March 9th, 2010
The Toronto Cyclists Union is being honoured in Washington, DC today, they have been awarded the 2010 “innovation of the year” award from the US-based Alliance for Cycling and Walking. The award is in honour of their partnership with Culturelink Settlement Services to promote cycling amongst newcomers to the city.
The program, known as the Partnership for Integration and Sustainable Transportation, includes posters, a cycling handbook and workshops. All material has been made available in sixteen of Toronto’s most commonly spoken languages.
The award recognizes that the program not only brings better transportation options to the city’s newcomers but also promotes an inclusive cyclist movement. Culturelink Executive Director Ibrahim Absiye explains, “In Toronto, 52% of people 15 and older are newcomers to Canada, and green initiatives must speak directly to them to be effective.”
The Bike Union has made a priority of working with other groups in the city to spread the promotion of cycling and bring a more diverse group on board. Kristen Steele, of the Alliance for Biking and Walking cites this a primary reason for the recognition. “We need an inclusive movement if we’re going to be successful in making our communities more friendly to bicyclists and pedestrians. The partnership between the Toronto Cyclists Union and CultureLink is a great example of how to bring people together.”
Photo by Shaun Merritt
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Posted by Marcus Bowman
Categories Cycling
March 9th, 2010
At a packed Board of Trade speech last week, Rocco Rossi vowed that as mayor, he would “put everything on the table” in negotiations with the province over the future of the TTC (and, by implication, its murky relationship to Metrolinx).
Everything?
Rossi seems to be implying that the TTC’s very status as a city agency may be in play if he wins. Rival George Smitherman doesn’t appear to disagree. In an interview with The Star, Smitherman (who’s found religion on the topic of contracting out) mused about outsourcing bus routes to private operators, as is done in London. He’s been vague about the rest of his TTC plans (the precondition to all changes, he said in an email, is the city getting its “house in order”), although he praised Metrolinx and called for more seamless transit within the region in a speech to the Board of Trade last December.
Time to call these guys out. If elected, are they planning to have council ask the province to upload all, or part, of the TTC to Metrolinx? And if so, what are the arguments? And what would drive the province to agree?
Spacing contributors John Lorinc and Steve Munro bring the debate out of the rhetorical shadows.
The Case For Uploading
In the past sixty years, the TTC has served Toronto well, concentrating growth within the former Metro boundaries and driving intensification closer to the core. In the 905, by contrast, municipalities and the province failed to invest comparably in transit, leading to today’s gridlock, productivity losses, and sprawl.
The region’s transportation crisis, however, cuts across municipal borders.
…continue reading Lorinc vs. Munro: TTC 2.0 or TTC RIP?
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Posted by Spacing
Categories City Hall, Queen's Park, Transit
March 9th, 2010
Good sign.
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
March 6th, 2010
Spacing Saturday is a new feature that highlights posts from across Spacing’s blog network in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and the Atlantic region. Spacing Saturday replaces the weekly features Montreal Monday and Toronto Tuesday.
• Spacing Ottawa’s Evan Thornton recently brought along his omni-directional microphone on a walk through the city’s Byward Market and Rideau Centre. Check out Spacing Ottawa for Thornton’s detailed description of the “audio footprints” he captured and to listen to the city’s soundscape .
• Spacing’s Evan Thoronton ways one of a number of commentators invited to CBC’s Ottawa Morning radio show to discuss was to revitalize the city’s “dysfunctional Sparks Street Mall”. Spacing Ottawa hosts links to this lively and productive discussion.
• Spacing Montreal’s Adam Bemma has produced an informative mini-doc on a contentious Montreal proposal that would see a bus corridor run through the city’s historic Griffintown neighborhood. Check out Spacing Montreal for the fascinating video where Bemma speaks with engineer and Griffintown property owner, Sami Hakimand , and L’Université du Québec à Montréal urban planning professor, David Hanna.
• An upcoming community forum will bring together Montreal residents and eight different city organizations to discuss options for Greening the Plateau. The ideas generated at the conference will then “be directed to the [Plateau Mont-Royal] borough council and the newly created Advisory Committee on Greening”.
• The winner of Spacing Atlantic’s “Best and Worst of Bike Parking in the HRM for 2009″ poll have been announced. Check out Spacing Atlantic to see what made the cut and why.
• The Halifax Regional Municipality’s Governance and District Boundary Review, slated to be completed by December 2010, aims to assess the Halifax Regional Municipality’s (HRM) municipal structure and propose changes for the future. Spacing Atlantic’s Emma Felts looks into the public consultation while untangling the many dense issues at stake.
• Josh Fullan, who teaches English and Civics at the University of Toronto Schools (a private high school affiliated with the University of Toronto), organized the Jane’s Walk School Edition featured in the “Walking” column in the Summer-Fall 2009 issue of Spacing. This week he writes a guest post on Spacing Toronto following up on what he and his class observed. Fullan discusses how youth interact with urban space and how to get them excited about the process of community planning and improvement.
• The Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway (DVP), two of Toronto’s most used roadways, are, as Spacing’s Dylan Reid points out “”city assets that don’t earn any revenue but have revenue-generating potential”. Reid muses on how leasing this fundamental infrastrucutre could have the double benefit of reducing car-use in the city (through the use of road tolls) while leading to much needed transit improvements (through re-investing the city revenue generated).
photo of Ottawa’s Sparks Street Mall by Pierre Tourigny
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Posted by Kat Snukal
Categories Spacing Saturday
March 6th, 2010
Last month, I had the opportunity to visit Bogotá. As late as a year ago, I had never expected to visit Colombia, as it was not on my radar as an interesting - or safe - place to enjoy some time away. But a family wedding brought me here, and many of my preconceptions went out the window. The people are friendly, the countryside beautiful, and the security much improved. (It was especially nice to be so far south at a time when even the US south was suffering from a lingering cold snap.)
Bogotá, the nation’s capital and largest city (with a population of about 8 million), is also one of the world’s highest cities, with an elevation of 2600 metres. The city is spread out on a north-south axis, As Bogotá has grown, so has its transportation headaches. Like most Latin American cities (even including those with heavy-rail metro systems), the principal mode of public transit are private minibuses, which travel along all the major roads with the route posted on the windshield, merely a long list of neighbourhoods and landmarks the unscheduled service stops at.
Huge fleets of minibuses, stopping anywhere they are flagged down, aren’t exactly the most efficient mode of transport, though it can be convenient (and cheap) for passengers. Combine those buses (of varying age, upkeep and tailpipe emissions), with trucks, motorbikes, private cars and other street traffic, in a city surrounded by mountains, and you have a recipe for a smoggy, congested, mess. So the city, under the leadership of bold, clever (and sometimes near-dictatorial) city officials began to address it with a three-pronged attack: buses, bikes, and bans.
During the last decade, Bogotá took the lead of Curitba, Brasil, and began rolling out an advanced bus rapid transit system, called TransMilenio. TransMilenio solidified the Latin American tradition of high-concept BRT systems (which has been replicated in Mexico City to augment its already expansive Metro system) with a complex web of routes operating in exclusive lanes and serving fare-paid platforms in simple, modular, stations.
…continue reading Transport in Bogotá: Buses, Bikes, and Bans
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Posted by Sean Marshall
Categories Cycling, Infrastructure, Other Cities, Traffic, Transit
March 6th, 2010
A commitment through the winter.
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, Streetscape
March 5th, 2010
The following is a reprint of my recent Psychogeography column in Eye Weekly. Photo by Smaku.
Toronto is a city of neighbourhoods, we’re told. When they work well, they feel like a small town and, when they work really well, we might feel like Al Waxman in the opening credits of the King of Kensington, walking down the street like we own it. That’s all fine, but it gives us a false sense of the size of the city. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded of just how big Toronto is.
Try standing over an expressway. Anytime is good, but late afternoon when the rush is at its peak is best. The bottom of Dufferin over the Gardiner, right before the Canadian National Exhibition arch, is good, as is the top of Avenue Road where the 12 lanes of the 401 have been called the busiest road in North America. Every second, dozens of individual people pass by, each going to an individual home, some filled with more individuals, each with their own network of friends and coworkers. It’s a web that doesn’t stop growing, and watching the traffic and thinking this way gets overwhelming fast. Where do all these cars park? How many pairs of pants does everybody own? The numbers add up meaninglessly high.
Another rush-hour place to feel this more intimately is the Union Station basement at 4:45pm on any weekday. Try standing still in the middle of the thousands of GO Train passengers. It’s like a flash-flood mudslide and, if you don’t watch out, you’ll be swept up and taken away to Pickering or Newmarket. The mental aggregate of all this is confounding — we can see all these people, but it’s hard to know where they fit into “the city we know.” It’s too much.
…continue reading Islands in the stream of consciousness: the people we never meet in Toronto
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Permalink for Islands in the stream of consciousness: the people we never meet in Toronto
Posted by Shawn Micallef
Categories Behaviour, Culture, Psychogeography
