Alex Potvin

In Ottawa, the catenary removes itself

They expected the high earners to buy McMansions in the next city over I guess

On that note, I still don’t know why MMB concerns herself with floodplain gentrification.

I’ve wondered if we’d still buy or choose bicycles the same way if we largely didn’t feel the impact.

Cargo bikes have pretty much exploded in prevalence with electrification after all, which hints that may be a correct guess.

Didn’t Quebecor exit it altogether?

Numbeo relies entirely on user entries and we know how that model has worked out for Wikipedia participation.

With cities establishing higher minimum wages and having very different costs, plus their inflation being more rampant, it’s an ever changing picture.

In BC I’d come out ahead because the geniuses at the legislature offer me an owner occupant deduction on my property taxes the province directly pays out to the city. Some of that lead is lost to a water charge through my strata fees or directly, but then regained via the separate school taxes I pay

See what I mean now?

I’m spending 3400 on a property in a city on that table, a condo would be about half. This is similar to Victoria or Vancouver, but there’s no water charge attached to my property tax or a school tax for that matter, as it’s charged independently. That cost varies with the neighbourhood but is ~200.

If you look at your monthly rates on that table, again, I’d invite the reminder that you have less services to spend on and water is taken out of this whereas it’s included in Quebec.

So, notwithstanding the provincial owner occupant subsidy, are taxes in Victoria actually low?

They can also be high in relative terms factoring in your revenue mix or property type in a given year. BCA annual reviews makes it such that we have years where certain asset classes are dis. or advantaged.

SEO-feeding aggregation won’t give you a neat, clear and clean picture of anything here, that information is obtained painstakingly by browsing through city budgets one at a time or by comparing various classes of property, with consideration for levers such as local gas or even licensing levies.

Other revenue sources exist in some cities and not in others like title transfer fees. Others have large development charges to help.

The revenue picture is extremely blurry overall and it’s important to break things down transparently to make the argument that a given city isn’t charging enough.

Victoria benefits from being largely urbanized and relatively dense in a fair weather environment.

Property taxes fund almost 70% of OC Transpo, while it’s less than 40% for BCT.

What’s another exclusion? Water rates. This hidden tax is often forgotten and completely absent of bills in Quebec.

The city of Ottawa is largely responsible for its transit costs compared to the GTHA, it also has responsibilities no other city has as a national capital.

Snow clearance is a more serious issue in Timmins than it is in Victoria, as is sprawling infrastructure and weather-related wear and tear.

I’m bothered with this narrative because it never discerns between the varied responsibilities of municipal governments across and even within provinces, as well as respective structural inefficiencies that make them difficult to compare.

Give me actual breakdowns that validate that it’s a problem.

already found a problem lmao

...harm too

Hot take but printing on Windows was always shitty

do yourself a solid and check his mutuals on Facebook if you want to see people into self-arm

(... I guess I could say the same about NFI since they've been scooping up stuff)

You'd really think Volvo would pull a lot of its European experience through Nova, but they seem to run it like their freight truck division in NA instead. Sucks.

"The ideal scenario is that these trolleys function so well that this becomes how bus service in the region is electrified..."

Translink/CMBC seems extremely committed to BEVs right now and I'm not aware of any trolley infra expansions in the works. I'd really like this to change, too...

I'm hopeful these new buses have been service lives for that and while I'm pretty excited to see them in operation, I'm also worried about the parts supply situation. Hope Solaris will have a domestic/continental supply because it was such a problem with BYD.

The theoretical off-battery range of the existing NF fleet never really seemed real, at least the time I've seen them in operation getting disconnected (possibly an age thing). They'd just freeze up and go on park anywhere lights briefly until the operator sorted it out.

Gregor really not changing my perception of him

I thought I was annoying everywhere tbh

Project with legal framework to support it receives overly publicized opposition from rurals and people with Mirabel airport PTSD over immaterial concerns and you’re already writing it off? Bruh.

(also alert: typo'ing street names as a potential city councillor is illegal)

You mean referred back to staff?