Seaton will have a lot of the same issues North Oakville had (an orgy of public land taking). The 'model sustainable community' stuff for Seaton is not gonna happen. The current plans show around 55,000 people in detached homes. The first phase includes a power centre (no suburb would be...

Our govermnet may be activist in terms of commisioning award-winning reports, but from what I've seen in the plans for North Oakville and Seaton they'll end up with as much sprawl on their hands as most governments.

I think he/she suggested you read the report with a grain of salt. I'm anti-sprawl (or at least I'm for sprawling intelligently) but I think if Toronto stopped sprawling the sticker shock for homes would be amazing. When I went through the home buying process I was blown away by the price...

No, that's something different. A van pool is a group of people who take turns driving a van that they collectively own. There's no professional driver. For a Toronto context picture a bunch of people who live in Newmarket but work for IBM at Steeles / 404. They would gather every morning at...

Gee, what an unbiased video. Notwithstanding the propoganda, vanpools could be part of the GTA's transport solution. I think only a couple of companies use them (I think Enbridge does), partially because of insuarance issues. They could work well in that they could complement a bunch of...

This story made me miss university. I can't blame the students. They were given a problem and told to engineer a solution. They probably got an 'A'. I was an idiot when I was in school and got lots of A's. Now I'm less of an idiot and I have crushing debt, inlaws and a drinking problem...

I would proposed a system of catapults and nets. It would be way more fun, much better used, and just as wheelchair-accessible.

There's two main reasons. The first is that the City will often say no and developers do not want to win or lose the right to develop based on parking. For all it's big talk about sustainability getting the City of Toronto to grant a parking reduction variance can be brutal. The second reason...

My solution would be to fire the Toronto Star staff person who thought a half-assed idea from a UofT frosh was newsworthy. No offense to the students (they're young) but this idea doesn't make any sense.

If people are really concerned about the overbuilding of parking, look into the City's new zoning by-law. It's the first in around 30 years and for the most part fails to reduce parking requirements for new developments. For example, new office developments downtown toronto will see their...

My beef with the annoucements isn't the transit city part (although I agree it's all about his legacy, I think having the biggest LRT system made Miller feel like a big man at his monthly mayors conferences in Europe), I just don't like hearing political announcements when I'm trying to take the...

Not sure if this is new but the TTC's automated subway anouncements have been replaced with a plea from Miller to save transit city. It's kind of pathetic. Althought I have to admit it's a nice change from the announcements about escalator safety (I didn't think the TTC had a functioning...

This is a regional issue, not a City issue. Any major shift like this would have to be regional, not City of Toronto only. Otherwise, it's basically the City of Toronto raising property taxes to fund regional transit, which won't happen. Do you think if York U could raise $5 million a...

But if the goal of this is to target behaviour, why target retail and office only? Here's some uses that would be exmpted for political reasons: - residential - residential visitor parking (even though it is sometimes pay-parking) - hospitals (hospitals are often the biggest generator of...

- $300 per year for downtown Toronto (which I think has something like 17,000 commercial spaces) gets you $5 million a year and is equivalenet to a $0.50 toll each way. It would be more than that or it wouldn't even be worth doing. - it would be very complicated. There's a mixed-use site in...

I work a lot with City staff and I promise you they could not accomplish this. - the exact number of parking spaces is not specified in zoning by-laws, usually only a minimum, sometimes a maximum, sometimes nothing. Remember, some sites in Toronto were built a very long time ago based on...

I have trouble seeing how a parking tax, spread accross a dozen municipalities with exemptions to residential uses would be easier to implement than road tolls. Even counting the parking spaces accross the GTA would be an enormous logistaical excerice, let alone asking thousands of property...

Pickering too. I think Pickering's sprawl (Seaton) will be bigger than Oakville's. Oakville is 50,000 people and 35,000 jobs, Seaton is 70,000 people and 35,000 jobs. Added together you get a motherload of mini-vans, TGI Friday's, and two-storey brick houses with garage snouts on the front...

I haven't heard anything from the inside regarding a variance for additional height. It may still happen, but there's some challenges: - The city may say no. The project went through a tough design review and the results may have included an informal height cap. Urban design staff were...

Tolling all GTA highways will help the core, because the core doesn't rely on cars nearly as much as the crap they're building in the York / Peel / Durham employment districts. That's where job growth is happening right now and it's based on free roads and abundent, cheap parking. Making...