In Miller's dream, our nightmare, he is in a large urban center in Maoist China where drivers are only tolerated long enough to pick their pockets, the streets are teeming with bicycles and masses of pedestrians rushing to their jobs at low wages that at one time were done by North American workers, and the people are cheering for him.
It's nothing less, really, than the ``vision thing'' on steroids. It's probably the closest you'll get in this town, in this lifetime, to a Christmas wish-list for grownups. It is a transit buff's Technicolor "WET" dream.
-Jim Coyle
TTC's dreams ignore passengers' nightmare
TTC plans light rail web
March 16.
As a resident of Regent Park, I am astonished to hear the TTC is planning more rail projects. The TTC is repairing the Dundas streetcar tracks between Parliament and Broadview but has refused to provide shuttle bus service, forcing customers to walk more than two kilometres a day until the completion date. With customers on Dundas not being served, this is not the time to be thinking of a master rail plan.
Justin Goldenthal, Toronto
The good news: It's fast The bad news: It's fast
Merchants bemoan streetcar users who speed on through
March 17, 2007
Jen Gerson
Staff Reporter
Toronto's Spadina light rail transit line affords a great, albeit brief, view of Chinatown.
In the 26 minutes it takes to travel between the Spadina and Union subway stations, commuters can glean a sense of this neighbourhood: They can see the tables of $5 shoes, the sellers of dubious DVDs and the fruit stands stuffed with sugarcane, oranges and chestnuts for less than a dollar a pound.
They breeze by, but don't stop in like they used to.
Those shopkeepers who have been around long enough to remember a time before the dedicated transit line are still too angry to talk about it.
The City of Toronto now has a plan to build similar streetcar-only lanes along the Finch and Eglinton Aves. corridors, north into Scarborough, linking Don Mills to the Bloor subway, and along the lakeshore.
To those who use the Spadina streetcar or drive the avenue, the consensus is clear: Light rail transit makes the neighbourhood easier to get through.
It wasn't always this way.
Before the dedicated streetcar lane was built in 1997, the cars that came here stuck – whether they wanted to or not. They were parked at 45-degree angles, jutting from corners.
The cars were jammed, the buses took forever and when the people came, they stayed.
"Everything is going this way," says Daniel Choi, pointing his index finger to the ground of his Art Supply shop at College St. and Spadina Ave. His shop has been on this corner for 27 years, he says.
"It's one of the oldest on the street now. Everybody has moved away."
The Spadina streetcar, he says, "killed the area."
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