Bryant and Road Rage

The judicial verdict is in on the sensational case of Michael Bryant. It sounds like a tragic case of a driver whose car’s stop/stall/roll action accidentally provoked an unstable bicycle courier, with tragic and ultimately fatal consequences. The driver appears to have behaved completely reasonably under the circumstances. The cyclist had a long history [...]

Winter cycling, Dutch style

Growing up in Toronto, I was a six-month cyclist and six-month pedestrian/transit rider. Since moving back a few years ago, I’ve been shifting to closer to ten months of cycling. I realized that I feel much better when I get that daily exercise and sunshine, and it’s considerably faster for getting around, chaining trips and [...]

Thesis: Synthesizing Agents and Relationships for Land Use / Transportation Modelling

I finished my M.A.Sc. degree at the University of Toronto in August. In a past post, I discussed some of the coursework that made up the first year of the degree, but I haven’t really discussed the core research here before. I did win an award for some interim results presented at a local conference, [...]

Backcasting: From Climate to Transportation

This is a follow-up to my earlier post about Monbiot’s book on climate change. In that post, I stated that I was interested in long-term emissions targets because they will probably constrain transportation planning over the course of my career. Now that I’m looking at the issue more closely, I’ve found some relevant research: a [...]

IPCC and Land Use

Mike passed me a recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group III (Mitigation of Climate Change). The IPCC is quite famous for its reports summarising the scientific consensus on climate science, so I was curious to see what the process and results of their follow-up reports looked like. I only [...]

Negawatts

I hope you don’t mind my descent into technobabble for a few moments.
The Toronto Star recently published an interesting article on demand management in the electricity sector in Ontario.

I go back to a speech that Paul Murphy, CEO of the Independent Electricity System Operator, gave back in January. He pointed out that of the 8,760 [...]

Annotated Readings

Almost all of these readings are old, dating back to my initial forays into understanding transportation. They’re listed in the order I read them, from newest to oldest. Most of the content is just quotations I found interesting, with a few comments. Many of the comments no longer reflect my current thinking; take it with [...]

Jetpacks & garden privacy

I just finished a term paper on “corridors in the polycentric city,” looking at various bodies of literature and their ideas for the urban form in transit corridors linking nodes in a city. Along the way, I read Stephen Marshall’s excellent Streets & Patterns, a well thought-out analysis of road hierarchies and the subtle auto-oriented [...]

Scholastica

I haven’t actually written much about my school experience here yet, so I thought I’d at least put up a few sentences on my experience with transportation planning here at U of T.
Last term was crazy busy, although in retrospect much of the burden was self-imposed. Since I was starting a new discipline, I was [...]

Sustrans talks galore, and the story of the Cheonggyecheon River

Before

After

It’s been an eventful two weeks. A ton of urban conferences hit Vancouver: the World Urban Form, the Canadian Institute of Planners Congress, and Planners4Tomorrow.
Enrique Peñalosa gave an inspiring talk about his time as the mayor of Bogotá, Colombia. In a city where less than 20% own a car, why was so much downtown space [...]