The bench tried to warn us

I remember when the Bloor bike lanes went in in 2016. It was such a small change, yet somehow momentous, as if a sign of a better city to come. It's so disheartening to see how regressive and hostile the politics of the GTA actually are.

I know stats don't really matter in this bike lane rhetoric from the Ontario government. However, in many places in Toronto, bike commute share is greater than 20% and in some tracts along Bloor it is above 30%. Also, in 2019, 48% of households had someone who biked for errands.

Of course, a straightforward diagnosis doesn't mean an easy solution. The GTA has and continues to dig itself into a whole. This is also a problem of housing and general land use policy. But Ford will just make the problem worse with regressive policies.

After living in a city for 5 years where only 1/3 of trips are by car, I've almost forgotten how dismal the discourse can be in T.O. Despite the reactions, the issue is pretty simple: the fewer the trips made by car, the better-off the city will be. Policy should support this.

Whenever Torontonians (or more often, people from the GTA) debate transportation, I'm always a bit bewildered by how many people insist it's absolutely impossible to accomplish what dozens, if not hundreds, of cities all over the world already do.

In the replies and elsewhere I am seeing many familiar pro-car/anti-bike arguments. I've previously written about why these views are mistaken. Let's start with a common one: drivers pay for roads. They don't. Indeed, driving requires costly subsidization:

Probably the biggest question I struggle with is why exactly trying to move towards alternative forms of transportation, or even just simply riding a bike, is met with such angry, reactionary, and resentful responses:

On what rules can look like if you build different kinds of transportation systems:

Against the retort that cyclists don't "follow the rules of the road," studies consistently find that all road users break rules with equal frequency. However, cars carry far greater risks, and indeed the rules only exist to counteract these risks:

But, this framing misses the point. The question should not be "Who is entitled to use roads?" but "How should we collectively use public space?":

Contra the view that cyclists don't pay for roads (everyone does), all else being equal, the average cyclist requires far less subsidization than the average driver:

A major issue is that not only does car centric transportation require massive subsidization to exist, it also externalizes costs in the form of pollution and risks to personal safety. This is unequally distributed from the suburbs to denser city cores:

In the replies and elsewhere I am seeing many familiar pro-car/anti-bike arguments. I've previously written about why these views are mistaken. Let's start with a common one: drivers pay for roads. They don't. Indeed, driving requires costly subsidization:

So I've been reading some of the discussion on bike lanes and I quickly remembered why I rarely go on here anymore.

Hi all, I rarely go on here anymore, but I've returned just to remind everyone in Ontario: there aren't too many bike lanes, there are too many cars.

Question for astrobiologists: Let's say we somehow got a hold of a 2000 year global mean temperature record from a distant planet and that we also knew the planet's atmospheric composition. If it looked the same as Earth's, would we consider this a sign of advanced civilization?

analyzing deficit model approaches to climate change coverage in Canadian print media: "uncritically reproduces the authority of science...strongest appeals to scientific neutrality are associated with climate skepticism" https://t.co/Bp9R4elw12 by @BernhardIsopp #ScholarSunday

Featuring my piece on politicization discourses surrounding climate change, alongside other great articles. Now with page numbers!

For those who have been asking here is the Table of Contents for our new awesome book: Victorian Interdisciplinarity and the Sciences The ToC and Introduction is also now available via @UPittPress website: https://t.co/D6hBFzJaY9