tldr: Roundabouts. Lots and lots of roundabouts.

“No one’s ever seen numbers like this before.”

PSA

In the century leading up to 1975, nearly 6000 freighters went down in the Great Lakes. The Edmund Fitzgerald was the last. The last. In 50 years, not a single commercial freighter has been lost in the Great Lakes. Why? It's NOAA. Of course it's NOAA.

Vancouverism (n.) - the art of pretending to be a diverse modern city by defunding the things that actually make it a great place to live.

Let’s go!

Fundamentally bikes (and espe cargo bikes) aren’t a thing most people should just order on the internet. They are a relationship product that requires skilled after-sales support and maintenance, and a supply chain of replacement parts. Rad had none of these things. Past tense intended.

This is one of the organizing principles of my own work! Here's a piece I wrote about it 10 (oof) years ago trying to define the urban. I'd add the public realm, but I still stand by it: thefoxandthecity.com/articles/the...

Canada too.

People will literally drive electricity on a train instead of building transmission lines (I haven't looked into the economics/physics of this at all, but its a great example of how policy matters for energy systems)

PSA

Folks living in suburbs (on aggregate) don’t want to live in cities. They want the wide, fast road access to the amenities but actually hate cities. If you actually want to live in a functioning city, you’re an elite and out of touch. It’s so fucking stupid how backward it all is #ottawa

Something I’ve been thinking about is the difference between cities and urbanism. - cities are required for urbanism - not all cities are urban places — Jane Jacobs defined urbanism‘s requirements as: - density - mixed use - range of building ages (and rents) - short blocks

Meanwhile in Toronto... The suburbs trying to destroy good urban policy again. Amalgamation has been awful for that city.

This is a great point to make. One of the things that make living here fantastic are the abundance of small independent grocers. Not sending money to Galen Weston every week feels pretty good tbh.

Interesting thread. I grew up in 1970s Edmonton in an affluent neighbourhood. But in the winter, everyone ate canned fruit, because fresh fruit wasn’t readily available. Mandarin oranges at Christmas were a huge treat.

Did you know that in Canada, if a budget doesn’t pass the government doesn’t shut down? Federal workers aren’t furloughed. Funding for social services doesn’t dry up. Failure to pass a budget triggers an election. It puts the politicians jobs on the line. They get the budget passed.

💥BREAKING💥 Four young Canadians just launched a lawsuit against the Canada Pension Plan investment manager, #CPP Investments, for alleged mismanagement of climate risks. Read more about the case brought by @ecojusticecanada.bsky.social and @gpllp.bsky.social#CPP 👉 https://bit.ly/4okNn1i

Oh yeah. The customer charges are brutal. Even switching our HWT to electric makes those summer enbridge bills unbearable. Switch whatever you can as soon as you can. The rest will fall into place as you realize just how much you pay to be connected to the gas grid.

Maybe what’s most annoying about all of these things is that the house was built in ~2022. There should be regulations in place prohibiting new gas installations by now in every city in our climate zone. No reason to have any fossil fuels in new builds in 2025.

Brb attaching a hobby horse to my GSD.

Hybrid cars be like

Our neighbourhood store is absolutely the best. Victoria sort of just legalized it everywhere …

Oh fucking YES. Youth bus pass program passed to return to the budget unanimously.

A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death. Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written." Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating. 🧪🧬🧫

every claim, every exaggeration, every time they forced AI into some software you use, was. leading to this: they want "AI supremacy" to mean so much that the US government will give them trillions of dollars.

So it turns out... the US air travel system was incredibly, deeply dependent on federal funding to just run day-to-day all this time, to the benefit of private airline shareholders, when everyone thinks that state-run trains are leeching off the government. Weird!

It’s a predictable pattern. Suburban and rural (mainly) voted to spend more, get less, align themselves with private interest to fund a project that doesn’t affect them, delivering lower value at the expense of urban quality of life and wrecking women’s pro hockey in the capital.

I vote:

every generation loves Rumours. it’s fucking Rumours

Although I'm partial to this one too. #CitiesAreForPeopleNotCars

Reckless pedestrian about to be unleashed for day 2 in Vancouver.

One way to find yourself extremely disheartened about the prospects for residential electrification is to talk to any homeowner who has actually attempted to electrify.

Gift article 👇

Timeline cleanse. Who can tell me what kind of fungus this is?

Toronto consolidation was a provincial act to weaken city libs. The equivalent move in say St. Louis would be to add suburban voters until repa can win, but those voters hate St. Louis and so the state is simply taking control of police and forcing the city to pay a police budget w/out oversight

The example that I think about is Rob Ford. Boris Johnson would be another. That's what you get when you draw the city boundary wide enough to include a lot of conservatives.

This. In Canada, conservative add conservative people (suburbs) to city centres to create the structural imbalance.

Required Reading this week from @theturner.bsky.social. - The energy transition is inevitable, and the faster we turn from petrostate to electrostate the better economy we’ll leave for our kids. www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/f39d95c...

I didn’t realize FT had a editorial comics section

🚨 Last month observed the highest average temperature for the month of October across the #Antarctic Circle, with clearly 2025 well above any prior year in the satellite era. Data from doi.org/10.24381/cds...

Timeline cleanse. Who can tell me what kind of fungus this is?

I just met someone who told me they refuse to go to a certain coffee shop bc their to go cups are plastic (not compostable). And 2 mins later said they’d drive their car 1.5 mile from their home to check out some new bike infrastructure we were talking about bc “biking season is over.” 1/2

Uncertainty analysis yielded limits that do not exist.

AI could end scarcity, end humanity - or boost trend growth by 0.2 percentage points

"In normal times, against a normal candidate, we have no evidence that picking a friendly, relatable, likable candidate without a history of sexual abuse will work. Let’s not read too much into it." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/yea...

Urbanists anytime they step outside and immediately notice the problem of cars everywhere.

6. We need to lose these freedoms only once to revert to the default state of centralised, hierarchical societies. Eighty-five years ago, we very nearly did. Hitler promised a thousand-year reich, and – who knows? - that could have been a realistic outcome, had he won.