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Newsstand: February 9, 2012
Hurtling towards the weekend, we pause to consider Thursday. And the news: mayor's transit plan is overruled, he's pretty sure it doesn't count thought; how about those local sports teams; sprawling suburbs have a transit problem of their own; and another book store bites the dust.
Everyone was abuzz yesterday over the special meeting and city council’s vote to reinstate a wide-reaching LRT-based transit plan instead of the mayor’s unilateral subway decision. Everyone except the likes of Rob Ford and Giorgio Mammoliti (Ward 7, York West). Mayor Ford said of the meeting, “Technically speaking, that whole meeting was irrelevant.” While Mammoliti basically called the democratic council vote an exercise in throat ramming. We know we’re supposed to make bad jokes about the news, but sometimes the things city councillors and the mayor say are so wrong, just so fundamentally not true, that we can’t even bring ourselves to make light of them for fear that adding any more lightness to the their completely baseless claims will cause our little burg to just float away into the oblivion of the meteors that dance just above us.
Speaking of transit and being out of touch with the real world and its real realities, the suburbs are in trouble. According to the most recent census data, Toronto is no longer the centre of the GTA as population growth is faster in places like Ajax and Milton. And yet there is no comprehensive regional transit plan to accommodate all that sprawl. So if we think it’s hard to improve transit on a few streets in one city, imagine how completely, sadly, discouragingly impossible transit planning for the black hole we call the Greater Toronto Area must be. But, hey, it’s our black hole, right?
It looks like the Leafs will officially be named one of the teams competing in next year’s Winter Classic game. Or, as non-sports fans who do happen to be TV fans have come to know it, “the game they play in that awesome HBO show about hockey where you can hear the players swear a lot on the ice.” If all goes according to plan, the Leafs will be swearing at the Detroit Red Wings in the outdoor game at Michigan Stadium.
Forget books, says Ryerson University. The school is shutting down one of their two book stores to make room for more lab space for their psychology and urban planning departments. You know, so students can study the neurological events that unfold when the receptor cells of a sensory organ are stimulated by contact with a book and other students can plan what to build when all those public libraries are finally closed.