While NOW’s Mike Smith was spending the week thinking about Scarborough (see post below), Eye Weekly’s Chris Bilton took Mayor David Miller’s lead and visited each and every one of Toronto’s 44 neighbourhoods. But while Miller spread his visits over three days in the final days leading up to the November 13 municipal election, Bilton covered the city’s 44 neighbourhoods in 44 hours. You can read his article about the experience in this week’s Eye Weekly or check out his extended notes on the exhausting trip online here.
Also online on the Eye Weekly blog, Eye Weekly city editor and Spacing contributor Edward Keenan will be sharing his observations and insights from Montreal at the Liberal Convention.
Another article of interest this week, is the alt weekly’s editorial on what Toronto’s rapid transit plan needs to actually work. I’m going to quote at length in order to increase the chances that someone at City Hall will take note.
David Miller says the plan is to “make streetcars and buses as speedy and reliable as the subway.” There’s the catch. We support that idea, and we know it is possible, but we doubt the mayor’s plan will make it happen. Because the way Toronto has gone about building LRT lines thus far, at Harbourfront and on Spadina and St. Clair, ignores the lessons of Europe and Australia about what surface rapid transit can be and instead duplicates the model of our existing streetcars with few additional benefits.
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Why, when we decide a surface route will have to stand in for a subway, do we ignore the ways in which it could behave like a subway? Why don’t we have a system of collecting fares that doesn’t involve stopping the car for minutes at each stop. Why don’t we space the stops out to every 500 metres or every kilometre so that the streetcars can speed along as subways do? Why don’t we have a not-so-high-tech system of traffic signal priority that would ensure a streetcar never had to stop at a red light, as they do all over Europe? Why do we make 50 passengers in a streetcar wait while a single driver in a car makes a left turn?
Photo from Eye Weekly
One comment
After reading the eye article, I wondered if there’s any value in having streecars only stop at major intersections, at least during rush hour. Streetcar stops can get silly on some routes, where people load and unload at almost every traffic light. This would probably only work on ROW routes with signal priorities, but it might let streetcars behave more like subways, or an express line.