Toronto’s Prince Edward Viaduct (most commonly known as the ‘Bloor Street Viaduct’) is one of my favorite pieces of infrastructure in all of my hometown. This 1918 Art Deco masterpiece was the cornerstone of the city’s plans to connect the growing metropolis with disconnected suburbs across the Don Valley River system. Is it functional? Yes....
What happens when you plan for the future using assumptions from the present? Well, for one Swiss water engineer, you get a whole lot of sh*t. Or as he likes to call it, “sediment.” Let me explain:
As some of you already know, CUP Projects runs a Gondola Project Flickr Pool of images. Problem is, these pools are unwieldily beasts. Ours already has over 800 images in it and if we really put our minds to it, it could reach into the thousands. Very hard to search, very hard to organize, very...
Bus Rapid Transit vs. Light Rail Transit. Currently that’s the major transit debate in the english-speaking world. Each have their advocates and their detractors and each have their own list of positives and negatives. And each want each other’s share of the market. Problem is, BRT and LRT aren’t the only combatants. While BRT and LRT...
I steadfastly support online file-sharing and streaming sites, legal or otherwise. iTunes? That’s great, too. I support these services because I refuse to pay for television channels and shows that I don’t watch (or album tracks I don’t listen to). And because it is near impossible to use a cable television service that doesn’t force...
Last week the Toronto Star carried an article titled Free Metropasses latest Condo Perk. The title suggests a pleasant surprise; a quality gesture designed to enhance the lives of Torontonians. It is a ‘perk’ after all. Problem is, this is no perk. This is a City-mandated program which in essence triples the price of Metropasses for new...
The other day I was pretty hard on Aerial Trams for being obsolete, expensive and inefficient members of the cable transit family. Because of their place in history, however, many of the most iconic and important cable transit systems ever built were Aerial Trams, a point I failed to mention. Here are 6 of them:...
Trying to write a post each day about cable transit and urban gondolas is exhausting. There’s so much more in the world of transportation that’s worth talking about, but just isn’t within the purview of this site. As such, I get my fix from other sites like Jarrett Walker’s excellent Human Transit blog. Jarrett’s blog contains...
I got my first email account in the summer of 1998. It was a Hotmail account. Someone dragged me to a local café and signed me up. It wasn’t that advanced at the time and I wasn’t overly impressed. Was email great at the time? Sure it was, but I didn’t see it. I missed...
There is a story of the scholar who, years ago, produced a dissertation that was loudly hailed as the best written and most valuable in a generation. A copy was reverently placed in the library files and the scholar, as an experiment, placed a crisp $20 bill among its pages. Every year he returned to...