Toronto’s grand LRT scheme, Transit City, appears headed for a premature grave. Almost immediately after assuming his new role as Toronto’s Mayor, Rob Ford declared to the province his intention to kill Transit City and replace it with subway lines. Toronto media has been ablaze with the story since it hit yesterday, but no one...
A couple years back the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) decided to do away with the practice of transit vehicle drivers announcing upcoming stations and stops. It was decided that a GPS-enabled system would instead announce upcoming stations (in the case of subways) and stops (in the case of streetcars and buses) via generic, female, computerized...
The Toronto Star reports today that the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) and a waterfront development agency are at loggerheads over a planned new streetcar corridor. The essence of the conflict is this: The Toronto Transit Commission wants to experiment with track design on a new streetcar route to speed up Toronto’s failingly low streetcar speeds...
A while back I wrote a post soliciting people to contribute their own Cable Propelled Transit conceptual ideas. Aside from some uptake from the good people over at neoHouston, there was little interest. No wonder: I never offered my own conceptual. Kinda’ hypocritical, huh? So, without further ado . . . Here’s how I’d use...
I’ll admit it: One of the things I love about cable transit is the “treasure hunt” quality of the entire thing. It’s a “lost” technology with clues and remnants scattered around the world. Picking those clues up and piecing them together is – for me – one of the most exciting parts of this work....
Last week the Toronto Star carried an article titled Free Metropasses latest Condo Perk. The title suggests a pleasant surprise; a quality gesture designed to enhance the lives of Torontonians. It is a ‘perk’ after all. Problem is, this is no perk. This is a City-mandated program which in essence triples the price of Metropasses for new...
I am decidedly against the City of Toronto’s decision to purchase almost 2 billion one-and-a-quarter billion dollars worth of new streetcars/light rail. And my problem with the decision has absolutely nothing to do with my position on CPT. I recognize that CPT is not a technology for all environs and I recognize that streetcar technology has...
Transit planning is a political act, no two ways about it. And as such, transit is subject to all the bumps and grinds characteristic of political and economic cycles. But unlike smaller scale legacy projects (because, let’s be honest, transit is as much about legacy building as much as it is about transportation), transit is...
It took me a while, but I’ve finally compiled all the comments left online to the Toronto Star article that appeared last month. Here, in a completely unscientific study, I present the results. Most of the comments left could be categorized in one of four ways: This is the worst idea I have ever heard...