On January 31, 2006, Steve Munro’s Web Site went on the air.  The first post was a collection of my Toronto Film Festival reviews partly as a test posting and partly for many friends who are always after me about what I’ve written over the years.

Looking back at all of the posts, I’ve covered a lot of transit issues.  Funding.  Service.  Wasteful subway projects.  LRT everywhere.  Even Swan Boats!

Through all of this, I’ve seen a growing audience of readers both by comments and email, and the number of links to this site from others is gratifying.  When I started writing, I expected a fairly small community of transit fans and advocates would be interested in the technical stuff, but that community grew to include a wide variety of readers, some from very far away.

Many thanks to all of you who read and contribute to debates here.  Yes, there are times I just copy a comment into my archives and don’t post it.  There’s only so many times one can cover the same ground and, after all, it is my site.

Thanks to my friend Trevor whose system hosts this site.  Those of you who know that I’m an old IBM mainframer from the dark ages of computing, and that professionally I work in an environent overrun with Windows machines, will be amused to know this site lives on a Mac.  Trevor’s a Mac bigot, what can I say, and WordPress (the software that runs the site) works very well here.

Special thanks to my dear friend Sarah who puts up with that distracted look when she knows her conversation is time-sharing my brain with a post that’s writing itself behind my eyes.  She was co-author of the Swan Boats epic and co-conspirator in its creation.

Finally thanks to everyone else who runs a site dedicated to urban affairs of one kind or another, and to the journalists from whom I’ve had many encouraging words.  Keeping people well-informed about how their city works is important, and all of us contribute to that in many ways.  Feeling that I’m part of that community, both amateur and professional, is very rewarding.

The next years will be vital for transit in our city and region.  Either we stop pretending that we can be transit oriented without serious investment in operations, vehicles and facilities, a real network of services, not a few baubles to get politicians re-elected, or we will slide into the car-oriented city that “Stop Spadina” and its era were supposed to prevent.