Oh The Urbanity!
More housing, bikes, and transit.
youtube.com/@ohtheurbanity
📍 Montreal, Quebec
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- This is a common misconception, but legalizing apartments everywhere does not force apartments to be built. They will only get built if there’s unmet demand to live in them.
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- I just don’t get how a Quebec nationalist perspective could feel more threatened by China than the US. Even under Biden, they opposed Quebec’s language laws. (No joke: a US trade representative actually used the adjective “Quebecian” for Bill 96.) Trump’s team called it an unfair trade barrier.
- The stupidest bike policy ever? Ireland is considering not just helmets but also *mandatory high-vis clothing* for cyclists!
- I encounter mobility scooters using bike infrastructure somewhat often in Montreal. It seems to work fine, especially on bike lanes with room to pass.
- Colorado’s Jared Polis is one of a few politicians in the US that consistently goes out of his way to put in a good word for Canada.
- The article is about burdensome regulations on apartments (zoning, building code) vs SFH. And so far the replies are complaints about privacy, renting, not having a garden. As if those personal experiences and preferences justify unrelated regulations around staircases and sprinklers!
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- Toronto is lucky to have a lot of smart people pushing it to reach its potential on transit.
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- YouTube recommends me streams of council meetings from places I’ve never even heard of. Like Guthrie, Oklahoma (population 10,000).
- You can see which direction was morning rush hour.
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- Where do you park/store your bike in winter? Is it different from the summer?
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- Toronto is considering a rule change that would make backyard pools harder to build, for tree coverage reasons. Councillor Stephen Holyday, notorious for obstructing new things (especially new housing), thinks rules on pools go too far. ”In many ways, this [puts] trees before people.“
- One problem with concentrating new housing development on commercial streets is that there are just far fewer commercial streets than residential ones. It would leave most of the city off-limits for density. Those European cities don’t do that.
- It’s easy to say the city is “full” when you have housing and you’re just telling other people that *they* have to go away.
- This Alberta separatism thing just feels so weird. Like it came out of nowhere. Yes, disputes with the feds over energy policy. Many resent the political power of Ontario and Quebec. But actually having a referendum on leaving Canada? Not something I would have predicted in a million years.
- I get the compromise behind a seasonal bike lane. Skeptics might be more open if it’s removed when least used. The problem: it makes it very difficult to build a culture of winter cycling. You reinforce the seasonal disparity. No winter lanes → no winter cyclists → no need for lanes in winter
- We have family living in a rural area 750 km away. They have an EV that they (usually) take to visit us. They take it instead of their big pickup truck (even in a Canadian winter). It’s nice.
- Freeze your city’s buildings in amber, you might just find other things about your city changing. Affordability, youthfulness, culture, dynamism.
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- Funny enough, Oxford tried to be *more accommodating* to drivers by allowing residents a certain number of passes (instead of just blocking through-traffic like simpler traffic management plans). But that came across as “controlling people’s movement” and ignited conspiracy theories.
- One supply skeptic says YIMBYism distracts from better solutions like funded vouchers to help pay for housing. Another supply skeptic says rising home prices reflect rising incomes, not zoning restrictions. (Implication: supplementing incomes with vouchers would just make prices rise.)
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- The nerve of a driver to get way too close to hitting me and then get mad at me after I stick my arm out to indicate “stop”!
- This shows why two-way bike lanes handle winter worse. If this was a one-way lane, it would still be narrowed by the snow, and it would be harder to pass slower cyclists. But there wouldn’t be automatic directional conflicts like this.
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- Listening to @thelineca.bsky.social talk about Alberta separatists having “loser energy”: 🤣 When they randomly digress to saying the same about safe bike infrastructure advocates: 😬
