Certain members of Toronto City Council will insist to you that Toronto's development charges are 100% necessary and no municipality could fund its capital budget without them and that they have no impact on housing construction. I don't think those beliefs can survive contact with reality.

This is the TSP setup that must be standard on #TTC streetcar, LRT, and priority Ten Minute Network bus routes along with fully actuated signals to get transit moving and make TTC the better way then general traffic in @toronto.ca @ttcriders.bsky.social @mayoroliviachow.ca @moretransitso.bsky.social

“To finish off survivors in the water” Sickening

so our government made a big deal about banning speed cameras but one city left theirs running to see what difference the ban would make and you are not going to believe this

This is a solid analysis, and a good counterpoint to some of the more knee-jerk reactions floating about. Very worth a read.

Another month of NASA CERES satellite data and it's only getting worse! 0.11 W/m² added to the 4-year average Net-flux increase over the North Pacific. Absorbed Solar Radiation is almost 5W/m² higher than at the start of the century. All added greenhouse gases since 1750 cause a 4.1 W/m² forcing

Hopefully all the attention on the unacceptably slow streetcars lately will finally result in actions from the city to address this problem they’ve been ignoring for decades.

Grizzly attack on 11 kids & teachers in BC. “one teacher jumped in front of the bear to allow the children to get away…he jabbed the bear’s eyes with his fingers and that’s how he was able to… how the bear just left him.” “That teacher was later airlifted from the scene.” Teachers are heroes.

Proposal to call these transit cocoons

Almost everywhere in the City of Toronto has fewer people that it did 50 years ago

Jealous, but congrats to Montreal and everyone who got the REM built

New Crosstown line extension bridge coming up

Yet another reason to be grateful for coffee

Congratulations to the Toronto Blue Jays on a magnificent season. It is a shame either team had to lose. And this was a gut punch. 💔💔 Classy players, fanbase, and truly one of the finest cities in the world. Future is bright with Yeasavage, Barger, and Vladdy. Now go re-sign Bo.

Let’s gooooo

IP, software, biotech, and pharmaceutical exports are not constrained by geography like auto parts and other heavy goods, so if we want to diversify our markets we should be investing in these knowledge sectors

Good News! The Finch West LRT has successfully completed its revenue service demonstration. The line will be handed over to the TTC by November 3rd and will open shortly after. news.ontario.ca/en/release/1...

I’ve been thinking a lot about a new kind of polling I’d like to see. We have polling that measures public opinion, which is obviously important, but I’d love to see a little more empirical work on public knowledge: what do voters know about politics and policy?

MechaHitler now fully in charge on X. I wonder if this will cause any self-reflection among the pundits & journis still hanging out there.

the population-weighted density of Canada is higher than Germany

NEW CANADIAN JOBS DATA: Employment Growth: +60k Unemployment Rate: 7.1% (+0%) Prime Age (25-54) Employment Rate: 83.3% (+0.6%) Employment Level: 21.0M

Toronto is the greatest city in the world now. I don't make the rules

Imagine we had a crime problem in school zones so cameras were added along with warning signs saying “remember, don’t do crimes here, camera present” and we had a study from SickKids that showed the cameras reduced crime in those zones, but then we turned them off because criminals didn’t like them

Nothing to see here just years on end of the streetcars miserably failing to meet an incredibly lax on-time departure metric.

REM Automatic for the people.

Macron remarks are notable- some quotes: "We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks that are controlled either by large American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies."

Pew finds something that everybody in codes and standards knows but few will say out loud: we apply far stricter fire safety standards to apartments than to houses. www.pew.org/en/research-...

We shape our transportation infrastructure, and thereafter it shapes us

Truly wild projected transition to EVs in China, if borne out would be great news for the climate and suggests countries that rely heavily on oil exports (like 🇨🇦) need to get cracking on building more sustainable industries

You love to see it - raised crosswalks being installed on road rebuilds in Toronto

In rare good news solar power continue to surge - China alone installed 250 GW of new panels in the first half of 2025. For reference, Ontario’s peak electricity demand is around 25 GW ember-energy.org/latest-updat...

Be great to see this on the east side of University Avenue, except with larger barriers protecting the bike/emergency vehicle lane from regular traffic and a sloped threshold between the bike lane and the sidewalk to let cyclists easily clear the way when needed for 1st responders

a good arbiter of how close we are to bad hybrid regime shit is if the political comedy shows start getting pulled for whatever reason

This new sense of urgency is welcome and something we've been asking for. Commitment must now be turned into action, using part of the $3.9B committed to deliver tangible results for passengers in parallel with the co-development phase. www.ctvnews.ca/canada/artic...

Discovering computer as an adult makes you go crazy. Discovering computer as a baby makes you go crazy. In all of human history, there will only ever be one generation to discover computer at the correct age: 13

The greatest story in Canada today is this guy, who wanted to get a slurpee while wasted so took his friend's daughter's toy jeep www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

"Solar power is transforming the world — and at record speed" @ember-energy.org ember-energy.org/latest-insig...

@englishrail.bsky.social and I have a piece in the Globe & Mail about how Canada can make housing more affordable and accessible, and disentangle itself from its unreliable and hostile southern neighbor: give its elevator industry the option to use the European/global standard, not just the U.S. one

How the electrocardiogram can identify previously undiagnosed structural heart disease with A.I. alone, better than cardiologists with A.I. support @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I am once again urging @eleanorolszewski.bsky.social to have 🇨🇦’s government place a large order for Alberta-made waterbombers to save lives & towns, to mitigate huge carbon emissions, to foster national unity, and to build a diplomatic asset when used abroad during our shrinking fire off season

Seems pretty telling of Toronto Police's lackadaisical attitude toward traffic enforcement that an officer feels comfortable publicly calling speed cameras a "fucking scam." www.thestar.com/news/gta/the...

A small Ottawa developer wants to build a small infill apartment, with 16 2- and 3-bedroom units. Exactly what the City needs. Yet they're laying on so many costs and fees to make the project unviable. 14 fees + 15 "cost-recovery" reports. ottawacitizen.com/ne...

A culture of lawlessness.

Here’s the bottom line for what’s going on with Grok - if the owner of the website is putting his thumb on the scale hard enough for the chatbot to turn into Goebbels, you should be deeply concerned about what he’s doing to the algorithm that you can’t so easily see, and what it’s doing to you

hey every single journalist who still uses twitter as your primary site, does the fact that the chatbot is promoting the Final Solution rise to the level of a news story or no stop making this the global hub for news communication

Seems bad that many Canadian institutions and politicians, including my MP @lesliechurch.bsky.social continue to use X, whose owner appears to have turned its AI tool into an an explicit nazi. Stop using Twitter/X, please, folks

My @thestar.com column: Data suggests about 25% of license plates snapped by Toronto’s speed cameras are obstructed. Forget these silly driver gripes about the cameras. The real scourge is scofflaws with illegal plate covers. Time for a crackdown on “ghost cars.” www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

Over the last free months Canada has upped its border security, agreed to participate in the Golden Dome, and spend 5% of GDP on defence and it basically all means nothing. No agreement will be stable or secure, even if we can eventually reach one. The new normal in Canada-US relations.

Chow says she wants the signs warning of speed cameras to be "as big and loud as possible — put it in their face! Put it everywhere! Warn them ahead of time, if the camera is just arriving."