healthetank

I work on the linear infrastructure side as a consultant - any particular reason that they took so long to award the tender? That seems extreme given that I regularly work with municipalities and tendering processes, and its a pretty well oiled machine - 1 month is about as long as I've ever seen the award be stretched, unless the engineering cost estimate was waaaay below the bids and they had to secure additional funding.

Construction is heaaaavily influenced seasonally. Thats obviously largely dependent on the field of construction (ie residential, commercial, heavy construction, underground, factory, etc)

A large number of the contractors I work with either lay everyone off, or fully shut down over the winter. As soon as things start freezing, construction costs skyrocket. Daylight hours mean fewer working hours (unless you want to provide sufficient lighting, which is another expense), quarries and pits close, concrete requires winter heat and heating for the first 3 days to sufficiently cure, etc.

Additionally, construction is very boom/bust, where the rest of the economy impacts how much work is available for them. Right now, theres a huge demand. But go back and theres been two or three big slow downs in the residential construction industry in the last 15 years, which pushes people to other jobs (as mentioned by the other poster). When the economy is slow, there's less investment in infrastructure by corporations, meaning there's less demand for factory/commercial construction, and the host of trades that go with it.

Trades are a specific job that often have lots of working experience, so when a good quality tradesperson leaves, its hard to get the experience and knowledge to replace them effectively.

Its always scary to see the impacts of climate change on an individual basis.

No one here, especially those reading these articles, were around then. All we can do it mitigate and reduce future impact.

Part of that is understanding that shits gonna get expensive for us. BUT if people collectively push against the government and complain about things like high food prices (when driven by actual food scarcities, not 'inflation' and corporate greed), the response will be to offload problems to another generation by stealing water from elsewhere, increased use of fossil fuels, or some other short term stop gap.

We as a society will not get the same life our parents and grandparents had. Full stop. If we try to, we will fuck things up even more for the next generation. It sucks, but I don't see another way around it. It can still be a good life, but we need to change a whole lot to get there.

"As a hydrologist, I definitely agree that there's always a cycle with the water," Stadnyk said. "But what the science says is that this is one of the regions in the world where we can expect more frequent drought cycles, and longer drought cycles. "That begs the question about economic viability, right? How long can farmers and irrigators hold out without that water and still be productive and still have a viable business?"

This is what it boils down to. I think that unfortunately, we're going to have to either develop more water-effective measures of irrigation (which all cost significantly more than the standard sprayers), or the yields are going to fall significantly. Either of those mean that food prices will continue to climb.

Its not a good situation, and there's not a good solution.

I do have to say that I'm entertained by the complaint about the average person's economic position, which is entirely valid, followed unironically by the statement that if Canada had "merely matched US Growth" over the last 5 yrs, per capita we'd be making $5500 more per year. Per capita earnings mean nothing if 10 guys at the top are claiming all the extra, and the US has not exactly been a system that is in a stable, healthy economic place for the majority of its citizens.

I agree that's part of the problem, but see my comment below. Stats show we have an all time low for housing:people compared to our past and compared to most other western countries.

To fix it, for sure we need scaling property tax rates and higher empty/vacant housing taxes, but my point is that even if we forcibly removed 2nd or 3rd houses from every single person/corporation, as well as taking any empty/vacant housing, and distributed it, we still wouldn't have enough to be on par with our historical rates OR other western nations

I can agree it would help, but we're at an all time low for housing to population. A Fraser institute study, so there's a definite conservative bias to their presentation and info, but it shows how long this has been coming.

In theory, we should be okay - Fraser report shows were at 424 housing units per capita, and most households are an average of 2.4 people, which means in theory wevs got enough housing.

But comparison to other countries show that, in general, we need about 10% more houses (closer to the 471 G7 average) in order to feel more balanced. Most other European countries have more

I agree with all your proposals, but they all require land/housing already built OR the people available to build them, and THAT would be the real bottleneck

I mean depends on how you define easily.

Even assuming infinite money, Canada has built roughly the same number of houses per year since the 90s. This means we have roughly the same number of skilled and experienced carpenters, roofers, plumbers, etc that work in new builds.

This means that if tomorrow we passed legislation eliminating every single bureaucratic red tape AND convinced developers to build everywhere they have land to do so, we would take years to catch up with the point where our houses:population ratio is back among the rest of the western world.

Not everyone there agrees with helmet less riding, though they do discuss the disagreement over the effectiveness of helmets for those, the stats say 1/3 of serious bike accidents involve brain injuries. That's some huge numbers!!!

We wear helmets to do dozens of other activities for sport or leisure - ski/snowboard, skating, mountain climbing, spelunking, white water sports. Additionally, the article says those engaged in cycling for exercise or sport almost all wear helmets. Why is there such an aversion to wearing helmets while biking?

In my lifetime skiing I've seen an enormous change in people. When I was younger almost no one wore helmets. Now, it's rare to see someone not wearing a helmet.

GoTransit’s Burloak Drive grade separation project would disagree, as it features a painted bike lane at level with auto traffic, despite having built an elevated sidewalk.

I said it was easy, doesnt mean its always implemented. Ive designed a handful of roads to have designated bike lanes or fully separated bike lanes. Every time we do any Active Transport, I've advocated for fully separated systems or physical barriers between. 90% of the time, the decision to cut them has come after resident input/discussion. Often the Townships I work with don't have the resident/political backing to justify narrowing vehicle lanes to improve bike traffic - because that is what is required. Unfortunately we still don't have enough public backing to push through these.

Hell, one job I'm working on is on a "designated bike route" and residents fought a separated path so much that the city scrapped it and went with the Advisory Bike Lanes.

I’m not totally convinced that the helmets are the best value here, even if money was available to grant every American citizen a helmet.

What?? Beyond cars, riding something moving ~20km/hr is still super dangerous without a helmet. Slightly off the trail and hit a tree or post? Icy conditions and you wipe out?

Even something as simple as a road speed design change (ie just changing signs without changing ANYTHING else on the road) are ~500$ a sign. As soon as you get into more complex changes, but still on the easy side (ie Advisory Bike Lanes, where the only change is painting lines to allocate specific space for bikes) run ~$15/m for each line painted. On a typical advisory lane, thats 4 lines ($60/m) plus 500$ per sharrow symbol which are spaced every 75m in each lane.

Even at an expensive helmet ($100), Helmets are by far the cheapest method of personal safety you can do. ( For example, Toronto has~5397km of roads and a population of 2.93 million. To even do a simple repainting on those roads is ~$400mil. New expensive helmets for every single person in Toronto is $293mil.

I work in civil engineering. It's not too hard to include bike design on new roads **when they come up ** (which is only every 20yrs on average) but arguing that its more cost effective? Definitely not true.

Appendix A in the report does.

All told, their total operating revenue was 9.9bil, operating expenses were 13.1bil without including depreciation and pensions,etc which brought it to 16.1bil. that doesn't include any improvements (capital) works or their debt servicing.

Not sure where you get that from. Most systems operate at a major loss and are propped up by grants/government funding. Typical targets for operating are ~1/3 of costs are covered by rider fares with the rest coming from grants or government funding.

Since the thread talks about NYC, I pulled this - MTA Budget. In it they state:

In a normal year, farebox revenue constitutes approximately 40 percent of the MTA’s annual budget, or $6.5 billion