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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...

Commuter rail in the US is generally a massive failure in terms of ridership, excluding New York and arguably Chicago. (The C-Train has higher ridership than any US commuter rail system. It has 10x the ridership of Denver's commuter rail type lines; 20x of Washington, DC's commuter rail, 50x of...

The maximum number of people will take transit into the downtown core if the whole trip to the place they want to go to is convenient, and the vast majority of places people want to go to are not east of City Hall. Nobody working at Eighth Avenue Place or Centennial Place will say "Hooray! I'm...

There are a fair number of lilac bushes in the community in Mission, but I think the urban corridor nature of 4th just means there's not a lot of places for a large bush (vs a tree which can grow above the pedestrian realm). But walk around Mission, especially a week or two before the festival...

Here's an interesting idea that I've been working on a little bit, not as a high fantasy trains everywhere thing, but a more modest proposal. It's a set of additional/enhanced MAX BRT routes. Here's the MAX and LRT service as it exists (including the NC 301 which is actually a better service...

7th Ave separation is nice-to-have but not need-to-have, IMO. I can't imagine the CP rail being capped in any way; not only does it have the same type of constraints east of 4th St SE (it needs to go over or under the Elbow River), freight trains are much less manoeuvrable than LRT, and CP has...

It's easy to remember: Brick above siding, your face you should be hiding. Siding above brick, that'll do the trick.

I think that only works if you assume the west end is a quite small portion of the total downtown office space, on the order of 5%. Here's the math assuming 10% in west end: 45M sq ft total * 0.1 pct in west end = 4.5M sq ft in west end 4.5 M * 0.44 vacancy rate =1.98M sq ft vacant West end...

Nexen is 600K sq ft, so about 5% of the total downtown vacancy. I don't know how much of the office space is in what they consider the west end, but I think it's likely 15-25% of the total space; at those rates, Nexen would be 20%-12% of west end vacancy, respectively.

I was talking last night to a crop insurance adjuster after the hail alert; he said his company didn't have much if any business in the area because the regularity of the hail storms means they just increased premiums to the point that no one bought from them. It's an interesting situation; on...

Speaking of which, here's a construction update on the Mission bridge and retaining wall work from a different than usual vantage point.