If you were looking for this site on April 1, there’s a good chance you found it off the air.

This was caused by an equipment fire in an internet hotel through which service to my host passes forcing a shutdown, rewiring and rerouting of various networks.

There’s a lot to write about, and I’m hoping to push various articles out the door over the next week or so including:

• Further details of the service changes for March 30, 2008
• Further information about the tunnel repairs on the North Yonge subway
• A review of operations on the 511 Bathurst car
• Reviews of the Metrolinx Green Papers
• A review of TTC capital funding in light of recent budget announcements

Although not necessarily in that order.

January 31, 2006 saw the first post on this blog, a retrospective of my Film Festival reviews from years past. That was something just to get the wheels turning, and the reviews took a back seat to transit right from the start.

Over two years, this site became an important venue for discussions about many aspects of transit planning, operations and funding, not to mention the odd flight of fancy. All of this could not happen without the readers and contributors to the site.

We don’t always agree, some have even marched away in a huff, but overall the level of conversation here is worth the effort of writing the original material and editing the comments as they come in. Thanks to all the regular contributors for keeping me on my toes and taking discussions down unexpected pathways.

Special thanks go to my friend Trevor who hosts this site on his system. Technology has its challenges, and regulars here have probably noticed that after a period of instability, things are more or less back to normal. It’s a long story. Let’s just say that the past few months have been challenging.

Yes, there will be more posts with oddles of charts about service even though I am now working with year-old data. The situation on the ground hasn’t changed all that much and it’s worth looking at other routes.

Yes, I will continue to argue from a position that we should consider LRT first and move to other technologies only when they are appropriate. I am sure that the definition of “appropriate” will fill many comments.

Yes, I will maintain my belief that transit really can make a difference even if it will take decades to see the effect on parts of the GTA. Doing nothing is easy, but unproductive. We have wasted far too long on bad projects that have more to do with political favouritism and support for the engineering and construction industries than with useful development of the Toronto region.

To the staff of transit and planning agencies around town who yearn for better days, don’t give up yet. I may be a feisty opponent when we disagree, but good plans that can make Toronto’s transit great will (almost) always have my support.

To the politicians, learn how to get things done. Announcements won’t make service on the Queen car any better, and won’t build a millimeter of rapid transit, whatever technology you may prefer.

Thanks to everyone who has sent supporting messages, with a special salute to the professional media for their compliments. I’m not a working writer, but enjoy both the act of putting my ideas “on paper” and the cut and thrust of moderating all those comments.

Over in the right hand of the screen, you will now see an option with a small a and a big A that you can use to adjust your font size for visiting this site.

Yes, I know, it only changes the font in the main column, not in the sidebar.

This should make life easier for folks using IE where, depending on their setup, they may get teeny-weeny characters until they adjust the font size manually.

Inevitably, just when things are heating up and there’s a real buzz around an issue, the Internet gods intervened to take this site offline yesterday afternoon and evening.

The problem lay in Bell Canada.  Although the ISP to which this site is connected has many redundant links, all of them are routed through one switch inside Bell’s network, and that switch failed.  It took Bell over nine hours to acknowledge, locate and repair the problem.

We are not amused.

Page-to-Page Links: 

Some of you may have noticed that if you tried to follow links to “previous” pages, you were dropped into a message telling you that it didn’t work, and to go to the main page again.

Without going into the details, this was related to security hooks added to this site.  Unfortunately, those hooks sideswiped another piece of code.  This has been fixed.

For those of you who get messages saying that your address has been listed by Spamhaus:

This is an inevitable problem with the fact that people (like me) who have high speed access but don’t stay camped on or have a permanent IP address will occasionally inherit an address that someone else used for spam.  I have found that simply recycling my DSL modem to pick up a new IP address gets around this problem.

Aug 13, 10:40 am:

A major denial of service attack on many sites in Canada has been reported.  Although this report involves email attacks, it is likely that the type of activity seen on my site (attacks on WordPress) is related to this. Continue reading →