Vjosa Isai, New York Times:

Some of the most popular bike lanes were making Toronto’s notorious traffic worse, according to the provincial government. So Doug Ford, Ontario’s premier, passed a law to rip out 14 miles of the lanes from three major streets that serve the core of the city.

Toronto’s mayor, Olivia Chow, arrived for her first day in office two years ago riding a bike. She was not pleased with the law, arguing that the city had sole discretion to decide street rules.

Jeremy Klaszus, the Sprawl:

Is Calgary city hall out of control in building new bike lanes or negligent in building too few?

Opinions abound. But with Alberta Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen talking about pausing new bike lanes in Calgary and Edmonton (he’s meeting with Mayor Jyoti Gondek about this July 30), it’s worth looking at what city hall has and hasn’t done on the cycling file.

I commute and do a fair slice of my regular errands by bike, and it is clear to me that seemingly few people debating this issue actually ride these lanes. Bike lanes on city streets have always struck me as a compromised version of dedicated cycling infrastructure, albeit made necessary by an insufficient desire to radically alter the structure of our roadway network. Everything — the scale of the lanes, the banking of the road surface, the timing of the lights — is designed for cars, not bikes.

But it is what we have, and it is not as though the provincial governments in Alberta and Ontario are seriously considering investment in better infrastructure. They simply do not treat cycling seriously as a mode of transportation. Even at a municipal level, one councillor — who represents an area nowhere near the city’s centre — is advocating for the removal of a track on a quiet street, half of which is pedestrianized. This is not the behaviour of people who are just trying to balance different modes of transportation.

Klaszus:

Meanwhile independent mayoral candidate Jeromy Farkas, who was critical of expanding the downtown cycle track network when he was a councillor, has proposed tying capital transportation dollars to mode usage.

“Up until now we’ve had the sort of cars versus bikes debate and I think the way to break that logjam is to just acknowledge that every single form of transportation is legitimate,” Farkas said. “When we tie funding to usage, we take the guesswork and the gamesmanship out of it.”

This is a terrible idea. Without disproportionately high investment, cycle tracks will not be adequately built out and maintained and, consequently, people will not use them. This proposal would be a death spiral. Cycling can be a safe, practical, and commonplace means of commuting, if only we want it to be. We can decide to do that as a city, if not for the meddling of our provincial government.

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CBC News:

All Calgary Public Library locations closed early on Friday after a cybersecurity breach compromised some systems, according to a spokesperson.

All locations were shut down as of 5 p.m.

Between this and the Internet Archive, criminals are picking terrible targets this week. I am not saying there are acceptable attacks, but these ones are particularly cruel.

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Lily Dupuis, CBC News:

Calgary: Blue Sky City.

That’s the new city slogan unveiled by Calgary Economic Development and Tourism Calgary on Wednesday, replacing “Be Part of the Energy,” marking the start of a new era of branding.

Strategists with the groups say this new brand is a nod to innovation — Calgary being a city of blue-sky thinking — and one that reflects all Calgarians.

Richard White:

Calgary tried to rebrand itself in the late ‘90s as the “Heart of the New West.” And when that didn’t work, in 2011 we tried “Be Part of the Energy.” It didn’t work either. The fact is, the best city nicknames are not contrived in workshops and brainstorming sessions, they happen at more a grassroots level or based on some obvious fact. I wonder, “Can a city give itself a nickname?”

Daughter is responsible for this rebranding:

We created a visual language inspired by beadwork, a cross-cultural art form where individual elements come together to form something strong, beautiful, and greater than the sum of its parts — a balance of individuality and collective identity. This is reflected in a dynamic logo system, and a broader visual language of beadwork and patterning.

I do not like linking to hard paywalled things, but Armin Vit of Brand New recently reviewed this new identity and it is exceptionally thoughtful:

I was in Calgary once in the dead of winter for a quick in-and-out trip so I saw a limited range of the city, which felt a little desolate in the 48 hours I was there and it was just brutally cold too. Sunny, though! So I can attest to that. Overall, this helps present Calgary in, almost literally, a new light and it should help in attracting visitors and business or at least consider it as a viable alternative to the more popular Canadian destinations like Toronto, Montréal, and Vancouver.

Even though it intersects perfectly with my local interests and design career, I have been sitting on this news for a while because it is the kind of thing which needs to settle. It is a huge ask to give a city a marketable identity. The most successful of them, as White points out, are given by others or earned, not self-created.

That must have been a tall order for Daughter. Mohkinstsis, and other names for this area before it was colonized, are a reference to our two major rivers and the elbow junction where they meet. Post-colonization, the city was known first as the “sandstone city” and then the Stampede City. “Calgary” possibly traces its name to Old Norse words for “cold garden”. But the city, as Calgary, is relatively new — incorporated just 140 years ago — and we are in the midst of attempting to correct for the terrible legacy of colonizer violence. Wrapping all of this together in a pleasant visual identity to market to tourists is surely a difficult task.

I think Daughter and the others involved in this rebrand have largely succeeded. Past rebranding attempts have centred an outdated cowboy image and our filthy petrochemical industry. To that end, it sure looks a little like greenwashing — or, perhaps, bluewashing. But, while locals like White have reacted somewhat negatively to the change, the more international commenters on Brand New are effusive in their praise.

I think it is an impressive rebrand, though the typesetting of the “blue sky city” tagline looks disconnected to my eyes from the rest of the work. Perhaps this is only a reflection of my writing this under a cloudy sky. Everything in this package positions Calgary as a destination which may be overlooked outside of ten days each July, but it also suggests a nagging subtext: Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver speak for themselves, but Calgary needs to be taglined and positioned. We are a city of a million and a half people and we are not yet acting like it.

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