10 Years of Beyond the Automobile: How it Started, How it’s Going

Beyond the Automobile started out as a simple ploy to get a job. From it emerged a passion for writing, and opportunities I couldn’t have imagined.

Ten years ago this month, I was a mechanical engineering student approaching graduation, pondering what to do with my life. So far, I’d followed my curiosities of physics and thermodynamics, but something was missing and a new itch was forming – an itch that had begun two years earlier when I’d been commuting on the GO train to a summer job at an oil refinery. On one of those train rides, an ad from an organization called Metrolinx caught my eye. I started reading. Suddenly, my years of playing Sim City 2000, my love of biking, and my disdain for car ownership began to make more sense. I began to think that maybe I could make a job out of this.

But where to start? I had no qualifications, after all. A recruiter would look at my resume and think I was a fish out of water. I knew I needed to start somewhere, so I started this blog. Initially called Moving Beyond the Automobile, I started this site to develop and share my thoughts, analysis, and insights on the future of transportation. In June 2015, an ad appeared for an Innovation Intern at Metrolinx, and I enthusiastically applied. While I still wasn’t sure how I’d be received – I had been working as a graduate mechanical engineer now for almost a year – I did my best to promote my interests and passion. It worked, and in no small part thanks to this blog. Ready to take the leap, I gave up my comfortable full-time engineering role for a 50% pay cut and a one-year contract at Metrolinx, and the rest is history.

While Beyond the Automobile started as a ploy to become employed, it made me realize that I really like writing. Developing an audience was slow-going; to this day, my first post garnered only 9 views, and it would be another year before I wrote I wrote a post that reached 100 views (on velomobiles, of all things). In July 2015, I was thrilled to be invited to interview on a local radio show for the first time ever. In September 2015 I began working at Metrolinx and met many influential people; the quality and depth of my writing began to improve, along with my following. My next big post, about the experience of being a bike courier for Uber, reached 2,500 views.

But it was Summer 2017 was when things really took off for the blog. I was on the trip of a lifetime, in the Netherlands completing a masters course called Planning the Cycling City, and began writing about Dutch biking.

Turns out that people like to read about this. My post, “Lessons from Amsterdam: How to make cycling easy and fun” racked up 4,000 views, and my follow-up post, “How Dutch Biking Changed the Way I Ride”, was promoted on Dutch websites and landed me a radio interview with the CBC’s Matt Galloway on Metro Morning. I still remember the excitement and nerves of walking from my Toronto apartment to the CBC building early in the morning that day.

I was forever changed by my experience of cycling in the Netherlands, and I continued to ride the wave. My most popular post to this day was in Fall 2017, “Bike Lanes are Not for Cyclists”, was originally published in the Toronto Star, inspired by the debate going on to make Toronto’s Bloor Street Bike Lane permanent (it succeeded, and today spans over 10km across the city).

2018 and 2019 were slow years for the blog as I went through big personal life changes, first landing a new role at Metrolinx where I wrote the guidelines for bike infrastructure at GO stations, then finished my Masters degree and quit my job to travel the world for four months (including a second visit to Amsterdam). Oh and amidst all that I started the popular BIKE MINDS storytelling series with my friend Michelle, which first lived on Beyond the Automobile and later moved to its own website.

In 2019, returning home from a whirlwind trip, I moved to Ottawa to start my “dream job” at Alta Planning + Design. Five years previous I had fancied the idea of being a “bike planner” but had no idea that it would be possible, and now here I was.

During the 2020 COVID pandemic, I leaned back into the blog, finding solace in writing during a time where I suddenly had a lot more free time and less things that I could do with it. The quality and depth of my writing continued to improve, as I built my knowledge of the field of transportation engineering. My first Ottawa-specific post, a reimagining of Gladstone Avenue, remains one of my proudest posts as I poured hours into the ideas and literally produced concept designs for the street.

The blog’s status was elevated once again in Summer 2020 when I collaborated with the emerging YouTuber Jason Slaughter (Not Just Bikes), contributing script and footage to his video about Dutch traffic lights, which I then wrote a follow-up post about.

In Fall 2020, I collaborated with my friend and colleague Justin Jones on a series about Bicycle Streets, which culminated with us interviewing together on the Active Towns podcast.

2021 was another year of big changes. I followed Justin’s footsteps into a new role at WSP where today I continue to work alongside a team of talented and passionate active transportation professionals.

Another influential change occurred in my life that Fall, when I moved for the first time in my life into the “suburbs”. Topics of speed, safety, and professional responsibility filled my blog as I launched another collaborative series, this time with Dustin Black. I became fascinated with how to make suburbs walkable and wrote a visioning post about the mall across the street from me that snowballed into the creation of the Better South Keys Centre community group, which advocates for progressive, sustainable redevelopment of the mall and has taught me many lessons about how to influence change at the community level.

In October 2021, I became a car owner for the first time in seven years and unpacked the decision in a lengthy post. The experience of living with and without a car in the suburbs taught me first-hand the mobility poverty that we create for people who can’t afford a car and motivates me every day to support these equity-deserving communities through my work.

In January 2022, just weeks before I became a parent, I published my most-researched post on this blog, “The Busway that Ottawa Abandoned”, a fascinating story about community dynamics and planning that included a trip to the Ottawa central library to dig up and read old documents in the archives.

Later in 2022, I started dabbling with creating my own videos, and my first one about how to design protected intersections was shared widely. I also collaborated with local Ottawa icon, Hans on the Bike, on a few posts involving us visiting places in Ottawa and commenting on them. Another milestone occurred in June 2022, when the first bike project I had designed back in 2019 completed construction, making it Toronto’s first protected intersection.

Beyond the Automobile carried me to new heights and thrills in 2023 when I was invited to be the guest speaker at Creative Mornings Ottawa, a TED-style event where I delivered an impassioned 27-minute talk about how cycling can transform cities, including Ottawa.

I’ve now reached the point where I often meet new people who already know of me through my blog. I can’t express how rewarding this is, especially when the person is an advocate or professional who shares that they’ve been inspired by my work. The legacy of Beyond the Automobile is real, and I’m so proud of it.

What’s next? I’ll keep writing new content and sharing new ideas. This post marks the 96th one on this blog, and incredibly I have another 50 draft posts in various levels of development: reimagining more places, thinking critically about stroads, and developing more sustainable communities are all topics I have much more to write about.

For now though, I’m taking a big breath and feeling the satisfaction of creating something that started from a point of joy, opened new career doors for me, and now inspires and motivates others to join the cause. Thanks for reading!