Well THAT took long enough. Forgive the egregiously long time between posts, dear readers, but I just wanted to let you know that the hiatus is over. I’m in the process of writing and cranking up Connecting Dots again. Over the last year, family concerns behind the scenes–plus many nifty new projects at work–meant that my focus needed to shift… Read more »
Some work I’ve been undertaking over the past couple weeks related to a prairie community got me thinking about what the “laws” or principles of transit planning might be. By this I don’t mean the principles of good transit service design: the best practices for designing route networks, schedules, infrastructure, their accompanying plans and so on. Instead, I’m talking about… Read more »
The 2016 Pro Walk Pro Bike Pro Place conference happened in Vancouver, BC from September 12 to 15 and I thought it might be interesting to pass on a few highlights. With an event program the size of a heftier magazine and held in conjunction with the Project for Public Spaces and Placemaking Week, the conference felt somewhat like the… Read more »
This post started out as a reserved and detailed analysis of the 2016 Canadian federal budget through the lenses of mobility and place. And then I took a break from writing and went out with my five-year-old son to practice riding his bike. And that’s when this post changed. On the fringe of downtown, our relatively quiet neighbourhood exists as… Read more »
“Oh, but it’s only adds on another three minutes,” is one of those phrases I’ve heard over and over again during my time as a transit planner and scheduler. And like some evil Pavlovian trigger, I can’t help but get bad flashback twitches every time I hear it. The changes that folks request that “will only take three minutes” sound… Read more »
Ever experienced a community process where you shared a common objective with others but your approaches seemed worlds apart and maybe even resulted in strife and conflict? Such a situation often seems all too common and can be demoralizing. Even more so, conflict over styles of approach has real implications in terms of our ability to make change happen. So,… Read more »
I’ve been watching with interest Chris Bruntlett’s Twitter posts (@modacitylife) and facebook page of crowd sourced photos of Christmas trees being carried home by bike. What I like most about Chris’s posts are that they are bringing visibility to the different choices that people are making in their lives in terms of how they get around and the meaning they… Read more »
Working as I do in the field of transit, it’s been an interesting few weeks since Justin Trudeau won the Canadian national election to become the leader of our country. Transit and spending on civic infrastructure that could help sustainable transportation of all kinds were two big themes of his campaign, and a bus was also part of his first… Read more »
From the Vault: I originally wrote the following story for Momentum Magazine in 2003 and had completely forgotten about it until speaking the other day with a co-worker interested in aquaponics. That chat made me remember the first time I’d ever seen water, plants and urban fish in action together, in Kolding, Denmark. While over a decade has passed since this… Read more »
We all know the power of images. Making a visual impact is even that much more important when trying to engage citizens in community decision-making, particularly when it comes to communicating project benefits and trade offs. Two great examples of visually communicating recently came my way and I thought I would share them. Example 1: City of Victoria 2015 Property… Read more »
The other day while gingerly nestling my bike against another unknown person’s at a bike lock up it crossed my mind that no car driver would ever tolerate parking their vehicle by rubbing it up against someone else’s. I started to grumble and launch into an internal diatribe. But then I stopped and thought again. Because maybe this wasn’t something… Read more »