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Newsstand: May 13, 2015
It’s hump day! And hump day, like every weekday, brings news: Mayor Tory supports rebuilding the Gardiner, TTC’s new streetcars aren’t made so well, and El Nino returns.
Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, Mayor John Tory still thinks it’s worth spending nearly a billion dollars to rebuild the eastern Gardiner Expressway, even though ripping the damn thing out would cost about half as much. City staff, meanwhile, have given the issue a “not my circus, not my monkeys” approach after deciding the whole debate has become too polarized to allow for a proper recommendation. Cue Benny Hill theme music, basically.
The TTC’s cool new voyeur-friendly streetcars are also kind of cruddily made, it turns out. TTC CEO Andy Byford has admitted that the first vehicles released from the new $1.2-billion fleet were so shoddily manufactured that the TTC wouldn’t use them out of genuine fears for passenger safety, which is why the city currently only has five of the 50 new streetcars it’s supposed to.
At long last, El Nino is back. The temperature abnormality made famous by a Chris Farley SNL sketch has been spotted again in the tropical Pacific for the first time since March 2010, which means a warm winter might be ahead of us here in Toronto.