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Newsstand: November 15, 2010
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
Monday’s back, and with it, some news: Dufferin Street finally goes straight, waterfront film studio wants to build fake cities for real people, new cops are hard to make, and Harry Potter comes to life.
After decades of discussion, the City has finally straightened out the Dufferin jog. A grand opening ceremony will be held on Thursday for the new underpass that will connect Dufferin Street in a straight path north and south of Queen Street West. The desire to realign Dufferin and end its dependence on Peel and Gladstone streets has been around pretty much ever since the kinky situation began more than a century ago, and the plan to fix it has been on the books since 1966. Now passengers on the 29 Dufferin have less of a chance of falling over when the bus takes its sharp detour, and rush hour gridlock in the area will be alleviated, saving a reported 250,000 litres of fuel. The ever-bustling West Queen West/Parkdale neighbourhood will also get some cool new art and a parkette where you can sit and watch the strollers go by.
Toronto’s inferiority complex is about to get reel, as mega movie studio Pinewood wants to build a residential neighbourhood that mimics the streetscapes of more popular movie set cities like New York and London. Anyone wishing to live in this “living studio” will have to sign a covenant promising not to complain when their private streets are closed for shooting. HOK Planning Group drew up the plan for Pinewood to expand their existing studios in collaboration with developers of the waterfront site. City-owned developer Build Toronto supports the proposal as part of a master plan to revitalize the area. It’s also being billed as a solution for traffic disruptions caused by film crews, and a part of the continuous effort to attract big budget movies to kind of film in our humble town. A potential downside though: implosion of Reel Toronto as the movie-city collapses in on itself.
During the municipal campaign, Rob Ford promised to add one hundred new police officers to the Toronto force to patrol schools, and now the chair of the Toronto Police Services Board outlines exactly how tricky hiring more cops can be. For starters, says Alok Mukherjee, the force is already fully deployed. Then there’s the issue of finding money, time, and space to train a hundred new officers. A deployment of that scale could add up to ten million dollars to the police budget at a time when the city is being asked to control costs. The training facility isn’t big enough to train that many officers for immediate deployment. And the board’s meeting on Monday may be the last time its current configuration sits down together. Despite Mukherjee’s expressed desire to keep elected officials like vice-chair Pam McConnell (Ward 28, Toronto Centre-Rosedale) on board, especially with contract negotiations with the police union starting next month, there is growing speculation that McConnell, and many other Ford critics, will be ousted by the new mayor.
A new report says light rail transit is a cheaper and greener option than subways. The Toronto Environmental Alliance (TEA) together with TTCriders is releasing these findings in hopes of giving City Hall yet another reason to reconsider scrapping the Transit City light rail plan. The report finds that subways cost up to three times as much as LRT to build. And since LRT lines can be built much faster than subways they reduce the number of cars on the road sooner, as time is a “luxury the environment simply can’t afford,” in the words of TEA executive director Franz Hartmann.
And U of T and Ryerson sent teams to the Quidditch world cup in New York this weekend. Yes, thatQuidditch, of Harry Potter fame. Ryerson didn’t make the finals at the broomstick-dodgeball-inquisition-fantasy game tournament, but they did make the crowd of mainly children in costumes and unicyclists smile.