Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Murray Mandryk discusses how COVID-19 has highlighted and exacerbated existing inequality in Saskatchewan. And Aaron Wherry points out that Canada shouldn’t treat its privileged position in securing early access to vaccines as cause to ignore the pandemic which will continue to rage around
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Accidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Both Apoorva Mandavilli and Sara Mojtehedzadeh highlight how a failure to ensure air quality in workplaces to limit aerosol transmission has been one of the main causes of COVID-19 spread within communities. And Noah Smith rightly recognizes that one of the lessons we
Continue readingThings Are Good: BIKEPOC Wants You on a Bicycle
Bicycles are the best form of urban transportation and more people should be out there riding on two wheels. In Toronto, like many North American cities, cyclists in the city are predominately white males (for a variety of reasons). With people stuck at home due to the pandemic there has
Continue readingThings Are Good: France Banning Short Flights to Reduce Carbon Output
Flying isn’t so popular right now due to the pandemic and many airlines are financially hurting, and in France they are helping the Air France. Due to ineffectiveness in the private company the French government stepped in and doubled it’s stake with one key condition: the airline eliminates some of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Kendall Latimer reports that epidemiologists are calling for far stronger public health measures as COVID variants have become the dominant strain – and spread to an alarmingly high number of people already – in Regina. German Lopez discusses the value of a
Continue readingThings Are Good: Cities can Easily Reducing Salt Wasted on Roads
Transportation systems that put cars front and centre cause a lot of damage, we know this. But aspects of our cultural approach to getting around like, the reliance on road salt, are easily ignored. Every winter in North America we dump an unfathomable amount of salt on our roads which
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Matt Karp writes about the connection between heavily polarized politics, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of people whose interests are served by voters rooting for laundry rather than holding meaningful input into policy choices. – May Warren reports on the
Continue readingThings Are Good: Highways Make Traffic Worse, Transit Improves Traffic
Regular readers of this site already know that highways are amongst the worst ways to move people effectively and also a way to ensure urban development is built to cater to cars instead of human beings. Yet, in Ontario the government wants to build a $6 billion highway to promote
Continue readingThings Are Good: Cable Cars Growing in Popularity
The future of urban transit can be found in the mountains. As we noted back in 2012, gondolas (AKA cable cars) are a very real and practical option to solve urban mobility. The benefits of using cable cars are many and when they are integrated into local fare systems they
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Good City is Only 5 Minutes Away
Paris is showing the world the future (their present) of good urban design, and it’s all about 15 minutes. We’ve looked at this concept before, and every year Paris pushes us further. The city has already reduced their reliance on automobiles and increased mobility for the entire populace. They’ve added
Continue reading52 Ideas: Within the decade, Electrification Technology will quickly impact the Alberta Economy & Athabascan Oil Sands
If I were the Mayor of Calgary, an Alberta MLA who goes to Edmonton or a MP for a riding in Alberta, the thing that would terrify me the most is the decreasing cost and improving efficiency of Electric Vehicle (EV) battery back technology. In reading OilPrice.com – a leading
Continue reading52 Ideas: Germany’s pandemic recovery has a direct effect on Alberta
It is rare for the Province of Alberta to feel the effects of a policy decision made by the German Federal Government. However, it is clear that over the next few years, Alberta’s economy – from Calgary to Edmonton, from Banff to Lloydminster – will begin to see an unprecedented
Continue readingThings Are Good: How Pandemic Life is Changing Transportation for the Better
Traffic is the worst and when people start to regularly work from offices we are bound to see an abundance of traffic. Nobody wants this, yet for the last century we’ve been building our cities and suburbs to cause traffic instead of alleviating it. This past year as the need
Continue readingThings Are Good: Britain Bans Fossil Fuel Cars Starting in 2030
The United Kingdom is taking a step towards a green future by announcing that diesel and gas powered cars won’t be allowed in the country starting in 2030. Older cars will still be allowed, but three will be a ban on any new cars sales that aren’t friendlier to the
Continue readingThings Are Good: Wheelmap Helps People Find Accessible Locations
Navigating the world can be challenging for able-bodied people, those in wheelchairs have it even harder. It doesn’t have to be this way. New buildings have to meet certain accessibility requirements which means that visiting places will only get easier for everyone. There are still places that don’t have good
Continue readingThings Are Good: Weather Doesn’t Matter Where There’s Good Bicycling Infrastructure
People opposed to multiple transit solutions often argue that it’s not worth building bicycle lanes because nobody rides in the rain. They couldn’t be more wrong. A new study from Germany looked into the use of bikes during poor weather and found that places with good bicycling infrastructure had more
Continue readingThings Are Good: Bike Lanes Save Lives in Toronto
Here in Toronto we’ve seen little to no changes in our urban space during the COVID-19 pandemic. Other cities have been closing streets and making more room for people while in Toronto we’ve closed a couple streets on the weekend and gave up sidewalk space to private enterprise. Neighbouring communities
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Evening Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Jim Stanford discusses the need to ensure corporations pay their fair share for the social infrastructure which allows them to thrive. – Jennifer Garrison writes about the gender imbalance in Alberta’s back-to-school plan. And Heather Scoffield highlights how Justin Trudeau’s prorogation of
Continue readingThings Are Good: How to Prevent Drivers Smashing into Buildings
This is a fun video exploring how we currently design streets for cars and how the Netherlands dealt with drivers. It’s sadly common that drivers steer their vehicles into buildings (maybe the buildings need to wear reflectors like cyclists?) throughout North America, despite the billions spent on roadways. Thankfully there
Continue readingThings Are Good: Toronto take note: Let’s Use Streets to Improve Cities
I live in Toronto where cars are king and everything else deserves to be banned from the road, heck we rip up bike lanes while other cities grow their bicycle networks (and we’re spending millions on a highway that gets fewer users than a bus route). Toronto has been shamefully
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