Joining Transit!

March 18, 2020March 18, 2020Richard A. 5 Comments

After more than 7 years as a Happiness Engineer / Happiness Rocketeer at Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com, the Jetpack plugin, the Akismet service, and many more), I am moving on to a new role as Project Manager at Transit!

At Automattic, I have been privileged to be part of the mission of Democratizing Publishing; I was also lucky to travel the world. One thing that I always tried to do every time I could (Paris, Buenos Aires, Madrid, etc) was to take public transportation (especially metros!). And my love of public transportation eventually led me to creating the Transit Mapping Symposium (I’m still sad that we had to cancel this year’s edition, but we’ll try again at a later date). So, it seemed only natural that my next move is to something related to that passion. Hence, Transit! It’s the best app out there for trip planning on public transit and other mobility modes around the world.

Even though I’ve been working from home during my time at Automattic, I’ve still used Transit every chance I got. I’ve been a fan of the app ever since I read this 2016 post on how they generate their maps. I try to use their GO function as often as I can; I hope to improve my standings with time!

My GO stats

Transit’s co-founder, Sam Vermette, was kind enough to be our opening speaker in the inaugural edition of the Symposium, and I’ve been in touch with the people there ever since. I guess it was only a matter of time before something like this would happen!

I’ve made some very dear friends at Automattic, but the great thing about working for a company that’s distributed around the world is that now, I’ll have people to visit, no matter where my new role takes me!

I’ll miss my friends in the global WordPress community, but greater and better public transportation and active transportation (also known as active mobility) are sorely needed to fight against climate change; I’m very happy that I’ll be doing my bit to make the experience better and to help encourage people to use those modes of transportation more.

And now, with the crisis and uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 virus (see here the drastic drops in app usage everywhere, a proxy for ridership), I’m even more eager to pitch in and help in any way I can.

Transit Mapping Symposium

July 1, 2018Richard A. 1 Comment

Last June, I went to Paris for WordCamp Europe. There, I met up with Jug Cerovič, an amazing transit map maker, whose maps are truly works of art. We talked about his book and his work, and during our conversation, I said that it would be absolutely fantastic to be able to gather all the people who work in this admittedly niche world of transit mapping, and to share ideas and thoughts on all aspects of it. Jug told me, “Let’s do it!” At first I thought it was a pipe dream, how could we possibly pull it off? But after thinking for a bit, I realized that it wasn’t that far-fetched! Since I knew that I had a 3-month sabbatical coming up this summer (thanks to my employer, Automattic; every employee gets 3 months off after 5 years of service), I had already decided that I wasn’t going to organize another WordCamp, so I knew that I would have the time available to fill the hole in my heart; I really like organizing things! And, I have the skills and experience in event organizing that would make putting a much smaller conference together relatively easy. From Jug’s side, he has the contacts in the field, as well as his own clearly-articulated vision of how transit mapping should progress in this age of apps and smartphones. Lacking both of those things, I needed him to put this gathering together, just as much as he needed me to handle the organizing and logistics. And thus, the Transit Mapping Symposium was born!

After several months of contacting different potential participants, Jug was able to put together a great list of speakers:

Sam Vermette, from Montreal’s own Transit app (which I love!)
Joey Reid, representing the very influential Human Transit, founded by Jarrett Walker
René-Claude Bouchard and Francis Brisebois from the STM
Peter Lloyd, author of a book on the Vignelli NYC subway map
Representatives from Naver, South Korea’s biggest search engine and web destination
Kickmap’s very own Eddie Jabbour
Anton Dubrau, a key blogger on Montreal transit
Representatives from Apple Transit
Jens Unger, a representative from Here.com

Image Upload on 2018-07-01 at 17_40_01.jpg

Eddie Jabbour from Kickmap

Quite the lineup! We unfortunately had a couple of speaker cancellations due to circumstances outside of our control. However, as luck would have it, one of our attendees had flown all the way from Singapore to show us the work on mapping and signage that he’s doing in their transit system, and he agreed to prepare a presentation for us. It was a great way to finish the Symposium; Samuel Lim’s presentation was expertly done, funny, and informative. Thanks Samuel, and thank you to all of the other speakers who attended!

Drinks at the pub after the Symposium ended (photo by Samuel Lim)

So, now the Symposium is over…. for this year! After the success of the event, Jug and I have agreed that we have to do it again. This year it was in Montreal, so next year, we’re going to do it in Paris! See you then!

Projet Montréal

November 4, 2017November 5, 2017Richard A. 1 Comment

Tomorrow is election day in Montreal. Last time around, we elected Denis Coderre, ex-immigration minister, and ex-MP from Montreal North, where I grew up. I didn’t like him back then as immigration minister, and I did not vote him as Mayor. I disagree with many of the things he has done or wants to do:

Formula-E boondoggle, which cost the city a lot of money and a lot of headaches and inconveniences to citizens.
Cutting down over 1000 trees in Parc Jean Drapeau for the construction of a concert venue, which will mainly benefit a private promoter, Evenko.
His fascination with bringing Major League Baseball back to the city (not a bad thing in and of itself!), likely with tax-payer money (which is where I fully disagree).

So he’s definitely not getting my vote this election either.

Today I had the pleasure of briefly meeting who I hope will be elected mayor today, Valérie Plante.

When she first won the leadership of the oppostion party, Projet Montréal, almost a year ago, I didn’t have much of an opinion of her. However, that has changed over the past few months, and especially over the spanse of the electoral campaign. The most important aspect which made her and Project Montréal win my vote, is the audacious idea of a new metro line for Montreal, the Pink Line (la Ligne Rose). The idea of this line is to relieve pressure on the eastern half of the Orange line (and Berri-UQAM station) which are operating at or above capacity during rush hour in particular, and also to serve poorer, dense neighbuorhoods that currently are far from any metro station and which cause long commute times for their residents; in particular, Montreal North!

The Pink Line; opening in 2025?

Here are some fascinating articles about this Pink Line and what it would entail:

Announcement of the project on CBC News
Analysis from CityLab
Analysis from Anton Dubrau, lead programmer behind the Transit app

I look forward to casting my vote tomorrow, and to the future of transit in Montreal!

POSTSCRIPT: She won!!

Nous avons marqué l'histoire. Merci Montréal! pic.twitter.com/QzKShhACLx

— Valérie Plante (@Val_Plante) November 6, 2017

Excited about the future of transit in our fair city!!!!!!

Trees

September 4, 2017September 4, 2017Richard A. Leave a comment

A couple of weeks ago, there was a freak windstorm in Montreal. Winds reached speeds as high as 110km/h in short bursts in some parts of the city (mostly in NDG, but also in St-Henri and a few other parts). These high winds managed to bring down dozens of trees; one large park in NDG was practically ripped apart by the winds. You can see some pictures in this Montreal Gazette story, and in this CBC News story.

Luckily, no-one was hurt anywhere as far as I’m aware. Unluckily, the trees behind my building were some of the ones that took a beating. A mature silver maple broke in half: it’s top half cracked off and ended up precariously balanced against our back staircase. Another tree, which was already leaning a bit beforehand, toppled over completely, but for one thin trunk that stayed put. Other branches from other nearby trees also were broken and fell into the back yard. It created quite a mess.

When the landlord came and took a look, he decided that it was too dangerous to leave the maple trunk just balanced against the staircase, so with the help of a nieghbour, we pushed it down to the ground.

The next day, the tree pruners came to clean up the mess. All that greenery, gone.

Now, we no longer see a wall of green when out on our back balcony; instead, I can see all the neighbours. It’s also much sunnier (and hotter) on the balcony. It’s sad, but such is life. Maybe next summer we’ll plant a tree in the corner to replace the fallen one.

Water Main Woes

August 28, 2016August 28, 2016Richard A. 1 Comment

A couple of weeks ago, on August 13th, a major water main broke in my neighbourhood, Saint-Henri, a few blocks from where I live. We first noticed that the water pressure was low at around 11 in the morning, and when I changed the cats’ water, I noticed that the water was coming out a bit brown. Now, I’m used to this; on our stretch of Saint-Jacques, we have a couple of smaller leaks or breaks a year, it seems. Once it broke in the winter, and the street got covered in ice. They had to send big scrapers to scrape away the ice every few hours, until they could find the source of the leak and fix it. Over 900 water mains break every year in Montreal!

Here’s one that happened also not too far, just a month earlier.

And this one happened just a couple days later.

And another one happened just yesterday on Notre-Dame and Rose de Lima. I can’t find anything in the news about it though, I guess it wasn’t large enough, ha! Here’s a picture of the street this afternoon; they’ve finished fixing it, and I guess they’ll re-pave it tomorrow:

Anyway, the pipe that burst on Saint-Antoine was a 76cm pipe, so, not a small one! Have a look at this gusher:

Some of the theories I read say that they were caused by some work happening elsewhere which increased the water pressure in the mains in my area, and since a lot of the pipes are so old (some are even a century old or more), they just couldn’t deal with the increase in pressure. I’m obviously no engineer, but this sounds plausible to me. When they’ve dug up the road on my street, I’ve seen how some of the pipes are just crumbling.

So, here are some pictures that I took last week, a week after the original breakage:

And here are some pictures I took today:

What a mess. Apparently it won’t even be fixed until the end of this week, as they have to do some work on some parts to get them to fit together properly. Not fun at all. School starts this week, and with school, extra traffic. Our kids’ school bus will have some long detours because of this. Can’t wait for it to be fixed!