{"id":11071,"date":"2010-05-12T09:00:01","date_gmt":"2010-05-12T13:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/?p=11071"},"modified":"2010-05-11T16:36:38","modified_gmt":"2010-05-11T20:36:38","slug":"whats-in-a-streetcar-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2010\/05\/12\/whats-in-a-streetcar-name\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s in a (streetcar) name?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

As part of Monday’s campaign launch<\/a> to showcase the city’s new streetcar design (to hit the streets in 2013), the TTC asked residents to help develop a nickname for the streetcars<\/a>. This reminded me about what they do in Gothenburg, Sweden (a cool city I visited last spring and found to be rather similar to Toronto). Each Gothenburg streetcar is named after a retired employee of the transit agency (you can see the name “Endre Nemes” in the photo just above the number 357 on the left side near the door).<\/p>\n

Now, I don’t expect Toronto riders would go for something like naming a vehicle after a sleeping fare collector, but which people in our city’s history could we name streetcars after? Maybe one of the vehicles used on the Harbourfront line could be named after Pierre Trudeau who was responsible for providing the initial funding to the Harbourfront Centre in the 1970s; maybe a streetcar on the Spadina line could be named after Bill Davis, the Ontario premier who cancelled the planned Spadina Expressway which allowed Spadina to be turned into a transit corridor instead of a highway; or a Johhny Lombardi-named streetcar could run on the College line which cuts through Little Italy, home of Lombardi’s CHIN radio empire.<\/p>\n

Who are the people you think would be deserving of having a streetcar named after them?<\/strong> And which line(s) \u2014 either current lines or future Transit City lines \u2014 would it run on?<\/p>\n

(I’m aware this kind of a post lends itself to commenters heaping deserved and undeserved abuse our public and political leaders, so let’s try to keep it civil.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As part of Monday’s campaign launch to showcase the city’s new streetcar design (to hit the streets in 2013), the TTC asked residents to help develop a nickname for the streetcars. This reminded me about what they do in Gothenburg, Sweden (a cool city I visited last spring and found to be rather similar toContinue reading “What’s in a (streetcar) name?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1022,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[2300,15008,15006,2243,636,21,2618,2306,15007,995,1295,19],"class_list":["post-11071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transit","tag-bill-davis","tag-chin","tag-gothenburg","tag-harbourfront-centre","tag-ontario","tag-other-cities","tag-pierre-trudeau","tag-premier","tag-sleeping-fare-collector","tag-spadina-expressway","tag-sweden","tag-toronto"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat's in a (streetcar) name? - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2010\/05\/12\/whats-in-a-streetcar-name\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What's in a (streetcar) name? - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"As part of Monday’s campaign launch to showcase the city’s new streetcar design (to hit the streets in 2013), the TTC asked residents to help develop a nickname for the streetcars. 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