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Extra, Extra: Toronto is Number Four, Gaming Transit, and Fan Mail

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Every weekday’s end, we collect just about everything you ought to care about or ought not miss.

Number four! Yeah! Photo by votreceinture, from the Torontoist Flickr Pool

Number four! Yeah! Photo by votreceinture, from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

  • According to a press release just issued by the City, Toronto’s population now barely exceeds Chicago’s, making us the new fourth-largest city in North America. (But, as at least one person has already pointed out, Chicago’s metro area is still a lot more populous than the GTA.)

  • Metrolinx has turned Toronto’s uncertain transit-investment future into a video game. Curiously, the only way to win is by imposing taxes, tolls, and levies. Just like real life!
  • NOW Magazine just got the sweetest fan mail, by way of Dan Savage: “This letter is about your slutty paper Now…”

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Comments

  • stopitman

    Chicago’s suburbs are a mess. Besides, including a metropolitan area is a pretty hard thing to do properly, especially with the States, which has absolutely ridiculous sprawl and a weird aversion to having cities absorb their neighbours. As an example of this extreme, there’s LA which has ~3.8M people, but it’s metro area has ~12.9M or the size difference between Chicago’s metro (28,000km^2) and the GTA (7,100km^2).

    Considering that non-provincial services are provided at a city level (policing, sanitation, etc.), it makes much more sense to compare Chicago proper with Toronto rather than metro areas.

    • Winkee

      Not to mention that Chicago’s metro area apparently spans 3 states, going into Indiana and Wisconsin, a moving target.

      • tomwest

        What do you mean “apparently”?? It does!

  • OgtheDim

    Honestly, do we really decide who we are based on an arbitrary pecking order compared to other cities?

    Frankly, I think Torontonians, outside of the media who know its SEO gold, are WAY past that “world class city” comparison thing. We just get on with doing stuff – some of it badly but a lot of it very well.

    Like, I’d rather be known as the sort of town that can develop a thriving hub of axe throwing contests then any ranking on a population comparison.

  • Bob the Builder

    The Metrolinx site is pretty good. We can build everything they want with road tolls and a parking levy or gas tax. Seems pretty easy to me.

    • Eric S. Smith

      I wish they’d give some idea of how expensive it would be to collect the various taxes and fees. Does it even make sense, for instance, to charge 2¢/km as a road toll, or would the toll-collection infrastructure take forever to pay for itself? How about the sales tax — if I set the slider to 0.25%, does that represent the province just handing over some money they were already collecting, or does it imply the creation of a Greater Golden Horseshoe Sales Tax with its own line on the cash register receipt and separate paperwork for retailers and so on?

      The sales tax option is interesting, since it would be fed by the supposed increase in economic activity brought on by all of this lovely new transit. Compare that with the parking levy or road toll, whose performance would presumably soften as commuters switched.