Each Tuesday, Spacing Montreal will share with you some posts from our sister blog, Spacing Toronto. We hope it will enable constructive dialogue on the urban issues faced by both cities, though we’ll settle for some witty jibes against la Ville reine in the comments.
Streetcars and LRT: Sean Marshall looks at Toronto’s streetcar system in the context of the light rail resurgence of the past thirty years (he provides some background on modern LRT in an earlier post). As much as Toronto might benefit from its streetcar system—the largest remaining prewar network in North America—they lack separate rights-of-way at priority at intersections, making them much slower and less efficient than they could be.
For the past couple of months, Tammy Thorne has profiled winter cyclists, which can be a pretty cool window on those people who decide to travel by bike even in the coldest, snowiest and most miserable time of year. There’s more of them than you might thing: La Presse reported a couple of years ago that there are as many as 50,000 winter cyclists in Montreal. This week’s profile is of Geoffrey Bercarich, a 23-year-old student.
In “Razing Bishop’s Block to save it,” Spacing editor Matt Blackett ponders the fate of an historic block in downtown Toronto that will be dismantled brick-by-brick and reassembled as part of a new highrise condominium development. He also notes the archaeological discoveries recently made at the construction site, which reminds me of the archaeological digs that routinely precede new condo construction in Old Montreal.