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Noooo!!!

Even if it looks real we can't put fake grass outside in place of real grass! It's just too cynical.

Even dry, yellowed, dead grass is better than artificial :S Ok, maybe not. But still; If we can't have grass, we can't have fake grass.

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The city of Toronto's pesticide and herbicide ban has made Toronto a city of weeds. They didn't want to put chemicals on the weeds, but it is okay to put chemicals in our bodies to fight the allergies from the weeds.

Now the weeds are growing so bad, if we did put grass on streetcar right-of-ways, only the action by the streetcar could mow them down as they pass, but leaving the weeds on the sides alone.

Soon as cracks appear on the concrete right-of-ways, the weeds will start to make an appearance. We may have green right-of-ways, but not the kind I would like to see.
 
pesticides do nothing for weeds don't they? don't you mean herbicides?
 
I don't see where streetcars have proven to be catalysts for development.

I hope you mean recently. Historically, streetcars were quite the drivers of which areas developed and how.

PS Asking the TTC bureautechnodolts to get their heads around the concept of regional electric rail is really like screaming at the wind.
 
I hope you mean recently. Historically, streetcars were quite the drivers of which areas developed and how.

That confuses streetcars with transit. Had the options existed, there could have been BRT suburbs or monorail suburbs or trained elephant convoy suburbs...the point is that there was only one transit line connecting an otherwise isolated place with a larger urban place in which everyone in the suburb just happened to work, a context that does not exist in 21st century Toronto (except for isolated suburbs like, say, Stouffville or Bolton).
 
Streetcars As Urban Development Catalyst

I don't see where streetcars have proven to be catalysts for development.

I visited Portland, Oregon and Seattle last month and both of those cities recently developed new streetcar systems explicitly as catalysts for urban development. The Pearl District, one of the areas served by the streetcar system (which is partially funded by the developers), has grown in the last ten years from brownfields to the type of area which Toronto would be very lucky to have develop here.
The city and streetcar company are now planning a significant expansion to the side of the river opposite downtown. The route is being planned almost exclusively as a means of promoting development in the areas it passes through.
 
That confuses streetcars with transit. Had the options existed, there could have been BRT suburbs or monorail suburbs or trained elephant convoy suburbs...the point is that there was only one transit line connecting an otherwise isolated place with a larger urban place in which everyone in the suburb just happened to work, a context that does not exist in 21st century Toronto (except for isolated suburbs like, say, Stouffville or Bolton).

If the internet had been around in the early 20th century, they could have telecommuted.

I did not confuse streetcars with transit. There were alternate forms of transit, for example there was a Davenport railway station in my area, but the streetcar was the primary catalyst for development here. Further, to use my area again, people did not all work in one spot and live in another. The construction of the Lansdowne, Davenport, St. Clair, and Rogers streetcars enabled people to live here and work pretty much anywhere in Toronto. Your argument then, that it was one line serving one community that all went to one place, doesn't hold water. In fact, multiple lines serving multiple different destinations isn't anything new at all.

That aside, you cannot dispute that a large number of neighbourhoods here and elsewhere were developed with streetcars as catlaysts. Did that have anything to do with the streetcar itself? Doubtful, except it was the better option available at the time. You are right that it could have been anything, but it still stands that it was streetcars.
 
Unless suburban streetcar lines were speculative, one can't really prove they were catalysts of anything - particularly when it was almost standard for a new suburban area to get a transit line in its infancy - unless there was an otherwise identical suburb next door that stagnated because it had no streetcar line, and just buses or trains or no transit at all. Urban growth is usually the catalyst for transit development...did the areas stagnate because they didn't have streetcars or did they never receive additional transit infrastructure because they were stagnating? One would to prove this cause and effect if one were to claim streetcars would be similar catalysts today, that streetcars have ingerent advantages over all other transit, which is a central point of an argument supported by some in this and other threads; that low-rise, Main Street, mixed-use Parisian boulevards automatically pop up along streetcar routes like mushrooms after a storm, and that every place could look like the old city of Toronto if only they replaced their buses and subways and everything else with streetcars.
 
I visited Portland, Oregon and Seattle last month and both of those cities recently developed new streetcar systems explicitly as catalysts for urban development. The Pearl District, one of the areas served by the streetcar system (which is partially funded by the developers), has grown in the last ten years from brownfields to the type of area which Toronto would be very lucky to have develop here.
The city and streetcar company are now planning a significant expansion to the side of the river opposite downtown. The route is being planned almost exclusively as a means of promoting development in the areas it passes through.

The thing with the Portland streetcar, jan, is that it was intended to be an urban circulator, transfering passengers from their MAX LRT system (which, BTW, is a Calgary-style "heavy" LRT, not a Transit City model) and then dispersing them to parts of downtown that are just a little too far for people to comfortably walk to.

The neighbourhoods themselves were not initiated by the development of the Portland streetcar. Instead, they are, as I am led to believe (never been there), a product of Portland's planning and a desire in that city for people to move back to the core regardless of the transit options that exist nearby. Remember that Portland has had a highly successful downtown revitalization program in the works for over 20 years, or certainly well before anyone had the idea of building a streetcar.

In another thread I reported that the Portland streetcar cost $58 million to build and serves 9,000 riders a day. In Toronto that would be considered a colossal failure. These figures also lead me to believe that people moving to those neighbourhoods in Portland aren't using the streetcar as much as light rail proponents would have us believe.
 
There's a big difference between a newly developing/redeveloping area that just happens to get transit infrastructure in its infancy along with the attention and incentives provided by a municipality, the media, developers, buyers, etc., and plopping down transit lines and magically having skyscrapers and great neighbourhoods pop up.
 
How exactly does "streetcars are more likely than buses to attract development" turn into "plopping down transit lines and magically having skyscrapers and great neighbourhoods pop up"? :confused:

Even ignoring the desirability of different modes of transit to developers, the fact remains that we need streetcars to carry the people travelling through downtown, at least until subway lines are built to replace them. Buses can't handle the crowds on Queen St. The argument that buses can pass each other is pretty much moot on streets where two of the four lanes are used for parking.
 
How will streetcars have any impact on development that the buses already running through the areas didn't?
Buses can easily be rerouted. Rails are a more permanent thing, and denote a higher quality service. Thus, developers are more likely to build around them. This is what I always hear, at least, and it makes sense to me.
 
How will streetcars have any impact on development that the buses already running through the areas didn't?

You don't know the history of street cars. I do.

here is an ordinary street like Eglinton with just a bus

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here's the amazing change that would practically happen instantly if we would just put in LRT

egLRT.jpg


but like others said, we should not build subways.... they just lead to the street looking like this

egsubway.jpg
 

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