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Extra, Extra: Sentient Buses, Bay Street Concourse is Closed, and Dimitri the Lover’s Rash Complaint
Every weekday’s end, we collect just about everything you ought to care about or ought not to miss.
The 97 Yonge bus. Photo by MrDanMofo from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.
- The TTC has introduced four “talking buses” on the 7 Bathurst and 11 Bayview lines. Buses #8200, #8300, #8350, and #9050 are equipped with speakers near the front doors that will externally announce their travel routes and destinations when the doors open to help aid the visually impaired. The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act requires transit agencies across the province to equip their vehicles with pre-boarding announcements by 2017. The TTC has said that talking buses and forward-facing dash cams are among measures it would test in the wake of the death of Amaria Diljohn, who was struck and killed by an on-duty TTC driver last December.
- Union Station’s Bay Street concourse is now closed. The concourse will be demolished to be re-built with an increase in size (from 40,000 square feet to 61,000 square feet), and will re-open in 2017. Metrolinx spokesperson Anne Marie Aikins said, “[The concourse] opened in 1979 and hasn’t been renovated since.” The cost of renovations for both the Bay and York concourses is estimated at $100 million, and is part of the revitalization project to increase capacity at Union Station.
- James Sears, otherwise known as “Dimitri the Lover,” is accusing postal workers of refusing to deliver tens of thousands of copies of his controversial publication wrapped with his party’s political flyers until after the October 19 federal election, alleging NDP-leaning affiliation. Megan Whitfield, the President of CUPW, Local 626, stated that the reason behind the halt in delivery is due to an investigation of the ink, which caused skin irritation in workers at the Commissioners Street Canada Post location. She added that distribution will resume in a couple of days. Dimitri the Lover denied he was responsible for spreading any kind of rash. Hat tip 12:36.