Change is possible: Seattle's Westlake Ave Trail before/after The super useful Westlake Trail was carved out of a publicly owned parking lot. It was absurdly controversial at the time, with the loudest opponents being a “super yacht” marina. Now it’s loved and no one wants to go back.

“Between 2010 and 2022, structural fires in Berkeley injured an average of 2 people per year, while between just 2017 and 2022, traffic accidents injured or killed an average of 694 people annually.”

Skytraining home from the #vwfc watch party

Out: Home is where the heart is In: Home is where the toilet doesn't flush until you tell it to flush

Minimum parking requirements create financially insolvent land use patterns. The two apartment buildings on the right generate six times more in property taxes than the big box store on the left, while occupying almost half the space! #BlackFridayParking

It is sad that these ‘water is wet’ papers are needed, but they are, so it is good to see people documenting how new housing frees up other housing as people move in to the new housing

Good read that brings together all the issues about tunnelling under Mt Royal in Montreal to serve Quebec City with high speed rail.

Why? Why do we do this to ourselves? This just feels like a waste of everybody's time. Why on earth do we think we need neighbours to weigh in on this?! Just build it already. www.therecord.com/news/waterlo...

Russil Wvong has put together a great summary of what the Professional Reliance Act would do and why it’s a good idea morehousing.substack.com/p/third-part...

The Best Cycling City No One Talks About with (among many others) @burgundavia.bsky.social and @ryanjabs.bsky.social

These are the building designs we used in the second experiment. NB: I used to live in building (b), and it passed SF's design review. Voters hate it and don't want to approve housing like it! Maybe our design review processes should be better.

Interesting research on Nimbyism - suggests that aesthetic concerns (tall buildings look ugly, in the minds of NIMBYs) are more significant than (some) people think, vs , say, traffic concerns, although my own opinion is that people just really don't like change in general, on many fronts.

I'm such a sucker for great tree canopies, and this genuinely feels like the average street in Canberra <3

Shout out to the recent upgrades to Crown St, Surry Hills. City of Sydney removed several car parks in favour of landscaped outdoor dining areas. Some were turning temporary ones from COVID permanent, others are new. It's a really great area to walk along and enjoy. Here's some before and after:

Great piece on how density restrictions in zoning are essentially BS.

I feel like I lived a hundred lives tonight. Absolutely spent. Am I the only one? #VWFC

Biggest cheer for an offside in BC place history…

I like Avi. I usually vote NDP. But OMG, please stop with the one-sided housing takes. We need huge amounts of public housing, but we also need market housing too, and lots of it.

New from me for Inside Philanthropy: California foundations need to decide whether they genuinely want to improve housing affordability or would rather keep funding NIMBY obstructionism in Sacramento. www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/philant...

Before (2024) / After (2025) the removal of parking Rue Pixérécourt, Paris 20. I don’t have any official info but I think that if the exit to the underground parking garage on the left had been elsewhere, this entire space would have become part of the little park that is behind the photographer.

Great discussion that has been going on for serval days now up and down this thread and in the quotes (up and down). Metrics matter, and some of our main metrics in the housing discourse simply aren't responsive to the issues: Standard affordability metrics suffer from massive collider bias.

Fortune magazine interviews Instagram users who flood the platform with racist memes, Hitler references and anti-Semitic content strictly for profit. They all say they don't care about the content, just the revenue streams they provide. Which have ballooned since Meta's moderation policy shift:

Before (2016) / After (2025) Place du Panthéon, Paris 5. The statue of Pierre Corneille stood in the middle of a parking lot until 2017, after which the parking area was replaced with a pedestrian zone. I’m not sure whether local tour guides used to stop here when it was in the middle of the cars !

not surprising that it's easy to give an LLM Twitter brain poisoning

Reclaiming public space for people doesn’t have to be complicated and expensive.

The biggest chunk of the REM in Montreal has just opened, and I’ve been reflecting not only on what it means for Montreal, but for Canada as a whole. Read my latest article now: open.substack.com/pub/nextmetr...

the biggest section of the REM (and imo the most important phase) opened today, basically extending a highway-median suburban branch into a full-fledged 50 km north-south metro across the montreal region montreal now has a 119-kilometre metro system with 87 stations, by far the largest in canada!

Slip lanes are a scourge in urban areas. Thankfully, Toronto has removed at least 40 of them in the last two decades, but there are many still remaining. The slip lane at Ossington and Dupont, which I encountered on a recent walk, had me thinking about these lately. seanmarshall.ca/2025/11/14/i...

The International Criminal Court is ditching Microsoft Office, saying it’s too dependent on US tech, in favor of Open Desk, a German open source alternative. The move comes after Microsoft revoked ICC head Karim Khan’s email access when he was sanctioned by the US for the warrant against Netanyahu.

A different world is possible. 🚲

Parking is actually too cheap in Vancouver and I'm tired of pretending it's not. Like you're going to let me spend 8 cents to park here and pay by american express? The West End is overstuffed with too-many parking permits for grandfathered users.

Vancouver's single commuter rail line is terrible on paper, with just 5 trains per day. But...it actually has insanely high ridership? What Canadian transit magic is at play here?! youtu.be/YlFzR5_3RWM

I love Toronto but the fact that permitting convenience stores in residential neighbourhoods is an actual debate reminds me of how incredibly conservative the city is. Like, are people okay?

Dreamt last night that there was a proposal to get rid of the letter ‘Z’ and just use ‘S’ instead. Proponents argued that getting rid of 1 of 26 letters would improve productivity by almost 4%. Makes about as much sense as a lot of what I see on the news, cheaper than a tunnel under the 401 to boot.

This is the greatest story ever told: A person in Hamilton, ON stole a city bus and then proceeded to make the stops along the way, allowing passengers to board and exit freely. The person actually refusing someone looking to board with an expired pass. 🔥🔥 hamiltonpolice.on.ca/news/police-...

WATCH: If you REALLY want to understand a BIG reason why cycling [aka riding a bike] is so dangerous in North America, and one of the biggest villains in the origin story of our unsafe status quo, invest some time watching this one, by NOT JUST BIKES (aka @theurbanistagenda.com here). Then share it.

Supply and demand is a real thing that affects prices - even in real estate- yet more evidence…

Cars might work fine in California or Florida, but they’re not practical here in Canada. We have winter.

Having a four-lane, 40-mph road next to an elementary school is a recipe for disaster. Fortunately, residents of Cedar Park, Texas, recently got the design of this street changed so students can get to school safely.

It is good that Carney is at least saying the right things here, even if I am skeptical much action will follow. Having fed orgs stop using these platforms for any official accounts would be a simple and symbolic first step.

Was visiting friends on the weekend, their middle school age daughter had recently started using transit to get around. Mostly positive about it, but one big complaint: ‘why does the bus have to stop on every block? It is so slow and annoying! Can’t people walk a block or two to get to their stop?’

This is an interesting comment thread on the ups and downs of electrifying your house: tldr: It is doable but your mileage (voltage) may vary depending a lot on your particular circumstances....

Street with a new raised crosswalk in Park Avenue - Rochester, NY Similar to 3rd Ave in Germantown -Bus line -6,000 AADT -Lots of pedestrian traffic -30 mph speed limit -2 lanes

No lies detected

Who Pays Trump’s Tariffs? By October, 2025, Importers now bore only 27% of the tariff cost—less than half the estimate for June. A slightly higher 18% was now borne by exporters, and a much higher 55% was being passed on to consumers. www.cfr.org/article/who-...

Toronto streetcar missing a light because it’s stuck in traffic.

The beauty of a Fraser Institute ‘study’ is that once you know the topic, you already know the conclusion. The only purpose in reading the report would be if you have some twisted desire to know how they got to their desired conclusion- as Max apparently does (to his credit)…

This is so much better than the broken massing.

Having recently ridden on the Chapultapec teleferico in Mexico City, I'm really hoping that this cable gondola system from the Production Way/ University Skytrain station to SFU on top of Burnaby Mountain. gets built. youtu.be/mnnkxes4ZxE

The SFU gondola would save a pile of emissions, would be a highly visible and relatively easy win for not all that many $, and is just about at the point where the only thing stopping it is a lack of capital funding. Just saying…