Results tagged “maps”

Contrary to what Google Street View indicates, Browns Line doesn’t have a huge gap in it. Although Google has mapped most of the city in 3D, Street View still has a few dark spots, including almost all of the neighbourhoods of Alderwood and Long Branch, an area east of the Greenwood Subway Yards, and a residential neighbourhood southwest of Finch Avenue East and Warden Avenue. We smell conspiracy, and based on the omitted areas, we can only conclude that Google is covering up some sort of secret government plot involving City Councillor Mark Grimes, outdated factories, subways, and 1960s-style bungalows. God help us all.

                                   

Yesterday's launch of Google Street View created a new wave of digital tourism, with most of us starting with our home address and then scouring the mostly anonymous bodies nearby for flickers of recognition. As is par for the course with the service, the camera sometimes captures some unusual, quirky, and mysterious events. Here are some of our local favourites (so far).

At long last, Google Street View has gone live for Toronto as of this morning. We're gonna be perusing the sights today, but if you spot anything great, email it to tips@torontoist.com.

Where's the heart of Toronto?

Derek Jensen, a longtime Torontoist reader and commenter, started slowly plotting out his fantasy TTC map in the summer of 2007, while living in Seoul. In the two years since, we've featured one fantasy map from U of T architecture professor Dieter Janssen, set in 2030, and another from reader Ryan Felix, set in 2050. Jensen staked out 2040 for his, taking inspiration from not only Felix and Janssen's maps, but also other fantasy TTC maps, Transit City's real plans, and other transit systems from around the world, all to create an extraordinarily well-thought out look at the possible geography and logic of Toronto's future transit system.

James Redekop loves to cycle. Between 2004 and 2009, he estimates that he's cycled for six hundred and fifty hours and covered more than eight thousand kilometres. Using the GPS data from these rides, Redekop created the Etch A Sketch–style animation above (the red lines represent five minutes of his cycling and the red arrows indicate rides outside of Toronto). But turning his riding into a cool animation wasn't always his intention.

Last Friday at Bloor and Lansdowne, Torontoist reader Caitlin Jane spotted one of Google's Street View cars, caught precariously in the middle of an intersection, as the cars are wont to do. Jane writes: "it was trying to turn right onto Bloor (heading west) and had to wait for the light, then waited for pedestrians, which was how I was able to take such a great picture. Then I waved, haha."

Dreaming up ways to improve the TTC is a popular pastime in Toronto. And while most of us just daydream about additional stations and routes, Dieter Janssen, a professor of architecture at the University of Toronto, is turning ideas into possible blueprints for the future. Janssen hopes that his fantasy map (above), which he developed while doing research for the urban infrastructure and design class that he teaches, will invite debate over the future of Toronto's transit system. "It’s painfully obvious that infrastructure, at least in the GTA, has to be much more developed than anything that they’re proposing," Janssen told Torontoist. "The TTC needs to properly address its future…people actually rely on the system and that needs to be properly respected."

Although March has been remarkably snow-free, Toronto and Region Conservation has still issued flood advisories as heavy rains swelled rivers throughout the city and wreaked havoc in the city's low-lying valleys. What floody surprises will April hold? There's no need to wait passively for weather forecasts and news releases. Thanks to TRCA, you can monitor river and dam levels throughout the GTA's watersheds in near real-time.

When it comes to Toronto's neighbourhoods, even well-versed out-of-towners have probably heard of Rosedale, High Park, the Annex, and the Beach. But Amesbury? Alderwood? L'Amoreaux?

To most people, a map is a tool used strictly to figure out which route will get them from point A to point B with the least amount of pain. As time passes, these maps reveal much about period styles of illustration, methods of planning, promised developments that never got off the ground, and changes in street names—Lot West Art Crawl, anyone?

The TTC has a new website: MyTTC.ca! It's got a functional trip planner, a stats section with the neat map/video above ("each burst represents a bus departing from the stop in that location"), pages for each route that can be edited by the site's users, more features like SMS/IM integration and an interface designed for smart phones and PDAs coming soon, and is—surprise—not affiliated with the transit organization in any way, shape, or form.

While we were browsing Toronto Life's newly-blogless website, we got all excited to see that August's print edition will contain an item by Carl Wilson about Fauxreel and "the murky world of profitable graffiti." But we couldn't help but notice the magazine's presumptive cover story: an article about how "violent crime is migrating downtown," our "acclimatization to it," and how "Toronto is learning to live with the gun."

...and it's rather unfortunate. Spacing reports that the TTC has begun to update its subway route map in subway cars—with a much uglier font, slightly more clutter, and a messy new treatment of addresses. To wit on the latter point:

...visual clutter is increased by the new addresses on the maps. The TTC did away with just displaying the approximate address numbers along Yonge, Bloor, Danforth and Sheppard (only printing the street name where the subway deviated form one of those four streets), and now has the precise municipal address for each station. Coxwell Station now has a Strathmore Boulevard address, in of 1568 Danforth Avenue, and Rosedale is now at 7 Crescent Road instead of 1009 Yonge.

Continue reading "The TTC Has a New Subway Map"

Frequent northbound travellers on the Bayview Extension have probably noticed the "Pottery Road" street sign pointing to a glorified supermarket driveway at the top of the hill, just south of Moore Avenue. Some may even have wondered how it relates to the more familiar street of the same name almost 1.5 kilometers to the south, winding up the valley wall to Broadview Avenue. The answer to this puzzle is that the two Pottery Roads used to be one, connecting Broadview and Moore Avenues, roughly following Cudmore Creek for much of its length.

While we're on the subject of TTC maps (as we often are), we might as well include the most wildly ambitious one of all. Reader Ryan Felix sent us his subway map, which he describes as a "fantasy map of the TTC" in 2050. Felix says it was "created in hope to influence people to become pro-transit, and to give a vision that Toronto can have a world-class transit system."

On Sunday, as an unofficial kickoff to the Walk21 pedestrian conference coming to Toronto next month, the Walking Life exhibit opened at the Gladstone Hotel.

A few weeks ago, Torontoist discussed a number of emerging collaborative gatherings, including Talk20 and Dorkbot, and a considerable omission was made when Drupal Toronto was left off that list. Toronto is quite renowned for having a very active and vital community contributing to the development of the Drupal Content Management System (CMS). What is Drupal and why should you care? Put quite simply, Drupal is an open source system for building websites. It is like Movable Type, the engine behind Torontoist and the Gothamist network, but it is extremely flexible and can be used to build any kind of site, from a simple blog to a social networking site. A global community of developers are working on modules that you can plug into the platform for all kinds of applications, from Google Maps mashups, to organizing a portfolio, to tracking recipes, Drupal is fantastic at organizing information at all scales.

When the TTC started mapping out its new future under Adam Giambrone, this probably wasn't what it had in mind.

Do you wistfully dream of having a little corner of the city to call your own, but balk at the "Homes" section of the classifieds with its hyperbole-strewn ads and dead-eyed realtors? A new Google Maps-based website, housing123.com, tries to make things a little easier for potential home buyers across the GTA.

For people of a certain age, memories of the Toronto Zoo begin with riding the old monorail. Only it wasn't the old monorail back then—it was the super-futuristic monorail. After a 1994 accident that injured about 30 people, the train's track was pulled up and some of the guideway removed. But if you know where to look, most of the route remains visible as it snakes through the grounds of the zoo.

Torontoist has seen its fair share of Google Maps mashups. For geography nerds like us, maps are always fun to play around with, but most of the mashups we've seen so far have not been particularly useful. That is, unless you're dying to know where they keep all the Timmy's or bust all the grow-ops.

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A new Toronto website promises to do to slum landlords what ratemyprofessors.com did to bad teachers or what dontdatehimgirl.com did to most men we know.

Have you found a great place to buy vintage jackets? Have you just eaten the best vegetarian pad Thai this side of the Mekong River? Do you want to use the Internet to tell more than just the six people on your LiveJournal friends list about your amazing discoveries?

The CouchSurfing Project has nothing to do with The Beach Boys or crowd surfing on a futon (although that must be fun) and has everything to do with traveling the world by the seat of a couch -- someone else's, that is.

We just found out about this absolutely incredible transit map of Toronto that incorporates the TTC, Go Transit, VIVA, Brampton Transit, Mississauga Transit, and Vaughan Transit into handy-dandy Google Map form, meaning you can easily input a location and find the nearest transit routes that surround it.