City
Morning Brew: January 5, 2009
Photo: "Polar Bear Dip - 2009 (6)" by HighPlainsDrifter Photography, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.
What's happening in the GTA (and sometimes beyond):
Unsatisfied with the business as it was, Danforth residents teamed up to give Michael's Meat and Deli an extreme makeover yesterday. Good for the neighbourhood. Better to take gentrification into your own hands than leave it to the big chains.
With the strike at York U reaching two months and plans for making up time including things like canceling reading week and shortening terms and exams, both sides finally sat down at a table and made some progress. Education may be the only business where consumers demand less for their money, but York U students want more than this.
Could the train linking Union Station to Pearson airport actually be on an express schedule? First proposed 6 years ago, apparently the environmental assessment will be fast-tracked, which means we should see this rail line in no time. Oh, right. Details about cost, how to build the thing and if the final plan will differ than the Blue 22 plan (no, that's not an Argos play) proposed 6 years ago are still undetermined. But nothing can stop it now!
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In what appears to be Toronto's second homicide of the year, a woman was found dead in her SUV near Leslie & Lawrence. There was a gunshot wound, but police are being cautious, saying, "At this time it is still being treated as a suspicious death." I say call a spade a spade, police wouldn't be looking for suspects if they didn't suspect somebody shot this woman.
They will take even longer to arrive than the Queen streetcar, or even the new streetcars that might get ordered this spring, but new TTC shelters are coming to stops near you. Unless the shelter near you isn't scheduled for 18 years from now, then, well, happy waiting!
Here's some shocking news for you. The Raptors and the Leafs both won yesterday.
Discussion
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Give me a frickin' break regarding these residents concerns about the train blocking traffic down certain roads.
It's all of four roads. Queen, King, Church and one other that I cannot remember, and none of them are truly necessary to get onto Weston Road.
Most folks can drive down to Lawrence West, and use the underpass there to bypass the trains.
They're not the first town to have this happen. It happened to my family when Autoroute 20 replaced the route 2 in Montreal, preventing us from getting to the mall at the bottom of our street since there was now an onramp in the way.
Get over it!!!
When I saw the above photo, "Polar Bear Dip"...first thing I thought of,
"Oh, sure, an intervention...we have those all the time...we say, what, you don't wanna be a polar bear no more?"
Someday, I need to run a C:\>delete *.useless -trivia
from my brain: - )
That sh*t looks cold!
not that i'm arguing, i think it's a good idea, put in some kind of overhead foot bridge and you're set, really.
i have no sympathy for motorists.
That said the Weston crowd has a serious case of cranial/rectal inversion, I remember when Blue 22 was first announced their spokesperson saying on "Metro Morning" that nobody has been asking for nor is there a need for better transit to the Airport, I just about did a spit take, of course Andy "no hard questions" didn't challenge that assertion. Blue 22 or not those crossings will disappear in order to improve GO service so it's a rather pointless arguement.
If one compares Blue 22 with what they have in Paris or Zurich or Philadelphia or Newark to NYC it's very similar and there is pent up demand for something like this. One of the complaints is that it only goes to Union but frankly, that's OK, not so much for leisure travellers but for incoming business travel and arriving tourists the demand is there and it really will reduce a lot of one way taxi rides (remember, Mississuaga licensed taxis FROM the airport aren't allowed to pick up return fares in the city, and vice versa)
The idea of extending the Eglinton crosstown to the airport is attractive and will help the leisure traveller more but it doesn't really help the business traveller.
What's really needed is a station at or very close to the airport where it can become part of a regional rail system (i.e. GO). There has been a suggestion of a station that would serve the airport and Woodbine racetrack and the developments around it soon to come, on the Georgtown GO line. This would require extending the current airport tramway which is apparently a non trival proposition since the geniuses at the GTAA picked a technology (cable car style) that can't be further extended easily.