(Street pictured) Municipalities across this province are backsliding on ped/bike infrastructure. Hotter summers make it more essential, not less. Giving people alternatives to driving is cost-of-living relief nobody talks about, seems like an opportunity for the right politician this fall.

This is beyond disappointing. It's going to keep Eglinton as a car sewer for a long time, making it a worse place to live and harder for people to run businesses.

This seems like pretty small-bore, uninspiring stuff. Maybe that's just what people want from municipal governance! But I think that people should be asking more of our leadership to make Toronto an actual good place to live.

Paris’ RER is a perfect example of solving phone call problems. Instead of duplicating infrastructure because different agencies controlled it, Paris made sharing work. It saved a fortune and created Europe’s most impressive regional rail network. open.substack.com/pub/infrasto...

All my faith in this city would be restored all at once if we somehow go with option 7 and close the Allen.

This is really a wild piece from the Transportation Services memo on why they weren’t supporting Church St pedestrianization. “Since the BIA is the applicant for the closure, the city is partially liable so we can’t support it”.

The Province killed the complete street redesign that would have saved this woman's life.

Don't get me wrong, this is fantastic to be moving forward, and I hope it's the start of many pedestrianised streets to come here, but this isn't even 250 metres! The way some people were talking about it, I thought it was multiple km

The Church Street pedestrianization project is APPROVED 20-4. Church between Wellesley Street East and Alexander Street will be made car-free between June 19 and August 21.

Ookwemin Minising will be a good place. And a near-total refutation of City Of Toronto’s planning and urban design thinking over the last 25 years. Big congratulations to Jason Thorne and the city staff who moved along this new plan, but without Waterfront Toronto, it would not have happened.

Toronto provides a lot of data on bicycle counts at different intersections, but no visualization. I set out to change that. I present a comparator tool for tracking all the bicycle counters around Toronto. I have also included (unofficial) Bike Share Toronto trip data.

Just wild how badly the Hurontario LRT construction seems to be going, given how... not complex... it should be.

This and mailing the carbon rebates as novelty sized cheques instead of direct deposits in the West could have prevented a lot

The "Toronto KPIs for parks are quantity and size, not quality" folder is overflowing

Many of you deserve to have your cash grabbed

From Safe Parkside: look what happened on Parkside Drive after Premier Doug Ford banned speed cameras.

Learning that people have estimated the cost of a canadian supergrid connection at 40 billion and thats so staggeringly cheap it makes me lose my mind

This is a fantastic chart idea, and I'm gonna try to do similar for the Canadian elections if I find some time

I keep coming back to "high stock, low flow" for systemic stability, and this is "low stock, high flow"

That little illicit thrill from degaussing a monitor--gone forever

This is also closely related to the "left"-american view that just taxes on just the wealthy fund broad public/social services. They both view public services as morally-justified rather than competitively-justified, and both tolerate mediocrity because the justification doesn't depend on quality

Got in a "why don't more people take transit" conversation the other day with someone who argued that people need to take transit out of civic virtue. But when people feel like they got punished for taking transit? It's a service and needs to deliver like one. People won't use transit out of pity.

Oh huh this is interesting

Now is the time to be strengthening environmental standards and decreasing emissions, but what do I know?

“Values”

Unfortunately, it's exactly the same thing for US/Canada relations

Gave some directions to a person trying to find bike to the Beltline. Toronto should really treat it as a much more important asset to the city--closer to High Park than a typical anonymous neighbourhood park. At a minimum we need clear wayfinding but why is there not an actual strategy for it?

Infrastory is back with more posts this week - today’s is about how Toronto completely inverts expectations of what is possible for transit in car-oriented areas. Much to learn here for cities in North America and across the world! open.substack.com/pub/infrasto...

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how it’s going

This should have been done on Eglinton. Still can be done.

This graph shows two things, 1) obviously that the cameras reduced speeding, but 2) that the improvement kept getting better over time. Speeders tend to get one or two tickets and then learn and change their behaviour. This isn't a cash grab, it's an extremely useful intervention.

The City of Ottawa posted the raw speed data from before and after Doug Ford banned speed cameras and the effect is so obvious it's not even necessary put a line marking when that happened. This chart shows the percentage of drivers going 15km/h or more over the posted limit.

knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a... Now up at @knightcolumbia.org - Cosma Shalizi and myself on "AI as Social Technology." It says that AI models are really a technology of social mediation that allow humans to connect with thoughts of other humans. Short-ish thread with major points follows.

Yonge Street was pedestrianized 1971 - 1974. It works in other cities and it also literally worked here, bring it back!

Don't want to get too controversial here but after a year, maybe two, of having basically just jasmine rice it is an unalloyed pleasure to cook some nice basmati to go with a chicken curry.

My newest article for @spacing.bsky.social about my qualms with Yonge Street and the Sankofa Square area, and how the YongeTOmorrow project is woefully inadequate to address them. Like Church St, most EU cities would have pedestrianised Yonge decades ago, especially as the backbone of the city.

Tea is soup. Coffee is soup. It is simply not possible that they are not.

I'm not saying no subsidy is warranted, but canada post spent a decade burning $400M+ a year to do home delivery to a lucky 1/3 of Canadians. There are important questions about whether canadians are getting value for money from the mostly flyer & junkmail delivery service www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

When people sneer at "million-dollar condos" as living in pampered luxury you need to picture living on the 20th floor of a 33-floor tower, one elevator's out of service/reserved by movers, now 500 people and all their bags of garbage are sharing one elevator and it's impossible to cram in. Luxury!

Toronto keeps building parks that try to do everything at once - and end up doing nothing well. A look at how the city’s parks dept has lost the plot on design, process and public space. And yes: We can do better.

To be sure, this issue falls under "phone call" rather than "engineering" problems and I'm increasingly of a view that permitting/development stuff in the province need to be standardized to avoid this situation where very basic building types simply can't be built. bsky.app/profile/infr...

This Oakville project is really interesting because it’s one of the largest examples of high density, truly greenfield development. When you look at the satellite imagery below you can see the context. And this is good because building more housing is going to require more than infill projects

The last 15 years or so have been a fascinating contrast with varied state leadership between Canada and the UK

Everyone sleeps on Manitoba, always

My God, it's like Ontario Political Corruption Bingo

ICYMI: Metrolinx has settled, for an undisclosed amount, a $500 million expropriation dispute with a development group that includes a close friend of Premier Doug Ford. #onpoli www.thetrillium.ca/news/politic...

Without in any way defending the payout to Tibbits: on the face of it, this is some serious bullshit from the province. There is certainly a case here to get rid of at least some Board members. A case for removing the board completely and putting a Tory in sole charge of the institution? Whoa now.