A couple of months ago I wrote a post promoting the use of Twitter’s Circles. It was one of my coping mechanisms for using current Twitter in its semi-broken state.
Then people started reporting that their private circle posts had were appearing in public timelines.
They were right.
Twitter sent out an email last week acknowledging what they call an “incident.” So that something…
I feel bad if somebody followed my advice to use circles and then Twitter leaked something sensitive.
Sorry.
Mayor Gillingham wants to spend $1,000,000,000 “improving” Winnipeg’s Route 90 (aka Kenaston Blvd) between Taylor and Ness avenues.
The proposal can be read here (PDF, it’s large).
“Improvement” seems to be defined as: a reduction of projected 2041 travel times (by car) by 90 seconds (page 7).
It should also be noted that the goal travel time is of 9.2 minutes is actually 72 seconds slower than the current travel time of 8 minutes. Travel times increase regardless of the capital expended on adding one more lane because induced demand is in fact real. And the proposal does seem to implicitly acknowledge this.
Or…
To put it another way, the Mayor is proposing to spend
$11,111,111 per second
…of travel time reduction. I have to question whether this is a good use of money.
But nevermind that, let’s talk about safety.
The City of Winnipeg has adopted a Strategic Road Safety Action Plan with the (very feeble but very achievable) goal of “…of a 20 percent reduction in fatal and serious injury collisions.” So I was wondering how the Route 90 expansion might fit into this.
The fine people over at MPI provided me with 10 years of collision data for Kenaston Boulevard for the proposed “improvement” area. Keep in mind that these are only incidents that generated a report to MPI, it’s safe to assume that this are all “serious.”
Over the past 10 years, 10 pedestrians have been injured in this “improvement” zone. Or roughly 1 in every 108 vehicle collision involves a pedestrian injury.
I cannot see how adding two lanes (a 50% increase) and increasing the speed limit from 50km/h to 60km/h is going to help bring those 10 pedestrian injuries closer to zero!
The pedestrians crossings at grade throughout this proposal simply are not going to be good enough! If we’re spending $11M dollars per second of car quality of life, surely we can spend a few million dollars to allow pedestrians to cross this pseudo-freeway safely!
Let’s save some money and turn Route 90 into a park!
At the time writing the city is requesting public engagement. Please take some time to complete the survey available here.
For those interested, the raw data from MPI can be found here:
Brent Bellamy suggests that the cost for this project is only a mere $715,000,000. Which brings the per second improvement cost to $7,944,444 🤷♂️
Today was budget day for Winnipeg City Council. Perhaps the most important day of the year. And I watched it so you don’t have to!
Spoiler: it passed 14 – 2 and it’s a huge step in the wrong direction.
There’s plenty of discourse on Twitter (I’d suggest starting with Millennium for All’s feed).
You can watch the entire meeting below.
But it’s over four hours long so I’ve gone ahead and created a table of contents, bookmarking the important moments.
If you’re extremely short on and you only have 10 minute to spare, watch Councillor Allard’s Introduction to his amendment and imagine what a great city we’d have if we had more than one urbanist on council. Or maybe the impassioned speeches by the delegates in opposition to the budget.
Think about what kind of amazing city we would be living in if their positions were flipped!
Note: this was presented “as information” only.
If you live in the following wards, your representative was totally silent during the most important council meeting of the year.
Please think about this when they’re up for re-election in 4 years.
Update: I should note that Councillor Sharma was on leave for most of the day and attended remotely for the vote. She may have had more to say if she was able to be present during the meeting.
A small programming note as they might say on TV or whatever.
I’ve been doing a terrible job sticking to my New Years Resolution to write a blog post every week. Not the biggest deal, resolutions are aspirational.
Anyways, I’ve come up with a new type of content I want to try writing in the coming weeks.
I intend to start posting a roundup of my Twitter bookmarks, focusing on Winnipeg/YIMBYism/urbanism. I find that I come across quite a lot of great content on Twitter, original research and other cool stuff. But due to the ephemeral nature of Twitter it just kind of gets lost.
I’m hoping that by logging these in a property categorized, SEO optimized blog post they’ll be more searchable and easier to find in the future. For example, say I want to find a post about value per ha of a given area of the city, we’ll it’ll be here in my blog, instead of a complicated advanced Twitter search.
Also the results of my car coop experiment will ready next week.
In 2021, I took steps to improve your privacy when viewing my site (read all about it).
Unfortunately, in order to start featuring Tweets on this blog I’m going to want to take advantage of Twitter’s embed feature. The embedded tweets are just so much easier to read.
This means that – on any page featuring an embed – you may be subject to any (undisclosed) tracking that these embeds might include. The rest of the site should still be tracker free and you’re always welcome to use browser extensions to improve your privacy. I’m not tracking anything and I don’t want to know who you are if you don’t want me to know about you.
Sorry. I wish there was something I could do about it without degrading the reading experience.
Update April 10, 2023:
I’ve been seeing some reports that Twitter’s “circles” feature leaking tweets outside of your defined circle. I haven’t seen any evidence of this happening on my account.
Although, I do see the “circles” callout disappearing from my circled tweets (i.e. the appear to be public) after some time. However, these posts continue to be unavailable to the public and in my tests I was unable to see them from alt accounts.
February 2023 is a weird time to write about the now Russian-government-controlled LiveJournal but suffice to say that I spent a great deal of my early 20s socializing on LJ, it was a very important part of the 00s to me.
In this post I’m going to discuss LJ’s “friends” features and how we can make Twitter a little more friendly by emulating LiveJournal circa 2001.
LiveJournal’s friends lists were implemented in a very specific way that I’ve never really see duplicated anywhere else in any social network ever since.
Here’s how friends worked on LJ:
LiveJournal.com basically had two views: your own journal (think of this as the “profile” section on twitter.com) and your “friend feed.” You could browse to another journal (or community) and read its posts in reverse chronological order if you wanted to, but generally you’d spend most of your time on LiveJournal use browsing your friend feed.
The friend feed was populated by reverse chronological posts of all the people (and communities) you followed. Basically twitter.com before it was enshitifed.
Now here’s the killer feature. When you published a post to your journal, you had three visibility levels: public, private (only you could see your own private posts, I think some people treated their LJ as a traditional journal) and finally “friends-only.”
The friends-only posts were semi-private, only logged-in users (not communities) on your friends list could view your “friends-only” posts, they’d show up in their friends feed alongside all the other public or friends-only posts from their friends. [Technically, it didn’t matter if you were mutual friends – as long as you’d friended someone they would see your semi-private posts – but most of the time you would be.]
These friends-only post enabled a really cool asynchronous interaction with your friend groups that I haven’t really seen on any other social network. Also, LiveJournal posts had a robust commenting system enabling your mutual friends to interact with each other in comments on your LJ. [IIRC comments also had visibility levels such that not everybody reading could necessarily see all the comments.]
That’s it, that’s the killer feature right there. Friends Lists.
Twitter circles are essentially the “friends-only” visibility mode for your tweets. They enable you to post semi-private tweets only visible to the accounts you’ve selected (“friended” in LiveJournal parlance).
The only thing that’s missing in order to create the full-cirlce LiveJournal-esque experience is the friend feed.
Luckily, you can create it!
I created a private Twitter list (called “circled”) and added all of the accounts that are members of my Twitter circle. I’ve also pinned this list which causes it to appear as a tab next to “for you” and “following.”
This way I’ll have a section of twitter does a decent job of acting as a friend feed. A quiet little curated corner of Twitter. TBH it’s one of the things keeping me locked in to Twitter.
As an added bonus, Twitter seems to be resisting enshitifying the lists feature. It seems to be non-algorithmic most of the time.
The main downside is having to manually sync my “circled” list with my twitter circles members. But I haven’t found myself adjusting my circles often so it’s not really a major hassle.
If you’re frustrated with the way that Twitter is right now, I’d strongly suggest trying out circles + lists.
I still remember an email I sent to the creator of LiveJournal. I reached out to him about it on twitter a couple of years ago and he actually replied. Like I said in that previous post Twitter is punk rock.
LiveJournal “communities” were also really cool and innovative, but that’s a topic for a future post.