In today’s digital age, it’s easier than ever to feel connected to our communities through social media. A quick like, comment, or share can give us the sense that we’re actively participating and supporting our neighbours. However, while these online interactions are valuable, they cannot replace the profound impact of real-world engagement. True community involvement requires us to step out from behind our screens and actively contribute to the well-being of those around us.
The Illusion of Online Engagement
Social media platforms have revolutionized the way we communicate and interact. They offer a convenient way to stay informed about local events, support causes, and connect with others. However, this ease of engagement can sometimes create an illusion of participation. Liking a post about a neighborhood cleanup or sharing a fundraiser link is undoubtedly supportive, but it doesn’t equate to the tangible benefits of physical presence and action.
The Power of Personal Interaction
When we engage with our community in person, we build stronger, more meaningful connections. Volunteering at local events, attending community meetings, or simply spending time with neighbors fosters a sense of belonging and mutual support. These face-to-face interactions allow us to understand the unique needs and challenges of our community, enabling us to contribute more effectively.
Building a Stronger Community
Active participation in community activities helps to create a more cohesive and resilient neighborhood. When we work together on projects, whether it’s organizing a block party, starting a community garden, or supporting local businesses, we strengthen the social fabric that holds us together. These efforts not only improve our immediate surroundings but also foster a sense of pride and ownership in our community.
The Ripple Effect of Involvement
The benefits of community involvement extend beyond the immediate impact of our actions. When we take the initiative to get involved, we inspire others to do the same. Our enthusiasm and commitment can motivate friends, family, and neighbors to participate, creating a ripple effect that amplifies our collective efforts. This shared sense of purpose and collaboration can lead to lasting positive change.
Conclusion
While social media offers a valuable platform for raising awareness and staying connected, it is the actions we take in the real world that truly make a difference. By actively participating in our communities, we can build stronger, more supportive neighborhoods and create a lasting impact. Let’s move beyond the screen and engage with the people around us, fostering a sense of unity and shared responsibility that benefits everyone.
I’m pretty annoyed that the entirety of political discourse in Canada consists of playing in to conservative propaganda that Justin Trudeau has done a terrible job the last 10 years and his time is now up. I’m not saying the liberals are perfect (they are not), and they are nowhere near as progressive as they talk about.
However, despite missing some key legislation I’m still mad at (electoral reform), they have done a competent job running the country for near a decade now.
The narrative that the party has to go and we need to usher in a conservative government as a matter of course is a false dichotomy, and since all the media (or any political parties for that matter) want to talk about is PP, that is what we’re going to end up with.
I’m not worried about myself, but I am worried plenty about the state of political discourse and civility in general, and I think whatever happens next will probably be really bad for the country.
For the purposes of the next election, there is absolutely no excitement to be had for any even purportedly progressive party (NDP and Liberal are both pretty close to the center).
I’m probably going to be discouraged from talking about politics very soon so I want to say this now while I still can, but I would love to see an actual popular progressive party pitch something truly revolutionary. The blueprints are there, it’s just a matter of using them.
I don’t think we should cede the entire political landscape to those who’ve completely given up on kindness and decency to those they don’t completely agree with, and I wish we had a chance to have that conversation with a party leader who was charismatic and showed they care deeply about Canada and its people.
The last 2 elections I’ve done a Vote Compass policy rundown thing, and while I don’t think I’ll go through that question by question like I have in the past, I am certainly going to talk about my own policy positions, and since there are plenty of positions I hold that aren’t held by any major political party, I don’t think I’m in any danger of breaking the political neutrality public servants are supposed to pretend to have.
I live in a suburb of Ottawa called Orleans, and though the neighborhood is starting to work towards a modern understanding of good urban design, a lot of the transportation infrastructure in the community is based on 99% car traffic. There are affordances for other modes of transport in some places, but in many cases unless it is a brand-new change, these affordances are for leisure (like with most of the park paths), not transportation.
Top: Current streetscape; Bottom: After the redesign.
I have many qualms with the loopy, inefficient neighbourhood street layouts, and missing sidewalks, but I’ll save discussion of those for another time. Today, I want to talk about the main road granting access to my neighborhood, Jeanne d’Arc Boulevard.
Jeanne d’Arc is about the least imaginative way I could imagine designing a road in the 80s, where I could imagine having trees and some green space alongside the road would be viewed as a vast improvement over the downtown core where trees would be few and far between, and grass would be a luxury.
The Current Design
Below, I’ve mocked up the average layout of the 32+ metre boulevard streetscape with a very cool tool called Streetmix. You can see the road has 4 lanes, plus extremely generous grassy areas on either side, followed by a <1.75m sidewalk at the very edge of the boulevard (Streetmix actually calls this ‘too narrow’ and throws up warnings when you put the sidewalk in).
By the way, Streetmix also warns me that the 4m wide outer lanes of the road are considered far too wide. This boulevard was overbuilt at 14m wide for 4 lanes, presumably at a time when this was considered future-proofing for a time when it would just get busier and busier, something that has just never happened.
Drivers who use this route to commute every morning at the absolute peak of traffic would probably tell you it gets backed up occasionally, but for the remaining 99% of the time you’re much more likely to see at MOST a handful of cars than anything resembling so much as a slowdown.
On its own, this overbuilt road is underutilized, but this is true of many roads in many places all around North America. The true tragedy of this road in its current state is the missed opportunity to include other modes of transportation in its design.
It’s clear from spending any amount of time on or around this road that cars are ABSOLUTELY the priority consideration of this road. Even though the road surface itself is in pretty desperate need of a resurfacing itself, the sidewalk is in even worse shape. Not only is it extremely narrow, but in a few places, every year overgrowth from adjacent bushes actively pushes users on to the grass. It’s not uncommon to see bikes on the sidewalk as well, since there is no safe way for less comfortable or experienced riders from sharing this already narrow space with anybody who walks here.
A 32.2 m wide boulevard (all distances were measured using the measuring tool on Google Maps) is massive considering the traffic volume of all kinds here, and giving nearly half to cars (14 m), while having nearly 50% of the space dedicated to grass and trees, while all other road users are squished in to the outer <3.5 m (around 10-15% of the total road space) is frankly embarrassing.
The embarrassment only gets worse when you find out that this road connects directly to a transportation hub with the LRT system opening in 2025, and buses come along this road at MOST every 10-15 minutes at peak times (all routes combined). With wide paths, multi-modal considerations, and a little creativity, we can rethink this road to not only accommodate a way larger variety of modes of transportation, but to carry a higher volume of actual people throughout the day, instead of just calculating for the most cars the road will ever see.
The Redesign
Below is a mockup of what Jeanne d’Arc could look like with a road design that offers multiple realistic options for travel. This is just one option, with all the added space that at this point can’t realistically be used for anything but this road, there is a LOT of flexibility.
In this specific example layout, I’ve added an extra-wide sidewalk, added more trees and a bike lane in either direction. I have removed the extra car lane in each direction here as well, but there is space to keep it, although other changes to this road happening elsewhere mean that 1 lane at 40kph (instead of the current 2 lanes at 60kph) probably makes sense as the appropriate lane configuration.
With this layout, the street is much safer (it is bordered by many parks and 2 schools in a relatively short stretch), and it is designed for travel at the safe speed of 40 kph instead of requiring annoying speed traps and red-light cameras to entrap drivers with big wide lanes. One other nice feature is that the road will be much quieter for houses backing on to it at 40 kph.
Final Thoughts
To wrap up this redesign, prioritizing safe transport, via multiple modes, and in a more sustainable way, seems like a pretty clear win for the community. At most, detractors could say that driving may get a few seconds slower, maybe 1-2 minutes longer to traverse the whole length of the several km section.
Perhaps it is transparently a value judgment that these are my priorities, but the tradeoffs of designing a transportation system with redundancy and multiple good options and reducing suburban car dependency and sprawling overbuilt roadways are unquestionably positives compared to the alternative (what we have now in many cases).
Remind me next time to actually plan to get up and spend enough time outside to let my eyes adjust. So cool, and it’s modern smartphones that enable this to be captured so easily.
Today is the end of the 3rd week of my 5 weeks of parental leave from work. We’ve done lots of fun things as a family, but honestly today was one of the highlights so far! I can’t remember the last time I flew a kite but I’m sure it’s been literal decades.
The feeling of getting the kite up in the air and keeping it there is very satisfying, and then being able to hand it off to your daughter and have her take control is a Big Dad moment. 10/10 would recommend.
Left: The view from our front bedroom window, shortly after moving in, on April 27, 2014. Right: The view from our front bedroom window, 1 day after moving in to our new house, on June 7, 2019.
We finished our move on Thursday, June 6 in to our new house, and we couldn’t be happier about it! The view at our old place has changed quite a bit since we first moved in (the lot across the street is fully developed now, and the building you can see has been demolished, for example), but you seriously can’t beat our new view!
Our new house was a can’t-miss from both of us mostly because of the excellent location, and since moving in, it’s been just as excellent as we expected! Who knows what the next 5 years will bring for our family!!
“Imagine going through life every day and having so many of your interactions involve somebody trying to give you a hug and stepping on your foot while doing it,” Prince, a 31-year-old trans woman in Alexandria, Virginia, said. “And then when you ask them to step off your foot, no matter how polite you are about it, they respond with, ‘Oh, excuse me, I was just trying to give you a hug.’”
This series on Vox is remarkable and honest. I’m not sure I can do justice talking about it, and I encourage you to go read the whole series.
What it comes down to is that it doesn’t matter how people choose to live their lives. Being assigned the wrong gender at birth, or having genitals that don’t align with your perceived gender or don’t fit into our neat, tidy definitions of ‘normal’ doesn’t make anybody less of a person.
As anybody who has ever been bullied for being ‘different’ can attest, it absolutely sucks. For humans, it has been evolutionarily advantageous to sort things into distinct groups and categorize them as such. But treating human beings that way, as though some are inherently more deserving of human rights or legal protections than others, simply because of how they choose to live their lives, is absolutely devastating.
In the last couple of weeks, we have seen big musical acts like Bruce Springsteen cancel concerts in North Carolina over a terrible anti-LGBT law that passed there, and more of this needs to happen. Lawmakers need to be responsible and consider the needs of all constituents, not just those who represent the majority.
I don’t personally know anybody who is transgender, but it’s just so blindingly obvious to me that those people are just as deserving of love, care, and compassion as anybody else in the world, if not more so.
The numbers are so huge they are not easily grasped, and so are perhaps best understood by a simple comparison: If U.S. roads were a war zone, they would be the most dangerous battlefield the American military has ever encountered.
I take the bus to work, and I absolutely love walking and biking. There are certain niche uses where a car is essential, but in an urban centre like Ottawa, many people can get around without relying on a car.
Having said that, just as many people, if not more, absolutely DEPEND on a car every day for transport to and from work and other social obligations. Most of this is because housing in big cities (Ottawa to some extent, Toronto and New York, for example, just take the example to astonishing extremes) is very expensive, so people choose to live where it’s cheaper, work in the urban centre, and commute for 30-60 minutes by car.
That thought is crazy to me. Even though I spend a ton of my life listening to podcasts, which are pretty perfect for car trips such as that, the thought of getting into a car every day to drive to the office is not something I think I’d enjoy that much.
Adding to that, we tend to think of car crashes as a tiny risk in our day to day lives, and it gets worse as those lives come to rely more and more on absolute certainty of normalcy. If our pizza is late, it’s free. If our Uber takes 10 minutes, we complain. When a bus breaks down (or doesn’t show up at all), we’re late for work.
But in a life (and society) where things are so safe (#firstworldproblems, anyone), the fact that any of us could die in such a quick, violent way on any given day is cause for alarm. We put car traffic above everything else in our transportation system, and yet it’s responsible for so many totally preventable deaths on our roads every day.
At some point, self-driving cars will take over, and crashes between two of those will be as unlikely as a plane crash is today. But for now, we’re stuck with an incredibly convenient transportation method where countless unknown cars around you are capable of completely changing, or ending, your life in an instant.
That’s scary, but it gives us something to strive for, and I think car culture as it exists now might be nearing its peak.
