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Newsstand: April 24, 2012
It's Tuesday, the day you convince yourself you're just not adequately hydrated to go to hot yoga, again. Stay home and read this temperate news instead: a proposal to lower speed limits, U of T joins a new urban research centre in Brooklyn, city council's mushy middle planning to plan some policy, and a condo proposal for a downtown church.
Just as we were beginning to long for the good old days when cars and humans were sworn enemies, the “war on cars” is beep-beeping its way back to the spotlight, with a recommendation from the chief medical officer of health that Toronto lower speed limits. The report calls for limits of 30 km/h on residential streets and a city-wide 40 km/h limit. Such a reduction could, according to science, reduce the severity of collisions between cars and pedestrians or cyclists. Plus, if this recommendation ever came to pass, the transition to slower driving would probably be easy for downtowners, who can thank gridlock for already doing a fine job of keeping traffic well below the posted limit.
Graduate students at the University of Toronto can soon study such proposals as the lower speed limit at a new “living laboratory” planned to open in Brooklyn, New York. Along with other universities and private companies like IBM and CISCO, the so-called Centre for Urban Science and Progress will research urban issues and give Toronto students an excuse to move to Brooklyn.
Here’s a kind-of story, the kind that results from a dearth of official City-business news coming from City Hall combined with daily deadlines for us news people: some city councillors are having an off-site meeting on Thursday. The councillors in question belong to the “mushy middle” that is said to have so much sway in the post-Fordian council. The group will get together to strategize and synergize and optimize their goals for the next little while, as the mayor doesn’t seem to be pushing too many plans of his own. Meantime, Mayor Ford is apparently reaching out to some of these mushy folk, and even some of the hard-line anti-Fordians, in an effort to get something going himself.
City Hall is so quiet these days that there’s even less non-news news, as the the brothers Ford cancelled their weekly weigh-in for the third time in five weeks. Could it be because the mayor was still not feeling well after calling in sick to his radio show on Sunday? Perhaps he ate a bad Double Down? Who knows. All we know for sure is the weekly exercise in humiliating the mayor for not exercising didn’t happen.
The Bloor Street United Church, at the corner of Bloor and Huron Streets, is trying to work a miracle: convincing local residents that the church should be allowed to add on a 40-storey condo as part of the church’s redevelopment. The Church is considering moving its headquarters to this downtown location after sometime spent at Bloor and Islington. Plans for redevelopment include space for other non-worship-yet-churchy things like yoga classes and Girl Guide meetings. The proposed condo development, say the church people, will help support the church financially.