The reality is that Italian jurisdictions spend too much on road signs because there are too many of them, because of a combination of cumbersome road code requirements and overzealous engineers playing lawyers. But also too little, because maintenance is terrible as a result.

il Post@ilpost.it · 5h ago

Il comune di Roma non sa quanto spende in segnaletica stradale. Per legge dovrebbe usare una certa quota dei ricavi dalle multe per rifare i cartelli e rendicontarne al ministero: non fa come dovrebbe nessuna delle due ilpost.link/mEBGM5EziR

Talking about false friends. In Québec's francophone university system: Professeur adjoint = assistant prof. Prof. associé = adjunct prof. (sort of) Prof. agrégé = associate prof.

Bus 37, which was used as a makeshift field clinic, and a firefighter truck opening the annual commemorative march to remember August 2nd 1980 bombing at Bologna Centrale station, the deadliest terror attack of the Years of Lead. This year running on the freshly completed tram tracks.

Today Bergamo's suburban e-BRT line started regular revenue service It mostly connects Bergamo's main station to a few large suburban municipalities and industrial areas to the south-west. It cost €84 M (including 15 artic buses) for some 30-ish km (70% in dedicated lanes) ebrt.atb.bergamo.it

When you look globally, there are many more countries that consistently abandoned street-running railways in the postwar years than ones that retained them. The simpler answer is that technology, decaying infras and the zeitgeist killed streetcars everywhere but in a bunch of countries.

Christof Spieler@christofspieler.bsky.social · 2d ago

I think the conspiracy is comforting to people -- "a few bad guys did this." The reality -- "electeds, planners, and most of the public believed that the car was the future and rail transit was outdated" is actually more unsettling since it raises the question of what we're getting wrong now.

Est-ce juste moi qui trouve bizarre que des études de l'@artm_quebec payées par des fonds publiques semblent être disponibles aux médias et au maire de Laval mais pas au public et aux autres élus du Grand Montréal à la veille d'élections au Québec? youtu.be/SVTv8KtgadU #polmtl #polqc

Le maire de Laval souhaite le prolongement de la ligne orange : entrevue avec Stéphane Boyer

YouTube video by Radio-Canada Info

youtu.be

Great video by @ohtheurbanity.bsky.social Having been on the market recently, I learned in depth the various tenure systems that underpins the relative abundance of multi-dwelling, and I wonder if they exists elsewhere in North America In "Undivided condo" and "Revenue building" a thing elsewhere?

Oh The Urbanity!@ohtheurbanity.bsky.social · last wk.

How Quebec became North America’s urban outlier (with @adammongrain.bsky.social and @jfrheault.bsky.social)

On parle á nouveau du prolongement de la branche ouest de la ligne orange du métro à Laval et... j'ai comme un déjà-vu... Sauf qu'à l'époque on parlait de 4 milliards, pas 17... www.huffpost.com/archive/qc/e...

Prolonger la ligne orange, le choix logique

Prolonger la ligne orange, le choix logique

huffpost.com

Interesting picture of one of the working sites for the fast double-tracking on a new alignment along the Messina-Catania corridor. This could be the headline pic of the "Long Modernization" as one clearly sees the new 2-track fast alignment diverging from the old, one-track slow one.

Hoisting this from the thread. It's a good article even though a bit dated. It doesn't give all the answers but it provides some data points about opex and capex as well as technical constraints and performances for gondolas/aerial trams.

Marco Chitti@chittimarco.bsky.social · last wk.

Cityrailways has a good summary for Italy. It really depends on the type and complexity of the cable car/aerial tram and on the levels of demand. But aerial trams à la Roosevelt Is. Are are up to €25 per car*km vs €3-3.5 for a 12m bus of equivalent capacity. cityrailways.com/articoli/le-...

My opinion about cable cars as urban transit is the same as for ferries (and "BRTs") They work better than other modes in specific geographic conditions and demand pattern. But they aren't that "one simple trick" that can replace other modes cheaply/more easily, as they are too often marketed.

𝚃𝚊𝚛𝚊𝚜 𝙶𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚌𝚘𝚎 🚇@taras-grescoe.com · last wk.

Can a cable car be a legit form of urban transit? I took a ride on Europe's newest, and longest, aerial tramway, the C1 in #Paris, to find out. (In the video: we're overflying a national highway + a high-speed rail line.) More in this week's HIGH SPEED dispatch: www.highspeed.blog/up-where-the...

🚋 tracks & 🚎 wires at 🌇 (Pic by Comune di Bologna)

Regardless of what you think of the efficacy of this measure in 2020s nyc, public or collectively-run groceries have been a thing throughout socialism history. See "consumption cooperatives" of which Europe is full. And municipal groceries were a thing in late 19th/early 20th municipal socialism.

Headquarters@headquartersnews.bsky.social · last wk.

Mayor Mamdani: Since 2019, food prices have soared at grocery stores around the country by roughly 30%. Wages have not kept up. Today, I am proud to announce a collection of essential staples that will be predictably 30% cheaper at all five of our city-run grocery stores.

The word "optimization" is a big red flag in planning documents. Don't use it, and don't trust those who use it.

Americans, February 2022: look those hypocrite Russian, calling their invasion of Ukraine "special military operation". It's a war! Also Americans, July 2026: we aren't at war, our Department of War is conducting "Overseas Operations". Now that I think about it, it's the Dept of Overseas Operations

Faytuks Network@faytuksnetwork.bsky.social · last wk.

Pentagon updates official casualty database from the Iran war, adds new “Overseas Operations” category for personnel killed/wounded since July 7

I've had for a while granular boarding/alighting data for regional trains in Emilia-Romagna between 2009-2019, and a while ago I did some testing for a waterfall-style graph of the hourly RV Piacenza-Rimini-(Ancona) (first pic) Today I asked Claude to use it as a model for the entire service

Today something reminded me that the railway network near Pisa and Livorno is a great example of the very early efforts of the "Long Modernization" and how railway operations have evolved from the early days of railroading to the turn of the century. >>

One of the big arguments of the current political US leadership is that allies are too reliant on US for defence. So we must pay for it somehow. Apparently, the US is not really able to defend anyone in a real war, so maybe the price isn't worth paying.

Savchenko Volodymyr@savchenkoua.bsky.social · last wk.

🇮🇷🇺🇸🚀 NBC: US military commanders are deliberately letting some Iranian missiles and drones through their air defenses to conserve dwindling interceptor stocks. With Iran having fired nearly 9,000 projectiles since the war began, commanders now only engage threats headed for US troops.

There is a bike path the crosses the entire Montréal's West Island along the HydroQC corridor. Over the last ten years it has been improved almost everywhere with better pavings, construction of missing links etc. Except on one municipality. Guess its demographic profile.

One of the consequences of the fact that major fire risk takes a disproportionate amount of ressources and efforts in transit project planning and design is that we end up with projects that are poorly designed to handle much more likely minor disruptions. www.ledevoir.com/actualites/t...

Crise de confiance à l’égard du REM

L’exaspération des usagers monte d’un cran après une panne majeure vendredi dernier ; Pulsar fait son mea culpa.

ledevoir.com

Your semi-regular pic of Bologna's upcoming tram. Fun fact: the bridge you see here was built in the 1920s to cross over the main station's eastern throat. The tram was supposed to have overhead wires here, but they eventually dropped it for bureaucratic rather than technical reasons. Why? >>

It's interesting how the Basque country is basically progressively transforming the Euskotren network into a regional metro a segment after another And the station design, like the newly open Altza station, is basically a copy-paste of Bilbao metro cavern stations youtube.com/shorts/nhSL4...

Dos minutos bajo tierra entre Altza y Pasaia en Topo. #topo #sansebastian #pasaia #transporte

YouTube video by El Diario Vasco

youtube.com

we had an interesting guest lecture on biking in Oulu recently, looking deeper into their high all-year bike share than "there's good infrastructure and winter service". A lot of it was how one planner in the 60s shaped things a lot and then mentored the younger generations coming after him

Polanyi calls knowledge that isn't written down in texts or drawings but that exist within people and groups of people as "implicit/tacit knowledge". The loss of this unwritten, often unspoken, knowledge is often considered to be one of the reasons why institutions lose the capacity of doing stuff.

Nina Metz@ninametz.bsky.social · 2w ago

Why Aren’t There More Imax 70mm Screens for ‘The Odyssey’? variety.com/2026/film/ne...

The other day I was biking through the recently redesigned boul. de Chambly in Longueuil and I couldn't help but notice how TSP in QC has been treated as a way to make the province pay for traffic signal replacement. A "feu chandelle" + bus stop in the right-turn lane, name me a more useless duo

These are single-stair buildings, BTW, with the stairs accessible through an open-air balcony working as fire compartmentalization/smoke filter. (note the abundance of elevators)

Brutalismbot@brutalismbot.com · 2w ago

Buildings inBologna, Italy r/brutalism

It's 2027. LCBO, SAQ and the other provincial alcohol monopolies have been forced to reintroduce American alcohol onto their shelves. Angry mobs of masked Canadians dressed as lumberjacks attack shops and destroy said alcohol with hokey sticks. They call themselves the Wine Party.

Tao of Stieb@taoofstieb.bsky.social · 2w ago

When the Californians assure Canadians that we’re all friends and they are on our side, won’t we please buy their wine and come back to visit.

The TTC and Transportation Services have seemed indifferent to whether the transit priority schemes they create actually work. Instead they've seemed to focus on whether it fits in a magic box of "dedicated lane" or "transit signal priority". My latest: toronto.cityhallwatcher.com/p/torontos-s...

One day, someone will explain to me to which God we must make sacrifices to get us in Canada to build sleek fancy viaducts like the French. Line 17 of the GPE at Villepinte. youtube.com/shorts/SFTDT...

Au cœur du chantier : le viaduc de la ligne 17 du Grand Paris Express franchit 14 voies d’autoroute

YouTube video by Batiactu

youtube.com

I almost missed we are again on a "Tariffs on Canada" day.