Warning: This post will be offensive to those with sensitive egos. In recent months, probably thanks to the election campaign, I have acquired a few “followers” who have enough working brain cells to put together rants on a daily basis. They decry my antipathy to anyone-but-Chow, subways, SmartTrack, and various other schemes claiming that I […]
Back in the early days of this blog, I wrote a long paper about the role of transit and what a truly regional plan would look like. To avoid extensively quoting myself, I suggest that any newcomers to this site read that as a starting point as it contains not just a list of routes, […]
At the end of my series on Transit City, I refrained from offering my own recipe for a new transit system. That sort of issue is hard to address, and without first knowing just how much any government, future mayor or council might want to commit to transit, it’s very hard to pick a “solution”. […]
Ontario’s Finance Minister, Dwight Duncan, yesterday announced that the province will run a half-billion dollar deficit thanks to the international financial upheavals and declining economic outlook. In this context, I spent the day at a Metrolinx “stakeholders’ meeting” where we discussed details of the Draft Regional Transportation Plan and Investment Strategy. The whole discussion has […]
Sean Marshall pointed out that I started a thread here just over two years ago under the title of A Grand Plan. The first post in that series included a long paper detailing what a regional transit plan for Toronto might look like as well as a technical discussion of transit modes. In the process […]
After that long post on the TTC’s capital budget woes, I promised that I would write a “what should we do now” post. Here it is. There are some hard truths that everyone needs to accept about our present situation:
With the Ontario Budget due out on Thursday along with who knows what other announcements, it’s time to think big about transit in the GTA. The documents linked here are intended to do this, to stake my ground for what a transit network should look like. The versions posted now have some minor changes, mainly […]
The TTC began consultations for its 2023 Service Plan on June 29 with a pair of online meetings for community groups, and more will follow. There will be an online survey available starting on July 11. At this point, the Service Plan is only a collection of proposals. The TTC seeks feedback on them that […]
Updated November 10, 2021 at 9:00 am: Links to TTC reports have been updated to point to the TTC’s new website. Updated December 22, 2020 at 1:20 pm: Some illustrations from the Board meeting presentation have been added to this article, or have replaced previous versions with lower resolution from the budget report. Text has […]
Updated June 3, 2020: A PDF version of the document has been added. With all of Metrolinx’ recent hype about the Ontario Line and its design, I have been digging into my archives looking at the promises made back in 1972 when Premier Bill Davis announced “An Urban Transportation Policy for Ontario”. This was to […]
Steve Munro 