@mnolangray Calgary has far more than 15 buildings under construction of 10+ storeys. I can see 15 from my apartment alone!
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Peter Schryvers
15.2K posts
Peter Schryvers
@PeterSchryvers
Author of Bad Data. Available in stores Jan 27, 2020. Fascinated with metrics. Measure what matters.
Calgary, AB, Canada Katılım Temmuz 2010
309 Takip Edilen1.8K Takipçiler
For those who don't know, Canada builds a ton of high-rise residential. (This map probably understates the case: US high rises are probably mostly commercial, while many Canadian high rises are overwhelmingly residential.)
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While Canada is fine with high-rise residential even in otherwise low-slung residential areas, California insists on chunky midrise even in other highly urban areas. What explains this?
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@JerusalemDemsas My favorite stat to use about renting vs owning and the economy is that the European nations with the lowest homeownership rates are Switzerland and Germany, and the highest are Albania and Romania.
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Lots of people -- namely @SenWarren -- seem to sincerely believe that no one in their right mind would choose to rent.
For @TheArgumentMag, I wrote about the millions of people who disagree.
theargumentmag.com/p/stop-trying-…
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@SCP_Hughes @WorksInProgMag I find it hard to believe that it isn’t mostly survivorship bias.
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Why do new buildings seem, on average, uglier than old buildings? We discuss some options:
- Survivorship bias: only the beautiful old buildings have survived (we reject this option);
- Cycles of taste: everyone always finds new buildings uglier (we mostly reject this too);
- Ornament became too expensive because of rising labour costs (we reject this);
- Ornament became too cheap because of mechanisation and then became low status (we reject this);
- Some sort of Protestant or Puritan anti-beauty inheritance (we are doubtful);
- Some kind of elite status game, perhaps a response to democratisation or elite overproduction (we think there is promise here, but serious work is needed on the details).
I discuss this and more with @Aria_Babu and @bswud.
Apple podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/did…
Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/2pIka6…
Youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=qvueKt…
YouTube
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@bfurnas @humantransit I made this exact argument in Bad Data. In most cases per capita is the right metric.
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“It is deaths divided by population, not deaths divided by driving totals, that gives a complete picture of the risk people bear while going about their daily travels.”
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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@MikePMoffatt My son’s birthday is 3 days away from mine. Best birthday gift I ever received. Being a parent is a blessing.
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11 years ago, Hannah gave me the best birthday present ever. Today, Matti and I (collectively) turned 60 years old.
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@MikePMoffatt It isn’t necessarily directing housing to areas of high vehicle traffic, but rather areas of higher transit service.
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I’m all for mid-rise apartments. However, I don’t get the obsession the environmental community has on making sure they’re only on the most polluted arterial roads. When did environmental justice stop being a thing?
nationalobserver.com/2026/02/24/opi…
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@joeljmiller @acoyne So long story short, this is just a correction from the COVID non-fiction book sales surge?
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If you’re in publishing or care about nonfiction books, this is for you: The Times recently told us all that nonfiction was in crisis. I read the piece and thought “No, they’re missing almost the whole story.” So here’s the whole story. millersbookreview.com/p/is-the-nonfi…
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@humantransit Is it that anyone is actually travelling in a circle though? Or that overlapping groups of people are travelling along various segments of that circle? Some people will travel from A to C, some from B to D some from C to E and some from D back to A. Hence a circle.
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Every time I encounter a circular or loop route I wonder how many people want to travel in circles. Medellín.
Jarrett Walker@humantransit
Cada vez que encuentro una ruta circular, me pregunto cuántas personas quieran viajar en círculos.
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@rcobooth @JerusalemDemsas @MattBruenig @TheArgumentMag Or, as I write in Bad Data, any incentive system results in this type of gaming behaviour. NYPD and “ghost 350s” (writing citations for people who don’t exist) cream skimming in school voucher systems, the list goes on.
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really great @MattBruenig today in @TheArgumentMag and it's quite something that it's taken more than a month for anyone to say this.
Think Medicare Advantage, "ghost students" in charter schools, landlords who don't spend their Section 8 vouchers on repairs
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Peter Schryvers retweetledi
NEW VIDEO: North America’s Elevator’s Problem
Our latest video looks into the many issues plaguing North America’s elevator industry, and what it might take to fix it.
youtu.be/Or1_qVdekYM
YouTube
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As someone who wrote a book on performance metrics, this is a refreshing read. Not enough organizations think about the differences between goals and objectives or inputs and outputs. Good to see am organization that does!
Dr. Mike P. Moffatt 🇨🇦🏅🏅@MikePMoffatt
New piece! There's been a surprising level of interest among our readers in "the business of think-tanks." Since you asked for it, here's a lengthy piece on how we think about and measure our performance and whether we're making a difference. Read here: missingmiddleinitiative.ca/p/how-we-think…
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@humantransit This also highlights the issue that some politicians and members of the public don’t want transit to impede vehicle traffic, so they make transit worse, which makes driving worse.
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Toronto mayor acknowledges that opening a much heralded new rapid transit line without turning on signal priority was a bad idea. The result was slower than the bus it replaced, worsening access to opportunity.
Mayor Olivia Chow 🇨🇦@MayorOliviaChow
Yes, the Finch LRT is too slow. I know, I rode it twice It has to move faster. I'll bring a council item to give it signal priority, and see what else we can do.
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@humantransit Calgary did something similar. We also have an at-grade LRT through the downtown (albeit with vastly higher ridership than portland). But no we are stuck with the consequences of slower, less reliable service on a key component of our system.
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Good example of the principle that being the first at something means making more mistakes.
In the US Portland was among the first to build modern rail and Seattle one of the last.
Seattle’s rapid transit is better than Portland’s because it learned from Portland’s mistakes. 1/
Tad Reeves@TurboDad
@JosephPolitano It's crazy to me that Portland had a near 20-year head start with the MAX and now Seattle's light rail has head & shoulders more ridership. Fine, larger metro area, but still.
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@michael_wiebe It may not be research but I do an activity with my business school class using a silent auction to do exactly this.
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🚨YIMBY research wanted🚨
Show quantitatively how a demand cascade works: when high-end demand increases, it spills over to the low-end market, so both high- and low-end prices increase.
Use a Bartik demand shifter for college-educated workers. Measure quality using home age.
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@MikePMoffatt Keep posting these charts! I use them in a planning and development class I teach for a lecture on the housing crisis. This is great!
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Of all the housing charts not made by MMI, this one is my favourite. It shows how, despite rhetoric, housing shortages aren't a global phenomenon, but they do seem to be an Anglo-American one.
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Peter Schryvers retweetledi
Public deaths, public costs: Why Calgary needs decentralized safe consumption calgaryherald.com/opinion/column…
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@humantransit I see this in the greater Toronto area. Random towers in the middle of nowhere, not connected to any sort of higher level transit. Density around transit makes sense, density not connected to transit doesn’t.
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Nice thread. Opposition to density is logical in a car-dependent place. That's why it's important not to demand density everywhere, but only in places where alternatives to car dependence -- some mix of walking, biking, and transit -- are really viable.
Addison Del Mastro@ad_mastro
This piece gets at why I like Strong Towns so much, and why I suspect some progressive-leaning folks kind of don't - ST starts with the assumption that "NIMBYism" is fundamentally legitimate and then tries to figure out *why* people are NIMBYs and fix the conditions that cause it
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@michael_wiebe There is an article called “supple skepticism revisited” that is a pretty good lit review of several abundant housing aspects. Good place to start!
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New project: I'm writing a literature review called Building Abundance on housing and infrastructure research.
First post is reviewing the literature on vacancy chains, link below.
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Another case of Bad Data. Yes, Canadians pay more income tax than Americans. They also have more services covered, particularly health care. This metric is useless unless it accounts for the value public goods provided by tax.
Sean Speer@Sean_Speer
If we compare PIT rates in the 10 Canadian provinces to the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, the scale of our problem becomes apparent. Specifically, when ranking the top combined (federal and provincial/state) PIT rates in 2025, Canadian provinces hold nine of the top 10 highest rates among the 61 American and Canadian jurisdictions. Saskatchewan (at 15th highest) is the only province to escape the top 10.
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@acoyne They only thing that has ever fixed congestion is pricing. 100% correct.
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Comprehensive mobility pricing a la Singapore: a city with the population of the GTA but the traffic of Halifax.
theglobeandmail.com/opinion/articl…
Eric Lombardi (EricForOLP.ca) 🇨🇦🚀@EricDLombardi
Toronto doesn’t need a “Traffic Czar”, it needs political leaders with a spine. Want to know how to fix Traffic in Toronto? - Eliminate on-street parking on Arterial Roads - Dedicated Streetcar/LRT routes with signal priority, dedicated BRT lanes for major bus routes - Variable congestion pricing on highways - Proper left-hand turn lanes where they’re allowed. - Modern traffic signalling infrastructure (eg, no pedestrian delay if there are no pedestrians crossing, timing responsive to traffic conditions should one way need a lot more flow than the others etc). A Traffic Czar cannot fix a lack of political will or accountability, which is the actual problem.
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