[PHOTO] Five photos of Exhibition GO station, taken just before midnight

This weekend just past, I was wandering through Exhibition Place down by the waterfront just before midnight when I came upon the Exhibition GO Station. I thought it a handsome station, all poured-concrete and cinematic lighting, but was also struck by its disconnect from the rest of the city grid. The 29 Dufferin bus runs in this area relatively rarely, for instance, and only in 2027 will it be plugged into the Ontario Line as a terminal station when that subway line is built. (If it is built. Let us hope.)

[URBAN NOTE] Eight Toronto links

• blogTO notes the strange house, a fantasia inspired by Greece, at 1016 Shaw Street.
• blogTO shares photos from inside Paradise Theatre on Bloor, reopened after 13 years.
• blogTO notes that GO Transit will now be offering customers unlimited rides on Sundays for just $C 10.
• Photos of infamous Toronto chair girl Marcella Zoia celebrating her 20th birthday are up at blogTO, here.
• Many residents displaced by the Gosford fire in North York have been moved to hotels. Global News reports.
• A TTC worker has launched a court case against the TTC and city of Toronto over issues of air quality. Global News reports.
• Jamie Bradburn reports on how the Toronto press covered the opening of the Suez Canal, here.
• Transit Toronto explains what, exactly, workers are building at Eglinton station and Yonge and Eglinton more generally.

[URBAN NOTE] Fifteen Kitchener-Waterloo items (#waterlooregion)

• Work on the second stage of Ion expansion, south into Cambridge, will not even start until 2028, and is expected to cost at least $C 1.36 billion. Global News reports.
• This proposal for regular two-way GO Transit rail connections between Toronto and Kitchener-Waterloo, frankly, is desperately needed. The Record reports.
• A cyclist faces charges for careless driving leading to a collision with a LRT in Kitchener. CBC reports.
• A GoFundMe campaign for a woman hit by a train in Kitchener has raised more than $C14 thousand. The Record reports.
• A school bus driver has been charged for stopping his vehicle dangerously close to a rail crossing in Cambridge. The Record reports.
• Waterloo Region is a successful testbed for virtual doctor visits. The Record reports.
• The Charles Street bus terminal in downtown Kitchener is not going to be redeveloped for at least a couple of years. The Record reports.
• Waterloo Region hopes to create more than 600 affordable new homes, in five developments, over the next decade. CBC reports.
• The number of single food bank users in Kitchener-Waterloo has doubled over the past five years. CBC reports.
• Waterloo is spending $C 3 million to renovate and modernize a handsome old Carnegie Library. CBC reports.
• A pop-up in Kitchener, Vivid Dreams, is charging customers up to $C 20 to use one of a dozen backgrounds for their Instagram photos. CBC reports.</li
• A Kitchener woman, Heidi Bechtold, has a thriving new dog-related business, Complete K9. The Record reports.
• The new digital lab at the Kitchener Public Library sounds great! The Record reports.
• Andrew Coppolino at CBC Kitchener-Waterloo takes a look at some of the different cuisines and restaurants in Waterloo Region featuring noodles, here.
• Andrew Coppolino at CBC Kitchener-Waterloo looks at the pastel de nata, the Portuguese egg custard, as an emerging commercial snack in Waterloo Region.

[PHOTO] Four photos of the Kipling GO Station

The Kipling GO Station, attached by a short tunnel to the Kipling TTC station at the westernmost end of the Bloor-Danforth line, looks rather impressive late at night, illuminated in the middle of an Etobicoke that has not quite condensed into a high-rise neighbourhood. The long sight lines are impressive.

[PHOTO] Three photos walking south past the GO Transit and VIA Rail yards, Islington Avenue

Sunday, I walked with the man I have been dating south on Islington Avenue, past first the GO Transit Willowbrook Yard then past the VIA Rail Toronto Maintenance Terminal. These are not working stations, not open to the public, but the view of these facilities looking down from the bridge under a perfect blue sky was stunning.

[BRIEF NOTE] Some thoughts on the mass transit gaps of Canada

After VIA Rail’s service from Toronto to Niagara Falls, Ontario dropped us off in that border city’s train station yesterday morning, I went inside the station to (among other things) take a look. I was interested to see the below map, depicting the GO Transit service network in southern Ontario. Niagara Falls is literally on the uttermost edge of the network, the southeasternmost extension of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area’s regional commuting network.

I’ll be sorting through the very enjoyable day trip to Niagara Falls for some time; sharing some of my photos is going to take up a fair amount of space, for instance. One thing that did impress me, as a Torontonian visiting from the city, was the extent to which Niagara Falls was physically removed from the heart of the Golden Horseshoe, could be substantially inaccessible even. The VIA Rail trip out in the morning was perfectly good, a comfortable ride two hours’ long that was only five minutes late, but it was not matched by a corresponding train trip back–we had to book a return trip on GO Transit, an express bus to Burlington and then a commuter rail ride east to Toronto. Had it not been for the combination of VIA and GO Transit service, we wouldn’t have been able to get there save by bus.

I live in the heart of a region that, by Canadian standards, is absurdly well-served by transit options. GO Transit does stretch far and wide, extending to Hamilton and Kitchener and Barrie and Oshawa, and bus routes do extend beyond these cities to smaller centres like Niagara Falls and Peterborough, but beyond that? Talk of developing a high-speed rail connection between Toronto and the southwest Ontario city of London have been dismissed by the new provincial government, with talk of perhaps increasing VIA Rail service, but I am unaware of this talk being solidified. There was a brief flurry of excitement this year when the mayor of Niagara Falls, New York, talked of extending commuter rail from Toronto to his city, and that does appeal to me; better yet, I think, also extend GO Transit just a bit further too, to connect to a Buffalo that while more distant from Toronto than Hamilton is also larger than Hamilton. The border, alas, is going to intervene. The Golden Horsehose will remain connected, but cities and destinations just tantalizingly out of reach will remain tantalizingly out of reach to people who do not own vehicles, to the deficit of these cities and to the Golden Horseshoe, too.

Beyond this, what do things look like for mass transit? There are, as best as I can tell, no transit links to such an eminently day-trippable community as Port Hope, just one hour’s trip east of Toronto. The Québec City-Windsor Corridor as a whole remains connected by bus and rail routes, but only barely; I cannot help but think that the lack of affordable transit connections in the arguable core of Canada is a good thing. And beyond Central Canada, mass transit options are scarce. Prince Edward Island can barely sustain decent bus routes within and between its major cities, with even the North Shore remaining consigned to private shuttles, for instance, while Atlantic Canada as a whole is lacking. At least things are better than in Western Canada, where a Greyhound hit hard by long distances and high costs has shut down most of its routes, leaving small communities especially disconnected from the wider country and with successors apparently unclear as to how they can fill the gap.

I am lucky in that I only find Niagara Falls a bit complicated to reach, and London offputting. Others outside the Golden Horseshoe, and the well-serviced conurbations of the Québec City-Windosr corridor, face worse fates, trapped in their communities without access to the wider world and facing terrible risks as they try to get out. The so-called “Highway of Tears” in northern British Columbia, known as being a haunt for murderers of women, could only take on this role in the first place because of the need of women to hitchhike for want of any other way to leave.

I can easily make the argument that much more funding is required for mass transit in Canada, to make it much easier for Canadians to move from one community to another. A Canada arbitrarily parceled out into communities of various sizes, each disconnected from each other with the costs of individual travel making regular travel inaccessible to most people, is a Canada that is poorer in so many ways. Why public policy in Canada has not sought to remedy this, if not through direct investment in new transit infrastructure then at least through subsidies to private companies like Greyhound, is beyond me. I would have thought the gains obvious. Far-sighted politicians should seize on this, I’d think, as an issue they can at least try to deal with.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: real estate, GO Transit, new homes, Gardiner Expressway

• blogTO shares a new map depicting prices for new homes at different stations on the GO Transit network, here.
• This real-estate ad offering an actively used office as someone’s home for a mere $C 1695 a month is ridiculous on so many levels. The Toronto Star reports.
• Transit Toronto notes that GO Transit has dropped fares on trips shorter than 10 kilometres while raising them for longer trips.
• 98% of the material used in these modern houses worth $C 1.7 million is made of recycled materials. The Toronto Star reports.
• The irony of a posh pop-up restaurant being created underneath the Gardiner Expressway while, just a bit to the east, homeless people living under the highway were driven from their shelter, is shocking. CBC reports.

[PHOTO] Three photos from the South Core, Toronto

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: Torontoist, Dundas West/Bloor, McArthur, schools, TTC

• Veteran Toronto online news hub Torontoist, silent for the past few months, has been acquired by Canadian combine Daily Hive. I wish Torontoist will; I miss it.
• A tunnel connecting the Dundas West TTC station with the Bloor UP station, a few hundred metres apart, is in the works but is still some years away. Toronto.com reports.
• A police officer who has been charged with negligence with regards to a 2016 claim of an assault by Bruce McArthur claims he is being made a fall guy. The Toronto Star has it.
• CBC Toronto looks at the low attendance at the Africentric Alternative School, despite the high praise it receives.
• At The Globe and Mail, former mayor John Sewell notes that the lack of consent of the City of Toronto to the takeover of the TTC by Ontario has some legal import.

[URBAN NOTE] Twelve Toronto links (#toronto, #topoli)

• Because of a lack of support from the University of Toronto, Ten Editions Bookstore on Spadina Avenue between College and Bloor has closed down permanently. blogTO reports.
• Statler’s on Church Street, a popular Village bar known for its performance spaces, closed down suddenly on account of massive rent increases. blogTO reports.
• The famed Coffee Time restaurant at Coxwell and Gerrard, subject of a documentary that looks at this affordable coffee place’s connections to locals, has closed down permanently. blogTO reports.
• Gilbert Ngabo at the Toronto Star reports on how Torontonians now have now choice but to use the Presto card. My experiences reflect others’ in that things have been working out for me, so far.
• GO Transit’s connections directly to York University have ceased in the wake of the subway extension, as promised. Many who depended on the direct link are unhappy that it is no longer being sustained. Global News reports.
• This Toronto Sun article shares the call of a brother of a victim who died by suicide at a TTC station for more action to prevent such unfortunate events.
• Steve Munro reports on the different challenges facing the TTC board in 2019.
• Enzo DiMatteo at NOW Toronto makes the case that Toronto needs to continue to address gun violence as a public health issue if it is to control this plague.
• A tall and skinny home in Riverdale that has gone on sale for $C 3 million has as many detractors as supporters. Global News reports.
• CBC Toronto notes that the new nickname of the Economist for Toronto and its tech sector, “Maple Valley”, is not catching on with locals.
• Marco Chown Oved at the Toronto Star shares the story of Don Sampson, a long-time resident of the Toronto Islands who faces losing the family home there because he cannot inherit the property from his brother.
• The cast of the venerable Global Television drama Train 48, filmed on a GO Transit Lakeshore West train in 2003-2005, recently reunited. Global News reports.