👏Move👏 👏The 👏 👏Damn👏 👏Stop 👏 👏After👏 👏The 👏 👏Intersection👏

i got tired of criticizing it years before it opened, but my feeling has not changed: this line is too good to be so flawed and too flawed to be so good. a network-warping service with in-built unreliability, underbuilt where it counts and overbuilt where it doesn't. at least it's finally here.

How many people who "hate winter" actually just hate how snow retains and reveals the unbelievable filth smeared all over by cars

i don't like that app updates now put liquid glass-style icons on my iOS 18 device. i don't claim to understand how this would work, but i wish app icons were some sort of smart vector file styled consistently according to a set of appearance rules set by the system or the user.

v1.116 is rolling out now! For all the overthinkers and perfectionists out there, we're launching Drafts.

after 15 years (most of our conscious lives) we have survived to see the opening of canada's biggest tram in a hole

i could take or leave the tram-in-a-hole. for me, today's main event is the new bus network :)

stadium high school, tacoma. how do students focus here?

remarkably, apple maps hasn't got the memo on line 5 opening or the accompanying bus network changes. usually they're pretty good about this. thank god for transit app!

i walk through the projected arrows in the IKEA showroom because it makes me feel like i'm a part of something

Today I'll be presenting at TTC about a comprehensive plan to revitalize surface transit in Toronto. To be effective, it needs to be implemented as a package but it could radically improve the speed and reliability of streetcars, LRT, and buses. www.ctvnews.ca/toronto/arti...

happy rectangular february, sunday-first world.

i spend more time on google maps and r/namenerds than i do asleep, so i am eating up this thread

The TTC subway cars this morning

oh, toronto ❤️

thought i cut my bangs too short but they're growing on me

oh??

the woke mob is giving He-man pronouns

good morning to the house by the line 1 trench with the flags of ecuador, canada, and progress pride

less than 20% of torontonians think the new line 6 LRT is successful. can anecdotally say it's pretty accurate and perhaps even generously high given what i've heard from locals along this line these past two months

“Thousands of crashes reported as winter storm pounds the Toronto area” Sorry, cars just aren’t practical here. We’re not California or Texas. We have winter.

prompt: "repost with your home river" colorado (texas) → willamette → oakland estuary → don (ontario)

The United States has the fewest elevators in the rich world, with Canada only a bit ahead. We teamed up with @uytaelee.bsky.social of About Here Videos to investigate why, exactly, North America sucks at elevators.

been saying

Toronto is always the warmest welcome.

line 6 mood: petulant teenager on family outing

Do you live in a city that doesn’t get covered that much by urbanist YouTube? Or at least a city that *I* haven’t covered that much? I’m trying to create a crowd-sourced footage archive to let urbanist YouTube cover more places! Interested in: skylines, buses, trains, bikes, housing, etc.

i wonder when "ty" overtook "thx" as the dominant shorthand expression of gratitude

happy new year

somehow only occurred to me now that the province which refuses to pick a side in canada's language binary is called, well, NB

the street blades of grand rapids are uniquely inconsistent and i kind of love them. here's what you can see in a few blocks of a single downtown street:

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