As I continued my drive up the highway I realized that the skyline is already littered with towers suitable for small turbines – the light standards. Imagine a little wind turbine integrated into every light standard along the highway, capable of providing enough electricity to power that light. And if we went through a wind drought the lights would be powered by the grid. Remember that a turbine generates electricity all day and night, as long as there is wind.

Put a cylinder turbine on top of, or integrated into the tower of each standard – a turbine like this one:

ITALY’S Agriculture Ministry announced this month that some wines that receive the government’s quality assurance label may now be sold in boxes. That’s right, Italian wine is going green, and for some connoisseurs, the sky might as well be falling.

But the sky isn’t falling. Wine in a box makes sense environmentally and economically. Indeed, vintners in the United States would be wise to embrace the trend that is slowly gaining acceptance worldwide.

Wine in a box has been around for more than 30 years — though with varying quality. The Australians were among the first to popularize it. And hardly a fridge in the south of France, especially this time of year, is complete without a box of rosé. Here in America, by contrast, boxed wine has had trouble escaping a down-market image. But now that wine producers are talking about reducing their carbon footprint — that is, the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in the transportation of wine — selling the beverage in alternative, lighter packaging instead of heavier glass seems like the right thing to do.

More than 90 percent of American wine production occurs on the West Coast, but because the majority of consumers live east of the Mississippi, a large part of carbon-dioxide emissions associated with wine comes from simply trucking it from the vineyard to tables on the East Coast. A standard wine bottle holds 750 milliliters of wine and generates about 5.2 pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions when it travels from a vineyard in California to a store in New York. A 3-liter box generates about half the emissions per 750 milliliters. Switching to wine in a box for the 97 percent of wines that are made to be consumed within a year would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about two million tons, or the equivalent of retiring 400,000 cars.

But here’s another reason to sell wine in a box. America will soon become the largest wine market in the world. In recent years, we overtook Italy, and France is now in our sights. (This is total consumption, not per person; we are still well behind by the latter measure.) As Americans drink more wine, we will be drinking it not only on special occasions like dates and weddings, but also on Monday nights with pizza. That’s a lot of wine — and potentially a big carbon footprint.

Although some sommeliers may scoff at wine from a plastic spigot, boxes are perfect for table wines that don’t need to age, which is to say, all but a relative handful of the top wines from around the world. What’s more, boxed wine is superior to glass bottle storage in resolving that age-old problem of not being able to finish a bottle in one sitting. Once open, a box preserves wine for about four weeks compared with only a day or two for a bottle. Boxed wine may be short on charm, but it is long on practicality.

Which leads to a final reason for boxed wine: it’s so much more economical. Having an affordable glass of wine may be the best way to keep our 15-year bull market for wine consumption running. It also would help keep per-glass prices of wine from rising as the dollar falls.

The main obstacle to a smaller carbon footprint for wine is the frequently abysmal quality of wine put in boxes. But that’s an easy fix: raise the quality.

In the past few years, the boxed wine sold in America has shown some signs of improvement. There’s been wine in a stylish cardboard tube made by a top winemaker in Burgundy. There’s a good, old-vine grenache from the Pyrenees sold in a box. A succulent unoaked malbec from organically grown grapes in Argentina is now available in the United States thanks to the 1-liter TetraPak, which is also being used by three renegade Californians who have a line of wines that are sold in 250-milliliter packages — about the size of juice boxes, but without straws. And then, of course, there’s the news from Italy.

Producers everywhere need to deliver better wine in a box — and make it snappy. Perhaps they will if consumers start to demand that everyday wines that don’t need to age in a bottle be sold in a box. If you’re sorry about the change, squeeze off another well-preserved, affordable, low-carbon serving of boxed wine and mull it over.

The Toronto Cycling Committee, chaired by Councillor Adrian Heaps, wants to make cycling an integral part of the city’s transportation strategy.

It plans: – Swipe-card-access bicycle storage areas at subway stations because, without doing evidence-based research, it has decided bicycle theft is the main reason people don’t cycle to work. – To add 218 kilometres of cycle lanes by 2010. – Ticketing of cars parked in, and removal of snow from, cycle lanes. – Construction of workplace showers (but no steam and shiatsu.)

If more people used their bikes to get to work year-round, that would greatly reduce traffic congestion at the times it really matters: the two daily rush hours. That should be the main goal of our municipal cycling strategy. In Amsterdam, where bikes are a mainstay of the transportation plan, you can’t tell it is rush hour by observing non-bike traffic. What works in Amsterdam, however, won’t work here, because they (at least for now) are Dutch and we aren’t. The cycling committee’s initiatives are laudable. But anyone who thinks they will result in even a slight diminution of the city’s traffic congestion is dreaming in Technicolor.

Fear of bicycle theft is not the reason people don’t bike to work. What stops people from bike commuting to work is fear for their safety. This has two aspects: being hit by cars and unsafe road surfaces. Bike lanes address neither issue. They don’t protect bikers from car doors or cars making right turns. They are also useless in winter because the city doesn’t clear snow quickly enough. Those who commute in summer but not winter stop, not because of the cold but because of unsafe road surfaces.

What is needed is a physical barrier separating cars and bikes and a means of keeping bike lane surfaces from becoming slippery.

The way to do it is staring us in the face: four lane, controlled-access bicycle expressways with ice-melting coils in the roads to keep them free of ice and snow — four north-south and three crosstown.

The north-south are the easy ones. Toronto has two major river valleys — the Humber and the Don — and the expressways could be built at the sides. There is already one along the Don that starts at Lawrence Avenue East and ends near Lake Ontario.

To prevent collisions, a physical separation would be needed between bikes on the one hand and pedestrians and wildlife on the other, so the bike lanes would periodically gently overpass the ground. The entire Bayview extension should be bicycle-only from Nesbitt Drive to River Street. After that there is no place to go other than The Brickworks, accessible from Broadview Station. Consequently, Rosedale Valley Road could be bike-only starting east of Park Road.

But for this to work, an expressway going straight through the centre of the city is needed. It could run alongside the Allen Road and Spadina University subway line from York University (when the subway extends that far) to Eglinton Avenue West where the Allen ends and the subway goes underground. Cyclists would cross Eglinton and travel through Cedarvale and Sir Winston Churchill ravines and Boulton Drive down to Davenport Road.

From there, the best choice is to elevate the bike expressway from Avenue Road to University Avenue all the way downtown to Adelaide, so cyclists could fly over intersections. The inferior choice is a bicycle right of way down the middle, protected from cars by concrete barriers.

This is also the way the east-west expressways would work. Richmond and Adelaide should have unidirectional expressways or rights of way. Bloor-Danforth is a good choice for an uptown route and Eglinton is for the north, linking with the north-south as do car expressways.

It will cost money, but we spend a fortune on infrastructure for cars and public transit. The TTC spent $55-million to $60-million to reconfigure St. Clair West to shave 12 minutes off that route’s travel time and is getting $2.6-billion to extend the subway to York University.

A fraction of that invested in bike infrastructure would cure the rush-hour traffic congestion, and, unlike the TTC, not lose money and require annual subsidization.

By definition, citizens, not politicians, will have to take the lead on this one. Otherwise, we’ll just end up spinning our wheels. – Murray Teitel is a Toronto lawyer and journalist.

But they are the same people who think that expenses of $107,000 each is acceptable.

The whole system sounds like a farce to me.

How about we determine the actual expenses required to be a trustee and pay for those expenses directly. On top of that provide an honorarium and a stipulation that no other expenses will be covered. The trustees are supposed to be in it for the kids so this proposal should not encounter any opposition.

I just did a quick scan of Joseph Martino’s expenses and I’m not sure why the School Board is paying for his home phone and internet; or family pack meal deals from Swiss Chalet.

• Create a subway line under Queen Street from The Beach to Roncesvalles
• Create a rapid transit link to the airport from Union Station – use existing GO Train line to Malton.
• Create a three-stop train-style link from Union Station to Roncesvalle to Browns Line.
• Follow the lead of London, England and assess tolls for vehicles entering the core of the city.
• Provide tax incentives to people who ride their bikes – just like we do for transit riders.

We need to start somewhere.

And if the majority of drivers start to obey the speed limit, those who don’t will become the rarity and stick out – easily identifiable, and catchable!

Same goes for all the other “little” violations that people make every day like failing to signal, illegal lane changes, stopping in the middle of an intersection, failing to pull over for an emergency vehicle, parking in a no parking zone, etc, etc.

Package Includes

Domain Name

Up to 10 email addresses

Webmail

Email based tech support

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What more does the average small business need?

Regular testing could remove a lot of the unsafe drivers from the road – making it safer for all of us.

And who can complain about this? Only those who are likely to fail. Have the test coincide with your photo renewal, make it a quick process, and everyone will be better off in the end.

Until now.

I’m going to start posting them, as they occur to me – perhaps writing them down my spark some interest or some action on one of them!

Posting my ideas is one of these BIG IDEAS!