It isn’t ”downtown as an active transportation first district” that I called for in April, but it ain’t nothing either: Charlottetown Launching Slow Streets Initiative.

The City of Charlottetown is launching a Slow Streets Initiative to help encourage active transportation throughout the City. Gay Avenue is the first road featured in the initiative with W. Burns Street being added by Friday, August 21.

The designated Slow Streets will allow more space for pedestrians and cyclists by featuring signage and barrels to notify motorists using the road to slow down and be mindful of pedestrians and cyclists that may also be using the roadway. 

Traffic in this area will be monitored and, although it is not mandatory, it is strongly recommended that only local traffic use these streets. Local traffic is limited to any residents who live in the area, those visiting residents in the area, or anyone wishing to access businesses in the vicinity. Local traffic does not include motorists just wishing to travel through the street.

The Slow Streets Initiative is a pilot project which will end in October, when a review will be completed by City staff to determine the effectiveness of the project.

Kudos to the residents of Gay Avenue for holding themselves up as a test case, to Bike Friendly Charlottetown for bringing the idea forward to the Mayor’s Task Force on Active Transportation, and to City Council for coming together to make this happen.

(Photo by Steven Garrity, area resident)

From Belt Magazine, A Night at the Drive-In During a Pandemic Summer: 

A night at the drive-in remains an attempt at unfettered escapism, if we can keep the bumper stickers out of our lines of sight and numb our minds to the occasional too-apt scene. For a moment tonight, as Rocky carries Dr. Frank-N-Furter to the top of the RKO Pictures tower, it works and something happens at the drive-in. For a second, all of us are together, totally. We are seeing exactly the same thing, all at once. It feels so foreign now, this kind of shared experience in real time—and sacred, like a solar eclipse or an inside-the-park home run.

But then, without sympathy, the lights come up, and we are all right back here somewhere in 2020—amid a pandemic summer, in a country fraying at the seams.

The time warp is over.

The Brackley Drive-in has been open all summer with a COVID-accommodating setup; we haven’t been yet, simply because none of the “classic” double bills they’ve programmed have caught our eye. But maybe we should go regardless, for that rare gift of a shared experience.

Peter Bihr writes about The Ryanair Test, suggesting that new technology be looked at through an as-if-operated-by-Ryanair lens:

What would this look like in real life if it was operated by Ryanair? Would it still be cool, or totally suck? Where would all the up-sell happen? How would it be to be blasted with ads while using it?

A similarly helpful test, when we’re formulating public policy, might be to stop to consider how whatever program or service we’re calling for will look like when operated by government.

Not by an idealized utopian government, but by the actual always-partly-broken, powered-by-fallible humans government.

Too often we make the mistake of coming up with plans that assume they’ll be implemented by caring, future-thinking people, skilled in systems thinking, and with the agency to evolve plans as they go. This is almost never the case.

Scrolling through the updated Photos app on my newly-updated-to-Catalina Mac, I came across thumbnails of the sketches I’d posted here earlier. They have a completely different quality once shrunk down like this, and you can almost imagine them being panels in a wordless comic that involves Rob MacDonald, Cherry Valley and the East Point lighthouse.

Something to note about our new refrigerator: unlike every other refrigerator I’ve ever purchased, it came without “butter compartment” in the fridge section and without ice cube trays (and a shelf for them) in the freezer section.

I wonder how these features got designed out: there’s an interesting home economics story to be told there, I’m sure.

We compensated for the lack of ice cube making capability by purchasing a Good Grips No-Spill ice cube tray; for butter storage, we opted to handle this on the outside, and are now proud owners of a Village Pottery French butter keeper, inspired by purchase of same by our forerunning friend Jonas on a visit two years ago.

Around about 6:30 a.m. this morning, with just the earlymost stirrings of the day started to make themselves known, I rolled my head in a way that seemed unremarkable as I was doing it. Until it didn’t feel unremarkable at all, and instead felt like I was on a roiling ocean liner amidst a hurricane: the room was spinning, and I was, it became clear, a victim of “sudden onset vertigo”–BPPV.

I’ve been fooling around the vertigo for some years now (here, here) and I’ve come to classify it into two types: there’s the background feeling of being slightly out of sorts that I’ve lived with unceasingly for a couple of years that appears to be related to the tendency of my eyes to not track properly, and there’s the tsunami-like vertigo I experienced this morning.

Fortunately, because of my longstanding dalliance, I had the steps of the Epley Manoeuvre (mostly) memorized, and was able to deploy it quickly. The positive effects were almost immediate, leaving me feeling less like on a roiling ocean liner amidst a hurricane and more like on a roiling canoe on a choppy day.

Unable to face the notion of sitting in front of a screen for the morning, I called in sick, arranged the pillows on the bed for best anti-dizzying effect, and spent the morning motionless. It helped.

Oliver, bless his heart, brought me lunch in bed. I resisted all urges toward productivity (so what if the office humidity skyrockets to 75% because I don’t empty the dehumidifier: the basement will survive). It was a wise move, as I felt better and better as the day progressed, and, as I write, I feel more hungover than roiling. 

Thank you, Dr. John Epley, for your crafty manoeuvre.

The Festival of Maintenance finds itself in need of maintenance:

We’re now looking to hire a designer who can help us with a rebrand and get people as fired about maintenance as we are.

We’re looking for someone who can help us communicate some tricky concepts — care, repair, shared (and often hidden) labour — through a cleaner, more recognisable brand.

The festival is once of those things that comes along, rarely, that hits almost every single one of my buttons.

We members of the 100 Prince Street household were saddened when the 2020 edition of Island Fringe was understandably cancelled due COVID, and delighted to learn of an Island Fringe side hustle, Pounding the Pavement, that was launched in cooperation with Confederation Centre of the Arts:

Island artists who identify as Indigenous, BIPOC, 2SLGBTQ+, and those with a disability come together to tell their own stories from their own perspectives. Performances are made up of 10-20 minute vignettes that explore people’s journeys of discovery to having their voices heard (be they personal explorations, activism for equality, etc), and presented as dramatic readings of original poetry and plays, songs, dance, and stand-up comedy.

With performances by Claire Byrne, Homemaker, Jay Gallant, Joce Reyome, Julie Bull, Reequal Smith, Sadie McCarney, Tanya Nicolle, and more, audiences will be moved by this experience.

Oliver and I went last night, and it was everything promised. Highly recommended.

Pounding the Pavement runs again tonight and tomorrow night, and you can buy tickets through the Confederation Centre box office. As there’s a chance you’ll be sitting on the concrete steps of the Confederation Centre’s amphitheatre, bringing a cushion is suggested; as it’s two hours long with no intermission, bringing a water is suggested too. The social distancing seating setup is top-flight: ushers were masked, seating spaced laudably distant; I felt in no imminent danger.

My company, Reinvented Inc., is an Island Fringe sponsor.

Island Nature Trust is again organizing a walk, at low tide, to St. Peter’s Island.

I absolutely loved doing this walk last year: if you’ve never done it, I highly recommend it.

Act quickly: only 30 spots, and they fill quickly.

A friend, let’s call him “Bob Gray,” asked for advice on the best way to cycle from UPEI across town to Riverside Drive. I gave him my suggested route:

• Go down the trail from UPEI to the Experimental Farm road (by the beehives). 
• Turn left, uphill, through the farm building complex to Crop Lane, which will lead you to Mt. Edward Road. 
• Cross Mt. Edward Road to Confederation Street, past Parkdale Elementary School. Cross St. Peter’s Road and continue along St. Plus X to Kensington Road. 
• Take a left then a right onto Garfield Street, which will lead you straight to the Riverside Drive trail.

On Saturday, after cycling out to Gallant’s for our smoked salmon bagels, and back to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market for our weekly shop, our next stop was Riverview Country Market, and I resolved that we should subject ourselves to The Bob Gray Way to see whether it actually works.

Here’s the map of our complete 15 km Saturday cycle:

Here’s The Bob Gray Way:

We discovered some pitfalls:

1. Crop Lane is almost impossible to find: it runs in from Mount Edward Road to the Experimental Farm, but in a non-obvious way that doesn’t connect to any of the other farm roads. You can cycle to it by going in back of a large farm building and going along a rough dirt trail.
2. Garfield Street is rocky and sandy, has no shoulder, and vehicles don’t expect to find bicycles there, so it didn’t feel safe to cycle on. As you can see from our route on the map, we departed Garfield and cut through the Liquor Commission and Access PEI parking lots to avoid some of this.
3. The Riverside Drive multi-use trail, which is a great gift to cyclists, is, nonetheless, somewhat harrowing to cycle: while it is physically separated from the roadway, when there’s a large transport truck using its air brakes a couple of metres away from you that physical separation doesn’t feel very comfortable.

On the upside, we avoided the Allen Street roundabout, the tricky Allen Street-St. Peters Road intersection, and Exhibition Drive.

But we had confirmed for us that east-west cycling in Charlottetown remains no easy feat.

As the area north of Exhibition Drive shifts quickly from industrial to residential, we should start thinking more about what the active transportation routes in and out of this area should be, and especially what the best way to safely connect to the Confederation Trail spine is.