Erik de Vries

Oh, dear. We have been customers there for years, and always use the bike rack right in front of the pharmacy when we visit.

This logic leads inexorably to the conclusion that we should just stay home, probably in the basement. Everything carries some risk. Want to fly? Nah, I’d rather be alive so I’ll stay home. Want to go for a swim? Nah, you could drown.

Nope. Build safe infrastructure, use it, and enforce the law.

I know it’s fashionable to train people to develop their internal resilience. Parents faced with lousy transit and child care that shuts down at 4:00 need civic resilience. In the short term, that means transit, bike infrastructure, and child care. In the medium term, it means urban housing.

It turned out most people can’t work from anywhere forever. The buses, subways and trains aren’t reliable. Everybody else has also bought a car, making traffic worse. Parking is scarce and expensive. Families with young kids face traffic, daycare shortages, and no way to make the daily slog work.

The temporary liberation offered to workers by the pandemic (everybody can work from anywhere - forever!) has proven to be deceptive and expensive. Some moved out of town to larger, more luxurious accommodation. Others, already far from the city, took jobs unreasonably far for a daily commute.

I’m seeing younger families struggle with the reality that previous generations took for granted: it’s almost impossible to avoid the need for expensive child care in a two-job household. There just aren’t enough hours in a day to cover the workday and commute without it.

After March, 2020, the sudden availability of working from home led to migration to cheaper and more comfortable housing far from urban centres, but also declining demand for child care and urban transit. Families aren’t moving, and it’s going to take time for childcare and transit to catch up.

Car dependency is so destructive. As employers move back to 100% in-office presence, employees who relied on their cars to fill the gaps left by hollowed-out transit, less (and worse) child care, and high housing costs are already at their limit. The “before COVID” world isn’t there to go back to.

Yeah, if we went down that path, we might wind up with other terrible things like housing for low income people, crosswalks, libraries, daycares, corner stores, bike share stations, wider sidewalks, bike lanes, public toilets, crossrides, bus stops, or public benches.

Maybe we shouldn’t be opening the question of whether to build a school up to public consultation at all.

What a slanted piece. These kids who don’t drive are walking, biking, and bussing, yet the entire story is about how they’re losing their independence. And the reason Colton doesn’t know how to get anywhere is because he’s been exclusively ferried by car his entire life.

Now, let’s not be hasty. Is it really worth investing all of that effort for this? Before we venture that far, it would be prudent to get some consultants to study the question and give us some advice. Now, let’s get started with a nice, easy procurement.

The city initiated a study of all of those unused reports back in 2018, but haven’t yet published the findings.

Cecilia Bartoli even more so. Possibly I’m a bigger fan of Italian singers than of Olympic pageantry.

Goddamn Bocelli sounds fantastic.

Holland is, as always, stunning.

Ireland: nice sweaters

Luckily the Germans look even worse. Their uniforms look like a sci-fi fantasy about futuristic electronic jigsaw puzzles.

Having athletes enter in multiple locations is probably great for somebody, but makes everything take longer, and the traditional gathering of all the athletes in one place is replaced by a bewildering spiral populated by a few inexplicable figures next to a DJ. I have no idea what’s happening.

Watching the Olympic opening ceremonies as a dutiful husband. I enjoy the sports, but dread the opening, which clicks in at over four hours. The Canadian uniforms look like they’re dressed as 1970s maple syrup bottles. 2/10.

I would be OK if we cancelled all wars, funnelled the resulting savings into social housing, and pressed on with baseball.

Look, I know everything is going to heck in a heckbasket, but spring training starts in six weeks.

One thing I'll never not find funny is how so many "trust the science" folks will quickly dismiss out of hand, without reading it, any study that finds that high housing costs reduce the birth rate.

A group of local whiners held this tiny project up for seven years because it would slow down their drive by a minute.

They might as well just use stock photos of the public meetings for this. They all look exactly the same.

This was my winter ride in Ottawa! A great bike. If the Gates belt is the original, it may break on the first cold day (my brother and I both bought the same bike, and that happened to both of us when it went below -15C.

She is nothing if not committed to the bit.

Oh, I see you and Maureen from Fairfield are already acquainted.

I mean this in the nicest possible way, but doesn’t it bother you that Maureen from Fairfield is now cut off from downtown and is forced to drive to Oak Bay to visit the library

Oh man. I had no idea that idea had been floated. What a priceless vision.