How younger people in Toronto see transit

Good commentary from next gen Toronto thought leadership on the state and future of the city's transit-building movement. Derek Flack at BlogTO offers a little more reflection.


Hat tip to My City Lives for producing the vid.

Toronto: Balanced and Bolder

Councillor Peter Milczyn issued a research paper (PDF) to inform bolder and more creative planning for the future of the City of Toronto. The Concillor believes his city lags behind such global cities as London, New York, Singapore, San Francisco and Melbourne. A sample of the recommendations intended to help Toronto keep pace:

• Transform active thoroughfares to car-free pedestrian boulevards, shared zones and transit malls.
• Offer land use and housing credits to developers proposing multi-use developments in transit-supportive areas to encourage a balance between employment and residential growth.
• Re-develop "dead" urban space, including alleys, passageways, parking lots, utility corridors, and other underutilized interstitial spaces as active and functional components of the urban fabric.
• Encourage the construction of iconic and identifiable buildings as gateway elements throughout the City.
• Redefine the "base building" and "middle (shaft)" elements of Tall Buildings as a "streetwall zone" and "pedestrian zone", respectively, to reinforce the defining role of the street.
• Establish maximum parking standards within a 500m radius of mass transit stations for retail, office, institutional, industrial, and public facilities.
• Establish a system of Transit Revitalization Investment Districts to encourage density increases, redesigns, and infrastructural improvements in the areas surrounding mass transit stations
• Develop a View Management Framework to support the preservation of significant views and vistas within the urban landscape.
• Develop a detailed food policy for the City to encourage the growth of an accessible, resilient and sustainable City food system.

Tough times Toronto

Ironically, Mio Pupazzo's rant against biking appears on Toronto's MetroActive network. It all reminds me of these hilariously ridiculous clips of the city's now Mayor Rob Ford.

Sherbourne Common opens the ice

Don't mean to crib content from Christopher Hume today. But this is an informative update from the Toronto waterfront.

Ridding Toronto of transit

The opening statement of Christopher Hume's latest column on the break down of Toronto's transit debate: 

By now, Toronto’s transit failure is all but complete. 

Toronto transit rap

Does Toronto care about its history

Kenneth Kidd doesn't pull any punches in his feature about Toronto's surprising lack of concern for preserving historic buildings, and he delivers the blows backed by a forceful quote from a local developer.

There is probably no other western metropolis of the size and stature of Toronto that has less collective interest in its heritage and, until recently, less admiration for the finest architecture of any vintage.

We are a city of immigrants, of course, but so are New York, Chicago and London, all of which venerate their pasts.

Toronto almost deliberately turns its back on all that has gone before. Unlike other great cities, we still have no museum dedicated to our own civic history, nothing to inform us fully of the legacy we inherit.

Instead, we’re prone to a kind of self-flagellation, in which our own past achievements are deemed slight, and current efforts thought to be inherently inferior to anything elsewhere. It’s an equation of self-defeat.

“We live in what surely is the greatest civil society on the planet and we’re building one of the least attractive, least efficient modern cities in the world,” says (developer) Paul Oberman.

The Toronto Star's emerging artist contest...

... was won by Kelly Turgeon with this acrylic painting of city streetcars.

Trains or tunnels in Toronto

Marcus Gee asks if subway spending - vs laying light rail track - is the best bang for Toronto's transit buck. This info graphic illustrates the differences in cost and infrastructures between the two modes in a key corridor.

Toronto is the latest to reject rail

Toronto Star columnist Christopher Hume interviews Councillor Shelly Carroll about newly elected Mayor Rob Ford's abandonment of the Transit City initiative, a move Hume writes is the beginning of The War on the City.

Scrambling in Toronto

The City of Toronto recently established its third pedestrian scramble. City Councillor Kyle Rae explains why.

Sherbourne Common

Toronto recently cut the ribbon on Sherbourne Common at the edge of Lake Ontario, and joined Chicago in substantially raising the bar for urban waterfront projects in the Great Lakes.

Ford un-focus

Toronto Mayor-elect Rob Ford gave a bizarre phone interview with CBC Radio's As It Happens earlier this week. (Listen to Part 1). The Toronist "attempted" a transcript. Hopefully he brings more attention to the job of leading the largest city in Canada (and on Lake Ontario).