La réalité, c'est qu'on vient d'ouvrir une ligne de métro léger sans connexions bus fréquents, sans solutions de dernier kilomètre et sans densité de logement—dont le terminus est au milieu d'une forêt. Le West Island mérite mieux qu'un éléphant blanc qui lie rien à rien.

I love this delightfully old-fashioned question on the City of New West's 311 form

La vraie capitale de l'urbanisme canadien

Who else likes biking in the construction equipment storage lane?

For some reason Vancouver seems to have a single American NACTO-style bike cross-ride. It's located on the mostly useless Alberni St bike lane where it crosses a random driveway.

Land value taxes are elegant and pure and make for endless high-brow party conversations. But if you want to make society and housing function better just do what @kevinerdmann.bsky.social says: Raise the [property tax] rates and make them more universal and equitable.

Of all the North American cities studied, Vancouver's buses have the second highest variation in travel time throughout the day. This should set off alarm bells that we have a lot of work to do when it comes to making buses reliable.

My favourite order at Tim Hortons is the classic combo of chocolate-coated paper bag and unglazed Boston cream donut

I'm not against data centres, but I'm against the zoning that makes a standalone one viable in the middle of Vancouver. Metro Van says we need to protect employment lands because they have high job density, but what jobs are we protecting in a bunch of self-storages, car dealers and server farms?

Shout out to whoever at the CRTC thought using the US president's nuclear attack warning system for Amber alerts 16 hours away was a good idea

Apparently last year, the government of Madagascar was overthrown by a human resources department

@lucymaloney.bsky.social brought an amendment to ask staff if introducing food delivery robots onto the narrow and overcrowded sidewalks of Kits and the West End will create a barrier to accessibility for blind people and wheelchair users, as the CNIB has repeatedly said. ABC voted it down.

Ken Sim and @petermeiszner.bsky.social are trying to force through a vote right now, on the same day it's introduced. I've never heard of council trying to pass a motion barring a specific landowner from a specific use without notice and hearing. Doesn't this breach procedural fairness 101?

Instead of housing catalogs and “pre approved plans” we need pre-approved Development Permits. The BP is mostly building code, is algorithmic, and very site specific. The DP is subjective, and at times arbitrary, but gives the city a degree of control over massing, aesthetics, amenities etc

I think Vancouver's become too reliant on using unrelated roadwork as an opportunity to build bike lanes. I argue that it doesn't save that much money, does little to quell local opposition, and often fails to create network effects.

This Harbour Air ad is the most personally offensive ad I've ever seen

That just seems cruel

I put all my Strava rides onto a heatmap and can you tell I always get confused about how to stay on Heather?

Who should pay for the costs of densifying? Should growth pay for growth? Taxes on new infill homes are counterproductive in a housing crisis, writes @jacksandor.bsky.social #yyj #bcpoli #vanpoli #bc

Is housing demand fake? Absolutely not, writes Will Dawson #bcpoli #housing #yyj #vanpoli

Words used to have meaning

Churchill once said, before Alamein we never had a victory, after Alamein we never had a defeat. Soon we will abolish winter time from sea to sea to sea

Vision Zero Vancouver representing at the Crescent 200!

Really great explainer of pedestrian-controlled crossings! I still believe we should phase out half-signals. We use them in spots that would be signalized anywhere else, nobody understands how they work and they create long green waves at night that let cars pick up dangerous speeds in urban areas.

I let myself nerd out on beg buttons 🫣 youtu.be/-oBT2IOpFf0

Absolutely insane this is being allowed to happen. Chemtrade produces 40% of all domestic chlorine in Canada - primarily used to treat drinking water - and they're being forced to cease operations after an online smear campaign funded by their direct competitor.

Today, Vancouver council passed a rezoning that will replace a SINGLE(!) Shaughnessy mansion with 31 apartments. Gigantic single family homes hoard so much land on the West Side. This should be legal to build everywhere by right.

Another issue: Would a law banning teenagers from using social media even be constitutional? Do 15-year-olds not have a right to express themselves on social media? Yes, 15-year-olds can’t buy liquor either. But engaging in democratic debate online is not the same thing as downing a Smirnoff Ice

no gentle density will ever be gentle enough —McGrath, since like 2013 or so

I build gentle density. Getting my homes approved attracts louder opposition than much larger buildings—usually from a very vocal minority. People don’t like change if they feel they have a say—even if the status quo means a loss of children & families in their “family” neighbourhoods.

This should lay to rest the idea that "gentle density" will solve anti-housing backlash. Calgary legalized multiplexes (2 storeys, 60% lot coverage) by right and still faced the same headwinds. We won't get homes built by pre-emptively watering down housing reforms, so let's aim higher in Vancouver.

Introducing Chad Chadson, the true blue conservative warrior who will stand up to woke *five seconds later* we regret to inform you that Chad Chadson has crossed the floor to the Liberal Party

me watching people outside enjoying the weather after getting sick for the second time in two weeks

if you wait long enough, the park board's no biking stencils become a bike lane :))

I'm okay in principle with strong mayors, because a directly elected weak mayor is kind of the worst of both worlds. What's the good faith argument for adding an unelected provincial viceroy with executive powers though? www.ctvnews.ca/toronto/arti...

Didn't take a picture but I saw this setup on the Mary Hill Bypass and just had one question: WTF? This is a freeway!

If the Liberals needed any other incentive to reinvent Canadian infrastructure project management to prioritize results over process, this is it. Delay means death for Alto.

ABC councillors Kirby-Yung, Meiszner and Dominato led an effort to defer the Indigenous-led Heather Lands housing project at council today. Meisnzer says he'd oppose the project entirely without a guarantee of the provincial subsidized homeownership component, calls it a "blank cheque".

I was out in the Burke Mountain area of Coquitlam yesterday and couldn't help but feel that an environmental crime was committed here. This is a direct downstream consequence of Vancouver's failure to allow housing and Metro Vancouver's disastrous regional planning that promotes greenfield sprawl.

"hey did you build that trail crossing" "Sure did boss, made it real victim-blaming and condescending just like you asked" "what"

people who throw chewing gum in urinals have no respect for the rule of law

North American airlines are turning into McDonald's and forgetting that you can be expensive or you can be slop but you can't be expensive slop

Canada's failure to adopt "one person, one vote" is a stain on our democracy. We have huge population disparities at the provincial level: in Quebec, there's 81,451 people in Bourassa-Sauvé and 12,654 in the Magdalen Islands. If this happened anywhere else, we would be first to call it undemocratic.

Transportation access would be a much less acute issue if we didn't insist in BC on putting every hospital, university, major housing project and employment centre in the middle of nowhere. Restrictive zoning in the core + inept value-engineering on land costs by the province have created a mess.

Motion coming to Council on Wednesday to raise property taxes on apartments but not homeowners with <$3M houses. Says it's analogous to the additional school tax, but the AST exempts apartments for a reason. Given that property taxes are partially passed onto renters, hard to see how this is fair.

From a recent police board meeting, crime trends year over year up to Q3 2025. Something clearly stands out! And yet despite ABC being in a constant moral panic about crime, it's the one thing they consistently ignore (or sometimes actively make worse).

Maybe the *one* use of flexposts is to be tall and substantial-looking enough to convince drivers to steer clear of them for fear of losing a mirror. Three feet tall mini-flexposts don't even accomplish this!

The fact that green arrows don't have a consistent meaning in Canada seems like such a preventable engineering failure. In some places, it means a permissive turn where you still have to yield to pedestrians, and in other places it's a protected turn that's clear of conflict with other road users.

If the Strathcona NIMBYs refuse to let us put homes on Hastings because it'll block their view, then we should simply put the homes in Strathcona

Treating passenger rail as an ineffectual jobs program instead of as a vital transportation connection is how we end up with a national railway that somehow manages to lose $55 per boarding moving people between Montreal and Toronto and insists on weighing your luggage