The duality of the cyclist

“Please slow down. Speeding is totally bad. Pretty please.” That’s the kind of tough enforcement that drivers respect!

this is actually kind of a shit argument because many of the most lethal types of firearms are heavily restricted or outright illegal to own while every year we make deadlier cars and sell them to whoever

Science Magazine calling the rise of renewable deployment the "breakthrough of the year" is awesome for all kinds of reasons but I want to add one more: It legitimizes "energy science" and the study of energy systems (or macro energy systems) as Science! www.science.org/content/arti...

YES. i bristle at language i see used to describe what LLMs do, like “thinking” or “analyzing” or “hallucinating,” because all of these verbs imply that LLMs are in any way cognizant and capable of human-like behavior. there is no behavior! it’s just algorithmic dice-rolling with words, that’s it.

Hi, I'm the CEO of Glorbo, the company who enjoys near unprecedented goodwill in our field, I'm here today to talk to you about our pivot to using the Magic 8-Ball powered by children's bones that everybody hates, I've given myself psychosis listening to the 8-ball aaaaeeeeeiiiiooouuuu

You are also the traffic you loathe. You’re the bad driver you curse. You’re part of the reason roads aren’t safe for pedestrians and thus are not safe for people who *cannot* drive, either because they are too young, too old, too poor, or otherwise car-free. You’re a car addict!

Remember, if a government agency collects public input at physical meetings, especially during the day, they will hear from retired people and people who are being paid by others to be there. Is that really a good sample of the public?

Just so I'm clear on this, computer memory has tripled in price because a bunch of it that hasn't been produced yet has been ordered to populate GPUs that aren't installed in data centers that aren't built yet in order to service a demand that doesn't exist to make profits that don't happen.

What Toronto and Montreal have done, Ottawa / Gatineau is overdue to try. I continue to work with @shawnmenard.bsky.social and @envirocentre.bsky.social to bring bike share to the National Capital Region. In Toronto, from 2.4 million rides in 2019 to 8.1 million (projected) in 2025.

WFH and ai are together ruining the case for full-time office attendance - consider also that occasional office attendance makes office attendance special and may serve as a motivator for workers to be on their best behaviour when attending the office. Full-time office attendance does not do this.

Mississauga to begin land purchase for Dundas Street transit bus project

"...in 210 μm by 340 μm by 50 μm, we were able to fit photovoltaic (PV) cells for power, sensors for temperature, four actuator control circuits, an optical receiver for downlink communication and programming, a processor, and memory."

The Ontario Science Centre property at 770 Don Mills Rd doesn’t belong to Doug Ford. It belongs to the TRCA and the City of Toronto. I’m asking council to ensure that this architectural masterpiece be kept in a state of good repair so it can one day serve the public again.

Convenient low cost storage for private vehicles is a huge part of their competitive advantage as a mode of transportation. No wonder people fight so hard to maintain it. Otherwise they may have to face the reality that cars don't work well in cities without a ton of public subsidy.

The people who make the plagiarism machine are deliberately reinforcing this conflation. It helps them if these actual good use cases are tied to their vapid product, for exactly this sorry of reason

This may very well be an accurate representation of the "modern software stack".

Today is "Murray Pound Day." Murray was a senior Etobicoke planner who proposed 160-km of bicycle freeways! Ring your bells for Murray. (From the Toronto Star, Nov 28, 1964) #biketo #onpoli

Plus, while you may try to inject your soul into every part of a book, a program is likely made of a lot of boilerplate, and only a small part is really creative. For this, AI is ideal. You'll rarely see people laying bricks, saying it's a creative endeavor; most would gladly automate that.

We warned you that self-driving cars would just create self-driving traffic jams, and here they are. The car industry has no solution to the shortage of space in cities. Public transit, cycling, and walking are all part of the answer, but cars are not.

i wonder how much of Americans' views on driving vs. transit would change if they had to pay for gas/insurance/etc every time they turned on the engine "i'm not paying $5 to take the train to work twice a day when i can just drive" is a genuine opinion held by so many people

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Having down time and rest should be more of a badge of honour than being busy.

The mixing on this new Zeds Dead song is so good. youtube.com/watch?v=gRmJ...

People will say it's the lack of enforcement, and that's a factor, but we also have technology to limit phone use while driving and our automakers and leaders refuse to implement it. It's a choice to allow distracted driving. And all the deaths and injuries that result are because of that choice.

Insane but true fact: making US roads as safe as Canadian, Australian, or European roads would save more lives than eliminating murder from the US.

The growth in solar is truly extraordinary. Soon the whole human race (except for people living in countries governed by morons) will have energy that's virtually free of recurrent costs.

"But by far, people said their biggest anxiety was what could happen if a battery overheats and catches fire." Each one of whom had one of the same batteries in their pocket...

this is a lazy metaphor, the writers need to do better

Attention is on NEETs today, but the problem is much worse. NEETs include stay-at-home parents & jobseekers. Strip those out to focus on people not working, not seeking work, not in education & not parenting: this group of economically & socially dislocated young adults has *doubled* in a decade.

i think if you want to have those disgusting LED headlights on your car, you should have to do a test where they blast you point blank with your own headlights and then you have 15 seconds to successfully complete some sort of vision-based task, and if you can't do it they push your car off a cliff

This is COMPLETELY INSANE. In addition to the environmental and labour violations, EIGHTY-FIVE times as much land is needed to power an ICE car on corn ethanol compared to the land needed for solar PV panels to power an EV car. www.cleanwisconsin.org/wp-content/u...

If you don’t know much about Toronto, our ravines are spectacular. 🦢 The Humber River & Etobicoke Creek in the west 🦌 Don River in the center 🦫 Rouge River in the east You can be in the heart of downtown, then bike for five minutes into the Don and see deer.

Here's a great video from @streetcraft.bsky.social showing how people miscalculate parking vs walking distances in urban vs rural contexts. There is SO much parking in Toronto, you just can't see it because it's around the corner, but closer than walking @ the Mall www.instagram.com/reel/DChTiyK...

Several of our corridor projects have repeatedly proven that customers do not use the parking spots in front of businesses. Those parking spots are not sustaining the businesses. streets.mn/2022/01/26/b...

And how much Transportation is hidden in the other categories? What portion of Housing costs is the garage under your apartment building? What portion of Food is the sea of parking surrounding the supermarket? What portion of Healthcare is car-related injury and respiratory disease?

The government of Ontario is choosing complaining drivers (including government ministers) over the safety of pedestrians and specifically children, not surprising but still disappointing that these are the leaders we’re left with. Read my latest article: open.substack.com/pub/nextmetr...

What’s most amazing about the speed camera discourse Is that all of the people who typically talk about personal responsibility and how our society has given up on it suddenly think that should go out the window once someone actually has the ability to harm others quite easily in their hands

xkcd.com/3167/ welcome to @thewaroncars.bsky.social @xkcd.com ? I think that's a much more direct approach but I'm game for giving it a shot.

All the things at the top are made by, or done by, people. All the things at the bottom are made by, or done by, robots. Robots will move up the list. We need a #UBI Universal Basic Income.

Very, very few infrastructure investments have a payback as short as the two years for this one.

Why buy stuff that you have to burn, then buy more again a week later when you can buy something once and it'll give you energy free for forty years?

A fun question. In 5 years time, what looks better? The US’s enormous bet & capex on AI? Or China’s equally enormous bet and capex on renewables?

Energy is quite literally* what allows people to do anything and everything. Free nonpolluting energy for everyone is a #UniversalBasicIncome. --- * Real physics; not a metaphor. electrek.co/2025/11/04/a...

idea for an alternate history show: British imperialism never changed or fell. the East India Company remains mighty today. they created the first powerful processed opiates and use them to maintain control over their far flung colonies title: The Sun Never Percocets on the British Empire

"Electricity is the ultimate perishable good" No longer. Batteries will change the solar harvest, in the same way silos and refrigeration changed the food harvest... but over years, not decades 🔋🍏 "Silos for Sunshine": a great new thoughtpiece💡 ember-energy.org/latest-insig...

An update from the analysts at WoodMac: yes, as of 2025, solar PV remains the cheapest source of power in the world. And -- bonus! -- it is still getting cheaper with every passing day.

who creates the lively art and music scenes if the rent is too high? who makes cultural life? who serves you food or washes your dishes? who creates the fancy little restaurants that draw you to urban living? affordable housing is at the heart of what makes city life worthwhile.