Misc.

I've known for some time now that newspaper reporters are regular readers of The Rise and Sprawl, but I can't help but wonder if newspaper editors are among the growing number of visitors to this site, since this story was in Sunday's paper, two days after I published this post on Friday morning.

But perhaps that's not any indication, since the Free Press' story was probably in the works long before my post. Also because it unfortunately only mentions "smart commuting's" positve impact on the environment, and not on it's more efficient use of time, space and infrastructure and the more tangible benefits this gives to citizens. Given the emphasis on the issue of "gridlock", you would think that this would have been taken into consideration.
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Speaking of dissonance, its funny to see that in 2002 the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (rightly) believed Winnipeg's then undervalued real estate market was a bad thing caused by stagnation, but in 2006, they found Winnipeg's improving real estate market as a bad thing caused by land use planning.

Still, it's better then their belief that helping low income people own financially onerous, continually devaluing automobiles would be good policy.
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Dallas Hansen wrote an excellent article on the inability to build anything in Winnipeg that can capture the essence--the scale, the geometry, etc.--of traditional architecture, though other cities like Chicago (to which we once famously aspired to) seem to pull it off quite nicely.
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