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Newsstand: February 3, 2012
Congratulations, it's Friday! And it's all thanks to you. In the news: the mayor's Sheppard subway adviser advises road tolls and then takes it back, a report on the city's cycling data, Proud FM forced to leave the Village, and the pandas are coming.
The man picked by the mayor to make the Sheppard subway line happen released his report on funding options for the project on Thursday, and he’s already having trouble talking about it. New taxes, development charges, and zone-based road tolls were among some of the suggestions made by Gordon Chong to fund the line. But now, Chong says that we shouldn’t pay too much attention to the road tolls suggestion he made, even though he said it was kind of a key element of his plan and that the mayor would just have to get used to it. Now, when asked by reporters, Chong prefers to call road tolls “unmentionable” and focus attention on other options, like the City winning the lottery.
Newsflash: cycling in this city can be dangerous. Data recently unearthed and mapped by the Globe shows just how sketchy it can be to strap on a helmet and take your two wheels to the streets. Toronto has the most cycling collisions by population among major cities, and that number has been going up since 2008, while the number in cities like Ottawa and Vancouver has been going down. But that data doesn’t show any sort of patterns that might help identify problem zones, so just be careful out there, okay?
High rents in the Village are forcing some of the Proud FM staff to relocate to Etobicoke. While the station is adamant that their studios will remain in the Village, some administrative staff will be relocating to an office on Dundas West, out by Kipling station. The program director said rent for the whole space they were using was over $10,000 a month, which, in our inexpert opinion, does sound pretty high.
The prime minister is heading to China, and you know what that means: Paul Ainslie (Ward 43, Scarborough East) hopes Stephen Harper will bring back some pandas with him. The councillor says the governments of China and Canada, along with the Toronto Zoo’s CEO, are planning to talk about pandas. And the zoo board is believed to have discussed pandas during a closed-door session of their Thursday meeting. And Ainslie already knows how the zoo is going to put up the pandas at no cost to the taxpayer: the private sector. Right after they build that new subway, the great and glorious private sector will get right on the pandas’ new digs. Pretty swell guy, that private sector.