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Canadian Urbanism Uncovered

Toronto Tuesday: Vikings, subways and streetcars

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The Vikings have landed, reports Shawn Micallef, and they’re boorish and boring. That’s because they’re hawking mobile phone plans in a roving ad truck, a medium all too familiar to Montrealers who have had to endure such trucks on all of our major streets. While some Torontonians are working to ban ad trucks, similar efforts in Montreal have failed.

Does Toronto’s subway need a downtown relief line? Sean Marshall thinks so. With 68 stations along 64 kilometres of rail, the TTC’s subway system is nearly identical in size to that of Montreal, but its ridership is 1/3 higher than ours, which means it can get very, very crowded. Marshall details the history of plans to build a third downtown subway line to relieve traffic on both the Yonge/University and Bloor/Danforth lines.

Dylan Reid, meanwhile, considers the sounds of the TTC — “the opening door chime, the Star-Trek-style wooshing sigh of the doors opening, a sudden surge of footsteps and voices, then the closing chimes and it starts all over again” — and looks at the work of a composer, So Jeong Ahn, who has incorporated those sounds into her music.

Finally, still on the topic of the TTC, Sean Marshall describes his encounter with the rusting hulk of one of Toronto’s last 1930s-era PCC streetcars — in a farmer’s field more than an hour away from downtown Toronto. The last of the city’s PCC cars, regarded by many as some of the finest trams ever built, and still in everyday use in San Francisco, were discarded in 1996.

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