Gondolas are slow and while they have high headways, so should other primary forms of transit. The fact that the MAX Teal has 20 minute peak / 28 minute offpeak headways isn't a natural disadvantage of BRT that gondolas can take advantage of; it's a failure from a lack of investment in core...

The existing grandstand is a fair bit longer than McMahon (note the corners of the seats are visible and there's a substantial curve so you don't get neck strain watching anything out of the red zone). The thing that occurred to me is that the chuckwagons just need to go. The track takes up an...

There's a lot of reasons for differences. The biggest one is that I was using a measure of household trips, not person trips. About 40% of the trips were by one person, about 30% by two people and about 30% by 3+ person parties, bringing it much closer to the numbers you have here. The TSRC is...

I suspect this effect would be very small; you could live in Carstairs today, get affordable housing and take a 45 minute commute to downtown Calgary. Yet almost no one does this; almost no one even lives in Crossfield for a 30 minute commute. And sure, sitting on a train is easier than driving...

I've heard this from time to time (not just from you), where Calgary-Edmonton have some crazy outlier of demand. And I've been wondering if this is one of those stories that people tell because they've heard it from other people, repeated from civic booster to politician, but there's not any...

It's a great graphic. It could also do a great job of illustrating why Alberta HSR is not a particularly strong project:

I bolded the important part. Here's the current conditions at 10th Ave And here's a better version that accommodates cars, cyclists (and other wheelers) and pedestrians equally, specifically 20 feet each.

It's a road intersection. The cars have the right of way, the bike route has a stop sign (not visible from the road, but the shape is): Not that I ever use this; in my experience I always hit a red on 7th. Once I cross 7th on the green light, the light at 6th is always red, so I (and most...

Here's an interesting "missing middle" form I haven't seen before for sale in Whitehorn: Might not look like medium density at all, but check out the floorplan: Yes, it's a 13 bedroom 2 1/2 bathroom detached house, in merely 1100 sq ft. Ten of the bedrooms are under 100 sq ft, and there are...

You don't need anything that complicated; here's 1st St (north is to the right): 1st St becomes transit/ped only (with bikes if room, but I'm not sure there would be) between 9th Ave and 7th Ave. Bus stops between 8th and 9th aves, both sides available for loading and time points. Through...

The biggest difference between the two projects is that Calgary Transit began engagement on the BRT in fall 2020 and its going to be open... Actually, it doesn't say when, but construction will be "substantially complete" in Summer 2025, whenever that is. But hopefully it'll be open for the...

Is it easier or harder to consistently make therapy appointments if you have a safe, consistent place to sleep and to keep your belongings? Is it easier or harder to attend substance abuse counselling or programs if you have a safe, consistent place to sleep and to keep your belongings? Is it...

A real solution exists, and is cheaper than status quo, but it may not be popular enough. The solution to people not having homes is to give those people homes. It feels expensive, because it's capital not operating, but in the long run it's cheaper. It feels bad to some people because they like...

You're counted when you connect in an airport (and double-counted because both getting on and getting off planes are counted), but the airport improvement fee is only paid by the people who start a trip at the airport, not connecting passengers. They keep track of this for revenue purposes, but...

Not true; the first table even says explicitly that these are enplaned and deplaned passenger statistics. This means that a passenger is counted if they get on a plane or if they get off a plane. So a visitor from Portland is counted once the day they arrive as a deplaned passenger and once the...

A few thoughts: The census tract containing Lake Bonavista (bordered by Macleod, Anderson, Acadia and Fish Creek) is 27.7% people over 65, and 14.6% visible minority; a representative community meeting would have one person with brown skin for every two heads of grey hair, and more than two...

The next season of Top Chef US has been announced as being in "Canada" (with the promo featuring judge Gail Simmons in her hometown of Toronto). There's been a lot of filming in Toronto apparently, although host Kristen and Gail were posing at Inglewood Drive-In on Kristen's instagram. The way...

Low floor LRVs are not magical. But neither are high floor trains. There are two key aspects to choosing low floor trains. The first is that they are the industry standard, and have been for almost a quarter century. Every single LRT system in Canada - Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, Waterloo...

It's a really good metric for identifying people who haven't thought seriously about rail transit, or who haven't done so for decades. It's perfectly fine for people who are thinking about something for the first time to make silly beginner mistakes and focus on the wrong thing; people can and...

A good transit project is not good at any cost, and at some point, the costs are too high to justify. Part of the problem is a bad procurement strategy, lack of civil service capacity, as well as high risk and inflation from (almost entirely conservative) political actors. Some of these could...