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This is Twitter

Making a Masters. Is it time to go back to school?

Making a Masters Degree for myself.

open.substack.com/pub/cinqpers...

Broadway Subway Construction - March 2026 YouTube video by StainerTheFirst

In this video is their main subway project, which is running just a little late and over budget, but cost significantly less per km than anything Toronto is building, and will be hugely busy from day 1.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-9E...

One of the most frustrating side effects of the "everyone in Canada is now an expect in high speed rail" is the extremely Toronto-centric "We couldn't get the Eglinton line done, so Canada is incapable of building transit!"

Vancouver has been better at this since '86.

Yeah, but color me skeptical we are going to effectively use digital twins for maintenance when IIRC the overhead maintenance department was writing everything on paper even recently and was having tons of problems. Sometimes you really do need to walk first.

Its one organization with only so many people and resources. While streetcars currently continue to atrophy ridership and are slower than ever, having people trying to "innovate" things for trams that are better done elsewhere feels like a poor utilization of resources.

What can I say, I'm not the CEO

Like I get that nobody wants to be the person to say things like this. But really, can we crawl before we run?

It feels hard to justify spending effort on "drone-based digital twins" when we aren't using switches from this century and streetcars are often 30 minutes apart for no good reason.

High-Speed Rail and Canada's Lost Conservatives. A sad pairing.

Yet another look into Alto in light of yesterday’s… news.

open.substack.com/pub/nextmetr...

With the Liberals not having delivered intercity rail in the last 11 years, and the Conservatives solution being "we just won't build stuff! for *those* people in Ontario and Quebec (the majority of the countries population)" I'm reminded that what I really want is pro-rep.

Thats fair enough!

Yeah but the MTA is gigantic and in the worlds top global city, and they weren't even smart cards!

My fear is that people *aren't* concerned enough

Translink continues to absolutely blow other North American transit agencies out of the water. This is stuff you usually only see in Asia and Europe.

Do any of the services that interview a software engineer and go find them jobs still exist?

That people are dismissing this technology as being not actually valuable and this is blinding them to disruption and impacts it is going to cause.

Part of that is legitimate work replacement "cost cutting", albeit not all of it.

I agree many of the execs are bad

We need better governance. Feels like the most fundamental thing.

Again, this is exactly what a warn against. People suggesting there is nothing real and of value underlying this stuff.

If the AI industry needs AI adoption for things where AI is not useful then it's doa, don't think it does tho

I am concerned that people are dismissing AI purely as "overhyped" and think its going to set us up for some very bad things.

I'm jelly paul

Ok, not clear you read

I'm Concerned About AI. And especially people's response.

I’m concerned about AI. Read my latest article:

open.substack.com/pub/cinqpers...

A big problem with Alto seems to be that they've identified decisions made in CAHSR as problematic, not the entirety of how the Anglosphere and noveau Canada approach transit builds.

They don't only get downside, and the downside they get is minor

We are never going to get high speed rail in Canada if we can't rationally weigh the enormous quantity of urban dwellers who will (largely, but not only) benefit against the small number of rural NIMBYs.

It'll be painful if a small number of rural folks who do not want to see a train successfully derail hsr in Canada, and somehow it is feeling more and more likely

Because the city gov can barely do much more basic things at the moment. The idea that they are going to be able to better manage a low margin business is not very cut and dry imo!