Newsstand: August 24, 2009

To start off with news from over the weekend: Toronto officially has a new song stuck in its municipal head! Votes were tallied up on Friday night, and the best song in the sensibly named Toronto Song Contest is “Love to Live in Toronto,” [MP3], by George Axon and Aidan Mason. Out of five hundred entrants and ten finalists, Axon and Mason were crowned the Toronto-est (no relation) of all on Friday evening at the CNE, earning themselves a five thousand dollar award and an NXNE prize package, as well as civic kudos as the writers of the centrepiece tune of Toronto’s 175th birthday. The public’s vote counted for 20% of the finalists’ score, with five “celebrity judges” (like Mayor David Miller) making up the remaining 80%. That being so, in case you were interested in what we thought of the finalists, Torontoist published our own professional opinion of all ten (and, not to brag, picked the winner) back in June.

Meanwhile at the TTC, hopes are high for a major upgrade of bus service, to the tune of just over fifty-two million dollars a year. The Transit City Bus Plan [PDF] proposes to bring eighty more drivers onto the payroll, and buy fifty-six extra buses, in order to run pickups every ten minutes on twenty-one key routes, including Dufferin, Pape, and Bathurst. Got all that? The TTC votes on the proposal this Wednesday.

But if, after all those shiny transit promises, you’d still prefer to walk, then how would you feel about taking a stroll to the island? The Toronto Port Authority has gone over City Hall’s head and requested federal funding to build an eight-metre-wide underwater tunnel complete with moving sidewalks to zip pedestrians to the Island Airport. The plan, originally hatched in 1928 but quashed by then-Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, has been dredged up several times since over the past seventy-two years, so don’t count it out just yet—even if the mayor isn’t exactly keen on the scheme.

Canada has a bit of a reputation for rough weather and nitpicking bureaucracy, right? So when a little old crazy storm smashes up your car with a huge tree branch, that’s no excuse to leave it parked on the street for a few hours without the proper permit, now is it? The real story here may be that literally nothing can stop Toronto’s invincible traffic cops from doing their job. Toronto Police have refused to comment on the issue, saying only that traffic cops “use their own discretion” when ticketing vehicles, but if that’s the case, discretion must have been running pretty short last Thursday.

And a system designed to give Torontonians a single phone number to connect them with the zillion branches of the city's massive civil service is finally poised to go live, after spending six painfully ironic years mired in political tussles and red tape. The new 311 system is much more than an information hotline: it promises to let residents report all sorts of problems, "from potholes to missed garbage pickup," to be checked out by the city—and if we're lucky, it'll get it's own iPhone app before long.

While Toronto is late to adopt a 311 system, City Hall trumpets that ours will be the largest in North America to launch with "end-to-end service integration," a mouthful of jargon that basically means it will give the city's patchwork of departments some semblance of a common interface—a huge relief to anyone who's had to navigate Toronto's telephone labyrinth in the past.