@nickshaw.ca
🚉 I’m a transit planner based in Toronto 🫡 Registered Planner (RPP, MCIP) & PRINCE2 certified (UK+Europe’s PMP) 🌎 I do this because it’s the space between places that determines the health of self and community. and peace blooms in cities 🏳️🌈
This is really about…milk.
Specifically, Canada’s tight supply management system that protects Canadian dairy farmers. The US wants it gone. This demand pre-dates Trump. At least he’s transparent aboot it if you can read between the lines. This will be a fun CUSMA/USMCA negotiation.
I just realized that the core message of Mark Carney’s Davos speech—“Taking the world as it is, not as we wish it to be”—is blatant plagiarism from the Buddha, probably Jesus too and any prophet before or after. I think they’d be down.
What does an iPhone and a railway have in common in 🇨🇦🇺🇸?
One company owns the infrastructure, runs its own services on it, writes the rules for 3rd party access while carving out exemptions for itself.
Own the rails or run the trains..not both.
We need only look to the 🇪🇺for inspiration.
This took real courage to see through. The inertia of business-as-usual in a complex system like New York takes sustained, laser-focused expenditure of collective energy. Hoping these numbers bring over the last holdouts, previously locked into a fear of progress.
“If 2025 gave out awards, you'd get: Most Likely to Have a 5% Design Ready by Lunch For turning every crisis into a colour-coded phasing plan and every napkin sketch into a Class 5 estimate -before anyone else's coffee cooled.”
Three big themes of 2025 Steering Complex Transit Decisions You navigated high-stakes LRT and passenger-rail studies, translating competing technical, political, and environmental pressures into phased, decision-ready plans for clients and agencies. Building Tools That Think Spatially You advanced your custom GIS and graph-theory toolkits-turning abstract connectivity concepts into actionable indices that guide municipal policy, risk, and equity priorities. Recalibrating Balance and Connection You faced an intense personal year, integrating trauma recovery and accountability work with deeper reflection on how connection, rest, and authenticity shape sustainable growth.
If you haven’t seen your ChatGPT ‘year in review’, highly recommended 🫥🤯🥲😕😍
In Hamilton, the latest LRT design released this past spring show best practice stop spacing and, critically for speed, limited left turn lanes. assets.metrolinx.com/image/upload...
If anything this will serve as a very important wake up call to City officials to realize there is a world outside Toronto, even the GTA. Like, look at Kitchener-Waterloo, home of Ontario’s first modern LRT: 20km, operating for 6 years (!), built in 4 (!) & an avg speed closer to 20 kph (!!)
Screenshot of a New York Times article titled “At State Department, a type face falls victim in the war against woke” with a picture of tired and pissed off Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
I’m sorry, Calibri, but we did some digging and let’s face it: your type is too “woke” for our brand and you’ve become a liability.
Long Live Times New Roman!
While the IEA is a bit more tepid on oil demand growth, they might as well be screaming that building new LNG export capacity is a bad idea, just economically speaking.
5 lane road with no drivers/ It's with a very heavy heart that we will be removing this pilot road, just not enough people driving on it. We encourage you to write an email to your councillor about future road opportunities. Please check our website for alternative car routes.
We’re so sorry.
You can produce a brilliant transit plan, value engineer & stack benefits until the business case giggles in delight…
But if it doesn’t shine, if the name doesn’t glimmer on the page, if people can’t feel what it’s trying to change, it dies quietly in a staff report.
We need storytellers.
A large group of people holding signs promoting co-op housing, and shovels. In background yellow construction equipment.
City of Toronto breaks ground on Canada’s largest co-op housing development in a generation. 612 units in #scarborough #kennedygreen
News release: www.toronto.ca/news/city-of...
Eyes of golden retriever a dog peeking out of a window.
Leaving last night to meet up with a friend, I turn back and look up to see this. Her haunting stare burned in my mind until I returned home.
Ontario’s Premier says, "We need [oil pipelines] west; we need them north; we need them south; and we need them east. And as long as they're using Ontario steel"
What if instead we prepared for an electric future and used that steel to build a national transmission grid & electric high speed rail?
Screenshot from the Electricity App showing realtime GHG intensity and Electricity mix, the decreasing as the latter shows 25% of Ontario’s electricity is generated by wind power.
When the sky darkens
And the winds begin to howl
And a chill of dread starts to spread
From the tips of my toes
I open the Electricity App
And warm myself to know
That this wicked wonderful wind
Is powering my home
🌬️🏠🧦🙏
#poem
Probably what’s in all our attics: collective intergenerational trauma
This a big deal: "China’s carbon dioxide emissions have been flat or falling for 18 months"
China's economy has grown by ~5% in the last year, so this comprehensively debunks the idea (again) that emissions are tied to growth. So yes, faster progress needed, but this is how you turn the corner.
Allowing shops, retail, and small business within neighbourhoods is good planning. Period.
When a supermajority of the community says HELL YES (repeatedly, over a multi-year engagement process), leaders lead the charge to reform.
Toronto just gave up. Where are the leaders?
The slow march toward single stair egress building code reform continues across Canada.
Arguments for the status quo have centred around safety. LGA’s research—focusing on performance/outcome—disproves this. What are we waiting for?
Line chart showing that there's been a rapid escalation in how quickly the world installs a gigawatt of solar power capacity.
Time for the world to install a gigawatt of solar power capacity
2004: A year
2010: ~ a month
2015: ~ a week
Now: A day
ourworldindata.org/data-insight... 🧪
Love this. A reminder that sometimes the breakthrough isn’t a new policy, infrastructure or funding stream…it’s governance. Connecting people, assets, and institutions so they can act collectively. Collaboration as infrastructure for more non-market, community-led housing. The elusive ‘third way.’
I did a back-of-the-napkin analysis of my no car vs with-car life. Investing my net savings I could retire 15 years earlier (50 instead of 65) and live 5 years longer (based on a conservative mortality rates for a no-car lifestyle). This brought it home why I became a Planner—fix this mess.
Screenshot of LinkedIn post from Yellowknife Mayor describing the costs and consequences of trucks having gotten so much bigger. In the link, he explains the backlash he received for his post.
This is good —the Mayor of Yellowknife NWT in Canada’s far north weighs in on “Car Bloat” (truck bloat actually) and its many big costs & consequences (thanks @davidzipper.bsky.social for heads-up). And like most who dare tell the truth about that, he’s taking flack.
www.linkedin.com/mwlite/feed/...
You know what I like about trains?
Everything.
They take you nice places, and don’t mess up the world getting you there.
#Lugano #Switzerland #railsky
Map of the Eglinton East Light Rail Transit project—a proposed 27 stop, 18.6 km light rail transit line (future Line 7) spanning across eastern Scarborough. This is one of the City of Toronto’s two priority transit projects.
“Business as usual” is not free. Yet in transit investment decisions, BAU is often seen as “do nothing”—a non-choice.
On Eglinton East LRT in Toronto, we showed that buses couldn’t absorb projected growth. A higher-capacity line isn’t just better—it’s the only viable choice.
In Canada, risk management in transit delivery focuses on cost overruns + schedule delays.
What’s missing? Risk to benefit realization.
If benefits aren’t protected in delivery, you don’t just slip the schedule—you chip away at why the project existed in the first place.
Income and risk adjustments to the fines would probably close the gap in the still high % of drivers operating dangerously. Vehicle weight and hood height are all linked to the plate. As a proxy for income, estimate the car value from the make and year.
If North America wants to implement effective transit priority in its legacy gridded neighbourhoods, it needs to understand that many lateral streets will need to stop to be through streets
Congrats to Ana Bailão. As her former constituent, I watched her work closely as she was consistently the voice of housing reform looong before the political establishment realized there was a crisis.
Also, this fund to acquire “at-risk” apartment buildings seems like a big deal
Always feels risky to critique fire depts—I have deep respect for those on the ground. But orgs like LAFD pushing myths against single-stair design & safer streets show a blind spot: planning is about trade-offs, not black/white thinking. Stakeholders need to know their lane.
