City hall blogger—and Informer contributor—Matt Elliott has spotted something that we missed: Rob Ford never signed an official proclamation for Car Free Day. Elliott points out that because the application wasn’t filed six weeks in advance, the mayor can conveniently chalk the missing proclamation up to a paperwork problem rather than his hatred for bikes and pedestrians. But that’s not the most interesting part of the piece. Elliott also provides two long lists that show which proclamations David Miller made that Ford has not, and vice versa. While it seems appropriate that Ford has proclaimed “Red Tape Awareness Week,” given the sheer volume of proclamations we’re mostly impressed that the mayor has free time to do anything else. Read the entire story [Ford For Toronto] »
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Denzil Minnan-Wong sets his sights on the Dundas and Yonge scramble intersection, snubbing Kristyn Wong-Tam (once again)
Pedestrians scramble at the Yonge and Dundas (Image: David Vincent Johnson)
Yesterday afternoon, council announced its latest salvo in the war on the car: Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong is calling for the city to examine the impact of the scramble intersection at the corner of Yonge and Dundas streets.
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Ryerson University students agitated for the closure of Gould Street for years, but it took the front wall at 335 Yonge Street to collapse and come crashing to the ground for them to get their wish. Of course, now that the strip between Yonge and Church is open to pedestrians only, the university wants the experimental pedestrian space to stay that way beyond the official end of the term in September. Ditto the University of Toronto’s road closure for Willcocks Street between Huron and St. George. The locals, and even local business owners, appear on the universities’ side; however, we have to note that city council’s attitude toward pedestrian infrastructure hasn’t been wildly positive thus far. Read the entire story [Globe] »
Kristyn Wong-Tam is pushing an ambitious revitalization plan for Yonge Street—but will it fly at Rob Ford’s city hall?
The Yonge Street strip (Image: John Douglas)
Yonge Street dollar stores, strip clubs and head shops be warned: an ambitious new plan for revamping Toronto’s main drag is looking to erase some of the ramshackle shabbiness on the stretch between Dundas and Gerrard streets, adding wider sidewalks, a narrowed roadway and high-quality retail stores. Spearheaded by local councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, the plan is set to be fully unveiled Wednesday—in the always exciting form of a report—and is designed to look at ways to improve the troubled stretch following a suspicious fire that ripped through a heritage building at the corner of Yonge and Gould in January. The loss of that building served as a wake-up call to businesses and residents, highlighting the fragile and often overlooked history that exists on Yonge, particularly north of Dundas. But while we welcome any changes to the historic street—and, really, it should be one of downtown Toronto’s finest—we have to wonder: will this kind of thing make it past council with the Rob Ford regime running city hall?
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Toronto leads the country in bike-on-car collisions—wait, really?
Cycling in Toronto (Image: Commodore Gandalf Cunningham)
The city recently released a report about last year’s data on cyclist collisions with cars and pedestrians, and the statistics are surprisingly grim. The data reveals that Toronto leads the country’s biggest cities in cyclist collisions, which we find more than a little bizarre. Usually, as more and more cyclists populate a city’s streets, the accident rate drops, not rises (New York and Minneapolis are but two examples). The reason is simple: as cyclists become a predictable part of the local traffic environs, they’re in less danger of being run over. Except, apparently, in Toronto.
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War on the Car: cars still winning, this time in a battle against a Bixi bike stand
Two-wheeled casualties everywhere (Image: Daniel Dale)
We didn’t expect to see the clash between the city’s two allegedly warring modes of transportation play out quite so literally in Toronto’s streets. But, yesterday, a rogue Lexus plowed into the Bixi bike docking station right across the road from city hall. Add some gravy from a nearby chip wagon to the mix and we’d have Toronto’s civic debate—2009 to present—wrapped up in one tidy metaphor.
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Welcome to Toronto the Rude
We swear at each other from cars, bark at each other on the TTC and yell into our cellphones. How a supposedly livable city suddenly turned boorish
(Illustration by Kagan McLeod)
I got into a cat fight the other day at the Bolshoi ballet, one of those live satellite transmissions at my local Cineplex, where people arrive an hour early to get a good seat. The orchestra in Moscow hadn’t yet begun warming up when one balletomane barked at me for sitting in her territory, a 10-seat swath ambiguously marked with scattered scarves and hats. “You can’t sit there,” she said, with surprising nastiness. When I chose a seat farther down the row, she snapped, “That’s taken, too.” Steaming, I moved to a third spot and plunked my bag down on the seat beside me, not to save it for anyone, but to ensure zero human contact after being bullied by Lady Ten-Seat.
Rudeness is contagious. When another woman arrived a minute later and needed two seats, I set my jaw. “You’re not going to move your bag?” she asked, incredulous. “Nope,” I replied. We exchanged sharp words. “I’m tired of being pushed around by your friend,” I finally hissed, nodding at Lady Ten-Seat. It turned out not only did they not know one another, but my newfound adversary had just received the same rude treatment. “Now I’m totally edgy, too,” she confessed, suddenly extending her hand. “I’m Jane. Let’s be friends.” Mortified, I shook her hand, apologized and moved my coat. Then we all settled in to watch Giselle.
I wish such hostile encounters were rare, but it’s hard to navigate the city these days without experiencing friction. At least that’s my observation. Perhaps I’m just a magnet for trouble. Perhaps you, on the other hand, float through winter with people politely stepping into snowbanks to let you pass; perhaps you’ve never been held captive to a cellphone user’s inane conversation on a streetcar. But I say civility is on the decline, and the evidence is everywhere.
Councillor kills Fort York bridge in the latest example of war on “waste”—and impending fire sale of city assets
(Image: Wanda Gould)
Fort York is pretty enough, but getting there is fairly treacherous for cyclists and pedestrians. The city had decided to address that by building an $18-million bridge for the feet-and-two-wheels crowd. When the price went up to $22 million, Councillor David Shiner effectively killed it in a committee meeting on Tuesday night. Shiner, echoing the mayor’s regular refrain, says the bridge is too expensive for the city’s current budget—despite that fact that the city had actually budgeted for it. Call us paranoid, but we think this might be about more than just cost overruns.
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Ford set to kill citizen committees, because he’s all about respect for taxpayers
City hall by night (Image: James Burry, from the Toronto Life Flickr pool)
The City of Toronto has a lot of committees, so it may be tempting to cheer when a small-government mayor like Rob Ford announces he’s going to do get rid of a slew of them. The problem is that he’s not shutting down some committee that spends a massive amount of money—he’s shutting down the free ones. According to the Toronto Star, city workers are recommending that council disband committees that have no budget and are full of volunteers. Suspiciously enough, the committees that staffers say we should axe are the ones that don’t jive with Ford’s agenda—the ones that are meant to give a formal voice to pedestrians, cyclists, Aboriginals and people working to help drug addicts. In other words, the polar opposites of the denizens of Ford Nation.
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Yorkville’s redesign kicks street food vendors off the curb
A hot dog vendor at the safer location of College and St. George (Image: Alfred Ng from TorontoLife.com Flickr Pool)
The costly Bloor Street Transformation Project (BSTP) may have added flowerpots, trees and benches to the widened granite sidewalks on Bloor Street between Yonge and Avenue, but it’s also become yet another reason why Toronto’s street food industry is floundering. Apparently the Yorkville renovation left no room for several street vendors, forcing out eight hot dog stands (some of which have operated in the area for 15 to 20 years), two retailers and an ice cream truck.
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Karen Stintz wants to crack down on bikes on sidewalks
We can’t imagine why Karen Stintz, who’s got work up to her eyeballs with the restructuring of the TTC under Rob Ford’s Transportation City plan, wants to pick another fight. But some councillors are able to multi-task better than us, we suppose. Stintz’s new project is to crack down on cyclists who ride their bikes on sidewalks. She’s requesting ideas on a new approach from police and civic staff.
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How to deal with the Gardiner Expressway: a history of solutions that have never come to pass
Peter Michno's vision for the Gardiner
Dealing with the Gardiner Expressway is never going to be easy. Critics say it’s a costly eyesore that partially blocks access to the waterfront. Boosters say it brings millions of people into downtown. No wonder the Gardiner has inspired so many city planners and architects to make the roadway more palatable to Torontonians. A new idea, reported in the Star today, is to turn it into a giant tube. According to originator Peter Michno, encasing the Gardiner would transform this utilitarian piece of infrastructure into a work of art that would improve aesthetics while reducing traffic noise.
His is just the latest in a series of ideas that have surfaced over the past few years. We thought we’d take this opportunity to review some hilarious, improbable and fun proposals that are supposed to help us start loving the Gardiner.
City unveils new pedestrian scramble intersection
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Score one for the latte sippers: the city sent out a press release this morning announcing that a new four-way pedestrian scramble is going live today. Bay and Bloor, rammed at lunchtime with Yorkville office dwellers and shoppers, will join Yonge-Dundas and Yonge-Bloor as the city’s third pedestrian priority intersection. A fourth, at Bay and Dundas, should be in place soon—that is, unless the scrambles are eliminated in Rob Ford’s attempt to stop that war on the car we’ve heard so much about.
Darcy Allen Sheppard’s dad joins memorial bike ride, calls Toronto “toxic”
One year after his death, friends and family gathered in downtown Toronto to remember Darcy Allan Sheppard, the bike courier killed in an angry confrontation with former attorney general Michael Bryant. In the sweltering heat Sunday afternoon, a few dozen cyclists and couriers came together to remember a friend and bash the provincial prosecutor who dropped all the charges against Bryant. Among them was Sheppard’s father, Allan Sheppard, who had some choice words on the war between transport modes here in Toronto.
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Toronto G20 photo gallery: the eerie aftermath
A collage of the many businesses that had to cover smashed windows over the G20 weekend. Most have already been replaced (Image: Karon Liu)
Before hundreds of bystanders were corralled into a human blockade at Queen and Spadina under torrential rain, the downtown core had a sense of peacefulness, albeit one that was basically forced down with an iron fist. Yonge and Queen streets, where much of Saturday’s riots happened, were practically deserted at noon. Stores were boarded up or closed, the roads were empty, save the streetcars that were running unusually frequently, and the only people on the sidewalks were police officers guarding every city block, tourists and amateur photographers who were weirdly hoping for a repeat of the previous day.
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