cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/22167250

The Mayor of Calgary, Canada, just received this warning letter

Context

Alberta is a conservative Canadian province that is rich because they extract a lot of oil.

The Alberta Government opposes all measures that could reduce oil-production or reduce oil-consumption. For instance, the Government of Alberta publically protested against the Canadian Government when Canada tried to take measures to reduce plastic pollution.

Calgary is the largest city in Alberta. The city is facing the worse traffic violence in Canada.

Jyoti Gondek, Mayor of Calgary, recently suggested building more safe bike lanes to reduce car dependency. A few days later, her office received this warning letter from the Alberta Government.

  • @[email protected]
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    5910 days ago

    Minister of Transportation doing his best to be in conflict of interest by way of lobby groups.

  • @[email protected]
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    71
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    10 days ago

    You can’t maintain or expand road capacity as populations grow. It doesn’t work. Bigger roads means more cars means bigger roads means more cars, it’s an endless and pointless cycle.

    • @[email protected]
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      1510 days ago

      “Building more roads to solve your traffic problems is like buying bigger pants to solve your obesity problem.”

      And

      “Traffic increases to fill the space allocated for it.”

    • @[email protected]
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      28 days ago

      Interestingly enough, reducing road capacity has the polar opposite effect - demand lowers until it about matches the relative congestion of before.

  • @[email protected]
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    5210 days ago

    I don’t he understands what road capacity actually entails. The space for a car vs the space for a bike. Bikes win the density game

    • @[email protected]
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      2610 days ago

      Ah but you see, cars are the only viable modern transit so we made our model not count bike trips as valid trips and also made our models assume no one will be biking for the next 20 years cause as we keep adding car lanes and increasing lane number and car speeds, cyclists have been decreasing. We also made sure to not even include existing bike routes in our transportation model.

    • @[email protected]
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      1610 days ago

      Idiots like that only see in terms of volume rather than people moved.

      So seeing a traffic jam, which might only have a hundred cars, is like a wet dream to them compared to seeing a thousand cyclists in half the amount of space.

      It’s disturbing that somebody like that could even be in any position of power, let alone ministry of transportation.

  • @[email protected]
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    810 days ago

    Please don’t meet with this person. From this letter alone I assume he doesn’t understand traffic or is, possibly, lying… Which is very unlikely, I am sure.

  • lettruthout
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    1310 days ago

    Interesting folds on that sheet of paper. Somebody showed their respect by making a paper airplane out of it?

  • @[email protected]
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    8310 days ago

    Dreeshen (author of the letter) previously worked on the Trump campaign, though lately he seems not to want to talk about that…

  • Track_Shovel
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    2110 days ago

    Did they make a paper air plane out of that letter? The creases look like it

  • @[email protected]
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    3010 days ago

    The government of Alberta currently has something like 6 open corruption investigation ongoing.

    That’s after they changed multiple laws to weasle their way out of at least 2 more blatant corruption scandals

    • @[email protected]
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      69 days ago

      Which makes titles like “Her Worship” and “Honourable” such bullshit. We should really just get rid of those titles.

  • @[email protected]
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    3310 days ago

    Just one more lane bro. I promise bro just one more lane and it’ll fix everything bro. Bro, just one more lane. Please just one more, one more lane and we can fix this whole problem bro, bro c’mon just give me one more lane, I promise bro, bro bro please! Just need one more lane