visited the yule cat

shoutout to the city that still runs the trains every few minutes on christmas day 🥰

merritt christmas 🚈

this reminded me that i spent a few years at "santa per se isn't possible, but there might be an international publicly-funded organization of gift-bringers each responsible for a small chunk of the world"

📢🌾 I’ll 2x match up to $5,000 donated to the World Food Program between now and December 28th end of day. That‘s a 1x personal match and 1x employer match. We can raise $15,000 together, up to 60,000 meals. 🙏🏻 Just share your redacted receipt, I’ll match daily. donate.wfpusa.org/page/Funding...

bus-only queue jump doing its job on eglinton, letting buses glide past long lines of left turning cars to enter cedarvale station. sometimes its short, focused transit priority treatments like this that make all the difference!

For those who see Brad Bradford’s TTC refund policy and think, “That might be a good idea.”, consider that this one delivery truck has been holding up a streetcar for at least 5 minutes. Bradford would punish the TTC and do nothing to the driver.

there's a good incentive for this as our transit system becomes less downtown-centric as well. for trips that don't start and end downtown, line 1 is never used as a single line - and more of those trips are happening post-2020. toronto really has 3.5 subway lines, not 2.5!

to inaugurate the new blog, i've written about a local and contentious topic that's been on my mind for years. at its heart, it's about understanding the information that transit riders need. the case for splitting TTC Line 1:

new: i have a real blog that you can like and subscribe to. thoughts on transit wayfinding, nomenclature, principles, etc. you know me. i'm planning to publish soon because people keep discussing things i want to cover before i get to cover them. (how dare!) fernkhahn.medium.com

new: i have a real blog that you can like and subscribe to. thoughts on transit wayfinding, nomenclature, principles, etc. you know me. i'm planning to publish soon because people keep discussing things i want to cover before i get to cover them. (how dare!) fernkhahn.medium.com

FROM: Design Review Board RE: 300m iron tower STATUS: APPLICATION DENIED Proposals must be sensitive to the height, bulk, and scale of its surroundings. A 300m tower is an egregious departure from the neighborhood’s mid rise datum and the use of iron is inconsistent with the vernacular of the area

The Third Avenue transit cordidor has lovely new banners all along the street but this is clearly the best one.

For the Star’s opinion section I contributed to the year end “loss” package: the loss of the TTC as “The Better Way”. Not yet the worst way but sliding towards it. Many culprits, ultimately but it’s our own fault for not demanding, & voting, better.

i think if you ride public transit enough you learn that most weird behavior is not dangerous, and conversely i think driving a car teaches you that everyone is trying to kill you at all times

funny thing: unclean indoor air remains a normalized and solvable problem. we're ok with catching airborne illnesses over and over. until this is reckoned with at a societal level, i'll continue to opt out by masking. it's an option i'm grateful to have. i've not been sick for two years straight!

I try to avoid linking to Substacks but this essay is FASCINATING

when you want to induce weaving but you don't have the space for a cloverleaf

love these comparisons, though tbf metroexpress is a low-volume busway on its own ROW. some speed comparisons using similar street median north american tramways: minneapolis: 🚊 22 kph, 🚗 27kph portland: 🚊 27, 🚗 29 kitchenloo: 🚊 17, 🚗 18 10.8km houston: 🚊 21, 🚗 27 toronto: 🚊 13 kph, 🚗 21 kph

this was a super satisfying watch. "people aren't just interested in ranking cities and declaring which ones are 'great'… people who are invested in their city… also want to see examples, models, and stories that are useful to them in advocating for and proving the place they call home."

it's easy to tell seals from seal ions: seals lack an ear flap, whereas seal ions have a net electrical charge

can i just wake up one day and forsake something or is that kind of god's exclusive purview

So. We’re doing alt text discourse again. COOL. Welcome to a primer.🧵 If you're unfamiliar with what alt text is, what it means, and how it's used around here, the following may be helpful. Although it's still a very underused feature, users can add "alt text" to any image 🧵 [1 of 9]

A year ago, our lawsuits helped make sure congestion pricing would go into effect on January 1, 2025. Now, the results are clear:  Congestion pricing has resulted in a marked drop in air pollution – not just in Lower Manhattan, but throughout the metro region.

you can copy my work but don't make it obvious

right then

Here’s my cut at what the stop removal portion of a St Clair streetcar upgrade could look like, cuts intermediate stops by a third, from 26 to 17, with only limited reduction in rider catchment within a 5 min walk. Together with signal priority upgrades, would cut travel times a lot -worth piloting!

amid the buzz about the introduction of regional connections, less positive change has come to subway interchange announcements: "transfer" replaces "change", and line names are back. the *whole point* of numbering the lines was to avoid relying on these clunky names. now the announcement scrolls!

Learned some illuminating things about Line 6 from City/TTC staff at today’s board meeting that’s worth sharing: 1. Current run time on the Finch LRT is around 56 minutes end to end.

august came home with a loaf of bread and a bag of "regular smiles" the front of which discloses amusingly little about their actual composition

Yeah, okay, the 2 Line is showing, but I strongly believe if you’re just going to say Federal Way or Lynnwood on a digital sign and not Federal Way Downtown or Lynnwood City Center, there shouldn’t be a Federal Way Downtown or Lynnwood City Center. Signs static or digital should match 100%

i grew up in jane & finch as a kid. i remember being there when they were initially planning this line and promised a fast, new train to replace the overcrowded finch bus. i was excited back then. all i can say is i feel insulted this whole project feels like an insult to communities along finch

transit ridership has always been high in the northwest part of toronto, and investment was never there. overcrowded buses were a way of life. to throw a train at us without even making an effort to make it faster (or reasonably frequent) as the bus that's been there forever, is just insulting

Northwest Toronto just got a transit investment that actually lengthens their commutes. They deserve better.

We’ve gotta talk about the Finch West megaramp… There’s no way that the additional excavation required for all that station volume isn’t more expensive than a simple elevator. It’s also such an insult to force anyone with mobility issues to walk 3x the distance!

passing through jane and finch on the new line 6. i'm going to need a patience transfusion. just watched a bus speed past us. i'm livid for the people who have endured years of buses held up by construction only to depend on this goddamn streetcar. we're only two kilometres in. 😭

I'm repeating myself ad nauseam, but this totally stupid nonsense of all identical traffic lights with written signs to indicate what they are meant for is so absolutely insane that has come to symbolize the hyper-provincialism of Ontario and why it fails so miserably at transit construction.

You know what's funny? It's that Canada does multi-stage pedestrian crossing in its oldest LRT, in Edmonton! Because it treats it as a railway crossing, with railway barriers... But conceptually it's a multi-stage pedestrian crossing, allowing the LRT to have full priority... at 70 km/h!

fun fact: you can get from Kipling to kennedy on line 2 (across the whole city!) in the same amount of time you'll be able to get from humber college to finch west when line 6 opens tomorrow. even though it's under half the distance. our first new "rapid" transit line in 23 years 🥲

coyhaique is a chilean town built around a pentagonal plaza. naturally, i had to figure out how they arrange house numbers. looks like it's just two grids: one covers three sides of the pentagon and most of the town, and a smaller one picks up the rest. neat!

If tiny cars are too dangerous to be allowed on our streets, think of how it feels to be a pedestrian or cyclist!

another colombian example to disprove conventional urbanist wisdom - Bogotá shows that you don't need to remove buses and build a street-running tram to make a pleasant, lively, walkable streetscape in your city centre. bogotá does it better than any NA city with a bus-only street for their BRT.

another: it is often said that underground transit misses any opportunity to improve the streetscape - especially here in toronto. yet, guadalajara built a new metro line in 2020 and used it as an opportunity to rebuild a stroad into a more people-oriented street.

these maps are meant to show the stations and connections directly accessible from a given *platform*. (here, that's Glencairn to Vaughan and line 6.) so why is line 5 highlighted? if you want line 5, this is the wrong platform, just as it's the wrong platform to go the other way on line 1.

what's the point of bus stops that don't look like this?

people never listen when i tell them that southern chile is just like the salish sea

so much conventional wisdom that stifles anglo cities' urbanity can be disproven with a quick look around San Antonio station, the towering concrete beating heart of Medellín's metro 🇨🇴 have a look yourself—my screenshots can't do it justice. maps.app.goo.gl/qTvxQ67Qeonw...

dude you know what'd be a sick setting for a city? four peninsulas meeting in a cross, each separated from the next by about the same distance. put some open ocean at the bottom and tilt the whole thing a few degrees anticlockwise for realism. no one will be the wiser. *pauses to listen* i see

Such an elemental yet overlooked reality of planning. If you don't: - Design a new route to add value to the network overall - Make changes to the existing network to incorporate the new asset ...you're kneecapping yourself. A key part of transit hist: homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2024/07/12/t...

grammatical gender is inconvenient and in a vacuum it'd be nice if it didn't exist. also, spanish allows me to describe my current transition as "no binario → no binaria", which absolutely leaves english in the dust.