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Newsstand: July 21, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
In this morning’s Newsstand, mayoral candidates debate again but don’t say much that we didn’t already know, Byron Sonne has been denied bail, street racing is for everyone, Toronto’s public pay toilet kinda sorta works again, and Rocco Rossi wants to go Presto to the TTC payment system.
The ever-present CP24 hosted the Toronto mayoral candidates in yet another debate, and everybody in Toronto was watching live-tweeting. See Torontoist’s own live coverage here, with Chris Bird telling it like it is as candidates tell us what we already knew. Sarah Thomson, Rocco Rossi, Rob Ford, Joe Pantalone, and George Smitherman came together and said things, mostly about the G20, which they all seem to remember happening. Candidates also attacked one another’s legitimacy, but no one attacked host Ben Mulroney’s legitimacy, which is really a shame.
Segue from Ben Mulroney to toilets. Toronto’s new automated pay toilet that was on the fritz is working again, completely and totally, except for the occupied light—but knowing whether or not someone’s on the can is not at all an important step in the public toilet–usage process. Everyone’s calling these toilets street furniture. Here’s hoping that means we can look forward to pay-per-use divans, too.
Byron Sonne, the thirty-six-year-old security consultant and Forest Hill resident was denied bail yesterday. Sonne and his wife were arrested several days before the G20 protest for possessing explosive materials.
Police say that they’ll be releasing photos today of another twenty-one people on their G20 “Most Wanted” list.
Street racing: idiocy for all ages! Early Tuesday morning in Scarborough, a Jaguar and a Cadillac travelling south on Kennedy collided just below Lawrence, sending one car into a pole and the other careening into nearby houses and cars, causing damage to the tune of, in the words of constable Dave Audette, “a lot.” Apparently gripped by road rage, the drivers were fifty-three and thirty-nine years old, and at 6:45 a.m., one imagines they might well have been en route to work. They’re being investigated under street racing laws.
Presto, change-o, Rossi wants to re-arrange-o the way we ride transit, pledging to roll out the province’s Presto smart card system on all TTC vehicles within three years, a move he claims would pay for itself. Getting his numbers from a super-reliable and not at all biased source a study undertaken five years ago by the company contracted to implement Presto, Rossi says the change will save us all bundles. TTC chair Adam Giambrone thinks costs will be higher than estimated. He’s already making moves to bring in an open fare payment system that would allow riders to use their debit or credit cards to get on the TTC.