Toronto's slow streetcars — and the search for silver bullets

Key System Streetcars — Oakland Public Library

Key System Streetcars — Sappers, Vernon J.

East Don Trail Project

The City of Toronto and TRCA are constructing an exciting new multi-use trail to connect the existing East Don Trail, Gatineau Corridor Trail, and the Don Trail System.

Taking imagery of bike lanes in Toronto: 60,000 photos later…

Imagery Update After a summer and fall of taking 360 imagery of bike lanes, I finished capturing street-level imagery of all the protected bike lanes in the City’s dataset. The last segment on November 8 was the final part of the new Harbord St bike lanes E of Grace St. So far, I’ve captured over…

Are Council contenders ready for "big freaking deal" changes to the Official Plan?

City Hall Watcher #388: Damien Moule on the "largest change to municipal land use planning in Ontario in decades", plus CITY HALL WATCHER LIVE lets you reflect on 15+ years of Council coverage

Transportation Map of Atlanta Showing Street Car Trackless Trolley and Bus Lines of the Georgia Power Company, circa 1950s

Speed: How It Explains the World - Vaclav Smil

In a world that feels like it’s moving faster than ever, Smil examines how our relentless pursuit of speed – in areas such as production, travel and communication – shapes not only our technological landscape but also our social and environmental realities. And through engaging anecdotes and striking statistics, Smil challenges the assumption that faster is always better.

Civic Searchlight - by Canada's National Observer

Search transcripts of municipal meetings across Canada. Find discussions about topics that matter to your community with Canada's National Observer's search tool.

Civic Dashboard

Toronto City Council shouldn't feel complicated. We make it easy for Toronto residents to track councillor votes and get involved in local decisions.

Plan the Geary metro right, right now

Part 1: Strong corridor; tight station spacing; frequent trains

CityStrides

The best tool to help you Run Every Street

TransformTO Tracking — Travel Modes by Ward

Track Toronto transportation mode share by ward, trip distance and year from the Transportation Tomorrow Survey, and progress toward the TransformTO 2030 goal of 75% of work and school trips by walking, cycling or transit.

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NYC experimental live music calendar • noise, improv, jazz, new music, avant-electronics, weirdos • performance against corporate interests!

Ode to the Shanghai Metro - Phoebe Lemon

Wayfinding has many applications, and arguably the most important one is public transportation systems. Granted, there are many different ways to design such a system, and the politics and culture of the environment in which it will be integrated certainly plays a large role. Interestingly, often when we discuss transportation systems on the global scale, individuals are so quick to praise New York or London’s metro systems, Europe’s “high speed” rail system, or how “Uber is the most original new technology cities have seen”. All of these statements are subjective, but somehow they’ve become accepted fact, especially in the West, and I argue that anyone who gives European/American public transport that much praise is blissfully living in a bubble. As an international student who grew up in America and has visited most of its major cities, lived in China for two years, and is now studying in the Middle East, I’ve had the opportunity to use almost every public transportation system to exist. Old fashion taxis, the Maglev, high speed trains, shared bikes, shared mopeds, carpools, the bus, the metro, I have used them all, but nothing quite compares to the way China does public transport.

Urban congestion relief experiments through routing-app interventions

Traffic congestion remains a persistent challenge for urban mobility, increasing travel delays and elevating CO2 emissions. The widespread use of smartphones and GPS navigation creates new opportunities to mitigate congestion through routing optimizations in apps, yet real-world evidence for the effectiveness of such interventions is limited. Here we report large-scale empirical experiments evaluating routing-based traffic interventions on ~100 highly congested road segments across 10 major US cities. By rerouting a small share of Google Maps trips from targeted congested highway and arterial segments to less congested alternatives of equivalent road-classes with comparable travel times, we observe a city-average 2% increase in vehicle speeds on the intervened segments, along with improved travel times 0.7% and potential annual reductions exceeding 1,000 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions per city in the majority of studied locations. These findings provide evidence that marginal routing interventions involving a small proportion of vehicles can measurably enhance overall road network efficiency, offering a practical pathway to easing congestion and advancing urban sustainability.