A story of cause and effect: Last November, Ontario banned cities from using speed safety cameras to issue tickets. Reckless speeding immediately surged in Toronto, Ottawa, Guelph, and cities throughout the province. A 🧵 about my latest in Bloomberg (gift link)

What Happens When Speed Cameras Get Shut Off

In 2025, Ontario banned automated traffic enforcement. Now the number of drivers exceeding the speed limit has surged, according to traffic data.

bloomberg.com

When I come across Doug Ford’s “Safer Ontario” ad campaign I think of the drug detritus in playgrounds in our neighborhood. I’ve only seen his changes making our community less safe. I didn’t use to see this nearly as often when there was a supervised consumption site open nearby. Thanks Doug.

Open streets to people, close them to cars

Brent Toderian@brenttoderian.bsky.social · 4d ago

Do you know about soccer tennis? Saturday nights are tournament night for the sport on the Granville Street Pedestrian Zone, & these teams are no joke! Nice way to cap off a great day on the people-street. Overheard one family talking about how they “can’t believe how great Granville Street is now.”

What?

Mayor willing to work with province as Ottawa misses target for housing funds

There were 7,871 new builds in Ottawa in 2024, only 62.5 per cent of its target of 12,583.

ottawacitizen.com

mark-sutcliffe.bsky.social@mark-sutcliffe.bsky.social · 2w ago

“Ottawa has been leading the way in solving one of the biggest challenges facing cities: namely getting homes built.” When the planning and housing chair had no solutions, I stepped in and created the Housing Innovation Task Force.

If you use AI for your advertisement flyers, I'm going to make assumptions about you. I'm going to assume you cut corners on everything. If you're a bakery, I'm going to assume you use poor quality ingredients. If you're a handyman, same thing, I'll assume you cut corners on your work.

Hey @arieltroster.com, any idea what’s going here?

Laskinator@laskinator.bsky.social · 2w ago

@mark-sutcliffe.bsky.social Hey Mark, why is Trillium pathway blocked at Gladstone, with no notice and no safe detour set up? Does the city not know this is the only car-free N/S cycling route west of O'Connor? It's used by hundreds of people a day. #ottbike #balance

Canada Is Not America: Ottawa Fireworks

Impound them.

Tiny Beaches@tinybeaches.bsky.social · 4w ago

Common site in Calgary pathways these days are electric dirt bikes. Parents seem to have no problem allowing their kids operate these illegally and our authorities don’t seem to interested in enforcing their illegal use. I guess that makes it okay🤷‍♂️ #Calgary 1/n

Another way of looking at this: here’s how Ottawa manages transportation challenges and congestion along Bank Street. Get rid of the cool thing that draws the most people.

Sean Devine@seandevine9.bsky.social · 4w ago

Many expressions come to mind: "One man's trash is another man's treasure." Or "What the fool casts aside, the wise person picks up." Or "One person's mistake becomes another person's advantage." Congrats @pwhlcharge.bsky.social. Glad you found a welcoming home. www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/artic...

Elon Musk and much of the Silicon Valley tech elite are rich because they were bright precocious young men who happened to have access to computers and the institutions and social networks to start companies before there was much competition. Every entrepreneur works hard. They just got very lucky.

Dave Karpf@davekarpf.bsky.social · last mo.

Shocker: a group of Silicon Valley types, self-selected for believing their intelligence and rationality made them fundamentally better than the rest of humanity, concluded that the most important puzzle was to “crack the code” on what makes genius-founders like Elon BETTER than everyone else.

Or: audit their use! And then fire for stalking, or literally any other breach of conduct. There is no way that they aren't trained NOT to do this. This is a deliberate choice. What the actual hell.

Luke LeBrun@lukelebrun.ca · last mo.

There is no legitimate reason for random cops to have unfettered access to sensitive personal information like this Instead of publicly humiliating himself making videos telling officers to knock it off with criminally stalking women, Ottawa’s Police Chief could cut off access to these databases

"Two solar facilities built on rehabilitated agricultural land were restored with native plants. Argonne researchers observed pollinators thrive." Solar power, when smartly built, can improve agriculture *and* provide clean, pollution-free, low-cost energy. www.anl.gov/article/inse...

Insect populations flourish in the restored habitats of solar energy facilities

Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory studied how insect communities responded to newly established habitats on solar energy facilities built on retired agricultural land. At the end of five year...

anl.gov

Or at least a tram, Porto style! (Too bad we’re committed to ripping it down now)

Brendan Dawe@dawe.bsky.social · 2mo ago

5) Alexandra Bridge, Ottawa Ottawa used to have a downtown thru-terminal and this bridge carried trains to Gatineau It should do so again

“Bike Share Toronto is an impressive success story: a public policy that for a relative pittance has blossomed into a substantial way to move people around Ontario’s biggest city in a way that doesn’t add to car congestion or require billion-dollar decades-long construction projects.”

ANALYSIS: Bike Share Toronto is a huge success. Imagine if we tried harder | TVO Today

The network already moves more passengers than some major transit lines, for a fraction of the cost. It could be so much more.

tvo.org

I have bad news for him… Vancouver literally is a land of 80% single family homes 😭😭 and this isn’t even counting Metro Vancouver which would be an even higher number

Ryan Packer@typewriteralley.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Martin is passing the torch to Patrick Condon, referencing Vancouver as a city of "towers full of vacant luxury condominiums" and not a land of single family neighborhoods. She says Vancouver has been made "unlivable for the people who built it."

We’re pathetic

Occasional Transpo@occtranspo.bsky.social · 2mo ago

(Canada currently has zero operational KM of high-speed rail. It is the only G7 country without a functioning high-speed rail network)

Great news in Ontario!⚡️ 🔋Battery storage projects won all 640 MW of IESO’s latest capacity contracts, beating out gas at some of the lowest prices in recent procurements. Every project is 50%+ Indigenous-owned. news.ontario.ca/en/release/1...

Yikes. We bike our son through that intersection all the time.

Patrick@obike.ca · 2mo ago

Another day another car crash

Hello Canada. We are GO ALTO. Canada has waited long enough for high-speed rail in the Québec–Toronto corridor. We’re here to make support visible and build momentum. Explore the campaign and add your name: go-alto.ca/en/updates/n...

GO ALTO launches national campaign for high-speed rail | GO ALTO

An independent public campaign working to make support for high-speed rail visible, public, and sustained.

go-alto.ca

He’s right — Bezos pays barely any taxes at all right now, so doubling them won’t do much. We’ll need to increase them by at least an order of magnitude.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 3mo ago

Bezos on CNBC: "You could double the taxes I pay, and it's not gonna help that teacher in Queens. I promise you."

First real day of air conditioning this year and it’s running entirely off the solar panels right now. It’s magic!

There better be a norovirus outbreak or something. That said, critical staff like this shouldn’t be in such short supply that the system has to shutdown.

Rail Fans Canada@railfans.ca · 3mo ago

Update on O-Train Line 1 and Line 4 service (Saturday)

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them

I’ll make some charts soon, but whoa! This stat: “There were 21,574 new zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) sold in March, an increase of **74.7%** from one year earlier. New ZEVs comprised 12.2% of total new motor vehicles sold, compared with 6.5% in March 2025.” www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quo...

The City of Ottawa posted the raw speed data from before and after Doug Ford banned speed cameras and the effect is so obvious it's not even necessary put a line marking when that happened. This chart shows the percentage of drivers going 15km/h or more over the posted limit.

My usually customer facing interactions with their services bears this out. They’re always chasing the new shiny and let existing things rot. Gmail still lets obvious spam slip through. What’s the point of all that compute if they can’t solve that?

Ketan Joshi@ketanjoshi.co · 3mo ago

Jeez, things are not great inside Google www.linkedin.com/posts/amshal...

Now up to 4 of 50 US states approving balcony solar. Zero of 10 Canadian provinces. Time to step up, Canada! 1/2 www.cpr.org/2026/05/07/c...

Colorado approves balcony solar, but approved units aren’t widely available yet

Gov. Polis signed a bill into law on Thursday making Colorado the third state to clear a path for plug-in solar kits.

cpr.org

It only asked me about the names, ages, and languages spoken! #lolsob

Oh The Urbanity!@ohtheurbanity.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I know this describes a lot of people on here.

Mediocre dudes have been able to coast for far too long—often on the backs of women. It’s about time they get more publicly called out.

The Economist@economist.com · 3mo ago

A wave of songs is taking aim at substandard men. We explain how it reflects a gulf between young men and women

“More drivers have been speeding in Ottawa’s school zones since the Ontario government banned photo radar cameras last fall.” Literally no need to read more than that. Doug Ford and his populist pandering owns the death and injury coming out of this.

Speeds increase 8-10 km/h at former Ottawa photo radar camera locations since cameras banned

Data collected by the City of Ottawa shows the average speed has increased 8 to 10 km/h at several former photo radar locations between October, the last full month for photo radar cameras, and April.

ctvnews.ca