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Tuesday’s headlines

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TRANSIT
• Solution to slushy curbs may be raising the road [ Toronto Star ]
• Building a less slushy intersection [ National Post ]
• Bike lane plan hits bump on road to 50 kms [ Toronto Star ]
• Stolen bicycle viewing ends [ National Post ]
• Want to make a difference for cyclists? Start a war [ Globe and Mail ]
• Underpass will ease the way at Dufferin jog [ Globe and Mail ]
• Steeles in running for T.O.’s worst [ Toronto Sun ]

CITY HALL
• Mayor Miller calls on federal leaders to ante up [ National Post ]
• Reviving old towers a tough sell [ Toronto Star ]
• Wrong kind of tax cuts [ National Post ]
• City tax plan iffy: Study [ Toronto Sun ]

PROPANE FIRE
• ‘Fear’ as gas tanks vented [ Toronto Star ]
• Explosion highlights hazardous substances near school [ Toronto Star ]

HOUSING & DEVELOPMENT
• $4.3M to fix social housing complex [ Toronto Sun ]
• Toronto condo craze cooling  [ Toronto Sun ]
• At this centre, it’s power to the pedestrians [ Globe and Mail ]

6 comments

  1. Bikelanes: now that London, New York, Paris, and every true world class city (no quotation marks needed) are doing for the bike, Toronto is due to ape them and call itself ‘world class’ for following other cities’ trends.

    If only.

  2. Instead of going through all the trouble of raising the street to the curbs, why not just add some drains on the corners?

  4. John Barber (“Want to make a difference for cyclists? Start a war”) is off the mark. In Paris and New York, people have the option of taking an extensive, fast, and traffic-separated rail system as a substitute for car trips; as a result, scholarship has shown that road capacity is almost irrelevant (the Downs-Thompson paradox). In Toronto, there’s no real alternative to the street unless your destinations all happen to be close to subway lines. Until there’s a traffic-separated transit system in the downtown core, taking away street space will make it far harder for everyone to get around.

  5. Another thing that world class cities are able to do, that Toronto has not, is create jobs. The score: Toronto minus 54,000 jobs in the last seventeen years, 905 region plus 700,000. Maybe that’s why Toronto does not want to make bike lanes. They would be much to expensive to stretch out to Mississauga, Vaughn and Markham.

  6. you could easily put a small strip of grated drainage at corners right where the lip of the lowered sidewalk meets the road. it need not be big enough to disrupt pedestrians/wheelchairs/walkers, because the rate of drainage necessary is really small. the key challenge is to provide some sort of outlet that won’t freeze or clog up.

    i think raising intersections is a good idea too, primarily because it would change the psychology of intersection points between pedestrians and cars. vehicles, raised to the level of pedestrians, would feel like they were on pedestrian turf, rather than the other way around. you see this done at some residential 4-way stop intersections around the university of toronto and in forest hill. unfortunately it’s probably not super practical as a systematic retrofit due to the costs.