Kandavel keeps saying he supports housing in the abstract but then it turns out he opposes every actual proposal in his ward. Who could have foreseen?

Stop Spacing Math In response to the “Toronto has the world’s slowest streetcars” meme floating around on line and among some transit advocates, various proposals were floated to speed up our syste…

Heroic point missing
stevemunro.ca/2026/04/21/s...

How Much Community Outreach Does the Urban Institute Think Italy and Turkey Do? The Urban Institute just published a brief about community outreach for public transportation construction projects. The authors are Yonah Freemark, Gabe Samuels, and Christina Plerhoples Stacy; I …

Pedestrian Observations: How Much Community Outreach Does the Urban Institute Think Italy and Turkey Do? pedestrianobservations.com/2026/04/20/h...

You mean we don't have to wait for a developer to apply to change the zoning by-law and evaluate that application against policies, we can just do things ourselves???

Tall and sprawl isn't imposed by one faction. It's a mutually agreeable compromise promoted by each faction of the political spectrum for different reasons. No one escapes blame.

There are multiple ways to gerrymander (typically shorthanded as packing and cracking) but a gerrymander depends on the goal being optimized. Mixing would optimize not for conservatism but something else. And I do blame the left for the things it deserves blame for, which includes a lot of planning.

I see less mixed wards. I don't think it's a surprise Sewell gets elected afterwards and I also don't think it's a surprise that downtown left councillors can't cobble an effective majority after, and that Crombie's coalition is not dependent on them.

I have seen you reference this before but I don't understand the posited mechanism. The map on the left is gerrymandered *in favour* of the denser old neighbourhoods by tying small suburban areas to larger urban areas. The map on the right produces a greater number of consistently suburban seats.

More broadly you don't have to do this every time. Nothing is riding on it. These people are all out of office. Take the good with the bad.

This is the income map towards the end of the reform era. The 1972/73 downzonings cover the Annex, Yorkville, Cabbagetown, Midtown, Ramsden Park. There are others (Niagara, North Parkdale) but I think a pretty clear set of priorities.

You can have a lot of issues with the mid-century planners, as I do around highways and mixed use. But stop it with reform nostalgia. Most of the housing problems we are tackling today are their legacy just as much as blocking the Spadina expressway.

Of course we have the usual veneration of St. Lawrence and a call to repeat it today with no recognition of all the barriers the reform era council itself put up to effectively make it impossible to repeat.

This description of the reformers stepping into to stop the segregation of the mean mid-century planners isn't right. They stopped all the towers, but especially in rich neighbourhoods. Their first priority was downzoning the Annex followed closely by other upscale downtown neighbourhoods.

Toronto’s next mayor should pick up where its last great mayor left off David Crombie wanted to create a lively downtown and neighbourhoods with plenty of parks, schools and libraries. Let's have more of that.

It's been 50 years. Do we really need this ridiculous reform council propaganda? They did some good and some bad and we don't need to shy away from an actual evaluation.
www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

Catching up on council committee business from last week. The new vision for Exhibition is... pretty underwhelming. There's nothing new to bring people there outside of existing events. Just a pile of empty space by a highway. I guess better than the current parking lots... but meh.

Toronto, as always, ruined this for everyone by asking for a bunch of extra tax powers, getting them, promptly cancelling the vehicle registration tax, then taking in money the land transfer tax in good times before complaining about its volatility when tides turned. Then asking for more tax powers.

We went from 2 Tim Hortons and a Starbucks on that 3 block stretch of King to none in about 18 months and I'm confused.

In honour of @akareynolds.bsky.social I'm going to just fire off parking takes:
-residents in new developments should never be blocked from applying for street parking
-parking passes should cost way more
-suburban areas should allow street parking
-TPA should sell, develop, or demolish all lots.

I think that probably tells you more about procurement and review timelines than their effort (though I think they just did what was asked rather than improve a suspect vision).

The big open space is the existing parking lot. Which they have chosen to show in the colour green. And given the existing programming for the rose Garden (basically none) I am skeptical they would be able to occupy this space outside of soccer/football/the ex.

I perceived this image too long and now my entire personality is landscape architecture critique.

I guess optimistically this would be a nicer way for Liberty Village residents to get to the lake/amphitheatre than Strachan. That's something. Just again... meh.

There's a persistent belief in Toronto that just having a park is de facto good public space despite all the barren underused parks that dot the city.

Catching up on council committee business from last week. The new vision for Exhibition is... pretty underwhelming. There's nothing new to bring people there outside of existing events. Just a pile of empty space by a highway. I guess better than the current parking lots... but meh.

I guess I'm supposed to believe these ad campaigns will be discontinued May 1 and that totally separate new advertisements will be performed by these groups.

It sure seems like no one is remotely afraid of violating third party advertiser spending rules.

Surely if drivers are running a red light at an intersection 15 times a day (to a level that's clear enough to get ticketed) that calls for a design intervention.
www.thestar.com/news/gta/tor...

This is obviously thinking way too far in the future given how slow we are at transit construction, but extending on Ellesmere (not Sheppard) also sets you up much better to turn south towards Lakeshore GO and turn Line 4 into a really nice circumferential.

Interesting to compare and contrast given the Toronto system has basically the same number of active docks (1030)

An underrated nuisance delay tactic by city staff: you need to go pay someone to prepare a report to tell us about our own infrastructure.