Ward papastew City Councillor Michael Janz (Photo: David J. Climenhaga). In recent months, a lot of ink has been spilled and hot air vented on the housing crisis being experienced everywhere in Canada. Meanwhile, as leaders at every level of government blame others for the crisis, our municipalities continue to
Continue readingTag: urban planning
Things Are Good: Paris Triples Parking Fees for SUVs
Paris is undergoing a transportation revolution that champions the movement of people over the movement of vehicles and the most recent change was put to the people of the city. Citizens of Paris have voted to triple parking fees for heavy, road destroying, SUVs that take up more space than
Continue readingThings Are Good: How Rotterdam Uses Water to Protect Itself from Flooding
As global warming melts the polar ice caps we are witnessing a human caused increase in sea level. The city of Rotterdam is on the front lines of holding back this tidal increase and they have designed some nifty ways to protect the people that live in the city from
Continue readingThings Are Good: Johns Hopkins: Narrow Lanes Save Lives
Johns Hopkins has reached a conclusion: to protect lives we need to narrow lives. Cars kill. Cars (and the people driving them) are more likely to cause death when they move fast and wide lanes encourage speeding. A logical step to curb reckless driving by car drivers is to limit
Continue readingThings Are Good: This Northern Canadian City is Investing $100 million into Cycling Infrastructure
People opposed to efficient transportation systems argue that cycling infrastructure doesn’t work in the winter, and anybody not suffering from car brain knows that people can ride bikes in cold weather. The city of Edmonton, located in the northern half of Alberta, has launched a great new initiative to promote
Continue readingThings Are Good: Expand Houses by Shrinking Lanes
Seemingly everywhere there’s a crunch on housing and there’s a surplus of roads, so let’s change some car space to sleeping space. If we take away even just one lane of parking for cars we can create towers of housing for people. Cities can benefit from increased revenue since housing
Continue readingThings Are Good: Bike Riding is Not Just a Phase
Every cyclists knows that riding a bike equals freedom, you can go where you want when you want and don’t need trillions of dollars of infrastructure to operate one. Electric bicycles are getting more affordable every year and more and more people are buying them instead of getting a car.
Continue readingThings Are Good: How Seville Stays Cool Despite Rising Heat
Climate change is increasing the average temperatures of cities around the world, which forces inhabitants to adjust to entirely new climates their cities weren’t designed for. In Spain, the city of Seville is expected to have the climate of Marrakesh in a few years time so the city needs to
Continue readingThings Are Good: Transit Hub Addiction Clinics Benefit Everyone
When social services are difficult to get to then their services are used less, it sounds obvious but in too many places social services are very difficult to get to. Car centric urban designs further exacerbate inequality by limiting mobility options, or to put it another way: cars limit freedom
Continue readingThings Are Good: Time to Move Away from Suburbia
Generic car focussed housing development. The future is 15 minutes away and it’s high time we get there. With the climate crisis in full swing we need to rethink unsustainable lifestyles and restructure unsustainable urban design into sustainable living. The concept of the 15 minutes city has gained popularity and
Continue readingThings Are Good: Rural and Urban Areas Have Less Depressions
Where you live matters in almost every way imaginable, and there’s now more evidence that your location impacts your mental health. We now know that what has been colloquially known is now provably true: rates of depression are higher in suburban communities than elsewhere. Of course, you’re probably thinking that
Continue readingThings Are Good: Humans Should Rank Higher Than Drivers
Hey @CityofVancouver? this is second incident I’ve seen caused by these useless ‘slow street’ barricades installed last month. They don’t slow down traffic; they cause crashes and traffic chaos. pic.twitter.com/A4xZOwMCGi — Jill Bennett (@jillreports) March 23, 2023 In North American cities the disease known as Car Brain infected urban planners
Continue readingThings Are Good: Cutting Construction Carbon
Building buildings takes a lot of energy and once done the built structure continues to consume energy and have a carbon footprint. Many options exist to reduce the carbon impact of buildings from the point of construction all the way to deconstruction, but the industry still needs to adopt these
Continue readingThings Are Good: Tokyo Demonstrates the True Cost of Cars
Japan’s well respected car industry sells cars the world over, but at home it’s a different story. Car ownership is low in Japan for obvious reasons like having a good public transit system and high speed trains for intercity travel. In the capital city of Tokyo car ownership is amongst
Continue readingThings Are Good: More Trees Means Less Death
In the cold of winter you might not be thinking of the nice hot summer days as a negative thing. In the winter when temperatures get really low people suffer from hypothermia or worse, whereas in heat they can suffer from heat stroke or worse. When it comes to the
Continue readingThings Are Good: How Chicago Brings Back Wild Nature Into the City
When thinking of Chicago you probably think of its famous architecture, and rightly so. In the future you may think of Chicago’s reclaimed land and eco-conscious landscaping. In the last few decades the city has covered rail yards and car parking with natural features (and art!), built new waterfronts where
Continue readingThings Are Good: Time to Rethink the Skyscraper
The climate crisis has us questioning where people live, work, and how they get between the two. We’ve known for decades that low density sub-urban living is horrible for the environment (and people’s mental health) because it detaches people from each other due to car-based transportation. Many have argued that
Continue readingThings Are Good: Kids Love Living in Cities
Urban places are already good places since they are more environmentally friendly than sub-urban places and have fantastic access to culture. Research in Toronto has revealed that children love cities too. In North America there’s a myth that suburban developments are better for children (despite the reliance on automobiles to
Continue readingThings Are Good: This Parking Space Technique Holds 10 Times More Vehicles
There’s a fiction that cars are needed in cities and we should provide parts of our limited land in urban centres so one person can leave their car. This fiction perpetuated by car brains hurts our cities and is really not good, to solve this problem the city of Rotterdam
Continue readingThings Are Good: How to Build People Focussed Communities
The Sustainable City Show · Ep 3: Creating Car-Free Communities | In Conversation With Eckart Wurzner & Chris Shears A sustainable world is a walkable city. Over at the Sustainable City Show they talked to two people engaged in making cities walkable, car-free, and down right pleasant to live in.
Continue reading