This week’s Satellite challenge looked into the twists and turns at a Toronto intersection.
UPDATE:
Ready to see whether your driver’s instinct led you to the right roads?
Sure enough, the popular vote was correct in pegging this as the intersection of Eglinton Avenue East and the Don Valley Parkway. Check after the jump to find out the answer to today’s bonus riddle.
For this week’s bonus challenge, I said that two things would be missing if I wrote that the picture below showed St. Clare Avenue (indeed, not St. Clair Avenue). Moreover, an extra hint was that Eglinton, York Mills and Finch all have one of these things, while Dundas has both.
Reader Brendan S. certainly knows his way around a riddle. As he identified in the comments, this picture actually shows St. Clarens Avenue at Bloor. Thus, the two things missing are letters: “n” and “s.” That said, many of you approached this by thinking about those visual elements that best define St. Claire Avenue, raising the absence of streetcar tracks in particular and, in the process, turning this into something of an exercise in examining St. Claire’s own visual identity.
Thanks for voting, and tune in next week for another Satellite challenge!
8 comments
That picture doesn’t show St. Claire’s streetcar tracks. I’m guessing that’s one of the things missing, because Dundas has streetcars, and you say that Dundas has both of the missing things.
… Is this the right approach to the riddle?
Subway and streetcar?
The street in the second image is Bloor at Lansdowne. I’m guessing one of the things that prevent it from pretending to be St. Clair is a surface transit route or routes.
Depending on the interpretation of a street “having it” and things being “missing”, you could claim that Dundas and St. Clair have both bus and streetcar service (albeit largely non-overlapping), Finch, Eglinton, and York Mills have just bus service, and Bloor has neither.
This is an intersection of Bloor and Lansdowne.
The streetcar tracks are missing. Not sure about the other one.
I think we should be able to figure this out from the picture. (Although it’s a pretty small picture….squint squint.)
There are no streetcar tracks, which I would figure is the one thing that Dundas has that the others don’t.
However, I’m a bit stymied by what I see in the picture, trying to find something lacking here that Dundas, Eglinton, York Mills, and Finch all have. Not a subway station, I don’t think, because it all depends on where you take the picture.
On street bike lanes? Nope. Only Dundas St. East has those. Off-street bike lanes? West end of Eglinton is all I can think of. Anyway I don’t think St. Clair (not St. Clare, by the way) has any bike lanes in the streetcar portion, but I could be wrong.
Centre turn lanes? Not on Dundas (unless you’re talking west of Six Points). And anyway not on St. Clair either.
Hmm, it could be even trickier. We are missing two things, call them A and B. Does that mean that E/YM/F all have A, and Dundas has A and B (and the picture above has neither)? Or could it mean that E may have A, YM and F have B, or some other combination?
The worst thing is that anything we DO notice in the picture above is not, by definition, not the ‘droids that we aren’t looking for. Or something.
Basically, if I see a picture of St. Clair, I expect to see an extra-wide street with a streetcar ROW in the middle. Okay, those are not in the picture. However, none of the others has a ROW anyway, and major portions of all of them are narrow. The only “like” streets to St. Clair would be The Queensway and Spadina, far’s I can figure.
That’s none other than St. Clarens Avenue. The missing things are an “N” and an “S”.
There’s St Clarens and St Clair, but there’s no St Claire (although St Clair was named for someone called St Claire).
@Larry – Yep, true. Thanks for the catch. I’ll pretend I was referencing St. Clair E.