Spurred by another superficial review of Paris’ push for bicycle lanes¹, I decided to write out why I think so many of these takes are overly superficial, and thus fail to provide useful lessons when applied to other cities.

First, by way of background, I feel like I have rather unique vantage point of being trained in Transportation Planning (in Civil Engineering), paired with having lived and studied in all three of France, Canada, and the United States. On one hand, my schooling was in Utah, one of the few places in the US where they are still building urban freeways²; on the other, I spent three years in France (including 8 months in metro Paris) relying almost exclusively on public transit. In a word, I’ve lived and commuted in both.

This is the collection of my thoughts about the proposed/in-progress Alberta Passenger Rail Master Plan.

While in France, the combination of being somewhere near ‘church mouse poor’ and living in a small (32 square metres / 350 sq ft) 1 bedroom apartment, I looked for hobbies that took up little space and so settled on photography (i.e. my Project 365 here) and dabbling in computer programming and to a lesser degree, artificial intelligence (my WmDOT for OpenTTD). It was quite enjoyable, but on my return to North America, I found myself with a lot more space and more geographically stable. I wanted to make things that were a little more physical and so with the encouragement of my Honey, I started into Model Railroading, a childhood dream. One of my shocks was the cost of models! A regular-ish building, measuring maybe 2x3x3 inches would cost $60! There had to be a better way…