Tuesday’s headlines

12 comments

1. i know this is now rhetoric, but i have a hard time swallowing the federal plan for the rail line.

   why does a federal government get to decide how a city gets its transport?

   why isnt money being allocated to union station?

   why is this called a green budget?

   is there any good to come from this rail line aside from the few peterbouroughians who get to use it?

2. Why all the fuss about recycling glass?

   It’s nothing but fused sand. Dump it in a landfill and becomes sand once again.

   Anything else in pointless Green posturing.

3. it depends on if you own land nearby; see stevemunro.ca
   and the print version of the Nat Post Bloor bike lane story had a better picture.

4. $100 million for 903 regular passengers. Sounds like a great use of trainsit resources.

5. The Sheppard subway could be analogous to the Peterborough rail line; conceived with the intension of building transit to service an area we think people will want to develop in the next 10 years.

   Let us further hope that this rail link is not like the Sheppard subway. An obvious political statement that has no real bearing on trends in urban expansion. If that’s the case, then where could this money be better spent?

   If the Peterborough rail link is the Sheppard Subway, then what alternative development is the Eglinton Subway, aka the project we should build? A Pearson rail link, perhaps??

6. Hmm. News items about Bike Lanes belong in the transit category, don’t they? Apologies for being picky.

7. Re Condo development on Bay.

   Shouldn’t Rev. Paul McGill be delighted that thousands of people will become potential members of his parish? What’s more important? The height of his steeple or the size of his parish?

   By the way, isn’t it blasphemous to say ‘Oh my god’?

8. The Sheppard subway could be analogous to the Peterborough rail line; conceived with the intension of building transit to service an area we think people will want to develop in the next 10 years.

   … and coupled with land development plans to ensure that they can. And, hey, look! Dense development all along the stubway’s path.

   Let us further hope that this rail link is not like the Sheppard subway.

   From the train’s standpoint, that’s kind of silly — we want dense development in a train corridor.

   From the greenbelt’s standpoint, however, agreed.

   The Peterborough train just makes no sense.

9. I love how disingenuous the Rev. is. St. Basil’s isn’t set in a rural meadow and threatened by a huge out of scale development. It’s on one of the major thoroughfares of the country, never mind the city and is within 4 minutes of 3 subway stations (Museum, Bay, and Bloor/Yonge). Not to mention that there are tall buildings on nearly all adjacent plots. It’s a very short block to the 55 storey 44 Charles tower of the Manulife center, just across Bay from Polo Club, 1001 Bay, and Sutton Place Hotel (none of which are short by any means), and just south of the 2 Bay Charles Towers, also not the shortest condos ever built.

   This represents the absolute worst aspect of anti-development activism – opposition to all towers everywhere, even infill projects amongst a neighbourhood of towers on a major artery with superlative transit. But heck people call towers proposed in the financial district “too tall”, and there was tons of opposition to other towers within 2 blocks of Manulife, so why should any less idiotic of a reaction be expected here?

10. Disparishun – all I can say is…uhhhh…what??

    Is there dense development along the Sheppard subway. I think the answer to that one is no. Maybe even, hell no! So low is the development along that route compared to “projections” that the subway was up for slaughter during the budget fear-mongering sessions in late summer/early fall.

    My comments are meant to question whether there is planned development to support the Peterborough rail link, not an endorsement for the Sheppard subway as an example of good planning.

    Quite the opposite. The Sheppard subway should be the aborted Eglinton Subway and I’d like to be sure that this new rail link isn’t a similar mistake.

11. If Peterborough is reopened, it does reinstate to passengers a big chunk of the old CP route to Ottawa. There are rumours, not sure how credible, of CP engineers tramping over the bit they pulled up. Having an alternative route to send VIA trains to Ottawa would be good news and the line through Claremont is a MoveOntario 2020 route – just low priority and not beyond the Pickering Airport site.

    There can only be one reason CP are agreeing to this when they have historically been hostile to extra passenger service, and that is that it boosts their cargo business and moves lots of trucks off the highway in addition to the about 180,000 passenger-km/day projected (taking an average round trip of 200km – Peterborough is 273km round trip).

    I hate to say this since this is such a blatantly political stunt, not to mention corporate welfare by rehabilitating tracks for a private company but the ramifications of it could ripple far beyond Jim Flaherty’s long-hoped-for trains to Myrtle – if we’re going to give corporate welfare there are worse people to give it too than freight rail and especially on lines which link Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal. Now if they could just stop scattering containers all over the place (hello CN! twice in a month!)

12. Is there dense development along the Sheppard subway. I think the answer to that one is no. Maybe even, hell no!

    Then, um, think again. Have you been on or around Sheppard lately? Noticed any tall condo buildings springing around there? There are, um, a few. Dozens. With many more in the ground. Culminating towards Yonge Street, where the condo forest heads north and lines Yonge up to Finch and beyond.

    In other news, the east-west buses which double the stubway’s route are among Toronto’s busiest. The Sheppard line’s growth continues even as many of the largest developments built along its route (hello, Cityplace) have yet to come online. And that’s for a short stubway that doesn’t even connect to anything, not SCC (or Scarborough at all) to the east, not the Spadina line in the west, etc.

    So low is the development along that route compared to “projections” that the subway was up for slaughter during the budget fear-mongering sessions in late summer/early fall.

    That Giambrone has it in for the Sheppard line is certainly not open to debate, agreed — hence the no-consultation rush-it-through Transfer City plan which will start by poking a permanent stick in the Sheppard line’s eye. (And not with, say, Eglinton.) Add that to his PR hijinks last summer and, yup, the subway “was up for” all kinds of stuff in TTC announcements.

    The, um, “slaughter” will have to take place more quietly. Death by a thousand transfers…