Month: June 2006

by

Farewell to the Royal, the Paradise, the Kingsway and the Revue (Updated)

NOW magazine reports that the Royal will be taken over by the company now operating the Regent theatre up on Mt. Pleasant Road.  Read about it here.

Although the Kingsway will close, there are no plans to sell the building, and this leaves the theatre intact.  We will have to wait and see.

My original post from last Sunday, the 25th, follows below. Continue reading →

by

Where Did The Rush Hour Go? (Updated)

Looking at the June schedules for the TTC, I was struck by something quite odd:  on some streetcar routes there is either no additional rush hour service, or only a marginal change in service levels.  Have riders abandoned the TTC?  Are “downtown” riders travelling at times other than the conventional peak period?  Or is the TTC just pinching pennies by cutting service?  Here are some examples: Continue reading →

by

A Plethora of Comments

Regular readers who post comments here will have noticed that some topics seem to have dropped off my radar lately.  The reason, of course, is that recent events have changed the focus of current discussions.

I stopped posting comments about the strike because the real issue for the City, the TTC and the Union is “where do we go from here” rather than recriminations about past events.

The threads on LRT, system design and service policies will reappear, along with some of the backlog of comments still sitting in the hopper.

Thanks for writing — it’s nice to know that there are lots of dedicated readers out there with good ideas to contribute.

by

Waterfront East and Scarborough RT Updates

The draft Terms of Reference for the Environmental Assessment of the eastern waterfront transit plans goes to the TTC for approval next Wednesday.

This draft is the product by much work in full public meetings as well as a community consultation group.  I must commend the team who worked on the draft for their openness to changes, expansion in scope and generally inclusive approach.  The stage of building a ToR can be extremely tedious, but it is vital to ensure that all of the alternatives are considered in the EA itself.  This is a refreshing change from the St. Clair project.

Assuming that the TTC approves the draft, it will go to the Ministry of the Environment for review over the next few months.  While that is underway, some preliminary work will continue collecting information needed for the study and also presenting some technical workshops so that the community can better understand the work behind transportation planning and design.

Meanwhile, the Scarborough RT study is not included on this week’s TTC agenda although it was originally planned for a June presentation.  I suspect that recent events at the TTC coupled with the relatively tighter timelines on the Waterfront studies have pushed the SRT report off into the summer.