Marco Chitti

Depicted: Traffic signals' poles in Magog (QC), Utrecht (NL), Helsinki (FI), and Stockholm (SE). In case you're still wondering why traffic signals have become so expensive to build in Québec.

My obsession with traffic signals' overdesign stems from the fact that they are relatively simple objects, and the bloat in their size and specs that burdens our built environment is particularly easy to see. Also, a symbol of the "quantity-over-quality" approach to design typical of NA engineering

What I really see here is a nice bus filter (with a car trap!) part of a broader circulation planning scheme. And I'm salivating 🤤🤤🤤

It's part of a broader redesign of circulation patterns on the eastern half of Sodermalm that transformed Katerinavägen from a through arterial to a bus-only through route. See the maps in the Transit Priority Atlas

The ZTL is a chameleon. It can be whatever you want. It can be adopted in any context, from city centers to mountain and rural roads. It's essentially the regulatory embodiment of the Dutch "autoluw" concept, adapted to the Italian cultural, political and bureaucratic context.

This is a great example of why the various "design guidelines" mandating volume articulation and changes of material are architecturally illiterate. This is a great building, and it's essentially a big box with a single well-thought architectural feature making most of the job.

Unlike the random façade articulation, which is at best a poor mimicry of Arts & Crafts or other picturesque-inspired pastiches, the building-long veranda has a great tradition in Mediterranean/southern indian architecture, as the salient feature of otherwise simple façade.

I don't know if I just noticed it now or this has been a thing for a while, but Montréal changed the way traffic lights work in many of Ste-Catherine's intersection, out of an overzealous will of avoiding left/right-turn/ped conflicts (my understanding) and the pedestrian experience is now a mess.

It seems like one if these cases when the excess of on paper "safety first" produces a less safe outcome: a traffic cycle that is not "credible" (as the French would say) and it's actually confusingly atypical so people have started not respecting it (many such cases).

I don't know if I just noticed it now or this has been a thing for a while, but Montréal changed the way traffic lights work in many of Ste-Catherine's intersection, out of an overzealous will of avoiding left/right-turn/ped conflicts (my understanding) and the pedestrian experience is now a mess.

It's mostly one-way /one-way intersections with high pedestrian flows and limited car traffic in St-Cath but very high ped traffic. It used to be a vanilla two-phase cycle with leading ped intervals. It's now a complex cycle with green for car + non-conflicting ped phases and ped-only ones.

The history of Canadian regulation, in four lines. Regulation-wise, I'm sorry to inform you folks that we amhave already become the 51st State. And we did it the way Trump wanted it: under economic coercion of the sort.

Evolution has produced two sounds that are unbearable to the human hearing: toddlers' crying and French people, notably Parisian ones, complaining. They both trigger immediate, irrational action by reaching directly to the limbic system.

These new alternative 6 & 7 routes possibly being studied for CAHSR are interesting not only because they reduce cost, but because they shorten the main tunnel from base-tunnel length to a normal-tunnel length (<10km), something I can believe the US tunneling industry can, maybe, deliver.

I'm hoisting this from an interesting exchange about platform height and path dependency because I think it's worth pointing out that the search for an "omnistandrad" is often one of the big drivers of costs. There is value in standardization, but there is also the risk of overdesign.

Ditto for railways. The dogma of interoperability means that RFI in Italy is upgrading many local lines to vanilla mainline rail standards (p.ex. 22.5 ton axle load) so they can potentially run Frecciarossa, bilevels regionals or freight trains on them... even though they probably won't.

I'm hoisting this from an interesting exchange about platform height and path dependency because I think it's worth pointing out that the search for an "omnistandrad" is often one of the big drivers of costs. There is value in standardization, but there is also the risk of overdesign.

Italy signed an MoU for mutual recognition of driving licences 10 years ago. Things have stalled since for a number of reasons, including the fact that Québec didn't want "Canada" to be mentioned anywhere in the agreement. I'm not kidding. Petty souvernanism all around us.

Fascinating article about the virtual contraflow queue-jump (also called "electronic bus overtaking lane" in the article) opened in 2019 between Ehrendingen and Baden in Switzerland. There is also a video showing how it works. www.badenertagblatt.ch/aargau/baden...

Nice tool to quickly visualize transit isochrones in many cities: tram.camilleroux.com/montreal/?fr... LEFT: how far you can get in 60 minutes from the CÉGEP Marie-Victorin (12 km from B-UQAM) vs RIGHT: Sunnybrooke (17 km from B-UQAM). Marie-Victorin was supposed to get a REM de l'Est station

That's quite the exaust/smoke extraction apparatus for a bus stop... NFPA 130's "enclosed station" definition striking it again?