It's such a bummer all the ways I see City Hall winding down before next fall's election. Do we need to consider shortening Toronto's election season down to a month or two? Would that even make a difference? It can't be good to just give up a quarter of the time for government action.b

Continuing to go through the item for as-of-right zoning impementation for avenues for wards 9 and 11 and I'm not sure how many more Toronto City Planning Equity Statements I can read in reports that do things like exempt streets in Rosedale from change because it's a heritage conservation district

This is the correct map.

I really wish lay people understood that there is nothing intrinsically faster in at-grade, on-street rail compared to buses. If anything, it has a number of constraints that can make it potentially slower. It's the quality of priority that determines its performance, not the rail.

Very cool map. Can't help but think restoring tracks on Parliament to link to the new Cherry/Ookwemin tracks would be justifiable (if we weren't hopeless at building and could actually operate trams properly). Same w/ restoring Mount Pleasant and Rogers to have branching off St. Clair right of way.

This is a good response to speed camera removal (or just good practice in general). I hope the other TEYCC councillors follow suit.

A monstrous parallel for him to draw clearly. But "Patrick Condon thinks buildings have the moral standing of people" would explain a lot actually.

one of the most prominent voices in Vancouver's housing discourse

So on this day a few years ago we were headed into the hospital for my daughter to be born. It was snowing. Today I went out walking and it started snowing and I realized I was wearing the exact same outfit as when we left for the hospital. I dunno. Felt nice.

Oh joy, a horseshoe coalition of residents associations and left-nimby housing justice advocates have teamed up to crash the Toronto and East York Community Council meeting to oppose an anodyne apartment building in Parkdale.

Every budget season you will see these charts from the TTC. A lot of people will look at this and say oh there's an enormous funding issue, our SOGR backlog is huge. I urge you to resist that thought. Go look up the projects list and the costs. Compare them to other (non-US) countries.

What happens when you downzone? Our new open-access research paper in @findingspress.org investigates effects of decades of downzoning in Chicago. Findings: —Downzoned areas added 1/7th of the new units as comparable non-downzoned areas; —Downzoned areas became more white & were more expensive.

Pie and YIMBYism. Yum.

A certain genre of housing article shows up every few months to argue for non-market housing and that's fine. But this is my PSA that the phrase "what kind of housing and for whom" is at this point a cliche that to me is a hallmark of bad analysis and I would avoid using it.

I don't for a second think this will happen but I would cackle for days if the feds managed to get an electrified train line into Toronto Union station before GO transit.

One more design review panel bro. I swear, just one more design review panel.

Did a quick check in on financial statements for the Scarborough-Rouge Park by-election to see if any of the major candidates filed yet (no) but there are multiple also-rans who spent thousands of their own money on delusional campaigns and I dunno... seems bad.

I need a unified theory for why some Liberal affiliated politicians stay sane municipally (Matlow, Keesmat, Myers, McKelvie, etc.) and why some go full reactionary (those cited below but most especially Bradford and Kandavel).

Fun legal case for the NIMBY haters. In Northcrest Neighbours v. City of Peterborough a group of neighbours tried to stop a 52 unit supportive housing project. 1/6

And right on schedule after we point to the enormous cost problems for TTC capital spending that all our politicians should be trying to address, the municipal right gives us... something completely pointless that would be so laughably unworkable I don't even know what to make of it.

A new twist on NIMBYism. Neighbours are worried it will be come a memorial park.

The estimated budget for the Waterfront East "LRT" (streetcar with tiny tunnelled section) is $2 billion?!?! Subway prices for 4km of streetcar. Glad we'll spend next year's municipal election talking about a made up crime surge. www.thestar.com/news/gta/tor...

Has any councillor's self conception been farther from reality than Kandavel's?

One thing I'd always like to point out when NIMBYs say some application isn't producing enough green space: we have the room for lots of green space. We just spend it on parking.

Trips holding up really well deep into Autumn this year, though still seeing the footprint shrink the later into the year we go.

The biggest indictment of the Gardiner is that for all its fabled indispensable utility, it can't handle literally anything fun happening downtown without breaking completely.

For all the complaining about the disorder and anti-social behaviour of certain people in Toronto, the actual centre of anti-social behaviour is the motorists trying to get on the Gardiner on-ramp at Rees street.

It is extremely disappointing to see members of the Kensington Market Community Land Trust opposing a new student residence on College. Apparently on affordability and heritage grounds (how much affordability and heritage did the former parking lot/garage provide?) thegreenline.to/stories/kens...

We support housing of all types. You can too.

Toronto, and urban history. Notably, Mayor David Crombie and his anti-development Council colleagues were sworn in on December 1, 1972. Local elections matter!

Just remembering back to 2020 when the Church of Bubbles bus would roll up to Bellwoods to encourage people to dance together rather than social distance and uh.. I guess it's always the ones you most suspect.

Beyond a certain level of traffic, you should dedicate the entire street to transit, dead-end half of the crossing streets, build platforms capable of having 2-3 buses stop simultaneously and/or stagger them. Fundamentally, there is no way to do effective TSP in through gridded street layouts

I was today years old when I recognized the pattern that in the grid part of Toronto, even numbered addresses are on the north or west side of the street and odd numbered addresses are on the south or east.

Line 6 Finch West LRT planned to be open December 7 according to publicly available Metrolinx board meeting slides Source: assets.metrolinx.com/image/upload...

If you're interested in making this spine a little chunkier, the latest on the North York Secondary Plan should be at Planning and Housing Committee on December 3rd. No new details available yet but opposition from the low-rise Neighbourhood is expected.

Update on my single exit stair ASP: we have an approval! Thanks to sixplex and single stair supporters Mayor Olivia Chow, Cllr Jamaal Myers, @joshmatlow.bsky.social and others who get why single exit stairs are key to creating livable, accessible, small scale housing. 1/6

Mike Colle speed running NIMBY talking points around Lawrence Plaza. He's worried that redeveloping a shopping plaza will make units that will be unaffordable... How many affordable units did the shipping plaza have?

Ultimately, this small, partial example of trade-offs associated with TSP strategies was meant to illustrate that TSP is a solved problem in terms of technology. We have had the tech since the 1970s. But the complicated part is about space, design and setting priorities, which is political.

FFS. The City's instagram is now also using Perks' boast that most of the housing starts are City projects. This is a bad thing everyone. The housing market fell off a cliff and you're partly to blame. You shouldn't be boasting about it. www.instagram.com/p/DRSUZ6lkYG...

New from me at TVO: Green P Delenda Est. www.tvo.org/article/anal...

It may be possible to recreate the effect of minimum lot sizes with lot frontage, depth, etc. but removing minimum lot area is a good start. No one should look at a min lot area of 8000 square metres and imagine that it's there for infrastructure or safety reasons. It's mansion zoning for exclusion.

Since we're out here dismissing city boards for harmful organizations, can we dismiss the heritage preservation board before they can do more damage?

Little noticed but as part of Bill 60 the provincial government in consulting on reducing or removing minimum lot size requirements. If they go through with it and do it right, it would be a big deal. ero.ontario.ca/notice/025-1...

Got some bone conducting headphones for running. Here's my two run review: Positives: I can hear all the cars. Negatives: I can hear all the cars.

I think we need to revisit the fact that Council spent over a decade calling the $1m houses “middle class housing for normal people” and the $500k apartments “luxury housing for elites” And then heaped extraordinary costs and obligations onto the latter in order to subsidize the former.

This was last week from @mattyglesias.bsky.social and it seems correct to me.

Mike Colle's AI generated version of people walking hand in hand in a plaza vs. reality. And since it's Mike Colle NIMBYism the instagram post starts of course with we don't need more condos.

Can we not add nearly 100 pages of design guidelines for development along each 2km stretch of road? Please? secure.toronto.ca/council/agen...

If these were downtown they'd have all been smashed over by cars hopping the curb by now.

I want to point that by this point in the debate the mayor's compromise motion was already introduced and Kandavel already knew there'd be no corner stores and carve out for Major streets in his ward. He got everything he wanted and still took to the floor to whine he was being treated unfairly.