SPOTTED BY: Martin Reis WHERE: College Street and Manning Avenue WHEN: Saturday, April 28 WHAT: Back in November, we learned that Astral Media, which has a contract with the City of Toronto to provide street furniture (bus shelters, trash bins, et cetera) had been cutting down bike posts to make room for their new (and [...]

Every year, Heritage Toronto works with local photographers to create Building Storeys, a visual documentation and anecdotal exhibit of our city’s heritage sites. This year’s exhibit—which is on view at the Steam Whistle Roundhouse throughout the month of May—is dedicated to rail and marine transportation. Over the course of the month, Torontoist and Heritage Toronto [...]

With the passage of provincial legislation on April 2, 1953, the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto became a legal reality, joining together the City of Toronto with its twelve neighbouring municipalities in a regional federation. But few of the region’s 1.1 million inhabitants perceived Metro Toronto, with its combination of dense urbanization and abundant farmland, as [...]

“Instead of running diesel trains for a business class premium fare express service between Union Station and the airport, we should maximize the impact of the provincial investment in the air-rail link…. We must build the air-rail link from the start as a healthy, affordable and sustainable electric transit line that stops in our neighbourhoods [...]

In July of last year, councillors passed a motion calling for the removal of the recently installed bike lanes on Jarvis Street, in favour of reintroducing a fifth lane of traffic, by a vote of 31–14. It was a resounding victory for motorists, and a dismal defeat for both cyclists and the local councillor, Kristyn [...]

Toronto’s Board of Health meets today, and on their agenda is a new major study which examines the question of walkability—how conducive our neighbourhoods are to pedestrian activity—and the relationship between walkability and health. Unsurprisingly, the study (available online [PDF]) found that walkable neighbourhoods are healthier neighbourhoods. Also unsurprisingly, it found that there is a [...]

Last summer, when city council unceremoniously voted to remove the Jarvis Street bike lanes (after very ceremoniously voting to install them the summer before, while David Miller was still in office) it seemed as though supporters of the lanes were all out of options. Mayor Rob Ford still had a solid council majority, and even [...]

Last week the National Film Board held a screening of One Millionth Tower, an interactive documentary imagining the future for a highrise in northern Etobicoke. The six-minute film asks viewers to reject the idea of the highrise as failed experiment and instead contemplate the potential locked within vertical living. To help provoke conversation, a panel [...]

“While there’s little or no gravy to be found in current city operations, there’s enormous wastefulness in the form of our cities… [T]he extra cost of operating a widespread, low-density city such as Toronto, compared with a more compact city such as Zurich or Vienna (to say nothing of Manhattan or Hong Kong), [is] an [...]

There’s a concrete pad in front of 52 Division (east of University Avenue and Dundas Street) where the police park their cruisers. Lots of people know that it was originally intended to be a public space. But Mark Osbaldeston, whose second book of local city-planning nonstarters, Unbuilt Toronto 2, was released on October 24, discovered [...]

Yesterday Gary Webster, the chief general manager of the TTC, went cap-in-hand to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Transportation, Infrastructure and Communities, looking for money to make the TTC affordable and efficient. The committee’s job is to recommend to the government whether or not Canada should have a federal strategy for public transit. [...]

Katerina Cizek’s biggest challenge has been working in a medium “that hasn’t been invented yet.” No mere film, Cizek’s new documentary, One Millionth Tower, combines video, photos, and animation in a 3D virtual space to tell the story of an aging Toronto highrise apartment and the people that live there. It’s being billed as “one [...]