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

Doug Ford should be in jail for a million different reasons, but one of the reasons he's not is becuase he's unbelievably good at politics

The thing about housing is that it *should* be a depreciating asset. Old housing costs more and more to maintain, much like a car, so a functional market would have used prices decreasing over time. The only reason it doesn't is becuase of regulated scarcity

Gradually, then suddenly

Yes, this is all performative nonsense, but performative nonsense changes the actions of real-world actors. The fact that approved projects can be voted against based on the whims of councillors is yet another risk Why would someone invest here when they can elsewhere that doesn't have this risk?

Drivers are going 100 km/h in a noise cancelling box but sure it's the pedestrian's headphones that are the problem

Doug Ford's favorite thing in the world is making you sit in traffic on the 401 and the Gardiner Literally the GOAT of traffic creation, the best to ever do it

"Do easy things and take credit for them" should be the easiest part of the job, and yet only one major politician has figured it out Fix a pothole, reopen a bridge, improve a public bathroom, then make a post about it. Repeat every week and after a little bit, people's lives are 10% better

Many jurisdictions actually have minimum parking requirements for bars. Objectively pro-drunk driving urban planning.

The secretary of transportation makes less than a random LIRR guy who is pushing the limits of the system seems impossible and yet

a lot of Canadian public-good unions are like this as well. Already earn 2x median income, amazing benefits, and then turn down significantly above inflation raises becuase they know they can hold their city hostage. It's bad for the cities and also bad for organized labour and unions in general

bike lanes require literal years of public consultation and design review. Fundamentally changing the downtown living experience permanently just needs a couple weeks apparently

Wow so weird how often this guy's friends end up on the gravy train side of a transaction Surely just a coincidence that an FOI request world clear... Oh wait

When the default to building *anything* in this city is "no", the few gatekeepers who are able to say yes are incentivized to do this "Nice property you got there, be a shame if you were never allowed to do anything with it" Corruption is designed into the system

So according to the Virginia Supreme Court, Republicans can just rebroadcast, retransmit, or give accounts of games without the express written consent of Major League Baseball and Democrats somehow can’t?

Folks! Who do you think can apply for a low paying, high prestige job? It's neither average people (representative) nor salaried technical experts (massive pay cut). It's people who don't need the income!

My @thestar.com column: City Council has an attendance problem. Councillors are missing votes and risking quorum. But an election year offers a simple opportunity to fix things: vote out some of the frequent no-shows, elect some new reps who care more about the job. www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

Worth noting that converting the rooming house into a single family home would have involved ~0 regulatory burden, but if someone bought the house and wanted to convert it back, it would be subject to literal years of review, 6 or 7 digits of fees, and still likely killed in "community consultation"

Not insignificant reason why these chuds hate cities, too. In a small town, everyone knows everyone and is cordial by necessity In a city, you get to choose who you associate with, and these guys mostly end up all alone

The problem with homeownership being the main driver of upward mobility is that you can only do it for exactly 1 (one) generation, and it's at the expense of every generation after Economic productivity is a positive-sum wealth transfer. Housing scarcity is zero-sum wealth transfer

The Venn diagram of "guy who wants a massive truck" and "guy who wants an ev" are two separate circles, and yet the big three went and spent billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars on the hummer, F-150, Silverado EVs That fact that shareholders haven't revolted against the CEOs is crazy

Good News! Starting May 24, TTC streetcars will now be able to enter signalized intersections and crosswalks at the speed limit. They are currently required to slow down to 25km/h. Some speed restrictions along the Queensway will also be removed.

a reminder that a lot of the things people find unpleasant about cities - along with the noise and dirtiness - are largely a product of filling them with cars. get rid of the cars and the pleasantness of the environment improves dramatically

GOOD

Only in toronto is giving more space to pedestrians who can't fit on local sidewalks called overcrowding

"this might be *too* popular, therefore we can't do it" is a one-line encapsulation of how Toronto city council thinks

You may not like American hegemony, but you are certainly not going to like what happens when American hegemony is gone

This is why gambling companies are money printing machines

Holyday was designed in a lab to cause me, specifically, maximum psychological damage

You don't hate Doug Ford enough

A lot of people focus on misinformation as being too easy to make. As in, a supply problem. Bullshit is easier to make than truth, etc In reality, it's a demand problem. People very frequently *want* misinformation

Politicians, especially at the local level, can just do things They don't actually need 8 years of consultation to make decisions

I just keep thinking about this. Ford loves to pound people to shit and strut across their political bodies. All the name calling. The Lefties. Socialists. Cyclists. Gravy eaters. But he whines like a high maintenance nepo when something doesn't go his way. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Older people looting every public good and then pulling up the ladder, episode number one million It's not enough that they froze their neighborhoods in amber, they also stole 150sf of road in front of their house as well. In their minds, they outright own that public piece of land

If it was marketed as a thing that’s good at writing code and reformatting documents and not the universal answers machine, we’d be thinking about it a lot differently.

The guy who took like 30-weeks of vacation last year is gonna argue that he needs this for work and I'm going to crash out This thing can't even land at the vast majority of airports outside the GTA

The gravy train is now airborne Also, now the whole "make Billy Bishop big enough for jets" makes sense

Metrolinx said it fired the German partners who were supposed to take over GO trains because they couldn't meet deadlines. Internally, however, the group found they were waiting on several key tasks being "blocked" by Metrolinx. #onpoli www.thetrillium.ca/news/municip...

Somewhat of a trump effect going on here that if you accurately describe Doug Ford's policies, you start to sound like an insane person "Doug Ford is ok with more kids dying in car crashes so people can get home 2 minutes faster without getting a ticket" sounds insane but is 100% true

One of the things that shocked me at my old job for a tiny (6 employees) company was that we would get hundreds of applications for our niche job postings Chicken/egg. It's a huge problem that AI is deciding which resumes to pass on. It's a huge problem that every job posting gets 1000 applocations

Journalist Alex Mayyasi argues Vancouver’s housing crisis wasn’t inevitable—it was engineered. Homeowners used zoning laws to protect property values, locking everyone else out. The Sen̓áḵw development is what happens when those rules don’t apply. https://ow.ly/LVwf50YFV2V

ANOTHA ONE

Literally just a carbon tax lmao we love our green pro-renewable American president don't we folks

The thing that has been haunting me for both Trump 1 and 2 is "what would it actually take to impeach and remove him?" The answer is increasingly clearly "nothing"

The way consumers act with zero foresight is perfectly calibrated to make you go insane.

Small government conservatives

Why is that apartment in Etobicoke helping fund the Spadina subway extension, library branches across the city, affordable housing, shelters, and long-term care? (because it’s easier to tax new housing than to raise everybody else’s taxes, that’s why.)

This is actually just redlining by a different mechanism