Recent content by SimonP

Here is a link to details on the Hearn accident: http://urbexbarrie.blogspot.ca/2008/06/hearn-tragedy.html

Look like the same demographic you see on the ferry to the airport. Airport users are not lower income suburbanites either.

There were small train stations at places like Parkdale, and Broadview. These would have been the fastest ways downtown in 1894. I'm not sure if the trains would be used for daily commuters.

I've heard this talking point before, but it isn't true. If you look at the last ten polls released before the election, Ford was ahead in 9 of them, and in the final poll he was ahead by 15 points.

There's going to be an unofficial gathering outside city hall at 4:00 today.

One slight clarification. If you look at the numbers, it's not that public sector wages have been increasing over the last few decades. Rather private sector wages for the bottom 50% of earners have declined. Indexed for inflation a public sector admin assistant or warehouse worker is making...

Can a building like this make financial sense? I've always heard that nothing much over 60 stories is ever cost effective. Once you get higher than that, the extra costs of elevators and HVAC cost you more per floor than the income you'd get from the extra units.

I don't understand how Pearson can be at capacity on its current site. Consider these Google maps: Pearson Airport - 30 million travellers per year Atlanta International Airport - 90 million travellers per year Pearson seems about the same size, so why is its capacity so much lower...

What are our old cars going to be used for in Nigeria? There are no subway systems in the country, though Lagos is working on a light rail project.

Over the last couple of years I've been working to illustrate the Wikipedia articles on the various Toronto neighbourhoods. For each article I've tried to get a shot showing a cluster of "typical" houses for that part of the city. Together they form an interesting gallery of the diversity of...

It is possible to transport it (see hydrogen pipeline transport ) it's just more expensive than oil, and requires the construction of a whole new infrastructure. There are certainly drawbacks to hydrogen, which is why no one uses it these days, but at a certain price point it does become cheaper...

I think it was Bruegmann's book Sprawl that mentions that commute length has been relatively fixed for thousands of years. If you look back at Roman cities the workers, who travelled on foot, also held to a one hour maximum commute time. While I agree that cities can, and do sprawl endlessly...

The other important thing with all of this is that capacity on the Yonge line is going to run out long before it will on Eglinton. The only real solution is a DRL that connects with the Eglinton Line at Don Mills. Such a connection would at the same time reduce the load on the busy Don Mills to...

No, 5,400 was the Eglinton number from the original Transit City estimates. Here's the data from Steve Munro: http://stevemunro.ca/?p=945

You're right, I just looked those up. 12,000 is much closer to subway numbers, and wouldn't have to increase that much to be at a capacity that requires a full subway. Of course, most of that increase comes from merging the RT with the Eglinton line, and the case for that merger is that an LRT...