|
|
Advertisement
- June 20-22, 2013; ACEC Summit 2013
- June 24, 2013: Transport Futures Great Media Debate
- Aug 18 - 21, 2013: AMO AGM & Annual Conference 2013, Communities: Inspiring & Aspiring
- Aug. 25-28, 2013: APWA International Public Works Congress & Exposition
- Sept 9-11, 2013: Meeting of the Minds
- Sept. 16-18, 2013: PWABC 2013 Technical Conference & Trade Show
- Sept 22 - 25, 2013; 2013 TAC Conference & Exhibition
- Oct 7-10,2013: CanWEA Annual Conference
- Oct 27 - 30, 2013: Sustainable Mobility Summit
- October 30-31, 2013 Globalization at a Crossroads - Toronto Global Forum
|
|
In a video that went viral last week, a Russian pedestrian is seen crossing over a car that stopped abruptly on a crosswalk. Without surprise, there’s a verbal confrontation afterward (without audio). YouTuber Alexander Egorychev caught the action and posted it online:
According to the Halifax Regional Municipality, “Drivers must yield the right of way to pedestrians who are lawfully within a crosswalk.” the driver may have been in the wrong, was this the right action to take?
[...]
|
|
|
|
|
Is there a set of public steps out there that always manages to trip you up? From subway entrances to waterfront walkways, stair design is critical to ensuring a smooth... trip. Dean Peterson, a Brooklyn filmmaker, found this was a unique problem at the subway steps at his local stop in New York City. And decided to put the hazardous result on film:
There is a happy ending to this story: A few days after posting this video, the City of New York sent a crew to fix the staircase.
[...]
|
|
|
|
|
Video footage released by the Pembina Institute suggests there are zombies commuting in the greater Toronto region. The video shows zombies waiting for the bus for up to 45 minutes in communities underserved by transit, while others appear to be trapped in gridlock on the region’s congested highways.
“It’s been obvious for some time that commuters in and around Toronto face many challenges in their daily trek from home to the office and back,” said Cherise Burda, Ontario policy director at the Pembina Institute, a national clean energy think-tank—with [...]
|
|
|
|
|
This morning, I moderated a panel on technology innovations in infrastructure. The Ontario Society of Professional Engineers' research and innovation taskforce put this event together to look at how policy- and decision-makers can learn to use innovations.
Every presenter agreed that LIDAR, building information modelling (BIM), and other intelligent technologies, along with mobile solutions and the cloud, will lead to a host of benefits. Cost reductions, quicker turnaround, more predictive costs, better infrastructure: it sounds ideal.
While Autodesk’s [...]
|
|
|
|
|
In one of the more entertaining uses I've seen of the popular app SeeClickFix, one concerned Toronto citizen pointed out bad kerning in a downtown subway station's lettering. While he's clearly joking when he suggests that "such a visible typographical error in Toronto's trendy west end indicates that municipal government has deprioritized the most forward-thinking sort of economic development," the issue is real.
An aesthetically-pleasing public transit system reflects the overall aesthetic of a city. And a city that cares about the look and feel of [...]
|
|
|
|
|
Campaigns to raise funding for transit, both regional and national, are proliferating. Advocacy group Greater Toronto CivicAction Alliance and national charity Evergreen have both focused their efforts on driving awareness of the negative effects of gridlock on residents of the Greater Toronto Area. Meanwhile. the Federation of Canadian Municipalities if pushing the feds for funding to improve transportation across the country. While each group has slightly different goals and audiences, each one relies on stats about average commute times, and each campaign [...]
|
|
|
|
|
NB Power says the Energy and Utilities Board does not have the authority to question the "reasonableness" of bills it ran up during the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station’s refurbishment because legislation passed by the former Liberal government shields those expenses from scrutiny (as the CBC reports it).
This project ranked number 18 on our 2010 Top 100 list, with a cost of $1.4 billion. But $1 billion worth of cost overruns bumped it up several spots to number 13 on the 2012 list.
Darren Murphy, a vice-president at NB Power, told a CBC reporter [...]
|
|
|
|
|
It's a new year and, having just released our annual Top 100 Projects report and having a productive conversation with the report's key players, we're looking to the future and wondering what this year has to offer. We'll be watching for updates on the federal long-term infrastructure plan, but there may also be news at the provincial level. Will other province's follow Ontario's lead and place a stronger emphasis on asset management? What's the future energy mix for Canada? According to just the Top 100 projects, renewable energy is building, especially [...]
|
|
|
|
|
David Bello, associate editor over at Scientific American, has an interesting post up recently looking at the supposed tensions between “resilience” and “sustainability.” His argument in a nutshell is that precisely the characteristics that make many urban systems resilient can also make them deeply unsustainable from an environmental point of view.
He's right, sort of. But really what's at stake here is a redefinition of how we build resilience into our urban systems.It's not so much a contradiction as an evolution. Let me show you what I mean.
As [...]
|
|
|
|
|
Much like the ongoing debate surrounding public-private partnerships, the issue of government in-house fulfillment versus tendering a projects with the private sector boils down to two basic questions. Should the public sector be delivering or just funding infrastructure? And, should government offload construction risk to the private sector?
Stephen Bauld recently waded into the debate in a column for Daily Commercial News. When I asked him what prompted him to write on the subject now, he said it was a recent article I wrote about the City of Edmonton's [...]
|
|
|
May/June 2013
|
