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Newsstand: November 16, 2009
With one very clever piece of spin, the TTC has managed to lose money it doesn’t even have! A lot of money! To reach their estimated one million dollars of revenue lost to token hoarding, the TTC would need Torontonians to stash away four million tokens by January 3. Here’s hoping that a single person will step up and do all the work for us, just so they can literally bathe in tokens. In all seriousness, the TTC’s estimate is plausible, if your definition of “token hoarding” is “anyone having any tokens they purchased before the fare hike.” With 1,485,000 rides per day, even when you eliminate metropass users and cash fares, it only takes single-digit tokens per rider to reach the TTC’s sensational number. The real question is, does having four or five tokens in your wallet at 11:59 p.m. on January 2 really count as “hoarding”?
Okay, maybe the TTC is being a bit cold toward token users (and why not, considering the abuse it saves for its most loyal customers?) but at least it’s saying nice things if you’re a university student. Chairperson Adam Giambrone wants to extend the $104 student metropass to university students, who would otherwise pay $126 for adult metropasses (or around $111 for subscription or bulk discount passes). Giambrone has said he’d bring his plan to a vote at tomorrow’s TTC meeting, which will also vote on the fare hike.
With all this talk about the sky-high price of riding the rocket, though, it’s funny to think that the Bloor-Danforth subway line cost two hundred million dollars in 1959: now just a fraction of the TTC’s budget, back then more money than anyone had bothered to imagine.
Toronto’s own Omar Khadr, the child soldier from Canada detained by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and held at Guantanamo Bay since 2002, is headed to a military tribunal “designed ‘to secure convictions,'” even as Canada’s Supreme Court considers whether to uphold a lower court’s demand that he be sent home. In Ottawa, hundreds of demonstrators called on the government not to let Khadr off the hook, but to insist he get a real trial, with fancy trimmings like due process and evidence that wasn’t obtained through coercion.
A Toronto woman who worked two jobs to get by died after being run over trying to cross Birchmount Road on the way to her second job. She had gotten off a bus half a kilometre away from the nearest crosswalk on one of Toronto’s many busy peripheral streets where people on foot have little choice but jaywalking. Six pedestrians were injured in traffic accidents last week, leaving two dead, and the percentage of pedestrian crash victims is on the rise, according to Toronto police.
There may not much of a bright side to this morning’s news, but maybe we can do better tomorrow. If that sound’s good and your schedule’s open, by the way, you might want to give this a look.