Pending approval from council, city will start slapping drivers who park illegally during rush hour with $150 fines. The proposal to hike fines from a measly $40 to $60 passed the city’s public works committee by a 3-2 vote and is now set to go before council. But while nobody likes gridlock, and cyclists, of course, will appreciate anything that discourages people from parking in their designated lane, we’re skeptical of the fine’s efficacy. The Toronto Star spoke to one truck driver who said his company thinks of tickets for blocking traffic as “the cost of doing business” (though he did speculate that heftier fines might change that). Meanwhile, a thread on Reddit explores whether fines geared to an individual’s income might be more effective. After all, $150 is basically pocket change to a fat cat in a Porsche. Plus, it’s kind of delicious, in a twisted sort of way, to think about somebody getting hit with a million-dollar fine. Read the entire story [Toronto Star] »
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Rob Granatstein: why the city should sell off its assets—slowly but surely
To close the budget gap, Rob Ford wants to sell city assets. Good idea, bad timing. Even a novice real estate investor knows to fix up the house before putting it on the market
Cities acquire assets for many reasons. Sometimes a wealthy citizen donates a property, as in the case of High Park; sometimes assets, such as Henry Pellatt’s Casa Loma, are seized when tax bills go unpaid. A city grows to meet the needs of its citizens, adding public housing and office buildings, a zoo (or three), convention centres, highways, police and fire stations, parks, arenas, garbage trucks, landfill sites and libraries.
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The last place to get a nice-sized home on a quiet, leafy street for less than $150,000 in the GTA—Twin Pines trailer park
On a bright morning in August, Judi Lloyd drove through Twin Pines with the air of a visiting dignitary. The preternaturally cheerful 57-year-old real estate broker was on her way to list a home. The Mississauga trailer park is located just off Dundas, one of the city’s main arteries. Like all of Lloyd’s visits to the park, the trip quickly turned into a mixture of socializing and networking as she waved to and chatted with residents from the driver’s seat of her black Ford Escape. She gestured at the mobiles we passed, noting the histories and special features of each. “You wouldn’t even know that’s a trailer,” she said, pointing at a 48-by-24-foot mobile on a spacious, pie-shaped lot. “If someone dropped you in there and you didn’t see the outside, I swear you’d think it was a little bungalow.”
1| Bob and Ena Barclay, paid $8,000 for their mobile home 45 years ago
2| Stephen Plume, paid $125,900 for his mobile home in 2007
3| Debi Little, paid $105,000 for her mobile home in 2011
4| Patrick Rostant, paid $140,000 for his mobile home in 2009
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Reaction roundup: wherein reporters ask a number of questions regarding Doug Ford’s glorious vision of the waterfront’s future
(Image: LimeBye)
Late last week, our friends at Torontoist reported that the city appeared to be making a move to seize control of development in the Port Lands, and things have only become more bewildering since then. First, Doug Ford started outlining vague plans for a massive Ferris wheel before he amped up the crazy in a conversation with CBC Metro Morning’s Matt Galloway, adding a monorail and a mega-mall to his waterfront wish list. So before the Fords dispatch Giorgio Mammoliti to distract us, we have a few questions regarding Doug’s grand vision, after the jump.
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What smart, innovative cities are doing to combat gridlock (Toronto not included)
A vanishingly rare occurrence (Image: Half my Dad's age from the Torontolife.com Flickr pool)
Believe it or not, Toronto isn’t the only city dealing with traffic congestion (paging Los Angeles). Big or small, old or new, cities around the globe are afflicted with the same issue: too many cars and too little road. Earlier this week, the Globe and Mail explored some of the more interesting and inventive ways that other cities—including Singapore, Zurich and Bogota—are dealing with their respective traffic problems. Unfortunately, most of the ideas the nation’s newspaper looked at are non-starters in Rob Ford’s Toronto.
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Gravy found? Why Toronto’s daycare for cars (i.e. the Toronto Parking Authority) should get the axe
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In between some of the more outlandish proposals by KPMG that will never be seriously considered (selling the Toronto Zoo, privatizing the public library system), there’s another proposal that actually should be considered: selling off the Toronto Parking Authority, either in its entirety or in part. We wrote about this a little in February, but it’s worth taking a look at—and not for the reasons you might think.
A parking space at the new Four Seasons Hotel that costs more than most cars (hint: we’re talking six figures)
Undeground parking—always glamorous (Image: THOR)
Apparently the market for parking spaces is booming at the moment. Or at least the cost of a spot in the new Four Seasons Private Residences in Yorkville suggests as much. The price tag? A cool $100,000. That’s right—five zeros. It may seem a little much for an uninspiring piece of concrete marked by a pair of white (or sometimes yellow) lines, but it appears that residents are more than willing to shell out the dough. And we guess we probably shouldn’t be surprised, with the likes of Mark Wahlberg and an unnamed international man of mystery—for whom $100,000 is probably pocket change, after blowing $28 million on a condo—moving into the neighbourhood.
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Rob Ford wages his own war on the car—no, really: he thinks cars illegally parked in handicapped spots are bad
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We assumed that Toronto’s war on the car ended when Rob Ford won the election. But apparently the good mayor himself is willing to fight one last battle against the motor-vehicle tribe—namely, city staff’s recommendation that the city lower its fines for people who park illegally in handicapped spaces. And he has some unusual bedfellows this time around.
Vandalism of Liberal signs and cars hits four Toronto ridings
A tire flattened at the home of a Liberal supporter in St. Paul’s (Image: courtesy Bennett campaign)
Until late last week, Toronto had been spared the election-themed vandalism that’s hit other ridings (notably Ottawa, where a Liberal sign had cross-hairs spray painted on to it). That’s all changed over the past few days as Liberal supporters were allegedly targeted in four Toronto ridings: signs were apparently stolen or defaced, cars keyed and tires slashed.
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True grit: “Hurricane” Hazel McCallion’s last hurrah after 33 years as the mayor of Mississauga
While Mississauga turned into a massive city of immigrants, Hazel McCallion remained the same stubborn, penny-pinching mayor. Now, in her final term, her legacy is threatened by allegations of misconduct and a gang of critics determined to take her down
Sweet 90th: In January, a furor erupted over a leaked memo indicating that city hall would pay for councillors to go to McCallion’s birthday gala. The mayor dismissed the controversy as overblown
On a mid-January morning, Hazel McCallion looks out her backyard window and sees blood in the snow. Missy, her long-haired German shepherd, has killed a rabbit. The dog has never done this before, and it strikes McCallion as strange. She furrows her furrowed brow.
This is also the first day the mayor has agreed to let me watch her at work. A dead rabbit in the morning is an ominous sign, but those are everywhere these days. McCallion, who has built a successful career and a city without changing her approach in over 30 years, is now under siege. She’ll be 90 years old in a few weeks—a curiosity in itself—and her peculiar morning is just the start of another day in a year of scandal and recriminations.
I arrived at her 1980s two-storey brick house in Streetsville at 7:30, but she was awake long before—she starts every day at 5:30. She lives alone. (Sam, her husband of nearly 46 years, had Alzheimer’s, and died of pneumonia in 1997.) Her property is surrounded by similar houses. Much of the residential development in Mississauga happened in clusters, repetitive blocks of townhouses and condos, and almost everywhere you go you have the feeling you’ve been there before. McCallion says seven years ago her street ended in a farm. She would walk over to buy eggs. Read the rest of this entry »
Vendors at Toronto’s farmers’ markets may get special parking permits
The farmers’ market at Trinity-Bellwoods Park (Image: Matthew Burpee)
City councillor Mike Layton is sticking up for Toronto’s farmers’ markets. The rookie representative from Trinity-Spadina feels markets should be exempt from a daily charge by transportation authorities in cases where vendors need street-side parking to set up shop. For the past five years, vendors that need parking have been paying an annual “street event fee” of $81.33. Recently, however, city officials notified market organizers that the fee would soon start to be applied each day. At least five park-based markets would be affected by the changes: Trinity-Bellwoods, Riverdale Farm, East Lynn, Withrow Park and Sorauren Park.
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Mississauga freezes downtown development: opposing big-box retail is not just for Leslieville anymore
Downtown Mississauga as seen from Square One (Image: Ian Muttoo)
As Mississauga continues to deal with having few spaces left to develop, we’ve been fascinated to see how the politics of the city would change to accommodate a new reality of rising taxes, more demand for transit services, and questions of how to develop remaining land. The latest revelation is that the city council voted to freeze development in the downtown core, because too many parking-intense big-box stores were on their way.
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Goodbye, Green P? Toronto Parking Authority might become privatized to fill city’s budget gap
P is for “privatization”? (Image: Matt MacGillivray)
With the latest in what seems like a never-ending string of budget crises looming over the horizon, Rob Ford’s office is looking at assets the city can sell to close next year’s gap. One of the assets that the Toronto Star says is potentially up for sale is the Toronto Parking Authority (TPA)—the body that runs the Green P lots and all the on-street parking in the city. Like so many of the proposals out of the mayor’s office these days, this idea merits some scrutiny.
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Disillusionment, thy name is Ford: city gravy hunters find out governing is, like, hard and stuff
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During the election campaign, Rob Ford repeatedly said that there was no question that, if elected, he would be able to find and destroy the ocean of gravy that was flooding city hall. Even right after his victory in the election, he was quoted as saying, “There’s a lot of fat down at city hall, and there’s a lot of waste” when asked about filling the fiscal hole his tax cuts would create. There’s just one problem in the cold light of a February budget meeting: the “fat” and “waste” Ford promised he’d cut just doesn’t seem to be there—at least, not according to the Toronto Star, which informs us that reality is starting to sink in.
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