| layout | title | number | date | published |
|---|---|---|---|---|
study--newsletter |
Try carpolling |
390 |
2025-02-23 08:30:00 -0500 |
true |
Picture this: GTA, 2025. You’re driving down the 401, pondering whether Alto will ever be real enough to make you reconsider driving from Ottawa,1 when, above you, you see one of those electronic roadsigns that offers you gentle admonishments about not texting while driving and so on. Today, it means to say “try carpooling”, except a few lights are burnt out, so it instead suggests us toward the dark art of “carpolling”.
We’re somehow in the final days of a provincial election (did you know it? I, most days, have forgotten), and it feels like these missing electrons are trying to tell us something, pointing us toward the real source of power and influence in this province (country? continent?): cars.
For carpolling is what many politicians seem to do. Repeating old, disproven, tired tropes (new highways will bring better travel times!), steeped in car culture, they take actions that encourage this car dependency. But it’s emotional: car culture is about much more than just the car, because having to drive is a symptom of the desirability of the living options available to us; the desire for a big, standalone house necessitates driving, because there’s not enough density to justify better transit, especially as those houses sprawl ever more.
And, look, I say this as someone who now lives in a house! But a small one, in an older neighbourhood, with mixed density near us that justifies good (ish), regular (ish) transit. And I’ve happily lived in small and medium apartment buildings—the newer of which was so well-built, we couldn’t hear anything from our neighbours (it was the neighbourhood that drove us away).
Sigh. I don’t know—I just feel there’s a better way out there, not so far out of reach, but we’re so path dependent, and we’ve already built so many roads.
On the bright side, all that driving gave us plenty of time to listen to On Being, including Krista’s conversations with John O’Donohue and Ocean Vuong. Earlier this week, I also listened to her conversation with Pico Iyer—all responding, one way or another, to timely questions of the moment.
- I got a new laptop recently, and have been luxuriating in setting it up fresh. One place I decided to pay a bit more attention was my terminal—fortunately, Julia Evans recently wrote about options for a “modern” terminal setup, which simplified my decisions greatly. Thankfully, I don’t use many scripting languages anymore—R is pretty easy to set up, as is node, and most everything else is in the browser. I’m sure whenever I get to needing Python (or Ruby… which my blog somehow still uses), it’ll be a bit more fun—but all challenges for another time.
- I was moved by reading Ethan Marcotte’s explanation for leaving 18F. It brought up a lot in me, including a familiar nostalgia for a similarly lovely set of colleagues, and the importance of setting lines in advance by which to evaluate the acceptability of future circumstances (which may come upon us shockingly fast).
- Mike Monteiro with some words on what’s trained out of us as we grow older. Takeaway: anyone can draw an orange!
- While flying around in satellite view, I saw for the first time the Waterloo Region Emergency Services Training Centre, a really impressive facility, including the University of Waterloo’s Fire Research Facility. I’m glad places exist dedicated to improving competence and knowledge.
To close, with more good words on questions of the moment, I encourage you to check out adrienne maree brown’s recent poem, “ask questions”.
All the best for the week ahead!
Lucas
Footnotes
-
When solo, I’ll usually take the train. But as soon as you’re splitting the cost between more than one, driving is roughly as economical (!), and having access to a car is more or less what makes suburbia bearable. ↩