How-Sen Chong
@how-sen
Toronto urban environmentalist. 20+ years in climate activism. ADHDer. Fancy degrees from McGill and Yale. Posts my own. Energy and transit should be free and plentiful. Cars should be an option, not a necessity.
One of the reasons I find impressionist paintings fasinating is because they paint the pollution of the time. The ‘hazy pink and purple winter fog’ of this 1897 Pissarro painting is almost certainly pollution from all the coal being used to heat buildings in Paris. @agotoronto.bsky.social
London’s temperatures are closer to those of Vancouver or Seattle than they are to New York.
It doesn’t matter if it’s natural gas, gasoline, or garbage: This will only get worse until we stop burning things to create energy.
Some of the verses from The Log Drivers Waltz or The Cat Came Back could work really, really well here.
Energy is one of the most plentiful substances in the entire universe and the only reason it’s expensive is because some corporations and their apologists profit from keeping energy scarce. Case in point: some areas of Australia have so much solar they electricity is being provided for free.
This road is not closed. It’s only closed to cars. This may seem like a small thing, but it matters because this message tells the public that streets only belong to cars, and anything else is an aberration —even though these streets were here decades before the private automobile.
There’s a Reddit sub called r/skyscrapers that’s been overrun with Toronto memes for a few days now and it’s pretty hilarious. www.reddit.com/r/skyscrapers/ #topoli
One more thing we really need to do at Union is make train wayfinding much, much easier. The Vienna station shows all the train services leaving the station on the same board. Toronto Union now has Via, GO, and UP, plus the subway. Union should put all the info in one place.
That’s it for Vienna for now. I’m going to take a break. I arrived at the train station to take the train to Salzburg. I got there with thirty minutes early, and my train wasn’t on any of the 3 screens yet because there was only room to show about twenty-five minutes worth of train departures.
In 2021, Austria introduced the ‘KlimaTicket’, a single ticket that gives the user access to every train, subway, tram, and bus throughout Austria. Germany followed suit in 2023. This is what you can get when ALL levels of government fund public transportation.
Here’s a bench / outdoor planting box combo. It’s designed so that vines will grow upwards, providing natural shade for pedestrians and… sitters (?)… to enjoy.
Here it is from the other direction. Because the streetcar takes up the entire length of the right turn lane, a right turning car can’t enter the right turn lane until the streetcar has has moved. This physically stops cars from zipping past on the right side while also being more accessible.
This is Weidner Hauptstrasse, a busy commercial strip. At this intersection there are only two lanes, both with streetcar tracks running in each direction. See that right turn car lane? IT’S ELEVATED TO PRIORITIZE STREETCAR ACCESSIBILITY INSTEAD OF DRIVERS MAKING A LAST-MINUTE LANE CHANGE.
Like Toronto, Vienna has streetcar network that’s been in for decades. Vienna has quite a few dedicated streetcar lanes.
Not everywhere, but there are many places where I saw porous parking spaces for cars. Porous surfaces allow for a place for stormwater to go that isn’t an overworked storm sewer system. This is important because climate change is producing more flooding. Toronto needs these types of solutions.
Vienna, like many (and maybe most?) other European cities fell into the postwar trap of allowing cars to go wherever they want. They’ve wisely reversed a lot of that. There are still cars, of course. But they don’t allow cars to go EVERYWHERE like we do in Toronto.
I’m on a trip through Austria and Germany. I’m going to post about ideas that we should shamelessly steal from other parts of the world. Here’s a photo of Salzburg, once one of the richest cities in the world… then we figured out how to preserve food without salt.
And yes, you can have streets where pedestrians walk and streetcars run with no private automobiles. Here’s one such thing street in Amsterdam.
In case you think progress is impossible, here’s the oldest church in Vienna (first built in 740 AD) with a Progress Pride banner unfurled. Happy Pride Month, all!
This space could have been used by four people to park their empty cars.
Right now, there are about six Bathurst streetcars going northbound to Line 2. At 20km/h all those riders in their own cars lined up in one lane would be nearly 8km long. At 40km/h, it would be 13.8km. The distance between Lake Ontario and Sheppard Avenue at Yonge street is 14km.
If everyone in this streetcar were driving, the line of cars would stretch well over a kilometer long. (One kilometer is the distance between College and Bloor streets.) Streetcars and buses deserve their own lanes. #topoli
Had the joy and privilege of MCing Toronto’s first Pedestrian Summit over the weekend. Over a hundred people showed up to learn and talk about building a better city for everyone. There are so many to thank that it won’t fit in a single post, so read on… (#topoli)
Most of the private space flights we see in Star Wars are super stressful. In comparison, look how restful and calm The Mandalorian is here on this space bus. He could actually be asleep.
A reminder that, while we usually see people flying private spacecraft in Star Wars, it’s clear by this clip from The Mandalorian that far more galactic citizens take public transportation. #ThisIsTheWay #MayThe4thBeWithYou
