Photo by gbalogh from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. The Star's Jack Lakey, aka The Fixer, is invaluable. There is no better way to elicit a favourable response from the City bureaucracy than by sicking him on a case of civic neglect. It really is the most consistent way to get things done in Toronto. (The TPSC got Viacom to fulfill their contractual obligation to put street names on transit shelters simply by getting him......

They're in cabs, ATMs, and the Entertainment District, and they're about to be in all TTC vehicles. By next June, every one of the TTC's 1.5 million daily riders will be photographed multiple times over their journey. A part of the TTC's $18-million security plan, the commission will install up to 12,000 cameras throughout the system—in key station areas and on streetcars, buses, and subways. The intention is to provide police with evidence if......

After evaluating the privately-contracted submissions from the City of Toronto's Co-ordinated Street Furniture Program, the design jury has awarded the contract to Astral Media Outdoor. Astral gained some notorious bad press recently when they threatened to sue IllegalSigns.ca and proprietor Rami Tabello for accusations that the advertising behemoth is refusing to remove illegally-retained billboards around the city. This also upsets the Toronto Public Space Committee, who say that the street furniture program will actually......

Last summer, Clear Channel Outdoor threatened to sue the Toronto Public Space Committee; last week Astral Media Outdoor threatened to sue Rami Tabello and his IllegalSigns.ca. That left one bidder for the "street furniture" contract with a relatively fuck-up-free slate. "Some people are blessed with intelligence; some people are blessed with good looks; others, with personality," Tabello wrote on Wednesday. "Then there's Nick Arakgi of CBS Outdoor. He's blessed with having competitors that are......

Yesterday the City of Toronto unveiled the designs submitted for the "Coordinated Street Furniture Program," its plan to grant a billboard company a twenty-year monopoly on providing and maintaining bus shelters, garbage bins, benches, and other items for Toronto’s sidewalks. The "renderings" have been posted on the City website as epic PDFs, but our friend Joe Clark has also extracted the images from the PDFs and posted them to his Flickr account for convenient......

The TPSC's Guerrilla Gardening posse will be doing their first planting of the year tomorrow afternoon. They'll be meeting at the N.E. Corner of Queen and Parliament at 2:00. Guerrilla Gardening, for those of you who don't know, is an urban intervention where you spruce up neglected parts of the city with flowers, plants and other green things. Sadly the weather sages at Environment Canada are predicting rain. On the other hand we've gardened......

Things have heated up over at the St. Clair Pro-ROW site, as the anti-transit group SOS (which is an acronym for Destroy Our City) have caught wind of it. Transit guru James Bow, editor of Transit Toronto, is pushing for calm heads and civil debate. What could be the future of Toronto's streetcars will be on display at the Toronto Hummingbird Centre, 1 Front Street East this Monday, October 24th from noon until 5 p.m.......