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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.
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City unveils new pedestrian scramble intersection
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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Strange bedfellows: with a plan similar to Thomson’s and Ford’s, Rossi turns the subway love-in into a threesome
Strange bedfellows: Sarah Thomson, Rocco Rossi and Rob Ford
It feels like it was just yesterday that Howard Moscoe was whining that none of the mayoral candidates was running as the champion of Transit City. Wait a minute—that was yesterday. But this is almost certainly not what he had in mind: Rocco Rossi is saying we should scrap Transit City and replace it with Transit City Plus—Rossi’s own plan that would put (wait for it) subways all over the city. Haven’t we heard that before, too?
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Turning the Gardiner into a park: an idea becomes safe for Toronto when New York does it first
(Image: Quadrangle Architects)
The Gardiner Expressway is many things: choked at rush hour, the Great Wall on the waterfront and, in many respects, ugly as sin. Last year, Toronto-based Quadrangle Architects proposed doing something about the last part: put a roof on the Gardiner, and then put a park on the roof. The idea, called the Green Ribbon by supporters, has a lot going for it. Boosters say it would cost less than tearing down the expressway, covering the road would keep the city from having to clear it of snow, and the city would have a new, seven-kilometre-long park running from Dufferin to the DVP. All that probably wouldn’t be enough to get an idea like this taken seriously, but supporters have an ace up their sleeve.
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The Ryerson revolution: how the once dumpy polytechnic is redrawing downtown
Sheldon Levy, Ryerson’s fiercely ambitious president, persuaded students, politicians and Bay Street to bankroll his big idea. Now his once dumpy polytechnic is turning into an urban academic force, swallowing up Sam’s and the Gardens and redrawing the downtown
Big man on campus: Levy’s greatest love—after his work and his wife—is his motorcycle. He keeps a picture of it on his BlackBerry (Image: Markian Lozowchuk)
When he was a teen in 1960s Toronto, Sheldon Levy would take the subway downtown and buy standing-room-only tickets at the great arena where Foster Hewitt broadcast from the gondola in the rafters. He was mad for hockey, and the Leafs were in their glory. Dave Keon and Frank Mahovlich were Levy’s gods, and Maple Leaf Gardens was their temple.
Forty years later, when Levy became the president of Ryerson University, in 2005, the Gardens was a silent, empty mausoleum. Levy saw potential in the great hulk on Carlton Street. If Ryerson could grab a piece of the iconic arena, the university would get both desperately needed space and a huge boost to its reputation. Just months into the job, Levy called the head office of Loblaw, the owner of the arena. “You have a building I want,” he said. “Sell it to me.” It was an act of pure bravado. Ryerson, the poor cousin of Toronto universities, had no money to buy the Gardens, much less turn it into the new athletic centre that Levy had in mind.
Loblaw wasn’t interested. The company had purchased the building in 2004 with thoughts of turning it into a superstore. Levy wouldn’t let it go: he invited key Ryerson executives and governors to dinner at his house, where they discussed how the university could get its hands on the Gardens. “Some people were just wide-eyed,” recalls Peter Lukasiewicz, a Toronto lawyer who chairs the board of governors. “I frequently heard from colleagues, ‘Sheldon’s got too many balls in the air.’ ” The idea of getting Ryerson’s name on the Gardens was tantalizing. “People walked away saying, ‘Wow, this is huge,’ ” says Lukasiewicz.
I read somewhere that the buttons at crosswalks in New York don’t do anything. Is the same true in Toronto?
The city’s stoplight buttons haven’t been neutered to the extent of their NYC equivalents, which have been purely placebos since the emergence of computer-controlled traffic in the late ’80s. Here, whether pressing the button is productive or pointless depends mostly on which part of the city you’re in. In outlying areas, impatient pedestrians can take comfort in knowing their button pushing does not go unanswered; the busier roads often get a permanent green until a car appears or someone hits the button. But in the downtown core—south of Bloor between Bathurst and Jarvis—foot traffic is steady enough that stoplight cycles are usually pre-set, so hitting that button once, twice or 15 times in quick succession won’t bring you any closer to a green. Depending on the distance from sidewalk to sidewalk and how well trodden the intersection, the walk signal lasts between 15 and 32 seconds. These cycles can be interrupted only by streetcars, which are equipped with devices that extend the green. But lest you label the buttons totally impotent, pushing them for three seconds triggers an audio aid for the blind—cuckoos for north-south crossings and chirps for east-west—making their presence on street corners not so birdbrained after all.
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