The TTC's cost recovery ratio is so high because it is under servicing so many parts of the city. How many cities have bus routes which carry 40,000+ people per hour? Remember that there are many cities in the US building new LRT systems for a total projected ridership of under 10,000 per day...

A couple comments about late night bus ridership: Firstly, ridership is typically uni-directional. Departing from the subway, the bus may carry a decent number of people. At 1 am however, there likely won't be anyone heading back toward the subway in the other direction. Just because the bus...

I wonder if it would be possible to just parcel up these large sites and sell the surplus vacant land to new developers? This would allow the current owners to cash in on the sale of property, and relieve them of the risk of building something new. I don't even think that it matters that most...

In North American terms, I'd say that Toronto is in the somewhat unique position where embracing new streetcar routes would be a step backwards in our course of development. We just didn't experience the hollowing out of our central core and transit system that other cities did, which means that...

I only brought car sharing into the picture because it uses the same pay as you go insurance plan that is mentioned in the article, and it works really well. Let's not turn this into a car sharing versus car ownership debate! Car sharing is only going to be practical for people who live in...

What would be the logic in building an LRT tunnel that permanently ends the Sheppard subway at Don Mills, especially when converting this small segment to a subway would cost about the same? If the Sheppard surface LRT still goes ahead, then fine. I'd just really hope that if nothing else, Ford...

Zipcar is modeled around this concept. Insurance is built into the rental fee, so if you never drive you pay nothing except the dirt cheap annual membership fee. Car sharing is the way to go in a dense urban setting for the odd trip here and there where driving is still necessary.

Less of a fantasy land than Rob Ford's! Transit City is not just going to disappear, nor will Ford magically come up with money out of nowhere to build his pipe dreams. The Eglinton underground LRT will be like a subway, and is far more important than surface LRT on Don Mills, Sheppard, Jane...

Oops, you're right. It's not too difficult to start all three projects at once - it's maybe 1-2 km of subway on Sheppard east of Don Mills, 10km along Eglinton, and 4-5km to STC. At $300M per kilometre, that'sabout $5 billion, compared to the $4 billion in approved funding? Maybe the Eglinton...

Well here's what I would do, and what is probably most politically feasible: 1) All approved Transit City funding, except that going toward underground portions of Sheppard, gets diverted toward underground parts of the Eglinton LRT. Construction starts ASAP. 2) Underground portions of Sheppard...

I would have to disagree. It would have been quite wasteful to have massively overbuilt the Bloor Viaduct in 1918 given that the first subway train would only use the bridge 50 years later. And did we really need the Spadina subway in the 1970s when even today it's not at capacity? However, I...

I have relatives that live there. Usually visit once every 2 weeks or so. The mix of residents is no different from any other older high rise building in the Bloor/St. Clair/Eglinton corridor up Yonge. Lots of older people who have lived there for decades, plus a mix of young professionals with...

The renderings are nice and all, but I'm admittedly not a huge fan of so drastically changing the appearance of such prominent buildings. These buildings are the First Canadian Place of midtown, and especially because the towers aren't even ugly, I think that the height increase should mirror...

No need to feel so strongly about this issue! When taken at face value, this guy's apparent nap perfectly exemplified what the public was already angry about, and it occurred at a time when the level of anger was at its peak. Without knowing any better, there couldn't have been a more perfect...

The average person wants a house and yard, but also a vibrant neighbourhood with trees, parks, and a main street they can walk to. Land value isn't high in the city "just because," it's high because is has the types of neighbourhoods that people most want to live in, which interestingly could...

This is a stereotype. No one likes trundling along Queen Street at 5 km/hr on a streetcar, nor the ridiculous stop spacing on the Spadina streetcar. There's a reason why people pay a premium to live on subway lines but not streetcar or bus routes - speed, frequency, and accessibility, none of...

New York roads work. They are crowded and full, but almost always moving along at about 20 km/hr thanks to flawless signal sequencing. You don't have cars driving along at 70 km/hr like you do on Toronto roads when they open up, nor do you have traffic moving at a standstill like you also have...

In its infinite wisdom, the green roof by-law excluded low rise buildings like these, which in my professional opinion couldn't be better hosts for green roofs. Instead, they are mandated on condo roofs hundreds of feet up in the air where they are far less likely to survive and barely going to...

You're one of the few who thankfully mentioned Eglinton. Most people ignore the fact that the Yonge subway is just as bad north of Bloor as it is south. At least at Bloor, lots of space is opened up by the people getting off. Try boarding at Davisville or St. Clair and you're out of luck for...

The opening of the subway brought about a massive change in the way people got around the city. No doubt it impacted peoples' shopping behaviour as well. But now that the subway has solidified its role in the transportation network, you can be certain that the same decline in business would...