Ken Greenberg led a very interesting "Jane's Walk" in May 2009 giving a pretty complete overview of the multiple layers of planning that his and other planning consultancies had done for the Lower Donlands area. I'm relying on memory (I really need to go to the Toronto Waterfront web site and...

B-b-b-but it's an oil SLICK, not an oil field! :rolleyes: I mean, I know cities in the GTA desperately need other sources of revenue, but do we really need to start drilling municipal oil wells, even if the local geology offered some hope of discoveries (which I believe is not the case)?!? There...

Not sure which forum is appropriate for this post, but I was struck by a Google Earth application that allows the current extent of the Gulf oil slick to be superimposed on any location on Earth, and the oil slick data is derived from the most recent available at Google's Oil Spill crisis...

The other day I came across a link to the videos of EMBARQ (http://www.embarq.org/en/about/about-embarq) on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/embarq/videos In particular, I thought the one about high speed bus transit lanes in Istanbul had a lot of relevance to Toronto's situation, with the constant...

Someone in another online forum has posted Paula Fletcher's (the local councillor) response to inquiries about the LRV yard location: http://www.leslieviller.com/xn/detail/2762268:Comment:12061: Judging by the map of proposed sites at http://www.toronto.ca/involved/projects/lrv/index.htm...

This is an elegant, straightforward functional design, but don't we want something with a bit more disruptive potential? Not useless curlicues, but something to distract the eye from the monotony of railroad tracks, roads, massive glassy condo blocks, etc., both while looking at it and...

I'm not sure if this particular bridge location can attract the kinds of multiple uses proposed. Will people actually slow down and relax above an active railway corridor? Getting more trees and vegetation into the downtown core is vital, but any tree is going to have to be exceptionally...

It looks wonderful, but as others have mentioned, will there be enough space for simultaneous, safely separated pedestrian and bicycle traffic? Also--already mentioned--the height above the train tracks may have to be increased. Perhaps there is a way to create a gentle asymmetrical vertical...

I've used Teksavvy for the past few years--very satisfactory. The down/up speeds depend on the length of telephone wire between your DSL modem and the phone company's modem: increasingly, the latter is located in a box on some nearby street rather than in the telephone company's local central...

I think the film industry crowd was an early opponent to the original proposal--the whole controversy sometimes sounded like the conflicting ambitions of all the local film studios were the major players. No, I wasn't referring to corner stores (I tend to buy milk at the supermarket anyway)...

One issue here is creating shopping opportunities within the city that do not just cater to the car-driving bulk shopper, with all the land-use consequences that entails (business size, parking space, environmental issues, etc.). Why should I have to walk 1 or 2 km. to shop for food for the...

I don't know how long the URL may be valid, but you can read it at http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/toronto/story.html?id=580843

Fine, the shopping centre may provide jobs to the people in social housing in the neighbourhood--but an exit strategy from social housing? Real apprenticeship type training and jobs in combination with efforts to deal with the school drop-out problem and persistent poverty would be more...

There is a Weston bread factory in South Riverdale (on Eastern Ave) that regularly emits the wonderfully synthetic odour of WonderBread(TM) a couple of times each month, I suppose when they clean the production equipment, and it spreads over the entire neighbourhood like an olfactory...

To your first point, the City restraining a property owner's right to develop land within zoning constraints: the City is doing precisely what its mandate requires, which is to ensure that commercial development within the city meets certain objectives relating to employment quality and...

Indeed, just last Wednesday evening I spent a good 25 minutes being quizzed by a polling company on the phone (I live near the Queen E./Pape Ave. area) about various power transmission line options into the Portlands area: via the Don Valley, or through residential areas (buried HV cables), or...

Good Lord, is Case Ootes actually thinking about the charms of urban design? He's the city councillor who has let a somewhat generic but still good for the Danforth street-scape funeral home (N. side, W. of the Albany Clinic) be razed in favour of a completely non-descript single level Shopper's...

And make sure that there are lanes set aside for all kinds of public transit in the new configuration!

...From the Star, 30 May 2008 See http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/433822

M. Wente's column... ...can be summarized thus: Her neighbours, residents of Leslieville ("NIMBYland"), are all in a lather over the possible arrival of Wal-Mart in their neighbourhood, "they know they are fighting the biggest battle in Toronto since ordinary citizens like them defeated the...