Ottawa's looming graffiti crisis

Lately I've been reading overheated media coverage of Ottawa's graffiti problem. You know, Krylon Invasion, city councillors buying business constituents high pressure washers to zap offending spraybombage - like that. I've been ambivalent. I know a lot of it defaces private property, but we coyotes like certain graffiti. Some of it is really beautiful, and when I see it, it makes me happy. I speak of the true public artists. Taggers? Not so much. May their sooty black aerosol cans explode in their sweaty little mitts. I digress.

Saturday, though, I sprayed a mouthful of my customary breakfast (Piping hot crumpets, cat marmalade, steaming mug of fresh-brewed vitriol) all over my morning Petfinder. Patrick Curran, OC Transpo's business development manager, was floating a trial balloon about selling transit station names to the highest-bidding corporate sponsors. Some city councillors and the usual suspects on the editorial page seemed to like it.

The argument is that Transpo needs the money, and there's no more space for ads on the buses. Seems to me that maybe the city should just fund the service properly. But dreaming up billion dollar tunnels and harebrained 'innovations' is way more fun than making sure the existing bus system works well in the most basic ways.

Mr. Curran rather disingenuously notes that St. Laurent transit station already is named for the attached mall, and argues that opens the door to more of the same. Nice try at historical revisionism to support a thin-end-of-the-wedge propaganda technique, but, ummm, no. The mall is labelled for the rather prominent nearby boulevard that the mall promoters swiped its name from.

Ottawa is a town where, when a boneheaded fuckwit has a idea that shrieks out for rapid trashing, then tries to smoke it past us by self-diagnosing it as 'innovative', a buncha other boneheaded fuckwits will nod sagely and murmur, "Mmmm... innovative!" It's how decisions are made. But non-sequitur-ish corporate sponsorship isn't innovative. It's already been inflicted elsewhere. Yoohoo! Senators Coliseum? Which became the Corel Centre? An asshatted monument to momentary corporate hubris - and sanctioned graffiti, really. Now it's ScotiaBank Place...

Transit is about moving people efficiently. Renaming transit stations - all of which now (very handily) key on nearby geographical features - is not. We already let businesses deface the cityscape by smearing it with their kind of graffiti. We just call them 'logos', 'signs' and 'advertising'. Why let 'em further confuse a bus ride, too?