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Thursday’s headlines

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TOURISM
• Who will step up to show off our city [ Toronto Star ]
• Learn to love tourists this summer [ Toronto Star ]
• Councillor hopes to flush away Toronto tourism woes [ National Post ]
• T.O. fights to lure in tourists [ Toronto Sun ]

ENVIRONMENT
• In the moth of madness [ NOW magazine ]
• New garbage, recycling bins, coming to Toronto [ CBC.ca ]
• TTC’s hybrids fail to save amount of fuel it hyped [ Globe and Mail ]

NEIGHBOURHOODS
• ‘At home’ in Little Tibet [ Toronto Star ]
• Court site, YMCA could re-energize Etobicoke’s hub [ Toronto Star ]
• Long live the leaning pole of Little Italy [ National Post ]

MISCELLANEOUS
• Panhandling’s labyrinth [ NOW magazine ]
• Pole relocation taking up sidewalk [ National Post ]

11 comments

  1. Since as an ex-pat I am now a tourist myself whenever I visit, I am very glad to see the worries over T.O. tourism getting some press. So shabby without being chic, so boring without anything new or grand to see, so overpriced with the high prices and taxes… why visit? I suspect most tourists come to visit family, but they still need something to see and be pleased with.

    Perhaps the best thing to do would be to send every single politician on a tour of Portland, Chicago, San Diego, etc. to see how to make a city attractive for tourists. Gleaming streetscapes, NO PANHANDLERS, great signage, blooming flowers… anyone reading this knows the list. The problem is that the leaders of the city do not.

  2. I often wonder how many of our local elected officials, policial appointees and city planners have ever lived outside of Toronto or Canada for more than a year. I’d be willing to bet it is a miniscule number. At least in their public comments, their knowledge/interest in cities such as those mentioned above is sorely lacking.

  3. All of these articles seem to forget why people actually visit cities: entertainment.

    And here we are, trying to shut down all the naughtier forms of entertainment, from “massage parlours” to nightclubs, and we don’t even have a decent downtown casino.

    People don’t miss Toronto the Good, they want Toronto the Bad.

  4. All of these articles seem to forget why people actually visit cities: entertainment.

    And here we are, trying to shut down all the naughtier forms of entertainment, from “massage parlours” to nightclubs, and we don’t even have a decent downtown casino.

    People don’t miss Toronto the Good, they want Toronto the Bad.

  5. that hybrid article from the globe makes me crazy. That hybrids should have been deployed downtown and other congested routes on day 1 seems to be news to TTC fleet management and nobody else. Instead they had 25 year old GMs on Bay St where air quality needs the help and conditions suit the hybrid technology.

    Gary Webster thinks that using other people’s numbers to report TTC fuel savings was a “mistake”. If I was a TTC Commissioner I’d have another word for it.

  6. …which raises the question, if even TTC recognizes that the true benefits of the hybrid technology is on stop-and-go downtown routes (see Webster’s comments on the New York tests), then why aren’t they being assigned there??

  7. I think the city needs to sell itself to residents first. How do you expect us to boast about the ROM if admission is $20? (I’m a member, but the ticket prices still outrage me.) How do you expect us to be happy and shiny to tourists if we’re pissed off about transit, air quality, street furniture, and any number of other issues? — not to mention wretched marketing campaigns. The current wails of outrage have a suspicious ring of beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves.

  9. “Perhaps the best thing to do would be to send every single politician on a tour of Portland, Chicago, San Diego, etc. to see how to make a city attractive for tourists. Gleaming streetscapes, NO PANHANDLERS, great signage, blooming flowers… anyone reading this knows the list. The problem is that the leaders of the city do not.”

    Well that’s great and all, but what do you expect us to do about the panhandlers? Round the all up and burn them alive?

    The panhandling is indicative of a social problem, and making panhandlers vanish is just sweeping the whole matter under the rug. No poor people here in Toronto! See, noone on the street!

  10. Ian

    So every city with few/no panhandlers has either (a) no poor people or (b) swept them under a carpet of some kind? (a) seems unlikely for starters. Surely some cities out there fall under (c), i.e. created dignified outcomes for all its citizens regardless of poverty levels.

    There was an extensive documentary on The National about three weeks ago about a US city (pretty sure it was Portland) which have massively reduced their homeless numbers through innovative thinking and cooperation between police and social services – this led a Vancouver delegation to go see what they could learn.

  11. It doesn’t help that an advertising firm is to supply our street furniture for many years to come. Our traffic engineers seem to care about the cheapest solutions for streetscapes and placing precedence on cars. Our planning department is understaffed. The utility companies ruin streetscapes by constantly cutting up small segments of roads and cutting trees rather than burying overhead wires. Bylaw enforcement struggles to enforce postering and billboard laws.

    Politicians are the tip of the iceberg of problems.