those construction decisions were subject to a costs
inquiry into equitable waste; train tracks starting nowhere and finishing
nowhere which have no trains on them, as the more cynical newspaper reports
of the day reportedly recorded. I have seen a copy of the essential parts
of the decision in a not too old LSUC annual practice update. It was a case
in point of its day and the actual ultimate use of the track infrastructure
vindicated the city planners actions, if not the actual
disbursements involved.

I can't remember the case Title or docket number tho - it may still be used
as a case in point, otherwise the LSUC wouldn't publish the facts in a
modern update record. I'll have to paraphrase how the courts reacted to the
city's expert witness on the costing; a records clerk. It was along the
lines of - if the city presumes that a common layperson, labouring in the
bowels and recesses of city administration is an expert, they are very much
mistaken.

It was only the passage of time and the subsequent rise in urban population
density of the post war industrial economy, which then deemed those earlier
costs and any overruns to be economically viable. Inevitably, it is one
thing to be an expert in filing systems; it is quite another thing
altogether to be able to analyze the contents of the file and provide
expert testimony purporting to validate a financial abstraction prepared
for the courts, This was an activity which the clerk was not qualified to
do.

Social media is a tricky thing. If you look on the web you will find on the
city website a detailed history of construction, which omits any references
to the City's legal finagling before and after the facts.

My data source was from an old CD from a deprecated LSUC annual report. I
did a keyword search for something related and stumbled on the case brief.
I thought the Justices words were a priceless comment on the phenomenon of
"expert bias" in testimony.

It was pretty clear  the "mirror" documents examined in the court did not
support the clerks so called expert testimony in his analysis of the
financial accounts.


> I suspect that two world wars and the depressions delayed use of the
> route for the tracks.  In the end, the part over Rosedale Valley did not
> get used.
>
> Fun fact: apparently the first Toronto Subway was 100% funded by the
> TTC fare boxes.


Personally I'd like the see both the farebox and automotive gas emissions
go the way of the dodo in favour of a carbon emission balancing scheme. In
order to do that, the entire foundation of hydrocarbon resource extraction
industry has to be re-imagined and that economic "jolt" factor has many
corporations working very hard to ensure they don't loose profitability for
their shareholders.

FYI - if you are a Toronto urban LRT fan

Flyda is an interesting design concept and is now open source. It runs on
rails, and while the project does not address actual power and process
control systems, with modern advancements, as the author notes, the future
implications of the original design are flexible in going forward with a
combined surface and elevated rapid transit system.

Advances in autonomous vehicles could remove rails in residential areas.
The cars, either self directed or automated, could link together into
chains for longer inter uban movement and even longer intra urban
destinations, in appropriate social distancing, should those provisions
have to stay in force.

Why build a subway underground and parallel to the don valley when
essentially the same style of capacity planning which provided for the
viaduct, could elevate this very flexible modular transit system over the
don roadway. Not to mention cable raceways for power distribution, optical
data and even combining water purification in an attached aqueduct to
handle upstream surface runoff.

Modern material science makes it possible that our infrastructure
constructions could mimic the carbon sink capabilities of our remaining and
ultimately diminishing urban green-space, effectively if not quite as
efficiently as our similarly at risk boreal forests.

https://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/flyda.htm

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-- 
Russell
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