Edmonton's 'war on the car' is a dog whistle / March 14, 2017 by Tim Querengesser

Hear that? It's the Edmonton Journal whistling for a bunch of dogs, throwing us another chapter in the bunk narrative of motorists versus pedestrians and cyclists.

On Monday, the Journal editorial board argued that the city's proposed changes to the west end of Jasper Avenue suggest it has the "unspoken goal" of making driving a private automobile so frustrating that motorists just give up.

The suggestion riles up a huge majority of Edmonton residents, so bravo, Journal editorial writers. These residents are forced to drive because, well, Edmonton has outsourced mobility to the private automobile in this city on a scale other Canadian cities have recognized is unsustainable.

But the rile up is based on pure fiction — that giving an inch to pedestrians and cyclists means taking it from motorists.

Not true.

The proposed changes to Jasper Avenue's west end — narrower lanes, transit buses sharing lanes with other vehicles and the overkill third lane being converted to event space and parking (though, let's be honest, the city hopes it'll be parking) — are all built around preserving Jasper as a vehicle-flow conduit.

If you've been to the many open houses on the re-envisioning of Jasper Avenue project, you'll have heard from the overwhelming majority who come out and tell the polite, if potentially frightened city planners, that what they want is a street that does what the Journal editorial writers seem to think is impossible: a street that both offers a place that's inviting and safe to be a pedestrian, while also allowing motorists to flow through their neighbourhoods.

It isn't impossible. That's the false premise this argument is built upon.

Why? It's all about size.

Edmonton's traffic lanes are among the widest in the world. Some are wider than fourteen-and-a-half feet. The emerging '10 not 12' movement in the United States is using hard, scientific research to back up the assertion that reducing lane width slows traffic to a speed that sees more pedestrians survive when struck by motorists, but also allows traffic lights to be timed more effectively to ensure traffic continues to flow while also allowing pedestrians increased safety.

There is a win win in this thinking. Jasper Avenue could be a place where multiple forms of mobility exist, rather than just one dominant one, with all other users risking their lives to exist there, as is the current case.

What needs to change most isn't Jasper Avenue, though. It's our mentality. We continue to live in the false idea of road scarcity. Any change, so goes this thinking, threatens the status quo, threatens the entitled right we have to drive without delay.

We can re-invent Jasper Avenue to be more pedestrian friendly. Shops along the avenue will thrive, since pedestrians spend more time (and money) than do motorists driving through an area on their way to somewhere else. A sense of place will return to a street we talk of as our 'Main Street' but is something of a hybrid between a freeway and a pedestrian mall.

The war on the car is a false conversation in Edmonton. The war was fought. The car won. All the rest of us are asking for with projects like changes to Jasper Avenue is simple co-existence.

* Full disclosure: I was nearly hit by the driver of an Edmonton Transit bus on Jasper Ave. this morning. I was in a crosswalk.

In praise of hustle / March 10, 2017 by Tim Querengesser

If there's one quality I love in myself it's that I've got hustle.

For the past two decades, that hustle has been of the side-hustle variety. It was a hustle I let loose in my free time while I concentrated on something more central, like a job or university degrees.

But my side hustles haven't always worked out. I had an idea for a television series based on the fur trade that everyone told me they loved, but it's still just that — an unwritten idea. And back in 2011, I had an idea for a book about the future of fertility and the next-generation global family, based in my experience as an only child and my thesis that, despite most of us not wanting "just" one kid, most of the world is arriving at this family size anyway. It's true in China, and in Cuba, and in Israel, and in Italy, and in Canada, and in Japan.

So I flew myself to China for 100 days or so of research on that project. It wasn't cheap. But, like all side hustles, someone who'd decided to devote proper time to their hustle — namely, another writer who was also an only child and also had a global view of only children — beat me to the punch.

She published the book I was hoping to write. My side hustle had failed. Her full hustle hadn't. Lesson: You want something, you have to devote full hustle to it.

In 2017, I'm backing out of the side hustle game and going full hustle. I have no job other than hustle. I have no side projects. All are front-burner items. All are hustle.

This is a terrifying thing to do. I had no idea how I'd be paying my mortgage in March. Thankfully, I hustled up some work and it's paid. Similarly I have no idea where the money will come from in April, either. But the rule of hustling is that it builds off of momentum. In a few weeks of hustling, I'm seeing that grow.

I'm less worried than you might expect.

This is a beautiful feeling, when it works. Where there was once nothing, you made something. And this is the only feeling that makes the hard hustle worth it. A feeling of intense confidence. A knowledge that your ideas can, sometimes, take off.

As I set out on a year of working on a book, it is this and this alone that I needed. Confidence. Maybe the book won't work out. Maybe it will. But without me remembering my hustle, seeing its potential turn into concrete things, like a mortgage that's now paid, I kept the book as a side hustle.

It won't be written as a side hustle.

I hope more people can follow their guts and their natural hustle, too. It's not secure, it's not predictable, it's not boring. It's the speed of life. It's how you achieve that hard, hard thing you keep dreaming of. Hustle.

To hustling.

Thanks to an important woman / March 8, 2017 by Tim Querengesser

Never mind those suggestions for women to hold hands with a man today, on International Women's Day. Men like me should today hold the hands of the women in our lives and thank them for all they've done.

I can't hold her hand today, as she's in Ontario, but if I could I'd be holding my mom's.

She became the first in her family to pursue and receive a university education. She then went on to become a grade-school teacher. For more than 30 years, my mom taught people struggling to read, well, to read.

Even today, when I visit Kitchener-Waterloo, where I'm from and where she still lives, people will hear my last name, ask if my mom was "Mrs. Q," as she was always known, and proceed to tell me how she taught them how to read.

Talk about leaving a legacy.

But it extended far beyond the school.

If you were sick, your family was struggling, you had just experienced hardship, Mrs. Q would be the first, maybe the only person, to drop off a pie or a stew or some other way of letting you know that she was thinking of you and had your back.

As a kid, while some of my friends were shooting hockey pucks against garage doors to burn away long hours of boredom, my mom was taking me to plays or giving me books or buying us tickets for the train to trips to Toronto where we'd explore museums, planetariums and city life.

I am who I am because of those early experiences exploring the world. I will never stop exploring, learning.

She came from a humble place and wanted only to give me more than she had. And succeeded.

She is a woman, like so many, who makes the world warmer and more connected. She gave me life, but also taught me about how to live it—how to always give back.

To women.