SPORTS: Are you sick of taking your baby or toddler to a sports event and hearing the aggravated spectators around you groan every time your kid cries? The Rogers Centre sympathizes, which is why today is their monthly Babies at the Ballpark Blue Jays game. Parents with young children can buy discounted tickets and sit together in a special 200 level section. Diapers and wipes will be available at no extra cost, and there......

We don't know what exactly spawned their big decision, but the big guys at the Toronto Cyclists Union sat down and decided they needed some kind of fundraiser. Bike-a-thon? Nope. Bikini car wash? Nope. Star-studded screening of Pee-wee's Big Adventure? Why not?! Love it or hate it, your childhood favourite (or most hated) flick will be showing at the Bloor Cinema, with homegrown indie darlings performing—Kevin Drew and Joel Gibb will be playing alongside......

Forget the snow, it's time to start planning your summer of cycling. The Toronto–Niagara Bike Train will be returning this year with an expanded schedule, more travel options, and some getaway package deals. Building on last summer's successful pilot program which saw dozens of cyclists and their bikes riding the train between Toronto and Niagara Falls on each of four weekends, the 2008 edition of the Bike Train spans eight weekends from late June......

Sarah Lazarovic––curator of the garage-based Montrose Portrait Gallery of Canada––is painting a portrait of a Torontonian (be they Mirvishes or Meashas) every day. Each Monday, we'll feature one of those portraits here. Duke's Cycle began its life in 1914, so while the Queen West fire decimated its present digs, it's no surprise that Gary Duke and family have vowed to find the strength and moxie to bring the venerable velo shop back to life. Check......

In the battle of who owns the roads, cyclists and motorists are frequently at each others' throats. Over the last few years we've seen a heated altercation in Kensington Market and another that resulted in a motorist being stabbed with a screwdriver. It seems that the threat of a streetside melee is always looming. At Yonge and Bloor on Monday afternoon, a motorist attempted to make an illegal right turn and nearly knocked a......

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2007––the people, places, and things that we've either fallen head over heels in love with or developed uncontrollable rage towards over the past twelve months. Get your dose, starting Boxing Day and running into the new year, three times a day––sunrise, noon, and sunset. You know that our transportation system is in dire straits when so many cyclists can get so excited about......

How many times have you been biking down the street and thought to yourself, "Wow, I wish I had a Pop-Tart!" Well, one enterprising cyclist (here parked near Yonge & Lawrence) has found the solution to this age-old problem––attaching a toaster oven directly to the handlebars of the bike. No word on exactly how the thing works, but we're guessing it's solar-powered.......

Last week, we reported on a confrontation at College and McCaul Streets where a cyclist stabbed a motorist in the neck and face with a screwdriver. Police have arrested Yonan Inwia for assault, but give no further details. It's stories like this that need Rosie DiManno: "Yonan Inwia fell roughly to the ground, his hands reaching out in a Christ-like fashion to break the heavy fall. Little did Yonan know, today he would be......

Remember when, nearly two years ago, a motorist and a cyclist were involved in a particularly newsworthy physical altercation which involved cup throwing, car-keying and bike stomping? At about 9:45 a.m. this morning, another shocking confrontation between a motorist and a cyclist took place at the intersection of College and McCaul Streets. During their heated dispute, the cyclist stabbed the motorist two to three times in the neck with a screwdriver. The cyclist, described......

Toronto cyclists and motorists have always shared a contentious co-existence. Sure, both sides often behave poorly toward each other, but there is one very important difference: cyclists aren't surrounded by airbags and crumple zones. Though much of the conflict stems from aggressive driving, many drivers simply aren't used to sharing the road with bikes, nor are they necessarily entirely aware of the rights of the cyclist. The new Ministry of Transportation Driver's Handbook has......

As we know, the bike lanes in Toronto leave something to be desired. Cyclists have been talking about it for a while, and now city officials have proposed a plan that would make Toronto more bike and pedestrian-friendly by creating special downtown "bikeways" (including one on the Bloor-Danforth corridor) as well as implementing pedestrian-friendly traffic signals. Daniel Egan, the city’s manager of pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure, said that they're looking at "creative solutions," such......

This weekend, the Ex is once again hosting Toronto's popular Clothing Show, the retail sales event offering "the unique, the unusual, and the handcrafted" to the citizenry. Currently celebrating its 30th anniversary, this event has been taking in greater numbers over the years because of its talented pool of local designers. And though there's an increasing amount of lazily silk-screened American Apparel T-shirts being touted as "alternative" fashion, it's still the best place to get......

As you may have read, Blue Rodeo played a series of free concerts around the city yesterday. As you also may have read, there's a provincial election going on. Reader Matt Kim sent us the following story of a rather odd intersection of the two: Me and some of my co-workers left early today to see Blue Rodeo, who were playing various spots around Toronto, promoting their new album. By the time we'd arrived,......

If you can imagine, for a moment, that Queen West has been designated a streetcars-and-pedestrians-only zone, it would not be that much different from the traffic flow in 1907, or this weekend. Join Streets Are For People this Saturday for World Carfree Day. Celebrated in over 1,500 cities around the globe, Toronto's version is custom-tailored to our homegrown oil addiction. This Saturday, there are two related happenings to be aware of. The first is......

With some 2,212 responses in just under two weeks, our TTC survey is done, and the complete data is in the hands of Michael Anders, the TTC’s Market Research Director. Tomorrow, Wednesday, the organization will be holding a special meeting in Committee Room 1 at City Hall to discuss their next steps, and Anders has told us that they "will be prepared to discuss [Torontoist's] findings" (whatever that means!––either way, Torontoist will be in......

Yesterday, after spending the morning and early afternoon at Day 1 of the Cabbagetown Festival (article to come), Torontoist decided to go for a relaxing bike ride through the Don Valley. Clearly the relaxing part of the plan didn't pan out, as we happened to be first on the scene of a wild brush fire, the flames of which were moving rapidly west and south thanks to unusually hot and dry conditions. Then, while......

We’ve mentioned the Bicycle Film Festival a few times before, but we’re going to give special mention to it again today because tonight at 7 p.m. is the screening of the festival’s first shorts programme, featuring Warriors: The Bike Race. The Warriors is basically one of the most excellent films ever, and in August of 2002, 89 gangs of bicycle riders took an all-night race from the Bronx to Coney Island in a sort......

In a recent jaunt to London (England), Torontoist saw colours on the road. No, these weren't hallucinations brought on by too much ale at the local pub. The colours were those of lanes on the street: red for public transit vehicles and green for bikes. (And in case you're wondering, bikes can use the public transit lanes.) The message? If you're in a car, stay out of them. Toronto already has bike and transit lanes,......

We publish a lot of articles here on Torontoist, and sometimes it's hard to keep up with all of them. Populist is a weekly recap intended for the casual Torontoist reader, featuring some of the coolest, most interesting, most commented, and most recommended posts from the past week on Torontoist. Populist will appear every Sunday night. This week on Torontoist featured bleepin' boobs, Brass Rail burn-outs, coulrophobia, Guitar Girls, Giambrones, and Alsop architecture. Here are......

Cyclists rejoice! One of Toronto's long-lost cycling routes is resurfacing this weekend when the Lower Don path south of Queen Street will reopen after sixteen months of construction. Those attending the official ceremonies on Saturday morning should expect dignitaries, celebrities, balloons, a marching band, and...oh, wait a second. It turns out that for the reopening of a major bike and pedestrian path, all we get is some burly guy in an orange safety vest and......

There are few things more irksome to a cyclist than a needlessly blocked bike lane. So while some people are making their own, others have created a service to help defend the far-too-few bike lanes we have already. This is precisely the idea behind MyBikeLane Toronto. A North American network of blogs launched in 2006, MyBikeLane is dedicated to outing the road hogs and other boobs blocking the way. All cyclists who have experienced......

It's been said that the geeks shall inherit the Earth, and a pair of Ontario high school students are doing it with zero emissions. Behold the Tango—a compact, electric motorcycle that could be the future of motorized solo transportation. Introduced at this year's Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (IISEF) in Albuquerque, Oakville's Ben Gulak and Hamilton's Jason Morrow based their invention on the science behind the Segway. The bike features two wheels mounted......

Billed as Canada's largest action sports and music festival, Wakestock is the type of event that courts stereotypes, despite the obvious talent of its athletes. It brings to mind Oakley-wearing Mystic Tan addicts drunkenly drooling over bikini-clad booth babes and to whom marketing companies like to throw obsolete lingo like "x-treme" and "epic" at. It's noisy, irreverent, polluting, and expensive. But what wasn't so charming as Wakestock wrapped-up last week was an apparent act......

Signs telling people not to feed birds in Nathan Phillips Square were suddenly installed and just as suddenly removed over the past week, reports the Toronto Star. Torontoist thought the signs gave some pretty compelling reasons for their all-too-brief existence. Feeding birds distorts their nutrition, migration, and breeding patterns. Also, guano is a nuisance (as many bike and car owners will tell you) and a health hazard, even if in less than Dr. No-like......

We're intrigued by this apparent statement discovered yesterday by Torontoist Flickr Pool contributor Eyeline-Imagery. The mystery art includes quarters glued to the sidewalk next to a Green P lot at Yonge and St. Clair, beside the message "Why scrounge? Park for free. Drive a bike." With most of the focus of cycling on the environmental and health benefits, it's a fresh idea to point out the high cost of parking instead, especially with such......

Torontoist just bought a new bike. It's blue and shiny and for some reason hasn't been stolen yet. In celebration of this fact, here are three bike-related items we thought you'd be interested in. First, bike racks on buses: should they stay or should they go? Come on and let us know! (Ahem.) Discussion for action is taking place at the TTC Commissioners meeting this afternoon at City Hall. The question (item 17 on......

When deciding who to see at this year's Over The Top Festival, we luckily opted to check out Halifax's Rich Aucoin. Between his musical pedigree (he's the brother of the Hylozoist's Paul Aucoin) and the fact that his EP was synched up to How The Grinch Stole Christmas, we knew he would at least be interesting. His set turned out to be far better than just interesting, so it seemed natural to give his Personal......

Torontoist reader Rajan tipped us off to this construction hoarding on Scollard Street in Yorkville, which demonstrates a little creative scaffolding. If one of our iconic post-and-ring bike stands gets in the way, why not work it? No, this isn't a ring bolted onto the structure; it's an existing bike post incorporated right into the supports. The scaffold uses an identical gauge of pipe as the bike racks, so it was a pretty easy......

Whether you associate the myriad back alleys that criss-cross Toronto with crime and filth or art and beauty, Graeme Parry's laneway tours are sure to be a treat. Each of the free cycling tours explores a neighbourhood from behind, uncovering the beautiful and unexpected sights along the way. Riders will see laneway houses, hidden gardens and parks, colourful graffiti, and many other under-appreciated bits of our urban fabric. This is your chance to explore the......

If you've ever noticed half of a bike coming out of a wall, naked plywood people screwed into the facade of a building, a portrait of the Gladstone pasted to the Dufferin bridge or a fat rope chain hanging from the next of Adam Beck, then you've seen the work of Specter. A self-proclaimed prankster, Specter's canvas is the city. Always inventive, his art is meant to brighten one's day and cause people to......