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Nine

Nine years ago, on January 31, 2006, “Steve Munro’s Web Site” appeared. It started small, but has grown to hold over 1,600 articles and 37,000 comments. Some of them have nothing to do with subways or LRT in Scarborough!

First off, huge thanks to my readers who have engaged, sometimes with great vigour, in debates on this site. Some of you are more prolific than others, some make occasional appearances, and some just lurk in the background. The comment threads are what make this more than me talking in a vacuum, and give the articles a life they would not have otherwise. They also have the benefit of honing my arguments and occasionally [gasp!] changing my mind.

Second, thanks to my long time, but about to be ex-host for stevemunro.ca, Trevor Jacques. The site has lived on a few machines in a closet for years, but the traffic outstripped its capacity some time ago. Last year, I decided to move the whole thing over to wordpress.com, and that migration is now substantially complete. The last of the content will come over in mid-February, and I will point my domain name at the WordPress hosted site at the beginning of March. Trevor will get far fewer phone calls from me saying “er, you’re down again” for which I’m sure he will be grateful.

For recent arrivals to this site, you may wonder what Swan Boats have to do with public transit. In a flight of fancy, back in April 2005, my dear friend Sarah Hinchcliffe and I came up with Swans On The Don published as one of the first articles on this site in 2006. Few people acknowledge or understand the vital role that Swan Boats could play, but that is only one of the many setbacks Toronto has seen over the years. This is lonely calling.

When I finally set up a Twitter account, @swanboatsteve was my handle, and that’s the name the WordPress version of this site uses. (After the migration is completed, the old and new site names will be interchangeable.)

Thanks for reading!

13 thoughts on “Nine”

  1. Thanks to YOU Steve, your patient, knowledgeable and (generally!) good-humoured posts and responses are an amazing resource. It’s hard to believe it has already been 9 years. Here’s to the next decade!

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  2. 9 years. Nine years of school. Nine years of prison. Almost nine years for light to reach us from the binary star system of Sirius.

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  3. A trivia question for your ninth anniversary. On the original YONGE subway, were there tail tracks at Eglinton as there were at Union Station, and could they hold six or eight car trains?

    Steve: There was a brick wall. No tail tracks.

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  5. 10 years ago I was just setting myself up in Malaysia and looking for ways to connect back to transit planning and projects in Canada. The appearance of this blog a year later made a huge difference.

    It has been an amazing 9 years Steve, and I look forward to marking the 10th year next year.

    By the way your new site does mention “Reviews” … is that a long term decision or will you be providing theatre and film festival reviews in future?

    Cheers, Moaz

    Steve: I keep hoping that, for once, there will not be a political or transit crisis just when I am trying to write reviews of HotDocs or TIFF. Several times, I have been derailed part way through, and the half-completed articles never went live.

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  6. I found your blog about six months ago in a fit of nerdy transit-oriented web surfing. I have enjoyed reading your posts and all the comments in the time since. I’m not sure I would have the same level of patience as you for some of the more “difficult” commenters who seem to show up regularly. Kudos.

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  7. Since all of us arm-chair planners love drawing lines on maps, have you given any thought to starting a topic that would let us indulge our fantasies?

    Steve: NO! NO! Long time readers of this site will remember endless comment threads triggered by every reader pitching their own transit pipedreams. Even I have my limits!

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  9. Steve:

    “NO! NO! Long time readers of this site will remember endless comment threads triggered by every reader pitching their own transit pipedreams. Even I have my limits!”

    I promise never to ask again (^_^)

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  10. Steve, thanks for all the work you do with the blog. Always a pleasure to read. I moved into the Fort York area 2 days after the 509 closed in 2012 (ouch!), I found your blog because of the immensely helpful construction updates you were posting for that project, and it was great to actually have solid info and detailed updates on it. Thanks for keeping up informed, from construction projects to service changes to the lines, both logical and illogical, people love drawing (literally, recently!) on napkins. Hope you keep it going for a good while to come! Looking forward to reading more as we continue the LFLRV deployment, deal with the Scarborough conundrum, see what happens with SmartTrack/RER, and whatever else may come.

    Thanks for helping me, and all of us, be more informed and more involved.

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  12. I would like to thank you too, as one of those lurkers. I learn much on your blog, and I am convinced that the debate here will help guide us collectively to better decisions on transit in the future. Eventually

    A few weeks back I got on the King car at Gerrard with my four year old daughter. We grabbed one of the remaining seats, and as her wet boots shot up toward the passenger in front of us, a distinguished looking gentleman with a grey braid and a leather jacket, I said, “Don’t kick that fellow.” I think I should have said “Don’t kick Mr. Munro.”

    Don’t kick anyone on the streetcar, but especially not Mr. Munro.

    A belated “Hello” if indeed that was you.

    Steve: Many thanks, on both counts.

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  13. David Cavlovic | January 31, 2015 at 5:31 pm

    A trivia question for your ninth anniversary. On the original YONGE subway, were there tail tracks at Eglinton as there were at Union Station, and could they hold six or eight car trains?

    Steve: There was a brick wall. No tail tracks.

    Firstly Steve, let me add my congrats on your nine year anniversary and my thanks to you for administering this blog. While you obviously have a great passion, it still, I imagine, is a very time-consuming and at times tedious process of editing/responding to and tolerating all the (sometimes ridiculous) comments. You provide a wonderful public service to us all and it is most appreciated.

    Regarding the comment above: If there were no tail tracks at Eglinton then I presume that the pocket track north of the station was added at the same time they tunneled north towards Lawrence for the first Yonge extension; is this correct?

    Steve: Yes. And it will disappear again as part of the Eglinton Station reconstruction for the subway/LRT line because the whole subway station is shifting north to improve the vertical connection between the two lines.

    Also, at Union, how far did the tail-tracks extend west (or west and then north) before the University subway opened in 1963? Was the centre storage track there from 1954 or was it added in when they started to build the University line towards St. Andrew?

    Steve: Yes, the tracks west of Union were there from the beginning, but just the straightaway (one train length), as I recall. I may be wrong in this, but others will correct me, I’m sure.

    Thanks as always for any info. you have.

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