public realm in na

2025 05 22

as i teeter on impulsively going into civil engineering and therefore student debt, i've been searching for ways to undermine my interest in the field. make me not like it anymore. most haven't been effective, becausue i really wanna go into it! the one thing that has been able to catch hold in my mind, though, is looking at it in real life, in Canada, where I am from. Infrastructure is... sad, unkempt, failing, and organisational small-c conservative in every ways. it's pessimissitic and anxious and scared of ambition.

this idea has been developing in my head for a while now, but what enabled it to fully come into purview was a Reece Martin mastodon post, where he speculates that "...governments in North America seem to undervalue infrastructure," and later a article he published where he mentions that small-c conservative thinking permeates throughout public transit management.

and... given that I came to this conclusion through another field (public transit!)... it's easy to want to extrapolate it to other aspects of the public realm.

Canada and the United States neglect their public realms in a baffling and shortsighted way that you only learn to appreciate when you know how easy it could be to stop. Whenever I go back to Canada and start complaining about everything, people locally don't seem to really get it. there's a jaded acceptance of the status quo, "how could there be something better?"

When I first returned to Canada from abroad, I distinctly remember looking at the screens by the luggage rotary in Vancouver Airport, and smugly thinking to myself, "welcome back to Medicority, elysia, i hope you enjoy giving up halfway through and celebrating it." the screens carried needlessly roundabout beaucracratic information and didn't display well at all, and all i could imagine was all the uncritical positive press they must've got when they first installed them.

it's everywhere, and it's kinda pathetic. even just in my last webblog, i rip into the transportes en commun au montréal, which is exactly the same. Gives it the fucking gas to get something done, and then give up on the other half where you need to complete it. The shitty, terrible websites. The inexplicably bad bus system despite a decent metro system. The people who argue that we shouldn't modernise the métro, and that its fine, no, better, as is. it's agonising, and there are very few exceptions.

anglo and québecois americans consistently undervalue their public realm, they regularly praise half assed designs, and have come to take for granted the hard work accomplished by previous generations, while elevating them to a higher plane of existence, as if theyre miracles from god. i hate it, and i want you to too.

civil engineering sucks and i just wanna fucking design cool shit

the thing that gave me the critical mass to pursue civil engineering, which is the engineering of the built environment (ie., infrastructure), was Sweden's crossing beg buttons. They were unfamilliar to anything I had seen before, and I wanted to know why they were different. Turns out, there's good reasons! every aspect of the design has been carefully considered, and it's really admirable.

it helped me put words to why universal and invisible design makes me so excited. It just works. It takes into consideration all possible use cases, and accomodates for them in clever ways. it takes genuine skill and signifcant thought, and makes an attempt to be universally applicable wherever it finds itself.

and then i thought of traffic engineers in Canada (they're a subgenre of civil engineers).

they don't do universal design. they don't do invisible design. they build with brute force and pre-conceived policy wire frames, and accomodate for a very narrow range of use cases. whether this is their fault or the regulations/government objectives they live under, I don't know, but i sure as hell know if i ended up in their position i'd feel stymied. like i can't actually do the thing i trained for. i don't want to make car road wider because it's what politican wants, i want to deconstruct the possible purposes of the road ( asking myself the question "why do we built roads in the first place? what abstract goals are we even trying to achieve?"), and after I get through that, I want to consider how it could be used, and how to accomodate for all that seamlessly. i want to study how people interact with different designs and recognise potential blindspots i have, and see how my design impacts everything else in the network ( holistic ! ). i want to iterate and make something elegant and thoughtful.

an example i always come back to is how road maintenence in north america involves just patching the hole with some fresh asphalt. it infuriates me to no end that there is absolutely zero consideration given to why a surface was orginally designed the way it was. no. no consideration. just asphalt blob. ughh. and it's all taken for granted??

like has anyone just stopped to ask why Ontario chooses the lane widths that they do?? like? anyone??? hello? all the answers im getting are just people being like "well that's what the MTO manual says." like this is just the incest taboo over again; people coming up with random excuses to justify something that is completely arbitrary and has little actual merit. even if there's some truth to it. yeah, incest can cause developmental defects and abuse, but that doesn't answer my question about why consensual marriage and non-reproductive sex is illegal? yeah, you do need roads to be wide enough for cars to fit on, but i was asking why 3.5m was chosen as the target width for urban roads in ontario? why that number specifically, maybe go over how it interacts with the right of way recommendations ???

and then you get to the real-world implementation. often the civil engineering guidelines do make at least some intuitive sense, and in some rulebooks they actually explain the reasons for the decisions chosen, but that all goes out the window when things are actually built. secondary design considerations are often sidelined or cut, and, i'd argue most importantly, you're given a very prescriptive guide on what has to be built. the actual projects that get built are hyperfocused on one thing and neglect all other aspects of the design. you get situations where the design is better during construction.

an example that comes to mind is ottawa's Kichi Zībī Mīkan, which is a waterfront flow road in ottawa. currently, it operates as a 1 lane per direction throughway, connecting motorists in Gatineau to Westboro and Lincoln Fields, and Transitway buses from Tunney's Pasture to Lincoln Fields. it doesn't really have traffic, other than when the Transitway signal used to let buses merge at grade goes off, but fortunately that will be removed when the adjacent metro line is completed, with the metro itself also further relieving traffic. this means that the flow road will run smoothly for the foreseeable future, and we'll only need to... widen it to be 2 lanes in each direction. Ottawa's traffic recommendations say that roads should be as narrow as possible unless there is signifcant and demanding motorist traffic. The Mīkan is being widened in spite of having no traffic.

the fact the parkway is owned by the NCC and so technically shouldn't be applicable to Ottawa's design guides helpfully pushes us into the fact that. it isn't just civil engineering. it's everywhere. the fact the NCC, Ottawa, and Gatineau, are all separate entities with their own arbitrary design guidelines that ultimately don't even achieve their own goals while also completing neglecting the other's rules is just another example of how half assed everything is. sure, we can have public organisations in a single city-region so that we can shape the public realm for everyone. now explain why we need three separate ones that act like the other's simply don't exist, all while not really even caring about their own fucking standards.

politicans absolutely love giving out prescriptive guidelines for what something needs to be, giving no room for the actual designers to design their shit well. that would be against contract.

i'll stop with the traffic engineering bullshit in a moment but i just think the way bus lanes and transit signals are used in canada are a perfect example of this. Oftentimes bus lanes will be rolled out onto an entire route all at once, and will have the exact same design across the entire route, unless there is some external limitation.

So, for example. The 75 corridor in Ottawa is entirely on bus lanes. This is great! awesome, good job guys. except for the fact that... they're always on the curb, with the exception near Iris, where northbound has a central bus lane and southbound has nothing.

Um, the problem with Iris bus lane is that its effectively purposeless because of signal timings. Buses will always enter the bus lane at the same time as regular car traffic, meaning there is no cars in front of the bus for the bus lane to provide refuge from. And, when it becomes a left turn lane onto Iris, it becomes a mixed traffic lane. the bus lane design spec only considered buses already travelling on the road, and didn't consider the fact that signals are timed in such a way where the bus will almost never actually benefit from the bus lane. It also could totally be reversible based on peak travel direction, but it's not ? it does exist... but it exists in medocrity, never allowed to reach for its full potential, stymied from the start by small-c conservative design prescriptions.

it's so frustrating cus they put all the upfront investment and politcal work to get the bus lane in the first place. and then just. chose to hamper it from day 1.

let's look at how this applies to something like mains plugs. they suck in canda. they just fucking suck. they're dangerous and incredibly poorly designed. They don't secure into their sockets properly, and they have live current along the whole metal prong. There is very limited grounding and GFCI, and plug sizes are nonstandard, meaning you can't gurantee plugs will actually fit into a socket if another is plugged in. you can kinda also just. stick shit inside the socket. it's bad. ill get to the shutters in a bit.

just like the other things, they achieve their primary design consideration of "power shit," but stop after that. you know how easy it would be to make them better overnight? You can immediately start demanding for insulated sleeves on the prongs so that they aren't electrocution hazards when not fully plugged in. that would be incredibly easy and have an immediate and obvious improvement to the quality of the plug design. and yet i've never seen a canadian, mexican, japanese, or united states plug with sleeves. not once in my life.

How about doors? I really love how Canadian doors have a predictable opening direction; they're always push doors if you're approaching the building exit, and always pull doors if you're entering. This is for fire safety, but they also elegantly address the problem of being fucking embarassed for trying to pull a push door. Universal design. Beautiful.

Huh. but what about revolving doors? they're really useful for climate control and free form movement of people, and i enjoy how they make it easier to carry unweidly things through. they do require regular doors to be fully universal, but even as someone with a mobility disability, i actually usually prefer the revolving door. oh? you say they're only ever used for decorative purposes ? oh...

How about windows..! looks like they meet their design goal of being able to look through them and provide airflow. hey um? is it supposed to open more?? like im getting a sliver of air flow,, um. you know i kinda wanted a window so i could use it as a window?? you know??? like i know this technically counts but.. ugh.

it's so cool the city loves landscaping public spaces so much! i wonder if i can use indigenous plants to... oh .... i need a european short grass lawn ....

do you think a single planner has ever actually thought about navigating an urban space with disabilities beyond singular hyperfocused projects. yes, buses are accessible, and bus stations are accessible, individually. But their accessibility needs are planned seperately from each other, so interfacing between the two is so ridiculuous. like. like why do buses need to kneel or deploy a ramp at bus rapid transit stations. did they not realise they have a fucking dedicated bus platform they could raise to be level or nearly level with the floor of the bus. like how do you make that oversight? i don't care that both individually meet their accessibility goals, why did no body consider that maybe when someone is using one they may want to also use the other ( i know, using a bus station to catch a bus. wild stuff. )

it's so cool the city invested in this screen so they can show dynamic information to the public about civil engagement!

did they forget to hire a graphic designer though! it's so ugly and confusing

zoning bylaws really annoy me in particular and are like the pinnacle of overly-prescriptive rules sapping out any potential for creativity or clever design. like, there is absolutely zero justification for the way cities micromanage zones, it's completely arbitrary. in canada it's common to have half a block be zoned low desnity and the other half be zoned high desnity, despite both being suburban residential. its prescribed at the scale of tens of metres sometimes. and badly prescribed! we all know the horrors of exclusionary zoning segregating land uses for no good reason. hey, i heard north america doesn't have enough places to hang out or gather, let's build one! oh! fuck! it's illegal !!

and again i need to emphasise that there is never a meta-analysis made between any of these different things. there is never a cross-examination between how all these different rules impact each other, no effort to streamline or give it any elegance. it's so.. rough. artifical. "designed this way because the codebook said so". and i feel it, it's so obvious how careless the implementation is.

and that's when you even get to implement anything. remember the whole undervaluing infrastructure and ottawa road design rules? hah, as it turns out, we don't actually build things!

I really want to shoutout the design and thought behind Ottawa's road design rules. There's been lots of genuine research and trial and error, and the city genuinely has a vision for how all their plans are supposed to fit together. The city has unbelievably competent policies for transit, zoning, accessibility, road design, nature areas, etcetera. When these plans are implemented, it's genuinely quite good ( it does help that they had to design them from scratch and didn't just rip them from a cheatsheet someone else made .... like ottawa is the organisation that made the protected intersection design guide ). there is still the obvious oversights but it's a lot harder to get frustrated at them when they're actually updating standards as they learn new things, instead of setting the standard in stone and then treating it as a bible.

the problem is, Canada and especially the US don't build things!! haha!!! awesome!!!!! so none of the good planning documents matter at All!!!!!

building new things in these countries is seen as going against the status quo, and is fought back against furiously. it doesn't matter that ottawa wants to narrow its roads, make more rapid transit, improve crossiing safety, increase density, provide high quality centrums around transit stations, etcetera. none of it fucking matters cus they either never actually get built, or they take so much money and political will that there is nothing left in the tank when it's finally finished.

it doesn't matter that mains sockets in canada finally require shutters on them in new construction, because we havent made any new construction really. it's almost performative regulation, because of how little reach it has with the state of housing.

canada and the US take their existing public realm for granted, and exploit it for everything it has left, without meaningfully adding anything back.

you could call it grave robbing

think about it. how old is the critical infrastructure near where you live. beyond that, think about how old the actual design itself is.

it genuinely takes some brain wrapping to come up with something that was created or designed after i was born. it feels disingenuous when i do find something, too, because it feels like cherry picking.

the US is particularly famous for this, with infrastructure that is falling apart being the norm, and the country's design standards being decades in the past. it's basically just an assumed fact.

It is less true in Canada, but I'd argue the same idea applies regardless. Much of what we rely on everday was created and designed by people many times older than I am, and we just assume it will always be there and never go away.

governments there almost treat old infrastructure as if its a natural part of the environment. there is very little enthusiasm about doing something new, because we "already have that."

it's so easy to say that we make no real effort on holistic projects because we view previous standards as omnipotent and all-knowing. or to assume that there's something already out there that will pick up the slack, all we need to do is refine and optimise what's there,

hyperfocus on it.

as far as i can tell, we haven't meaningfully updated our plug design in essentially like a century. where is the push to make the worst plugs in the world better? like. it's not a sacred cow guys

us and canada vehicle manufacturing is in such a sorry state. the companies are basically unable to handle overseas competition because of how terrified they are to change their designs. so motor vehicles, especially commercial and truck vehicles, are very antiquated in design. they hold onto the past like crazy.

manufacturing in general is so shamelessly backwards. very little effort is given to making it work in the modern day, mostly just protect it from having to catch up to the rest of the world by keeping the rest of the world out. it's silly.

can't touch housing policy cus that was written in the BeforeTimes!

in the civil engineering perspective, it's incredibly frustrating.

motorways obviously had a lot of thought put into their design when they were first conceived, but very little has changed since then. when things have changed in their design, it's not like they're new built or rebuilt anymore, so you never see it.

but like. everything's like that.

this publication by Transport Canada from 2004 just makes my heart sink. So much thought and consideration going into bus movements in Ottawa. now it feels like it's just. fallen in line. there are so many locations now that should have advance stop bars, but they don't exist. there are so many locations where signal priority should now be installed, but there isn't. the brief mention of slightly adjusting signal timing to massively improve bus operations without making any changes for drivers is just. like. that's all that needs to change for the bus lane by Iris to be good. but that bus lane was added in the last ten years, so, it doesn't get special treatment. the other bus lanes on woodroffe were installed before the publication, though.

the article even acknowledges the systemic thinking that is necessary for public transit. it goes over how a handful of random prioritisation projects dont really help at all. it talks about how you actually need to make iit so bus drivers are able to use it, too. it's so... frustrating. how this doesn't really happen anymore.

essentially all new bus infrastructure in ottawa has been haphazard. but... that's a small sample size... since most of it is older than me.

hard not to think of Edmonton's stadtbahn in the same light. It was the first modern "light rail" in North America and is designed like a german stadtbahn. It's good! It's fairly well designed and clear thought was given to it. At least the lines before i was born. The line built after I was born is a standard, shitty North American tramway. All modern light rail projects here are shitty thoughtless tramways. why do they even use trams?????? other than because that's what the contract prescribed!!

folks in canada and the US haven't really chosen to adapt when new information is provided. the bridge from 100 years ago that's rotting will hold up just fine and is literally the pinnacle of engineering. what are you talking about. we can't build a new replacement bridge because it would be wasteful? there is literally already a bridge there!!!

it's all so short sighted and nonsensical. getting fixated on the fact there is already a bridge there without recognising its a bad and dilapidated bridge. it serves the purpose, but just barely.

i think maybe the single best example of this is railway infrastructure. literally the single thing that enabled canada and the US to exist as countries in the first place. what so much of Everything in both country is based on. and it's all old and underappreciated, with very little efforts to modernise. and the plans that do exist are expensive, take forever, and dry up all the politcal will to build anything else.

railways are treated as if they've always been there, and all that happens is exploiting them for every drop of short term revenue they can muster before buckling from undermaintenence. you don't need to maintain the railway... passengers will always keep ridiing it...

sure you get one or two big projects here and there but like. they're so small in the grand scheme of things, and once again ignore the bigger picture.

i think if we just neglected a couple things, it'd be acceptable. being forward thinking is hard and exhausting, and you can't ask for it everywhere all the time. but... north americans are so negligent about everything in the public realm... maybe they just don't realise you can? just build a new pub in your area if you really want to?? like it doesn't have to have been there for 80 years,,,

do they just not know??

gods arent real but shower faucets are fuck you

at the end of the day i want to be able to go to someone's house in canada and use a fucking goddamn shower valve that lets me control water volume and temperature independently. i've literally never seen one in canada. not once. enough fucking around with the hot and cold valves to mix to just the right amount, and always being surprised by the wrong temperature when you first turn it on. fuck the single handle bitches that make no sense to my 8 year old brain

i don't want to be laughed out of the room when i ask for something as basic as that. sensation play taps aren't a higher being that demands respect.

apartments that work as apartments would also be nice? enough of the glorified stairwell laundering scheme we have going on below 6 stories ( single staircase midrise good! )

and like please for the love of fucking god can we put actual interiors on domestic buses? like i don't love spending days of my life in a unfinished basement you know. let some light in with bigger windows, give us some cosy seats, and some fucking reno to the shell so that it doesn't sound and feel like the bus is about to fall apart when it hits a small bump. enough of that stupid stair part way through the back of the bus, oh my god.

oh yeah im canadian so i kinda forgot about this but holy shit so many things in the US still use magstripe cards what the fuck are you doing over there. why did the MTA use magstripe for transit until like? what? 2023???? WHAT. new york?? new york city???? you're joking right????

idk let's please just like. actually consider the ways people will navigate space too. like i really just wanna go on and on and infodump about clever public realm design but it just makes me sad knowing that it's so rare here, and when it does exist, it's not properly integrated into the surroundings. why are our median tram platforms so fucking thin? i thought gothenburg's were precarious but toronto youve got like half a metre of platform space. too bad if you need to get to a different door lmao

like NA designers are well aware that people don't use their designs as intended, but they consider those people sinful and a disgrace to the country. Jaywalking is somewhat stigmatised and dangerous in Canada and its just illegal in the US, and sometimes they'll even put fences up to stop people from crossing. Like instead of actually designing something to work they just ban people from using their infrastructure the "wrong way".

smite me with the power of god for biking across the intersection instead of walking my bike across lmao. but like actually what the fuck are you on

i just wish we actually tried. it's. ugh. the whole moral highground thing or jaded complacency is so draining. it hurts so much for people to accept we're bad at things and try to reframe that as somehow actually being a good thing. double down on it so you dont need to reflect. like i said, it all feels artificial, because it all is artifical. all of this is like as if its from an alternate reality.

they really said "organic, multifaceted existence is too hard. let's give up." ugh.

im not gonna become a civil engineer unless i know i can do it somewhere that actually invites new ideas and is interested in handling problems. enough of this performative conservatism where everything needs to be as restrained as possible because we're already so perfect at everything.

oogling at fun engineering anways

anyways wanna indulge myself for a bit cus goddamn is it exhausting ripping the public realm apart. really wanted to talk about public squares and third places more broadly in this post so ill give it a brief mention.

there should be plazas and squares for gathering and places to just vibe. i love public courtyards sprinkled in between buildings and giving access to a pedestrian network away from traffic. i love just. open areas where you can walk in any direction. we'd probably set up the water drainage incorrectly in canda.

as a canadian, the million project in sweden is amazing. there was a huge housing crisis, and so the government said lets build a million new places to live. all 15 minute neighbourhoods. all around transit stations.

like, don't get me wrong, from a swedish perspective, the million project suburbs are bad. they're isolated and segregated and we really should have just built more in the city centres. but like. here's the thing. they actually exist. the canadian in me sees that it was actually built and is amazed. you can, like, do shit??? if you actually want to and take it seriously enough.

oh and holy shit swedish railway shit. like sweden was in the exact same boat as canada is for railway performance. absolutely dire situation. but they took the issue seriously and decided to... revolutionise railway regulation not only in sweden but the whole EU. im actually writing a paper about it now because it's so. we could just do that if we felt like it. canada is in a very similar situation.

sweden now has one of most impressive railway systems in the world, and I'd argue perhaps the best if you factor for size. it's crazy how much ridership there iis, how extensive the coverage is, how fast it is, and how heavily electrified it is, for being a country the size of... Sweden. 10 million people in a large cold sprawly country. hey... where have i heard low population density and frigid climate before...

um but im not here to talk more about cool swedish design and forward thinking im here to talk about the moon country LMAO

there are some absolutely amazing things in canadian design. i've heard nuclear fission is one of those, but i dont know enough about it to say anything.

i love the réseau express métropolitaine. in spite of everything i rag on about rail in canada and montréal, the REM is just. Good. it's just good. It's a fully featured project that gets a lot of necessary infrastructure built and it's awesome. My only niggle is that REM de l'est doesn't exist. which... it kinda needs to. but the rest of the REM also needed to exist, and it actually DOES. it's insane. it actually exists. it's a modern infra project that doesn't seem ludicrously over budget and yet under developped compared to the rest of the world. it's not needlessly over engineered, while also being able to handle itself for the long future. and it actually fucking exists!!!! holy shit!!!!!!!!!!! it actually considered things!! not everything. bnut again. it's a lot easier to accept oversights and shortcomings when they aren't literally everywhere you look.

in general i think montréal really does have to be a major exception to a lot of this!

there is like. a serious attempt being made to give spaces way more thought than they would previously. even montréal suburbs! big emphasis on third spaces and universal design in what the city is doing right now and i really love it. i assume a lot really is determined on a city by city basis, given that it's so easy for me to think of exceptions. i still do think the idea that its all a bit of a moon culture adds overall though, aand is an overarching trend. it also is like... a lot of the places that are doing things well now, are also places that are older and so have more historic bones, so i feel like my point still kinda applies.

i just wanna talk about how cool the transitway is. it's a oldie but a goldie.

like it's just simply fascinating seeing Ottawa talk about public transport in the way it does, in a north american context. it took buses so incredibly seriously and it really shows. The Transitway as a concept, basically as a stadtbahn but for buses, was also invented in Ottawa I think? and im generally of the opinion that that is probably the optimal way to do bus rapid transit. i'd probably have made it no-frills with simpler stations and less grade separation, and replaced the ultra high capacity routes with express trams, but, wow. the fact it doesn't use trams and has grand stations kinda adds to the charm even if it was very silly and wasteful. id probably use more tram style centre running with stronger signal priority and tram style stations but like idk i kinda respect the absolute gusto of the transitway. and to be fair going motorway speeds on a bus only roadway with no stops is kinda amazing.

oh shit i just remembered ottawa does actually have modern transitway that uses centre running and tram style stops. i love how they use the fully 3D style station map for it like the grade separated stations even though it's at-grade. i forgot about it cus it has... two local routes that stop at it. um. im so sorry barrhaven youre trying so hard

a post publication addendum

2025 06 04

As i've talked to others and talked about this more and more, i've come up with more examples, and have realised some of these may be more signifcant in Canada, due to cultural differences.

firstly, with regards to culture:

Canada acts like a simultaneously very individualistic and communal society. It's strange and rough, but I'd generally say it leans slightly towards the communal end. This communal bend makes it socially undesirable to try and achieve great things, because it disrupts the silent social contract in your community. I think about this a lot with regards to institutional contexts, where folks who push for improving the operations and strive to meet government regulations are seen as disruptive and annoying.

And This One wants to expand this out, and use institutional underachieving as another half assing example. Despite this, Canada also creates a lot of driven people who want to do amazing things, because of the individualistic aspects of society. Striving for positive change is generally seen as good from a distance, but negatively when it actually comes to making changes, at least up and till the changes being proposed are normal and standard in the community. Things only become acceptable once people have pushed hard enough to make them normal, and are therefore the standard in your community, and is no longer stepping out of line.

Canadians generally like to celebrate things they see as morally positive or good, but rarely actually want to deal with it in their own lives, cus that involves disruption.