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Toronto Transit Urban Planning

Ridership has tripled on UP Express, but we can do even better

When UP Express — Toronto’s rail link to Toronto Pearson International Airport – -launched on June 6, 2015, the one-way fare between Union Station and Pearson Airport was set at $27.50, or $19.00 with a Presto card. At the time, Metrolinx, the provincial agency charged with planning and integrating transportation services in the Greater Toronto […]

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Politics Toronto Transit

Toronto’s new rapid transit plan

Yesterday, City Council decided, by a vote of 27-16, to go ahead with the $3.1 billion one-stop extension of the Bloor-Danforth Subway to Scarborough Centre, rejecting Councillor Josh Matlow’s last-ditch attempt to resurrect the LRT replacement and extension of the ageing Scarborough LRT line. Council — Mayor Tory included — also voted to spend resources studying three more […]

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Politics Toronto Transit

What do I know? I’m just a downtown elitist

I once described Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong as the city official that “knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing.” In 2014, Minnan-Wong complained about the costs of building new washrooms at the soccer fields at Cherry Beach, holding up a sign that simply said “$600,000.” That photo of Minnan-Wong, scowling for the cameras, trying […]

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Transit Urban Planning

Missed opportunities on the Mississauga Transitway

Route 107 Malton Express bus on the Mississauga Transitway at Tomken Station After riding the UP Express back in March, the inspiration for a post on a proposed transit hub at Toronto Pearson International Airport, I went for a ride on the Mississauga Transitway. I first rode the Mississauga Transitway on a snowy Monday, November 17, 2014, the […]

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Toronto Transit

The many challenges of creating a transit hub at Pearson Airport

Sign in Terminal 1 at Pearson Airport. Whether we realize it or not, Pearson Airport is already a transit hub.  Updated April 7, 2016 Lester B. Pearson International Airport is Canada’s busiest airport, handling 41 million passengers a year. It is not the busiest transportation hub in the Greater Toronto Area, though; Union Station is considerably busier (GO […]

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Politics Toronto Transit

A smarter SmartTrack

John Tory’s original SmartTrack plan, shown with the existing TTC Subway and GO Rail networks.  In Friday’s Globe and Mail, we were treated to a scoop by Oliver Moore, that newspaper’s excellent transportation reporter, on behind-the-scenes revisions to Mayor John Tory’s SmartTrack rail transit platform, a topic that I discussed several times in this blog. […]

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Toronto Transit

Metrolinx’s strange priorities

Map of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT showing the original working station names along the corridor It’s too often that we hear from business leaders, planning experts, and pundits that politicians should be kept out of transit planning. To some degree, this makes sense. We saw what happened when politicians, pandering for votes from Scarborough, derailed a […]

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Politics Toronto Transit

King Street: a mess of Uber proportions

One of the most frustrating things about living and working in central Toronto is having to rely on streetcars for east-west travel. This isn’t the fault of the streetcars; when free of traffic, they’re a smooth, fast and comfortable way to get around. But trapped in the quagmire that is downtown traffic, streetcars are painfully […]

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Cycling Transit

Dispatches from Durham Region, and Kingston Road tokenism

Two weeks ago, I was out exploring Durham Region, the eastern end of the Greater Toronto Area. While south Durham Region is mostly made up of generic suburban sprawl, there are some interesting historic villages and new urbanist neighbourhoods. North of Highway 7, Durham Region is still mostly rural, though plans for a new airport in North Pickering may […]

Categories
Transit

GO Transit plans to raise fares in 2016. How about a better fare system?

Note: Updated in February 2016 due to a conflicting chart. At Thursday’s Metrolinx Board Meeting, the Board of Directors will be voting on a GO Transit fare increase effective February 1, 2016. As has become common, Greg Percy, the President of GO Transit, will be recommending a tiered fare increase, and we should expect that the Metrolinx Board will rubber stamp […]