Categories
Roads Transit

GO’s gaping gap, gone

My experiences riding the new GO Transit Route 17, and thoughts on improving Route 21

Categories
Brampton Infrastructure Transit

Brampton LRT: a second chance to get it right

Brampton City Council will once again consider extending the Hurontario LRT north into downtown. Will they hold out for a tunnel? Or succeed in getting it built?

Categories
Ontario Toronto Transit

Reviewing GO Transit’s big April changes

On Saturday, April 8, GO Transit will introduce big changes to its rail and bus services. Brampton and Waterloo Region will see the biggest benefits, while a major gap in Ontario’s intercity bus network will finally get filled. However, major construction work on the Barrie and Stouffville Lines will require the bustitution of most trains […]

Categories
Transit Travels Urban Planning Roads Infrastructure

Montreal: a tale of two busways

Across Canada, our biggest cities are building new transit. Here in Toronto, the Crosstown and Finch West LRTs are well underway (though the first phase of the Eglinton-Crosstown is already three years late), as well as the Scarborough subway expansion, the Ontario Line, and GO Transit corridor improvements. Vancouver is building a major expansion to […]

Categories
Ontario Transit Travels

A transit tour of Southwestern Ontario

In January 2023, while visiting the site of the now-demolished Sarnia Eaton Centre, I took advantage of two new rural transit services serving Southwestern Ontario: Strathroy-Caradoc Transit and Huron Shores Area Transit. While both services connect London and Sarnia, they operate as separate services with different fares; they also have different terminals. Strathroy-Caradoc Transit offers […]

Categories
Development History Ontario Travels Urban Planning

The end of Sarnia’s Eaton Centre

Late last year, I wrote about the closure of the Hamilton City Centre mall, the last of Ontario’s downtown Eaton Centres to open. But Hamilton’s failed shopping centre wasn’t the only old downtown mall to close in recent years: Sarnia’s Bayside Centre, opened in 1982 as the Sarnia Eaton Centre, was recently demolished, with a […]

Categories
History Toronto Travels

I went back to Toronto

Toronto, Ohio, that is.

Categories
Maps Politics Toronto

Voter turnout in the 2022 municipal election

Ever since John Tory was elected mayor of Toronto in 2014, voter turnout in municipal elections has been in decline. In 2010, the year Rob Ford was elected mayor, turnout was 50.4 percent. Four years later, 54.7 percent of all eligible voters went to the polls to elect a new chief magistrate. However, in 2018, […]

Categories
About me Politics Toronto

Sean’s strong mayor agenda for a new era

Who knew, just two weeks ago, that Torontonians would be returning to the polls to elect a new mayor of Toronto? Looking back on John Tory’s last eight-and-a-half years in office, the biggest disappointment might have been that he spent so little of the political capital that he had accumulated after decades as a backroom […]

Categories
Brampton Infrastructure Transit

A better Bramalea Station, finally

Bramalea Station has come a long way, but it is not yet used to its full potential.