In our inbox yesterday appeared a link to a TTC tender for consultant services, sent to us by Joe Clark (as these things tend to be). They're looking to hire someone to (emphasis ours) "provide professional architectural, engineering/design services and specialized transit services to perform the study concerning the installation of platform screen doors at 75 locations in 69 subway stations and in the six stations that will be constructed within the Spadina subway......

Dubaimetro Naming Rights Turn your brand into a destination RTA offers Dubai Metro Naming Rights Welcome to the ultimate branding and marketing opportunity. With Dubai Metro Naming Rights, you can put your brand on a Dubai Metro station of your choice, or one of the two lines of the Dubai Metro Network. Dubai Metro Naming Rights offers you unmatched impact and visibility to take your brand to new levels of saliency and success. What's......

Photo by Jonathan Goldsbie. According to a December 2004 article in the Globe, Mike Harris is (or at least was at the time) the chairman of video advertising company Onestop; he got on board "in return for an equity stake" in the business. Presuming that he still has that stake (and why wouldn't he? he may be evil, but he's not stupid), Harris became a richer man two weeks ago, when the Toronto Transit......

Snappy Answers runs every Saturday afternoon. Send your questions, be they tough or trivial, to snappyanswers@torontoist.com. What's up with the longer-than-normal wait at Chester Station? I know the reason for the one at Coxwell; the drivers change. But at Chester? I'd been planning to email the TTC and ask, but I imagine you'll answer my question in a much zazzier way. Thanks, J.......

"The Better Way Gets Better," yesterday's TTC press release proclaimed, teasing the media for today's big announcement of service changes. And, really, it'd be hard to disagree. As anticipated, today at the TTC's Arrow Road Garage, David Miller and Adam Giambrone announced a fleet of changes to the TTC's fleet of bus and streetcar routes, designed to decrease crowding and increase service across the system: 75 bus and the Queen, King, and Carlton streetcar......

Our friends over at Spacing Magazine have officially launched their foray into a whole new blogging environment, Spacing Montréal. Covering the urban environment five hours down the Macdonald-Cartier Freeway, Spacing's new blog looks at many of the same public space issues in Montreal (in a refreshing mix of both official languages) that the newly-rebranded Spacing Toronto examines here. It may be worth noting the many parallels between Toronto and Montreal that make it a......

On Monday, the TTC unveiled a survey that, in lieu of other public consultation, would be used to help the organization determine what cuts it may need to make this year. (For more on the TTC's potential budget shortfall, see our interview with Adam Giambrone, the TTC's documentation included with the survey, and Steve Munro's excellent summary of the situation.) The problem is, the survey really isn't that great: it's too vague, too incomplete,......

A lot happens in and around Toronto, but we can only write about so much in a week. Here's the best of the rest, in a new weekly feature we're calling Superfluist. Superfluist will now appear every Saturday. Three couples tried to break the world record for longest kiss last weekend at Mexx. If the photo above is any indication, it was precisely as awkward as kissing competitions tend to be! More photos are in......

A lot happens in and around Toronto, but we can only write about so much in a week. Here's the best of the rest, in a new weekly feature we're calling Superfluist. Superfluist will appear every Friday night. Cathy Gordon decided to get very, very publicly divorced on Monday, with an art piece she called "On My Knees." For it, she crawled around Toronto for a while (on her knees!), signed divorce papers, and then......

A lot happens in and around Toronto, but we can only write about so much in a week. Here's the best of the rest, in a new weekly feature we're calling Superfluist. Superfluist will appear every Friday night. First a monkey escaped. Then, elephants did. And now, a bear has! Animals are apparently not big fans of being captive. Weird, right?The semi-famous Enrique Inglesias was at MuchMusic.This weekend (starting tomorrow morning at 11 a.m.) is......

One of the pillars of the TTC's plan to trim its budget is to cut some twenty-one "poor performing" bus routes. But what, exactly, is a "poor performing" route? As it turns out, transit whiz Steve Munro claims, it sure isn't what the TTC says it is: "in a flat fare system," he writes, "it is impossible to allocate fare revenue in any way that makes sense and produces meaningful comparisons between routes." There......

Photo of a locked-out Keele Station during last year's strike by David Topping. Yesterday's announcement of budget cuts to the TTC garnered a visceral reaction from just about everyone (and not just angry Globe & Mail readers): a normally cool-headed Adam Giambrone proclaimed that "this is a horrible day...This is going to have a dramatic effect on Torontonians, not just TTC riders." Transit advocate Steve Munro weighed in, too, in a piece detailing what......

Can a transit system foster love for a city? Torontonians may scoff, but Londoners will nod. The underground—better known as the Tube—is often cited as a reason why so many Londoners take pride in their city. One trait of the Tube—and possibly something that Toronto can learn from—is the way in which stations are named after the city’s neighbourhoods and landmarks. A journey where you board at Notting Hill, travel past Marble Arch and St.......

Ever since the creation of the Greater Toronto Transit Authority (GTTA) last year we have been eagerly awaiting some information about what it is they actually do and/or when/where they will actually do that thing. So, last week when Dalton McGuinty announced that (if re-elected) he would invest $17.5 billion in transit programs to be administered by the GTTA we decided it was time to do some serious research (i.e. Google them). Alas, we......

The Star's website is reporting that at 10:30 a.m. tomorrow morning, the TTC will announce details of a plan to blanket the city in a network of sixty to eighty kilometres of Light Rapid Transit (or LRT, as it's affectionately called). The cost, according to Giambrone, will be an anything-but-light $30 million per kilometer, which puts the price range for the new lines between $1.8 and $2.4 billion. The TTC hopes to get the......

It looks like the St. Clair right-of-way streetcar lane -- that controversial beast years in the making -- is almost ready to go. Steve Munro just posted these great shots, taken by Harold R. McMann, of the first streetcars making their test runs on the newly-completed eastern section of the path. Numbered 4171 and 4176, the streetcars were effortlessly led along the snowy path by a truck and crew removing obstacles (that's the reason......

For six weekends in early 2007, subway service will take an unusual detour through the fabled Lower Bay station(!) In a recent blog post, Steve Munro notes:Bay Station will be closed, as will Lower St. George. You will be able to see Lower Bay, but not use it. Museum will become the grand transfer station for the two Bloor services and the regular University-Spadina trains which will operate over their normal route. We wonder......

Of the city’s 196 streetcars, only one is air conditioned; streetcar No. 4041 is the new option for keepin’ your cool. You can catch this Rocket on the Spadina 510 route and since there’s a large white box perched upon its roof, you’ll be able to spot it from afar. The cooling system for Canadian Light Rail Vehicle No. 4041 is a $50,000 trial that began in early July on the Queen 501 route.......

Spacing is launching their Transit issue tommorow tomorrow night at the Gladstone Hotel doors at 8 ($10, includes a mag). The issue includes lots of fun stuff like an interview with Mayor Miller on Transit, a profile/interview of transit guru Steve Munro and it's all in glorious full-colour. The launch will also include '50s promo videos for the TTC, subway buttons (including the shiny ones for the RT that might eventually become collectors' items) and......

Bluffer's Park dumpers, you're on notice. The Star reports that there's evidence on who has been dumping huge amounts of garbage at Scarborough's Bluffer's Park and the city is keeping an eye on it. Two bodies have been found in North York in the last two days. Police say bodies are often found in the spring thaw. This fact totally creeps out Torontoist. A 17-year old was shot in the foot during his sister's birthday......

Torontoist nearly spat out his coffee this morning after reading this story on the Spacing Wire. It turns out that the Ontario Government somehow might find the money to help fund the extension of the subway from Downsview all the way up to York University. That's right, the York Subway, that long-held Toronto dream might just become a reality. The total cost of the extension will be somewhere around $1.5 billion according to the Star,......