There are a whack of articles in the Star today that relate to public space issues:
City councillors gave general approval yesterday for city staff to invite private firms to bid on a 20-year contract to supply the city with all its “street furniture” — transit shelters, litter and recycling bins, benches, bicycle racks, newspaper vending boxes, information pillars, and even public toilets. The city will ask the private bidders to put up the cost of the various items: By the end of the contract, for example, the city expects to have 6,000 transit shelters, each costing about $20,000 to build and install, for a total of $120 million.
Vaughan is going after posters. The city has found a way to take the stick out of illegal advertisements plastered all over city poles and signs — sort of a Pam for spam. “These signs are a blight on the urban landscape,” Vaughan Councillor Alan Shefman said yesterday as city staff sprayed non-stick oil on a street sign to show how it works. Every year, thousands of illegal paper signs, advertising everything from three rooms of furniture for $499 to pest control, flutter from light standards and street signs in city intersections. But now, Vaughan staff has come up with an environmentally safe product that greases up the metal so the advertising can’t stick.
At her first fundraiser as a mayoral candidate, Jane Pitfield pledged to reduce homelessness, make Toronto’s streets cleaner, and throw her support behind the Guardian Angels, a group she says the city needs to combat its crime problem. “I support a Canadian version of Guardian Angels starting, and I applaud our Toronto volunteers who have stepped forward. I would encourage our police chief to work with them. I hope that happens because they won’t be effective unless they work with police,” Pitfield, a Toronto city councillor, told reporters last night.
Greyhound Canada has come up with an $8 million mega park-n-ride proposal designed to make travelling between Toronto and Barrie faster by bus and cheaper than taking GO Transit. The City of Barrie is considering a proposal from Greyhound to build a terminal on the south side of town with a lot large enough to provide free parking for 1,000 cars.
Also read the post below for links to Royson James’s column on the Expo bid and the new airline that will take flight soon from the island airport.
5 comments
Maybe the reason that people aren’t out it droves supporting the World’s Fair bid is a cultural thing.
Time after time, the same tired groups show up looking to make a buck off of a fair, an olympics, some megaevent that will involve lots of consulting fees even if we don’t get the bid. Some of these people bear a striking resemblance to the crowd who think that they own Toronto and can do things like keeping the Island Airport alive.
Meanwhile, the list of things the city really needs, now, today, not in 2015, gets longer and longer. People waiting for a bus in Rexdale are not helped one bit by whether there will be a fair here 9 years from now or not.
For people to get behind their city, they need to believe in their city. The megacity wars, the cuts through downloading, and the forgotten promises at every level of government leave us with a city that many people just survive in. If the city did a really good job of looking after the things people need, then we might have a civic attitude that felt a World’s Fair bid was worthwhile.
I agree with Steve. Royson James’s column puts the cart before the horse; in reality, people will only get exited about the expo if they already believe in their city, not the other way around. His column is also just intellectually dishonest. That Montreal hosted an expo and an Olympics in the space of a decade might have something to do with the city’s “culture,” but it has at least as much to do with the corrupt and autocratic political style of Mayor Drapeau.
Likewise, it’s just not true that “confident, progressive cities” are getting ahead by hosting expos. Most major cities haven’t hosted an expo in many decades (New York, Paris, London, Berlin, San Francisco…) and many others have never played host (Boston, for instance). If you look at the list of cities that have hosted expos in the last thirty years or so, it’s not a very inspiring list. And in most cases the legacy of the expo is mixed, at best.
And finally, there’s clearly something very, very wrong with an argument that tries to present Vladimir Putin’s Moscow as a shining example of a city that has “embraced a whole new era of global co-operation” and is in a position to teach Toronto a civics lesson.
The expo may or may not be a good thing for Toronto. But if Royson James’s arguments are the best the expo boosters can come up with, they shouldn’t be surprised when no one signs up to cheer for them.
“Greyhound Canada has come up with an $8 million mega park-n-ride proposal designed to make travelling between Toronto and Barrie faster by bus and cheaper than taking GO Transit.”
Which is a great idea… until the 400 gets all buggered up with cottage traffic early friday afternoon. Or when a blizzard hits.
That’s the nice thing about rail lines. They’re not full of automobiles.
Why would anyone drive to Barrie when you could take a train?
Why would anyone take the train to Barrie if you can drive?