Glenn Kubish

That is my old Miyata Six Ten leaning against the trash can. This is my fave piece of sidewalk. Behind the white chair I’m sitting on is Transcend Coffee, and behind and below Transcend Coffee is Pharos Pizza. Great Popeye there.  Pharos sat on the corner of 109 St and 87 Ave, and it was west along 87 Ave that we would take Sunday drives with my grandfather in his 1965 Ford Custom. When motoring mattered. He would take us through the University of Alberta campus. Years later, I got glimpses of Athens and Jerusalem there. I saw Shelagh in Dewey’s there.  South down 109 St was Miami Pizza. We’d take food back to J + M’s place and listen to Neil Young.  Across 109 St sits the building that housed the restaurant I had breakfast in the morning Shelagh and I got married. I think. I can’t remember what it was called. Thirty years ago this summer.  To the left of the restaurant building and back 45 years or so was the Kinsmen golf course on the o...

Janette Sadik-Khan is a lawyer. She moves easily in engineering circles. She led the New York City Department of Transportation for six years. There is no necessary reason with that professional pedigree that she should also be able to speak clearly. Lawspeak plus engineeringspeak plus transportationspeak plus zoningspeak can be the deadliest of communication cocktails. Numbed by acronyms, baffled by gab, fogged by vaporous words, listeners are quickly anaesthetized while the elect work their schemes unbothered because un-understood. Sadik-Khan spoke to crowds in Edmonton and Calgary last week. She spun yarns from her storied tenure at NYC DOT. Bike lanes. Bikeshare. Summer Streets. Plazas. A new Times Square. Deck chairs. Paint. Bus rapid transit. A reinvigorated way of seeing public space for people. All the riveting stuff of her book Streetfight: Handbook For An Urban Revolution. Read it! My copy Part of Sadik-Khan's revolution is in language itself. In the bo...