The magic room was a community effort, maintained by many residents volunteering their time to keep it well organised and running smoothly. I often saw my neighbour, Wendy Showyin, when I stopped by.
"Over the last year, our committee set out to learn about asset management and the state of one of our most important assets, which is our streets and our roads. We learned that our streets are riddled with potholes, and many of the streets are failing. The condition has worsened over the last five years. We learned that if we do not act now to address the degradation of our streets, it will continue to worsen."
The larger share of the order consists of 200 Scania intercity buses equipped with CNG fuel systems designed for extended range, allocated to services within the Paris region.
The real problem is infrastructure, not vehicle safety. Roadways are open systems with infinite variables—weather, pedestrians, distracted drivers, and aging infrastructure. Communication between vehicles is minimal, and infrastructure is largely silent—and in that gap lies the potential for deadly collisions.
Intercity bus transport in Europe is characterized by a fragmented operator landscape, including a high number of small and medium-sized companies, alongside less standardized operational patterns and frequent dual-use vehicle profiles.
Every city contains two transportation systems. One is the visible network of roads, rail lines, sidewalks, and bus routes mapped in planning documents. The other is the invisible geography of privilege and exclusion embedded within it: the neighborhoods that received highways instead of parks, the communities whose bus routes were cut, the sidewalks that abruptly end at the edge of a district.
