February 9th, 2010
Intersections are inherently a competition for space and time. In many places in the world, intersections are still governed largely by the assertiveness of the participants. Crossing the street in many parts of Italy drivers will not stop unless you walk out onto the street. In orderly Toronto, the nature of intersections has been heavily institutionalized and regulated; we expressly decide which parties will have the priority at intersections in the city based on the importance we place on different modes of transportation.
While it is easy to argue that our society gives this priority to cars, Toronto is taking steps, albeit small ones, to shift its priorities and institutionalize intersections where transit and pedestrians are the primary focus.
Toronto began gradually implementing signal priority for streetcars along Queen Street in the mid 1980s and since then has expanded the program to 332 intersections across the city. You will likely have experienced — possibly unknowingly — a handful of signal priority intersections if you travel on the Queen, King, College, St Clair, Dundas, Gerrard, Bathurst, and Spadina streetcars or Dufferin, Jane and Finch West buses. The city has the goal of implementing priority along one route every year and is currently working on Finch East. Bruce Zvaniga, at Transportation Services filled Spacing in on some of the details of how the signals work for transit vehicles.
As a streetcar (or equipped bus) approaches an intersection it is picked up as part of the control system’s loop. Upon detecting the transit vehicle, the system will hold its right of way for two second intervals, until the vehicle has passed. This can last a maximum of 30 seconds. If the vehicle is facing a red light the system can initiate the pedestrian countdown and shorten the opposing green up to 15 seconds.
…continue reading Signal priority: Who gets to go first
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Posted by Marcus Bowman
Categories Intersections, Pedestrian, Traffic, Transit
February 9th, 2010
Good to take an umbrella.
Street Scene will appear each week showcasing the illustrations of local artist Jerry Waese.
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Posted by Jerry Waese
Categories Street Scene, Streetscape
February 8th, 2010
It couldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the city’s swinging right in this election year, and not without reason, given the increasingly perilous state of Toronto’s finances (the gory details of which will be getting a lot of airplay over the next week). But there’s something bizarre about the breast-beating over the alleged dearth of red-meat conservatives in the mayoral race.
Exhibit A: Marcus Gee’s plea in Saturday’s Globe and Mail for Rob Ford to jump into this “lefty” campaign. As a journalist, I whole-heartedly agree with him that the spectacle of a Ford candidacy would be enormously entertaining to cover.
But surely there’s more to this business of holding elections than simply the prospect of nine months of zingers. In our yearning for some blue blood, have we lost sight of that little matter of competence?
At the risk of inviting days of attack on the comment string, I’d argue that three current and former council conservatives certainly have the skills to run the city: Doug Holyday, Karen Stintz, and David Soknacki, former budget chief and currently chair of Parc Downsview Park. You may not agree with them on many points, but they all have functioning brains and understand the issues.
In lieu of these figures, we have Rocco Rossi, whose pronouncements to date make him look more and more like a conservative in Liberal clothing.
…continue reading JOHN LORINC: Conservative yearnings
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Posted by John Lorinc
Categories 2010 Election, City Hall
February 7th, 2010
Below is a repost of my Eye Weekly Psychogeography column that appeared last week. The TTC has, obviously, had a bad few weeks (worse than the US Democratic Party’s January, maybe). That’s no fun for them, but it’s good for the rest of us because it’s a perfect storm of complaint, anger, citizen reporting and an election year that has led to movement on issues that have been systemically ignored for years. Earlier in the week The Star’s “Fixer” was incredulous at Chair Adam Giambrone’s acknowledgment that customer service is a problem after earlier denials and just yesterday TTC general manager Gary Webster released a letter to employees regarding this heretofore elephant in the TTC’s boardroom.
It’s easy to be cynical and wonder “why now” — those of us who have been riding the TTC for a long time have all experienced routine events like drivers leaving a running bus or streetcar to get coffee, and certainly management did too. So, how to manage this perfect storm now that it’s blowing change all over the city? Can it be channeled into someplace not-angry and useful, with long term effect (that is, beyond this election cycle)? Perhaps, as I write below, a TTC Riders Union could fill that void. Responses to this column and the past week’s events-at-large have reinforced my call for an ideologically-free union (with no ties to either side of the political spectrum). On the right we’ve heard the usual tired calls to “crush the union” while the left shifts any blame from workers to either management or chronic funding problems (a problem, yes, but not an excuse for bad customer service and broken corporate culture). Both look at the TTC through ideological goggles and, as I write, a TTC Riders Union can’t do that in order to be successful.
Last year in this space I wrote about quitting my near-decade-long TTC metropass subscription. It was a difficult decision, but the routine anger and frustration I felt using the system was tarnishing my experience of Toronto. As expected, the rider rage is largely gone, because now I can abandon the streetcar stop anytime, as I haven’t prepaid for bad service. Now I walk directly to places two to four kilometres away, without any wait-and-see delay. This also is the first year I’ve continued to ride my bike into January (the warmish, desert-dry winter we’ve been having is, admittedly, helping). Once you start winter riding, it’s easy and it can be all done without looking like a fleece and GORE-TEX Mountain Equipment Co-op gear fetishist.
As I mentioned in that column, my living and doing most things roughly within the old city of Toronto boundaries makes this possible, a luxury a lot of Torontonians don’t have, so my escape from the TTC is not an option for many customers. One letter to the editor in response to that column suggested I was being irresponsible by abandoning the TTC, that I should have stayed and worked to make it better from the inside, as if there is some kind of altruism in submitting yourself to the bad machine for the greater good.
There is hope on the horizon though, and it isn’t Adam Giambrone’s “Blue Ribbon Panel” of experts looking at how the TTC can improve its customer relations. That’s a good thing, certainly, but we all have a hard crust of cynicism when it comes to change happening from inside at the TTC, a bureaucracy that some city hall insiders refer to as (with appropriate apologies to the disabled) the “most autistic of the city’s agencies.” TTC management has a habit of blaming riders for problems (whether subway delays or the removal of the “Walk Left — Stand Right” signs) and now, so does its union.
…continue reading Bad days at the TTC are good days for the rest of Toronto
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Posted by Shawn Micallef
Categories Transit
February 6th, 2010
Why is the night snow tangerine colored?
Street Scene will appear each week showcasing the illustrations of local artist Jerry Waese.
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Posted by Jerry Waese
Categories Cycling, Street Scene
February 5th, 2010
This post is part of a series of articles exploring the Environmental Assessment process and how it’s shaping Toronto. The series focuses on four major developments currently at the EA stage.
Though you may not know much about the person sitting next to you on the streetcar, chances are you have at least one thing in common: you both want to get to where you’re going quickly. Whether we are heading towards Kennedy Station or a revitalized approach to urban transportation, we’re understandably impatient about arriving at our destination.
In the case of a better transit system, each of us is silently groaning, “are we there yet?” And why shouldn’t we? Changes to the TTC will alter our paths and patterns, economic possibilities, and environmental realities in a way that few other projects can.
Like a long ride with many transfers, the environmental assessment process is notoriously arduous — which is why the Ontario Government made the bold move in 2008 to streamline transit undertakings as a unique class of environmental assessments known as Transit Project Assessments.
In this edition of the EA series, I’ll be looking at the Transit Project Assessment process through the lens of the Scarborough-Malvern Light Rail Transit (SMLRT) project. This project, in various incarnations, has been a transit pipe dream since the 1980s. Bandied back and forth for several decades, it gained steam with the Transit City announcement in 2007 and again last year when Toronto’s 2015 Pan Am Games bid was accepted.
…continue reading Environmental Assessment: Scarborough-Malvern’s Transit Projects Assessment
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Posted by Hilary Best
Categories Environmental Assessment, Transit
February 5th, 2010
Bay Street North from Lakeshore Blvd 1926 - 2009
Before and After will appear each Friday showcasing mixed Then and Nows by local artist and Toronto history enthusiast Alden Cudanin.
Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, f1244_it0519
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Posted by Alden Cudanin
Categories Before & After
February 5th, 2010
Only a mere two kilometres north of Meadowvale, in Brampton, is another “lost” village, Churchville. Both communities share a lot in common: both were established as mill towns on the Credit River, both were served by the Credit Valley Railway when it arrived in the 1870s and the Toronto Suburban Railway, which ran from 1917 to 1931. Both are removed from major roadways, perhaps helping their survival.
In “Toronto’s Lost Villages” by Ron Brown, published in 1997 and one of the inspirations for this series, the author lamented that Churchville was about to be inundated by suburban development. Luckily, because of strengthened historical interest, and the proximity of floodplains that restrict new development, it remains relatively intact and somewhat interesting.
Churchville was the most northerly settlement in Toronto Township (which in 1968 became the Town of Mississauga) and is somewhat older than Meadowvale, established in 1815. At its peak, Churchville had several stores, a church, a hotel, mills and other local services. An ambitious network of streets was laid out, some of which do not exist today, but still appear on some maps (such as the Google Map linked above). After a a period of growth, the population level stagnated after nearby Brampton grew larger with the 1856 arrival of the Grand Trunk Railway and designated as the county seat. Many of the stores left, the mill was lost to time, and fire destroyed at least one of the churches.
…continue reading GTA’s lost villages: Churchville
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Posted by Sean Marshall
Categories Brampton, Historical, Streetscape, Suburbs
