In today’s Star, Murray Whyte’s article states that I never worked for the TTC.  That is an error, although one from very long ago.

I worked at the TTC for three years from 1966 to 1969, but decided that it was clear that there were limits to what could be done within the organization especially starting off from a lowly position.  Streetcars for Toronto came along in 1972 launching my activist career.

From time to time, I get notes asking why someone’s comments have been trimmed or deleted.

This is not a blog intended to be a wide-open forum for anything someone posts.  If you write to the Globe and Mail, you can’t demand that your letter be printed.

From time to time, someone gets repetitive and there is no point in publishing this sort of material.  Other times, people say things that deserve a new thread and I hold onto the comments as a starting point for that discussion.

On many, many occasions, I fix up the layout of comments, the atrocious spelling and grammar by some writers who have good things to say, but whose text would put off some readers by its style. 

That’s what editors do.

I have shuffled the content around in the sidebar so that recent comments are at the top of the pile and you can see them without having to scroll down.

Steve

A new spam filter has been added to this site.  If you have Javascript enabled, you should see no change in the behaviour when leaving comments.  If it is shut off, you will get a challenge to do something to prove you are human, not a robot.

Please note that not all comments that people leave are approved for visibility by everyone else.  I keep them all, and some become ideas for future threads.  If you think that you have left a truly cogent comment and I have missed it, please send me an email (using the Webmaster link at the bottom of the page) so that we can figure out where your comment is going.

With luck, this change will eliminate the need for me to wade through piles of messages flagged as spam looking for the one or two that are from real people, but which triggered the old filter based on content.

Most comments I receive rarely contain URLs pointing to other sites.  However, spammers just pack their messages with this sort of thing.

If you are going to send me a comment and want to include a link to another site for reference, please omit the prefix “http://” or add a blank, underscore, whatever, in the middle.  I am now trapping out messages with this string embedded to simplify ongoing maintenance of the spam filter.

If I do post your comment, I will restore the correct spelling of the link when I edit it.

Note that your feedback will be delayed until I check the spam bucket for real messages if you don’t follow this helpful hint.

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.

From time to time, I get emails or comments that go roughly like this:

I left a comment a few days/weeks ago, and it never showed up.  What did you do with it?

Well, at this point, I have a backlog of about 50 comments on various threads, some going back into the summer.  Not every comment deserves a reply (or even to be posted), and some deserve a new thread of their own.  Alas, I have only so many hours a day to devote to this blog, and if a topic sits in the “in basket”, well that’s the way things are.

I’m hoping to catch up with some topics over the holidays and early in 2007 before a barage of major issues, especially the budget, hits the TTC and City Council in late January.

Meanwhile, the best of whatever holiday season you may be celebrating to everyone!

Transit issues:

• A discussion of route economics (thanks to all who have sent feedbacks — I am holding on to your comments to incorporate in one post)
• Further comments about service reliability, a topic that is getting a lot of coverage these days
• A commentary on the whole LRT versus guideway business that will be my final word on the subject
• Whatever intriguing goodies surface at the October TTC meeting (usually the pre-election agenda is rather dull, but if there’s anything worth reporting, you will see it here)

Every so often, I get an email that says “where did my comment go” or something vaguely like that.  A few words of explanation:

All comments are moderated — nothing is visible online until I decide it is, and I almost always edit the comments a bit before posting them.

When you submit a comment, the software running this site “knows” that it’s yours and the comment is visible in your current session.  However, when you come back later (especially if you’re not on the same computer), the system has no way of knowing who you are and your comment vanishes.  You are a new user to the system, and so the comment is hidden.

There is a continuous problem with spam (yes, spammers know how to post to Blogs) and I don’t want any of that showing up online.  Some is trapped and purged, but some evades the filters and I have to delete it manually.

Some comments are, shall we say, a tad incendiary and suggest that the parentage of various politicos may be suspect (those are the mild ones) or even that they might have just a tiny conflict of interest.  While I might agree, I want this site to deal with transit, not with political mudslinging, and I also don’t want the world to think I concur with some of the sleazier comments by posting them.  Anyone who runs a Blog goes through the same thing, and some people turn comments off for just that reason (as I did when this site was getting started).

Some times, I hang onto comments for a while letting a group of related topics build up if they are worth a post of their own.  Some times I just tire of the same arguments back and forth.  It is my site, after all, and if someone wants to advocate some other grand scheme for transit, they can set up shop too.  Meanwhile, some readers have started to comment on each other’s hobby-horses, and that’s a good sign that it’s time to change the subject.

Thanks to everyone who does write.  I really do read them all, and post most of them even if I don’t always agree.  The debates about transit issues are complex and it’s worth hearing different points of view.

Now I’m going back to working on Film Festival reviews.

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.