Welcome to the personal website of Andrew Turnbull. This outpost features tons of stupefying and trivial things pertaining to various and diverse interests of mine. Chances are, if there's something I know about or like that doesn't much other representation on the 'net...there's a bit of it here.

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January-March 2020 Archive

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30 March 2020

As I begin my second week of being marooned at home, I feel compelled to ponder the mysteries of the world that surrounds us.

What could possibly be more mysterious than this sign? It's a yellow circle on a square, and it's posted on a road to nowhere on Mission Island in Thunder Bay. I have no idea what it means.

The road ends at a river...and the foot of another sign. It's a red circle on a square. And I have no idea what it means, either. It surely isn't a navigational marker.

Any answers? Or ideas? I'm all ears.

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23 March 2020

Crossing the Pigeon River

Thunder Bay and the expanse of Canada that surrounds it is connected to the United States by a bridge and border crossing on the Pigeon River, not far from Grand Portage, Minnesota.

That wasn't always the case. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Port Arthur and Fort William were effectively an island in the wilderness connected to the outside world by rail and ferry only. There were roads that snaked around, but they were primative...and they didn't lead anywhere.

A road from Fort William to the Pigeon River was completed in 1916. But, there was no funding for a bridge crossing the river. So, what happened? The Fort William-Port Arthur Rotary Club elected to take matters into its own hands, solicited donations in conjuction with their compatriots in Duluth, and built a bridge themselves...without official governmental approval! The so-called "Outlaw Bridge" was a rickety span of timber that cost $4801 to build, and it formally opened to traffic on 18 August 1917. As befitting its "Outlaw" name, the bridge didn't initially have any customs offices or border controls; though that state of affairs didn't last long.

The Outlaw Bridge was eventually "officialized." The south approach became part of U.S. highway 61 in 1927; the north approach became part of Ontario highway 61 ten years later. By that point, however, the original bridge was gone: In 1934 it was demolished, and replaced by a steel truss on the same site.

In 1964 the third Pigeon River bridge opened, a simple girder affair located nine kilometres downstream. This bridge still exists today, and it's so boring that you barely know you're on it when you cross the border.

But what happened to the old bridges, and the old border crossing? The old stub of Highway 61 that approaches it is still traversable, although the pavement is rough. Part of it is now signed as secondary highway 593, and part of it is signed, prosaically, as "Old Border Road."

The bridge is gone. The road ends in a cul-de-sac, with a striped guardrail blocking the chasm. A similar scene exists through a gap in the trees on the other side.

Looking east, one gets a sense of the elevated scale of the surroundings. The left side of the river is Ontario; the right side is Minnesota. The left side is Canada; the right side is the United States. The left is the land of the free, the right is...well, you get my drift.

And yes: The river's frozen. You could simply walk across it if you thought you could get away with it. (Though considering the US, they'd probably have ICE goons in mukluks prowling the woods.)

Looking down, we see the edge of a bridge abutment...the only visible concrete evidence (see what I did there?) that this deserted scene was ever a major transportation link.

Looking back, we see the road leading away. Until 1964, this scene was the southern terminus of Ontario highway 61. I believe that the customs house would have stood on the left side, just fore of the trees. There is nothing left of it, nor of the gift shops and visitor attractions that were once clustered on the other side.

All for now.

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16 March 2020

My flat licence plate essay got some attention on Toronto Reddit the other day. Wonder how many folks bothered clicking through to the front page to read my thoughts on Mr. Ford's marvellous new design? (Probably none!)

Since everyone's sequestering themselves indoors this week, enjoy this outdoor picture of the Province of Ontario's previous pieces of stamped steel. This is on the wall of an antiques store between London and Stratford that I never did go inside, because I never could figure out when it was supposed to be open.

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9 March 2020

Was ist das? Die Berliner Mauer?

I don't yet know the story, but it's in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

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2 March 2020

A Proposal for a New Ontario Licence Plate Design

Backing up to February, it's clear that Ontario's new licence plate design doesn't have a lot of good qualities going for it. So what would be better?

Let's start by deconstructing plates to their core. Their first and foremost role is to identify vehicles. Clearly. Effectively. Anything else is pure window dressing.

For sixty-odd years, nigh every licence plate on the North American content has been a scant six-by-twelve inch rectangle...15 by 30 centimetres, in contemporary units. This was an arbitrary size, selected in the mid-1950s to placate Detroit's automotive stylists. I'm more a fan of the Australian standard of 13 by 37 centimetres, which allows for wider and much more legible characters while also cutting down the amount of "dead space" along the top and bottom edges. Unfortunately, a 13x37 cm standard is physically incompatible with the plate recesses on some Canadian-spec vehicles. That shouldn't stop us: A 15x30 cm plate can still be legible, we just have to be skilful in order to use the limited size effectively.

Being skilful with a 30 cm plate length means restricting ourselves to a serial length of six figures. (Five would be better still, but five figures don't offer enough capacity for a place where 12.5 million vehicles are registered.) This means discarding Ontario's absurd ABCD-123 format, and also discarding the illegibly slender dies it requires. Let's go back to the bolder, wider, and more gracefully curved serial dies that Ontario used from 1967 to 1994...or possibly something even wider than that, like the squat dies on this Mexican plate.

The six-figure ABC-123 format hasn't been issued in Ontario since 1986. The reverse 123-ABC format has barely been used since 1997. Why not reuse some of these legible and desirable serial combinations? The MTO is well past overdue to apply a sensible retention schedule to its annals of motor vehicle records, purge its database of licence plates that expired 20, 30, or 38 years ago, and allow this to happen. Alternatively, why not follow the lead of Quebec or the Netherlands and use four letters and two numbers? Formats like ABC-12D, A12-BCD, and AB-12-CD each offer up to 45.7 million unique combinations apiece, without any need to delve into seven figures.

The biggest stink about the new plates comes over the change in slogan: The celebratory Yours to Discover sentiment of the previous 38 years is out, replaced by the vague A Place to Grow, the obnoxious Open for Business, or their equivalents en Français. But is a slogan even necessary at all? Short answer: It isn't.

A 1960 University of Illinois study found that slogans reduce the legibility of other elements on plates, and proposed eliminating them entirely. No slogan would also obviate the need for Ontario to produce and inventorize separate stocks of plates in English and French. So let's scrap the slogans, shift the serial down, and plaster "Ontario" across the top in letters as big and legible as will fit. In mixed case, too (à la Quebec), for improved readability at a distance.

Ontario's new plates are white and blue. So were the old ones. All Ontario passenger plates have been blue and white for the last 55 years, and you might be forgiven for thinking that blue and white are the province's official colours. But they're not: Green and gold are. Green and gold also don't allow for an awful lot of contrast, and have rarely been used on licence plates. Our solution? Side-step the PC party colours and the official colours, and instead go back to the badass black-and-white of the late 1950s. Another bonus? Maximum contrast!

It goes without saying that the plates should be embossed, to ensure that they retain a modicum of legibility even when kissed by snow, dirt, or the glare of the evening sun. They should also be distinctive, and durable: After all, some Ontario licence plates have been on the road for 47 years and counting. Long-term durability means rethinking the norms of manufacturing materials, though: Woe be the provincial purveyor of plates when the 3M reflective sheeting on those plates starts to peel and shred after 7 of those 47 years.

There's a solution to this problem so obvious that it exasperates me that no state or province is currently exercising it: Dump the reflective sheeting entirely, and instead start manufacturing plates with glass bead reflectorization on the raised surfaces. Such plates are immune to blistering, peeling, and shredding...and though they lose a modicum of reflectivity over decades of extended use, they maintain readability during the day and age far more gracefully than plates with reflective sheeting do. To be legible, this technique obligates the use of light numbers on dark backgrounds, the reverse of most plates in use today...which means that any plates produced with glass beads stand out boldly from the pack.

Ontario actually pioneered this manufacturing technique on doctors' plates in 1939, yet never used it again. Beaded plates enjoyed extended periods of popularity in 17 U.S. states and Alberta due to their lower cost, and were the general issue in Michigan as recently as 2006. Maybe someone at Trilcor could call the prison in Adrian, Michigan, and ask them if they have some surplus bead-applying equipment that they could send over the border? It'd be worth a shot.

Painted borders are elements that clutter designs, and it's an embarrassment that the reflective white edge on the new Ontario plate design is more visible at night than the serial is. So, our proposal won't have one. We'll indulge ourselves in allowing one superfluous element on the plate, just to add visual interest: A graphical separator embossed between the letters and numbers of the serial. It could be a trillium; it could be a crown. (The former is preferable, since the monarchy is a superfluous ceremonial institution whose end is probably coming sooner rather than later.) But it should not be both.

One last touch: The validation sticker. The current version isn't exactly a bastion of legibility, with its tiny year digits and crammed-together three-letter abbreviations. Nor do the colours really work: Ontario cycles through a different colour every three months, and thanks to early renewals and two-year registrations there are as many as fourteen colour schemes that may be valid at the same time!

So, let's get to work: Like the province name, the validation sticker should be made as big and as bold as possibly will fit on the plate. Let's make it 50% bigger. Let's move the serial to the edge, where it doesn't get in the way, and set the expiration date in numerals that can be read at a car's length or more. Let's use numeric months, both for legibility (a numeric "1" can be printed larger and more boldly than a three-letter "JAN") and to obviate the language issue. With a legible month digit to establish validity, the province would be free to change the colour scheme every twelve months instead of every three, thus linking it to the expiration year and reducing the number of potentially-valid colour schemes from an unmanageable fourteen to a manageable four.

Add all of this up, and what do you get? You get this:

I can dream.

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24 February 2020

About those new Ontario plates...

It's a tragedy, really.

Ontario's licence* plate collectors have been starved of excitement for decades, with little to keep themselves occupied other than watching the letters tick by. Any opportunity for a new design...particularly a new general-issue design available to all...ought to have been a cause for celebration.

But celebrating is the last thing I want to do, given the design and the circumstances of how it came to be.

Where to begin? Well, much like the current round of teachers' strikes, the new Ontario licence plate design is the crackhead's brother's legacy. It's his way of leaving a visible mark on the province, in much the same way that a dog visibly pisses on its territory. That alone is enough to leave a stench.

Licence plates should not be flat. The new plate is flat. Completely flat, with not even a raised edge to lend stiffness to the material. Which means that not only will the plates flap, vibrate, and get reduced to crumpled balls of tinfoil after a few bumper lashings, but they're also illegible when they're covered in salt, silt, or snow. Which in Ontario, means that they're going to be illegible for half the year.

The flat plates were produced with 3M's Digital License Plate system, using the same Minnesota-lookalike serial font that nigh every 3M plate uses. Which tells me that 3M executives probably mailed a pretty big cheque to Doug Ford's headquarters. 3M executives helped bankroll Tom Emmer's far-right Minnesota gubernatorial campaign in 2010, and they'd surely pull the same stunt north of the border if they could.