The State Of Public Transit
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Summary
Brady Wedham joins us to talk about his experience riding the GO train in the winter, and why he thinks public transit in general is in need of a major update. TPL Media is a podcast that focuses on the intersection of technology and culture in the digital age. Hosted by Alex Blumberg and Matt Knutson, TPL is dedicated to bringing quality, locally sourced content to listeners.
Transcript
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Canada has invested billions in public transit. Delivery has been slow and expensive. It's been
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unreliable in some of the best cases in major cities across the country. And in fact, it doesn't
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necessarily match up with the way Canadians live. Talking with me about that today and more,
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Brady Wedham joins us, reporter at large here at TPL. Brady, thanks. I appreciate this.
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Reporter and GoTrain specialist. I think I've become a GoTrain specialist over the past
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eight months or so. Yeah, it's been quite the experience. Before we get into it,
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All of the most recent shows go up. Plus, there's some members-only content coming to YouTube. So
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if you're watching this on YouTube, right, maybe start signing up or thinking about it and
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allocating those funds for that. But yeah, we're going to put up a couple of features out on YouTube.
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So some premium content is on its way. Two new docs are slated for members-only,
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and we'll be giving you more information about that. But yeah, you are a GoTrain specialist here
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in the studio. Many people that work here are transit people, but the majority of us are drivers.
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Yep. Your experience over the last seven months on the Ontario Go between the Hamilton area and the
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Toronto area has been nothing short of abominable. You know, I used to take pride in riding the GoTrain
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back in like 2016, 2017-ish. I was on it every single day for a year going from, I lived on Lakeshore
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going down into Hamilton for a business that I owned. And I used to love getting on that train.
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You almost felt like it was like, my baby takes the morning. It went through your head.
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I didn't see that coming. I'll be honest with you.
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Yeah. No, it felt like you were on the train to go and do something successful. Now, when you get
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on the train in 2026, 10 years later, you feel if the train actually shows up, because they have been
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canceling a lot of trains recently, and we'll get into that in detail here through the episode. But
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showing up to the train now feels like it's your one getting robbed on your ticket price.
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It used to be $21 inclusive for the day, right?
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$30 a day is a lot of money to ask people to put aside from the paycheck.
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It is. And if you're most of these stations outside of the downtown Toronto GTA core, they take an Uber
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to get to, right? They're not in suburbia. They're in the middle of like the big block areas.
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Well, that goes to the thing that I opened with saying, you know, I don't know that transit really
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matches up to the urban sprawl that we put out there. And how as Canadians we expect it to be
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serviced in that way is really difficult because it does require buses to trains, trains to
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And then another bus or Uber once you're in the city to get to the location you're trying to get to,
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Since the holidays, it's been a challenge for you because there was technical issues
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with a derailment, I think, near or at Union Station.
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That took what felt like weeks actually to repair and get back on track.
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It seems to be the big one. Frozen signals. I don't even know how we were in a zone in Canada
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where they don't keep those signals either warmed. Our friend Paul, a host on this show,
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was saying that too, that there should be some sort of like system in place that if the weather
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even dropped to minus 50, that these signals would still work. Minus 20, they shouldn't be dying out.
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Mainly winter here in Ontario. Like you think we'd build for that.
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Understaffed is another big thing that I'm noticing. Staff is not the same as it used to be
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even just in the summer. And it seems to be less and less every week that goes by. You see one
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security instead of two, or you see nobody. Like if a train gets canceled, there's no one to talk to.
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So what happens? You're stuck at a train. You've got to get to someplace.
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What do you do at the station when you realize, okay, my train has been fully canceled.
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You hope the next one shows up. Man, if it doesn't, once you're three in, that's my motto now,
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is once I've missed two or three or I see that cancellations have happened,
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In some cases, yeah. It seems to be more heading west than it is heading east.
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The people in the east are going, no, no, it's bad for us too.
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No, I know, but I see the schedules everywhere, right?
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It's very rare do I see them getting canceled heading into.
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Or what happens is they get turned into express trains.
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Now, a couple of months ago, we did an episode on transit crime.
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And that was a disturbing bit of business because across Canada, there is less security.
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People feel less secure on our public transit, buses and trains.
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Add to it these scheduling problems and technical issues that are holding people up.
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Since COVID, by the way, transit went down over, I think it went over 70% drop around COVID.
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It only bounced back to about 70% of what it was pre-COVID, 70% to 75%.
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Now there's been a call to action to get people back to work.
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So now you've got cancellations of many more people not getting to their destinations.
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This can cost you a job, cost more for daycare.
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Put you in a situation of stress that you weren't bargaining for just to get to where you need to go.
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I can only imagine the amount of people that lost their job.
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And the jobs that don't have any leniency on being late.
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Literally that minute, you've got to be in there timed in.
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Trains just seem to come and go as they please.
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And speaking about the crime or the transit, just so I don't forget about it, the crime in transit.
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I see that that's probably maybe after some of the stops that I'm taking because I haven't seen any of that.
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Okay, so now go is one issue, but then you get into the rest of Toronto.
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This is kind of the crux of the discussion, if you don't mind, Brady.
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You know, other parts of the country, Montreal was successful with it.
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We're not necessarily great at building transit here in Canada that matches our needs for certain.
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And now we're about to embark on a high-speed rail project at the federal level that will connect Toronto with Quebec City with stops along the way.
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So we look stuff up a lot of the time before we do these shows.
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Although, like you say, the comment section may not agree with us.
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Yeah, we do tend to do a little bit of research.
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And one of the most outrageous numbers is per kilometer, what it costs us to do transit.
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And I think that the reason those numbers are so high and why transit may get a kind of secondary seat is because Canada's not really laid out for transit outside of major cities.
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So what's the price per kilometer to lay transit down?
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Well, the average cost, it's some of the highest, by the way, in the world.
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We didn't build the infrastructure to handle it, and we built the sprawl already.
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It's really interesting to me that we're so streetcar adept and so light rail adept when we're in the winter.
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I mean, there's nothing better than the subway in winter if it's run right and, you know.
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Who wants to wait outside in the snow to catch a train to be across town in 10 seconds and apparently get in a fight while you're on it?
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Well, don't worry, Brady, because it's only $396 million per kilometer.
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It can be north of almost $500 million per kilometer, everything in.
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Having said that, they have an amortization program that essentially should bring the cost down to a mere $30 million per kilometer by the time all is said and done.
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Because they're building so much of it, this is 1,000 kilometers of high speed rail that we're talking about going 300 kilometers an hour,
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reducing a trip between Toronto and Quebec City to, you know, roughly half the time.
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They had a meeting in the city of Toronto down at the St. Lawrence Market where all of the experts and all the pundits got together and had a chat about it
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and explained from an engineering standpoint how they would do it from a political standpoint.
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And it makes me wonder, okay, so we're not really great at doing this.
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And yet we're going to undertake this massive project that will take longer than the average political stay in parliament.
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Okay, so the cost of that, I'm just trying to think of where we get to that number.
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Let's just say it's 30 and it's not 500 because 500 is just mind-boggling.
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You know, if you're digging tunnels, it can be outrageous.
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But the farmland that they bought, why would the cost be so high to just lay down track?
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I think a lot of it has to do with where they're going to lay the track and what's required there.
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There's a lot of, you know, Brady, I made this all up.
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No, I understand how you get to that number because there's a lot of, just to lay down a kilometer of track is a lot, it would be a lot harder than laying down a kilometer of asphalt, right?
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The amount of team, the team that would be hired would be a good portion of that alone.
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I don't think you could have a lot of moving around engineering-wise on a high-speed train.
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I think it has to be pretty smoothly engineered.
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Have you seen the turns that some of them do in Japan?
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Because I think it'd be cool to get on one of these things.
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It's made a big difference to how people can do business and live life in a widespread area, you know, live in one area, work in another.
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You know, to use via rail is not necessarily inexpensive.
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I wonder if this is one of the reasons why they kiboshed the idea of doing the light rail across Canada.
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One of them going into the States, there could be some issues and things like that.
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It's interesting because let's talk about other transit getting us across the country.
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I mean, a flight, you know, on one of the airlines, one of the discount airlines for sure, you could get there for $169, $200.
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If you don't take a bag, you can get there for...
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If you don't take a bag and you don't have a coat, they charge you for every single thing.
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You know what it costs for a bag to get on a plane with you now?
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So, okay, by the time you get to Montreal, if you have bags from Toronto, you're looking at probably $400 taxes in.
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Would that train, would a high-speed rail train be any less expensive?
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Because if you take a look at a Via Rail ticket, and it must be at least double that.
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If you're getting there in half the time, I'm just going to guess the ticket will be twice the price.
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So, I think we'll have a lot to pay off on this, and so they won't be discounting tickets all that often, I'm assuming.
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You're already more than taking a flight, and a flight gets you there an hour earlier.
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I don't know that there's consumer appeal for this at a price point that would be comparable to air travel.
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Well, it would be quicker, even though that the travel with the flight is quicker.
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It still technically would be quicker with the process of getting on a train and getting off of a train,
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going to a parking lot, not waiting for your luggage.
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Brady, you go to Porter, let's say, for example, on Toronto Island Airport, and you're getting in a cab in Montreal an hour and a half later, at the very longest.
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And it also depends on the stations that you're arriving to, too, right?
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It ends up in Peterborough, I think, as its first stop.
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The main terminal cities are Toronto and Quebec City.
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The intermediate cities would be Peterborough, Ottawa, Montreal, Laval, and Trois-Rivières, Quebec.
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This just sounds like a luxury line for the people in Parliament.
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So, that would be the first tie connecting two provinces, which is interesting.
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If this transit is created for civilians to get to places easier and make life easier,
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and the very first thing we're going to do is slap it in the middle of Parliament and get that figured out first.
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You know what's interesting is they actually base this, it's only 200 kilometers.
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So, you're looking at a couple of hours driving, okay.
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Kind of, in the sense that it connects our capital with another major city in another province.
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But the other thing is, it is one of the busiest train-use corridors in Canada.
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I think there's already a market for it with the federal offices and the government offices.
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That would make the average Canadian happy to hear that, though.
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If it's snakes on a plane, we'll find out from our politicians first.
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But it's interesting because that first corridor is an interesting test.
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If all they did was build that, I bet they could get away with just doing that.
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I don't know if that's a tinfoil hat moment because if they build this and it seems like
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it was a difficult build, they'll have to rethink the extensions on either side.
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Well, look, if it's operated like the Go, we're in trouble.
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You know, so I would love to do the high-speed train.
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A high-speed train from here to Quebec would be an interesting trip.
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And I say that the second that, you know, that they do this, we're one of the first groups
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You get on a Via Rail and you're like nicely sad.
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We're lucky we're not turning the party lights on right now.
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We'll go meet up with the Prime Minister and go for drinks.
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