This is great: 70 new stations to Bike Share TO in August.
•Lessons from Amsterdam: How to make cycling easy and fun
King Street pilot project wins city council approval
Good… I think? The plan is a little confusing. Simpler to just make it transit / bike / pedestrian only.
Subterranean home for 400 found in Beijing basement
I once had a dream, when we were renovating our basement, that we discovered a sub-basement with an extended family living in it, subsisting on “night potatoes”
Interesting half-hour doc featuring Christopher Hume talking about streets, cars, bikes, downtown and suburbs. Article here.
•Toronto’s ambitious bike plan, one year later
As you might expect, a little disappointing
We Bought a Crack House
Everyone’s favourite hate read this week, in which a yuppie couple evict a bunch of poor people so they can renovate their third property and blow $1-million through a series of poor decisions
My daily commute by bike turned me into a witness of a truly tragic event
We will look back on how our roads are structured in decades to come and consider it barbaric.
On Chicago’s Improved Bike Infrastructure
as Chicago’s bikeway network grew over the last decade or so (135 percent between 2005 and 2015), crashes per 100,000 trips fell by more than half (54 percent) and fatalities and serious injuries per 100,000 trips dropped 60 percent. And that’s as more and more people started bicycling in the city: bicycle trips grew by a whopping 167 percent within those ten formative years.
Axing OMB boosts cities’ planning power – for better or for worse
On the proposed replacement for the not well-loved Ontario Municipal Board
My favourite park is coming along nicely
•Berlin Expands Streetcars to the West
Restoring streetcar lines that were torn up in the 60s
Downtown Toronto went all in with a pair of Kings
Re: rezoning of King St in the 90s
Streetcars are Toronto’s civic treasure and the King St. plan gives them their due
Besides, if you want to drive without streetcars in the way, you have your pick of all kinds of other cities. You can go to Hamilton, or Mississauga, or Pickering. You can go most places, and they won’t have streetcars. We do have them, and they’re a civic treasure. It’s about time we treat them like it.
OMB Reform: Contested development
Star feature on the shady Ontario Municipal Board, the unaccountable provincial body that has the final say in development approvals in Toronto