An excellent listen!
25.02.2026 07:20
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An excellent listen!
Cars and car-centric design ruin cities. Walkable and bikeable neighborhoods subsidize suburban sprawl. Build up, not out. 🚶♀️👩🦽🛹🛼🚲🛴🚌🚈🚋🚃
NEW: “We’ve let the lies be far too successful, and that’s significantly hurt our cities. No more.”
The brand-new @urbantruth.bsky.social has a blunt op-ed in @usa.streetsblog.org written by Canadians @brenttoderian.bsky.social & @tomflood.bsky.social, & American in Paris @grantennis.bsky.social.
Car puns! Love ‘em!
Refusing to building supportive housing for those who would otherwise be homeless means more people homeless in our streets and parks, AND higher public costs for all of us. It’s as simple as that.
Anderson Cooper: “So it's more expensive to have a chronically homeless person living on the streets than it is to actually subsidize an apartment for them?”
Answer: “Yes, we’re paying more as taxpayers to walk past that person on the street and do nothing.” #HousingFirst #UrbanTruth
Making driving work better for all those who have to drive, or don’t want to stop driving and aren’t deterred by the Congestion Charge (which by the way, is legally required to be reinvested into public transit).
Congestion Charge systems make mobility work better for everyone, including drivers.
amazing and worth noting #criticalthinking
Love my walkable neighbourhood.
Can't wait to see what these very smart people get up to!
Which leads to a situation where the minority of council represents districts who generate massive revenue surpluses, and the majority of council represents districts who are subsidized by downtown's revenues. This sets council up to (usually) vote to loot downtown to keep taxes low
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On top of that, the city's underlying financial model is not sustainable. In theory the city provides services to residents and recoups the costs for those services through taxes. But in reality large parts of the city cost more money to service than they bring in, in taxes
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Ironically drivers are almost literally parking their tanks on our lawns, our pavements, our mobility paths and our town centres. We’re apparently waging war when we ask for some of that space back for people.
Or even asking for drivers to share the space while being aware of other road users.
This is not a good day for anyone to lecture me on how he can’t do this.
This really exposes the lie from the Tech Bros that autonomous robot taxis are the only way to reduce traffic fatalities.
What a great episode! The heavy hitters of cities for people, right here.
Some lessons here for Christchurch as it tries to entice ppl to live in the city centre after earthquake rebuilding: where are the public schools, services, hardware stores etc?! Instead we get endless townhouses for airbnbs.
Ad on housing and homelessness: “If we don’t build housing to solve homelessness, we don’t really want to solve homelessness.”
Ad on car dependency and mobility freedom: “Car Dependency isn’t freedom. Mobility freedom comes from mobility choices.”
Ad on walkable neighbourhoods and complete communities: “Walkable neighbourhood aren’t scary, they’re convenient.”
Text from the URBAN TRUTH COLLECTIVE website, “About Us” page: “The Collective will share persuasive research, evidence, and information in ways that will successfully break through the noise and influence decisions. The Collective will create new messaging, brands, and marketing campaigns to help expand understanding around the truth about better city-building, and build defences to urban disinformation. And the collective will forcefully call out the lies, and the liars, that seek to undermine both the truth about, and the achievement of, better cities for people.“
A BIG thank you to everyone for all the interest and energy during our official LAUNCH WEEK! Trust us, this is just the beginning, as we continue to “build this plane while we’re flying it.” Please keep helping us spread the word, and stay tuned for more details on how to get involved. #UrbanTruth
Building supportive housing for those who would otherwise be homeless is the right moral thing to do. It’s also the right financial thing to do, since it actually saves public money. It’s a no brainer, so don’t let wrong-headed ideology get in the way.
Tell your leaders to build supportive housing.
Downtown highways are a quintessentially North American scar. Their negative economic impact is enormous, and the sooner we get rid of them, the better off we’ll be.
Sprawl costs: some surprising, and we all pay them.
#urbanism #yyj
'Elon Musk’s X was the epicentre of Canadian conspiracy content, accounting for 70 per cent of likes and the majority of posts....a hub for deepfake pornographic images and misinformation, the platform remains a primary communication tool for Canadian politicians.'
Wait, we’re afraid of walkable distances now?
#UrbanTruth
“Unfortunately, as was seen in the case of the “15-minute cities” concept, disinformation campaigns against better urban environments can be strong and successful, even if they make no sense.”
@brenttoderian.bsky.social, @grantennis.bsky.social and @tomflood.bsky.social in @usa.streetsblog.org.
Inject this content straight into my veins
Watching the Luxembourg episode now… and once again contemplating the possibility of reclaiming Luxembourg citizenship by lineage, not least for the free transit. 🇱🇺
Citizenship dreams aside, Luxembourg is an interesting size/wealth comparison to Dane County—imagine if we had transit like that! 😍
Last year from January to June 471 people were killed or seriously injured on the roads in Birmingham, UK- and that was celebrated as an 18% reduction on the year before. Population is bigger than Brussels (9 deaths) but smaller than Berlin (55 deaths). We have so much further to go.
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Freedom comes with choices
“Conspiracy theories about globalist cabals, climate hoaxes and election fraud may seem ubiquitous on social media. But a report has found that they come from a tiny minority of users…
just 100 users were responsible for almost 70% of online conspiracy posts…”
Via @nationalobserver.com #UrbanTruth
Now THIS looks interesting…The Urban Truth Collective @urbantruth.bsky.social is taking on “the truth about cities in an age of disinformation.” And 2 of the 3 originators are Canadian! Our founding CanU president @brenttoderian.bsky.social, and our friend @tomflood.bsky.social.
Worth following!
This is fascinating and a great watch.