One of the things that makes me pessimistic about adopting a more efficient and effective approach to transit integration in urban spaces in North America is that the system is definitely not set up to accept anything other than oversizing as the only acceptable design solution.

A bit of a lateral question, but do anyone knows an example of a 320 km/h rail in actual highway medians? Because my sense is that that would require some continuous crash wall or something because of the risk of intrusion from vehicles veering off road.

You know folks, CAHSR is a mess of a project but I'm growingly sympathetic with the folks coming out with new proposals to try to deliver even a pale shade of service in a foreseeable future considering the political headwinds this project is facing.

"The one-way trenches" "And I will punish you with one-way streets." 1972. Plus ça change.

There is an entire cottage industry out there of scientific studies on transit priority based on some mix of micro-simulation of a made-up or existing scenarios that are all virtually the same study. Easy forecast: with LLMs, they will increase exponentially.

“When we’re serious, we don’t say the opposite of what we said the day before every day, and maybe one shouldn’t speak every day,” Macron saying out loud what most people think but few in a postion of power dare to say. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04...

It's not well known, but Italy briefly had an hokou-like system preventing people from legally moving from villages to larger cities, the so-called "law against urbanization" approved in 1939 by the Fascist regime and technically not repealed until 1961. it.vlex.com/vid/legge-6-...

Another vague international comparative sense I have for something vaguely relating to curbs is on drainage. Generally, the tendency seems to be that North America has fewer, higher-capacity inlets (catch basins) with center-running storm sewers, vs more closely-spaced inlets with curb-running sewer

I know the world is in a mess, but today I'm happy because I finally found a decent sheep ricotta here in Montréal. Little pleasures of life.

SBB-CFF-FFS making an April Fool joke about plane-like baggage allowances is high level involuntary VIA Rail trolling.

How many postwar Rome's intensive "palazzine" can you fit in a single suburban intersection is Delft from the same era?

Trying to crowdsource the answer to this question: when did Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich was pedestrianized and reserved to trams? I can't find a specific date or source online.

Sometimes it's very hard to understand if a lane is reserved to trams in Switzerland. There is no such thing as "tram-dedicated lane markings" in the road code, only bus-dedicated ones, so most of the time you get either a continuous white line (do not cross) or a dashed one (can cross)

Well I guess that the new normal in my area is: wind = no electricity. Seems like an issue to me. But what do I know.

Slightly polemic post.

Repost to scare your fire department

A great example of how modal filters/short segments of transit or bike/ped-only roads can enact circulation-based priority. Only trams and cars can enter Limmatstrasse from the East via a short tram-only segment, de facto making the entire street downstream a transit-first corridor

One of the little-known secrets of Zurich's transit priority and traffic management policies is that they systematically prohibit left turns to an extent that would never be accepted by a US DOT. In these 4- and 5-way main intersections, not a single left-turn is allowed. So many such examples.

Was looking at those renderings of the NoHo-Pasaena BRT in LA and oh boy, North American engineers do really hate pedestrian (or even traffic) islands. Just infinite monster-sized ped crossing that last 30+ seconds and come every 2-3 minutes probably... And forget about truncated-red TSP...

Working on circulation plans, one learns that the dichotomy between car-friendly and transit-friendly approaches can be misleading. Zurich is probably the most transit-friendly city on Earth, but it does quite a lot to "fluidify" car traffic too. Like these dead-endings to speed up a main arterial

I should launch a GeoGuessr, but just for circulation plans. What city is this?

I've been on & off into a rabbit hole of videos of people taking the bus in various parts of the world to check boarding policies, and now I think that the single best indicator of whether one country is an emergent or developed economy is "do they still have fare collectors on regular buses?"

One of the problem of a world in which formal communication is mostly email-based, is that you cannot anymore call one's office or go in person to yell at people not doing their job. That has worsened the responsiveness of all sort of administrative bureaucracy, IMO.

Civils and tracklaying have been completed on the 44km, €2.7 bn segment of Milan-Venice HSR between Verona and Vicenza. It's due to open for revenue service with the winter 2026 timetable change. veronapadova.it/completate-l...

After three years, it's finally happening something relevant in Italian politcs. This 3-year hiatus, that some people call "stability", was very weird, because normally something happens every month in Italian politics. We miss some Parliament and parties consultations at the Quirinal drama.

MaaS is really the embodiment of the "an app will fix it" idea of progress we, unfortunately, pretty much still live within.

Nice that finally we are opening the debate about whether it's normal to have a big red button on the governments' desk saying "ignore the fundamental rights of my citizens". (Spoiler: it is not. Not for a democratic country)

I never noticed it before, but Slovenia at least on some lines uses the exact same design for masts and catenary as Italy. Both the one from the first generation (1930s-60s, left), and the second (1970s-2000s, right). And even the new one in lines now u/c.

Interesting fact of the Italian politics: the prime minister, or better the President of the Council of Ministers, cannot fire its Ministers. They can ask them to resign, but they can't fire them formally. That's why a Cabinet reshuffle is a much bigger deal than in Canada, for example.

Very exemplary case of how making an HSR line capable of handling freight traffic, i.e. by raducing grades, increase the cost by requiring more tunneling. Left: pssenger-only option = zero tunnels Right: mixed-use line = many tunnels and/or a longer alignment to avoid more rugged terrain.

After long intermittent closures for modernization works, including track replacement, resignalling, and electrification, The Val Venosta/Vinschgauer railway is finally going to reopen in phases between the end of march and the end of the year, when it will run a full 30 minutes takt.

As a political sciences student in the early 2000's I had to suffer innumerable books assuming that the US/UK constitutional/electoral model is intrinsecally superior. Well, here we are.

"A fractured political landscape" "American journalism try to understand the politics of multi-party proportional representation" challenge.

The plan if implemented could improve speeds by up to 40% across the network, saving riders tens of thousands of hours *every day*, the time savings for riders alone would number in the billions of dollars in just the first decade! Read it here: fast-track.to/wp-content/u...

Today FastTrackTO is officially launching and releasing our 10 point plan to modernize the Toronto Streetcar network. An iconic symbol of the city that could be fantastic with some achievable, common sense and low cost changes. The plan if implemented would transform the city. fast-track.to (1/2)

Italian-Canadians and Italian-Americans really doing their best to reinforce all my prejudices...

It appears that the electorate has rejected Meloni's Constitutional changes concerning the functioning of the Justice System. Impact on the stability of her govt = Zero. Her allies have nowhere to go (and they campaigned for YES vote, too) Impact on Italy's foreign and security policies = Zero.

Impact on Meloni's image as a winner + someone who has voters on her side = BIG. Opponents should try to cash in in the run up to the next general election. Will they get their act together?

Impact on chances that Meloni introduces another Constitutional change she cares about even more: direct election of PM? Also BIG. The signal is increasingly clear—persuading a large enough share of voters to amend the post-war, post-Fascist Constitution remains extremely difficult.

Every time in the last 20 years that the Italian Parliament passed a constitutional reform on a thin partisan majority, the reform was rejected in the referendum. But somehow, governments delude themselves into thinking that this time is going to be different.

🤞🤞🤞🤞

I told you folks that you'd be spammed with freshly finished tram segment's pics. Unfortunately, it won't remain car-free. (From Comune di Bologna on IG)

A bit lateral, but it's somewhat crazy that a major mainline railway corridor through dense urban areas with relatively high permitted speed and heavy trains in an urban setting has less lateral protection of the RoW than a max 70 km/h light rail. Sure, Florida Man etc, but the RoW doesn't help...

Every map of Italy™️ This time for voters turnout at 7 pm. But it will be the same tomorrow at closing. Source: il Post.

Sorry folks, but you're going to be spammed with pictures of Bologna's tram in the nect few days as one of the major section through the city center is mostly completed and my feed is full of pics I feel compelled to share

A couple of months ago, a judge invalidated on formal grounds the traffic ordinance that established a general 30 km/h speed limit across most of Bologna's urban area. Three days ago, the city approved the first of many new detailed ordinances to re-establish it on an area-by-area basis.

Trenitalia has finalized an agreement to build a new maintenance center for its fleet near Paris, to be operational by 2029 and with a capacity for 25 trainsets. It will serve its growing French network and the planned Channel tunnel service. www.fsnews.it/it/focus-on/...

Both Japanese and Swiss operating paradigms (sorta platonic opposites.) reply on the ability to deliver trains to a station in very precise windows.

🚋🚋 Via San Felice, Bologna. Final touches before the reopening festival next Saturday. 📷 comune di Bologna

The thing about redesigning circulation settings is that they show that, when it comes to traffic management, you can't really understand how a transit-priority tool works if you don't look beyond the narrow corridor. This "transit gate" setup works only because some streets have been dead-ended.