Spacing Saturday

Spacing Saturday is a new feature that highlights posts from across Spacing’s blog network in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and the Atlantic region. Spacing Saturday replaces the weekly features Montreal Monday and Toronto Tuesday.

• An iPhone app developed by a Ottawa local Derek Gour, has become “the fastest and most convenient method to check bus schedules in Ottawa”.  Spacing Ottawa conducted an interview this week with the developer behind the app.

• As she learns to become a four-season “vehicular” cyclist, Spacing Ottawa’s Kathyrn Hunt takes us through the perils of winter cycling in Ottawa.

• Beginning as far back as 2006, the attempt to secure a company to replace Montreal’s aged metro cars has descended into a never-ending legal battle. Émile Thomas makes sense of the complicated “engineering and transit ideological war… brewing in Montréal”.

• A new Quebec reality show which pits Montreal and Quebec City against each other in a hockey tournament, has stirred up local pride.  Local artists in each city have composed a battle song to encourage their teams. Check out Spacing Montreal to hear Eric Lapointe’s ode to Montreal and Loco Locass’ hymn for Quebec City.

• The centrally located  Halifax Commons has become a hub in the daily commute of many Halagonions.  Making the Common cyclists friendly is thus essential to creating a bike-friendly city.  In light of the North Commons Revitalization Project, Spacing Atlantic’s Mark Lasanowski takes us through the numerous ways the Commons is failing the city’s cyclists and what has be done to improve it.

• The historc Africville— settled in the 1840s and populated by a largely African-Nova Scotian population for over 125 years—is vividly remembered in a series of historic photographs from the Nova Scotia Archives.

• Scandal has rocked Toronto’s mayoral campaign. Revelations of an “inappropriate relationship” with a woman other than his long-time partner has led City Councilor and Toronto Transit Commission Chair Adam Giambrone, to drop his bid for mayor just 13 days after announcing his candidacy. Spacing Toronto has been covering the story extensively, read about here, here and here.

•  Toronto’s Ryerson University plans to build a new Student Learning Centre at the corner of Yonge and Gould. Formerly the home of Toronto’s landmark Sam the Record Man store the site currently sits unoccupied. Architectural firms Zeidler Partnership Group of Toronto and Snohetta of Oslo, Norway have been hired by the school to design the new project.

photo of Africville houses from Bob Brooks’ Photographic Portrait of Africville in the 1960s.