I don’t know man, that sounds like a lot of work
Build more housing. Proud Canadian
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I don’t know man, that sounds like a lot of work
It's official: "Standardized Apartment Districts and City-Initiated Zoning Changes" is going to public hearing on September 16. This is a big deal; Vancouver is finally moving away from its insane "every building gets a new unique zoning district" system council.vancouver.ca/20250916/phe...
Dad's new place! Picked up the keys today. Rental built in 2022/23. He'll soon be transit accessible to me. Pet friendly, insuite laundry, dishwasher. All purpose built rental. Please build more of these.
Still kinda bummed that my personal nemesis of Boundary and Kingsway (where the BC Parkway crosses) got eliminated, but please vote!
Ontario mode, where the escarpment looks like Mount Thor?
This thread from Michael Wiebe is well worth a read. So many of our failures in urbanism stem from people who are unable to see the second order effects of policies. The impact of upzoning a parcel of land on the value of *other* parcels, to take one example
Kind of undersells how hilly Vancouver is. Always have to come up with ways to keep the grade under 6% on my fantasy skytrain maps…
Probably makes sense
A collection of Charles Wallace’s, for sure
Fantastic, never saw this before
Good building code proposal IMO:
Just one muni instead of 20 probably helps too.
One quote says that Calgary is doing better because it's job market is less susceptible to tariff impacts, but i suspect the true reason is that Calgary is less sensitive to the whiplashing of immigration rates seen in the past few years.
Good read, seems like mostly good news (in the long run), land values coming down is what we would want as a result from upzoning more broadly and reducing the scarcity of available land. Key thing seems to be reducing dev't timelines.
tricitiesdispatch.com/many-expensi... Good idea!
Some day I would like our society to figure out the technology of not-bundling-huge-cavern-with-every-building
Grateful to have the Central Valley Greenway as the route to school.
My friend Naama, venturing off w/ her kids to school this morning. Yes, Toronto is a car-dominant city. Which is why so many of us are fighting to change the mind sets of our elected municipal reps to prioritize the safety of vulnerable road users. It shouldn't be this hard. #TOPoli #VisionZero
Ahead of Noah Smith? Impressive.
Yeah, I wasn't super into Star Wars, but one of my friends had the Millennium Falcon and it was cool enough to almost get me into it..
I remember the Sears catalogue always had a really fancy tabletop hockey game that even had a working scoreboard...
Everything is downstream of the media/info environment and we are not doing anything to fix that. We subsidize US right wing owned media to propagandize our own population - that is how stupid we are. Our best hope is that, like in 2008, the US implodes before we do and we can get clear.
Going retro at our house also, "Mrs. Nordberg, I think we can save your husband's arm. Where would you like it sent?"
I remember it being a bit uneven from ep to ep, and they never really succeeded at integrating the classroom and 'super'hero worlds, but it was fun and the casting was very well done.
I always thought that the way WALL-E presented two diametrically opposed dystopias was very clever
If ever in Victoria, BC, a nice street to walk down & waste time looking at telephone poles is Cook Street, because some brilliant artist has painted every telephone pole for a kilometre or two with cats. I don’t know why. But I love it. Every one, both sides of the street. All different. #yyj
Cool thread on cross-country rail trip...
Yeah, there is a salmon bearing creek near me. You can stand for a while and watch how much work and time and how many attempts goes into just one little slide in a creek and then you think about the entire journey and it is kind of mind blowing
Nah, I make it work (but I take your point all the same!)
As the meme says, 'why not both?' but yeah...
I remember this xkcd strip: xkcd.com/993/ where I was like, dude, this is exactly how the Walmart house brand works, but I guess it might not be surprising that Randall doesn't shop at Wal-Mart...
Yes, this exactly
The word 'suburb' covers such a wide range. I mean, the district I live in is probably considered a suburban one by most definitions, but the school district doesn't even run busses and most kids walk or bike or (in high school) take public transit to get to school. But this kind of suburb, yeah
Good article, in general, per OECD, in Canada about 1/3 of GDP is collected by government as tax revenue, which puts us around the OECD average, which seems about right. Of course, all of this money comes back around one way or another, sometime more directly (eg CPP), sometimes less (eg education)
This is a great read, the specifics relate to a new theme park in England, but the story of media amplifying nimby voices due to some sort of fear of change / status quo bias will be a familiar one across many countries and contexts
What incompetence looks like in graph form. Governing isn't easy, and there was the pandemic to consider, but nonetheless maintaining a relatively *steady* level of population growth is not that hard, and is very very important. Hopefully we have learned that lesson.
NDP needs a new leader, and they need to focus on housing and in general they need to be bolder on policy. They can look to BC NDP for an example to follow on housing.
I mean, we transformed our info system from ‘couch potato’ (tv) to ‘flame war’ (internet). What did people expect would happen? The US is a bit unique in that talk radio sustained the flames of angry politics somewhat through the TV years and the UK has its uniquely toxic print media
This is closer than 99% of commentaries, but still not quite right. I think the main point is that ‘the medium is the message’ i.e. The turn we are seeing is a function of the nature of communication via social media/internet as opposed to the lack of gatekeepers on the discourse. Splitting hairs 🤷♂️
That time Toronto tried to build a six storey apartment building on its own land and discovered that the R zoning on indoor amenity space was a problem, but just did a site-specific exemption instead of fixing the underlying issue. Why does no one build mid-rises? 🤷 www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis...
Yeah, feel the same way…
Might see that picture in a history book, some decade in the future…
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ANOTHER pedestrian is dead on this exact same stretch of Lougheed. When is enough enough? Do these cities and the province care at all? It sure doesn't look like it. vancouver.citynews.ca/2025/08/31/m...
Many people use social media more than traditional media channels. The same should apply to Elon Musk's X, Xi Jinping's TikTok, Zuckerberg's Meta, etc.. Their operations here in the EU should be spun off, and European-owned to safeguard European security. Canada, UK etc too.
Make no mistake, everything that’s happening in the United States is being significantly enabled by the right wing oligarch capture of media. Every other country needs to do everything possible to keep that from happening where they are. Including protecting the CBC from Poilievre here in Canada.
Also CTV and Global. All the newspapers. The Government of Canada should legislate the sale of compromised media outlets back into Canadian hands, at fair market value. That means breaking up huge mega corps so smaller Canadian orgs can purchase them.
Just terrible, so unnecessary
oh come on now these maze gates are getting silly, what is this even guarding against Highway 99/Oak St Bridge NB approach, Richmond (Ministry)
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Even while moving 10 bikes will take up at most 500 square feet (and 10 cars will need more stopping distance so more than 3000). Assume typical occupancy of 1.5 people per car and one per bike, and bikes increase the capacity of a single lane of traffic to move people in a city at least six fold
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These policies have been largely unsuccessful in boosting demand for office space further out. Which is probably for the better, fragmenting the job market goes against the very reason why cities exist. And it’s a productivity killer. Just one of the points where regional planing has work to do.
Should have zoned more of it for mixed use
A country that might be better off if the Central Bank focused on stabilizing mortgage rates instead of inflation?
Just out of curiosity, what is the urbanism of Canada's largest corporations?
There’s nothing like visiting aging relatives to make you appreciate how a car-dependent society increasingly becomes a prison as people become too old to get behind the wheel. We must take steps to make it easier for the elderly (and everyone else) to live in walkable communities.
The “4 town centres and detached housing everywhere else’ Burnaby model is way past its best before date
🤷♂️ it just shows how horrible most of our urbanism is. They make something nice, and it has to be dismissed as something from a different continent, or else we might wonder why the experience on the street is so crap across Canada
BEFORE / AFTER. Here's what the school pick-up was like BEFORE at our children's elementary school. A real rodeo. Lots of near misses. Cars parked in the crosswalks. Distracted drivers pulling up just when hundreds of kids are trying to arrive on foot or by bike. This June we changed things... 🧵
I have a personal rule to never short sell, but this case has been awfully tempting for a while
Let's send the exclusive-right-of-way TRANSIT to the neighborhood that developed the way it did because of exclusive-right-of-way TRANSIT! Burnaby Heights became what it is because of transit. To detour transit around it because businesses don't want it would be completely antithetical 🤦🤥
This is so important. We can't just allow frankly evil technologies to dominate us unchecked. The party should be over for Silicon Valley but which countries have the guts to actually pull the plug or regulate them into the insignificance they should be?
It's a good day when @naqiy.bsky.social publishes charts. For comparison, I tried looking at Vancouver's @translink.ca and came up with the following for 2024: Light rail (SkyTrain): $3.02/boarding Bus: $4.14 Note: my numbers are 🇨🇦dollars, so things are pretty cost effective up here!
So, what are two fairly easy things we could do if we wanted to change this? 1. Repeal and Remove the Subdivision Bylaw 2. Remove the unit caps in R1-1 I'm guessing this would be an interesting litmus test for the mayor and ABC. @lucymaloney.bsky.social @seanorr.bsky.social
I do not know, but if it works like anything else in Burnaby, the answer is, ‘when they can get a developer to pay for it’
Looks like the new path connecting the Granville Connector to the Arbutus Greenway is about to be finished any day. Nice!
Aka, the Swiss defence
Kind of surprising that the % is higher than pre-pandemic, I guess it shows that the decline in ridership is driven by work from home, not mode shift
Presumably they have always wanted electricity in the evening …. and yet here we are
Misleading, bank loss models mostly won’t even use 2021-2022 data because default and loss were so so unusually low due to the Covid measures in place. But at least you included a longer term graph…
New MMI piece! The MMI team has had strong concerns about the design of Build Canada Homes, the federal government's new flagship program to build affordable housing at scale. Today, we provide advice on how the program can be made a success:
Same everywhere, across the ‘west’ at least
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There should be a law that everything written about global energy use has to lead with this chart
You can find pretty reliable maps that show the level of solar power you can generate around the world, they are interesting to look over…
But they can’t afford batteries on this scale, not yet at least…
Solar is huge and growing at a crazy rate and will transform Africa, but I’m not sure this translates into massive drops in fossil fuel demand. The technology that could replace much fossil fuel use is batteries (and pop’n decline), but despite having come a long way, they still have a ways to go
Howard Jones is a bit of a clean-living outlier among famous musicians, I would say.
Apropos of nothing, a reminder that German stock markets kept climbing in an almost uninterrupted fashion in the run-up to WW2. Investors are really, really bad at pricing serious institutional and political risks.
An essay from a local Vancouver mayor: www.urbanyvr.com/coquitlam-af...
Oh, you could build a station there, but it would be a bad idea, we don’t need to build a new station to fight with Lake City Way for the title of least patronized Skytrain station
Yeah, I read it and all I heard in my mind was, ‘The sun’s going to come out tomorrow..’
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Coquitlam has removed a lot of their gates, maybe Delta could be pressured into doing the same?
I feel like this announcement not being met by anyone posting the crazy person ‘I just need to stimulate demand’ meme speaks poorly of the Aussie housing discourse
Same here (YVR), I was just laughing at a ‘New Traffic Light’ sign for a traffic light that got taken out years ago, the other day. If I had more energy, I was tempted to uproot it and just take it home and put it up on the wall somewhere…
That’s funny, I (re)ran across this one not too long ago. Very, very 1980’s, mostly in a good way
Yeah, still remember the two week gradual entry for Kindergarten…
Biked through North Delta again today and I'm still baffled at the number of maze gates they put everywhere on bike routes. Does someone's cousin own a company that makes maze gates or something? Even the railways don't use so many.
The good news is that the sulphur only rarely creates an unstable body double of you in order to investigate your past. (Stargate SG1 - episode Cold Lazarus…)
The Port Moody port switched a lot of capacity from sulphur to potash on the basis that Alberta running out of natural gas (sulphur being a byproduct) would mean less sulphur to be shipped out. But that was about a decade ago, this is probably just some short term thing
Definitely something to be proud of
Brentwood and Metrotown are very similar, some decent spots once you get away from the main arterials, but those main streets are very wide, with a lot of cars.
Nothing to see here, just @lucymaloney.bsky.social doing media against inaction on bus lanes while a SORRY BUS FULL 49 goes by at 2 PM on a Saturday. Cumulatively, 316 years of transit users time has been wasted since 24 July, 2024 since Vancouver voted to put bus lanes on its 9 busiest corridors.
Part 4 of my series on the current #NewWest OCP work related to new housing regulations and Housing Accelerator Funding: including a discussion on the part we aren't getting done fast enough: Affordable Housing. www.patrickjohnstone.ca/2025/08/our-...
The dude is made of cold stone
Interesting new paper compares density upzonings in two similar BC cities that had dramatically different effects in terms of construction & value uplift. Keys to the difference? Effects were only felt when upzoning was accompanied with expedited permitting processes & reduced parking requirements.
I know, but I like to imagine bringing in the whole crew and just giving them free reign to build it however they would do it back home
