The 501 streetcar spent much of 2016 avoiding a portion of Queen Street West, between Spadina and Shaw, thanks to construction. While there were shuttle buses on route, many riders chose to take the detour, which brought streetcars down along King Street West.
That portion of the route has reopened, but for most of 2017, the TTC will replace the western part of the 501 - past Roncesvalles Avenue - with buses.
"Starting Jan. 8, and throughout 2017, buses will replace streetcars on the portion of the 501 Queen route west of Roncesvalles Ave. to accommodate City of Toronto work on the Queensway Bridge, TTC streetcar track and overhead work, and the renewal of the Humber Loop," reads a note on the TTC website.
Members of Toronto’s Tibetan community are demanding an apology from the TTC after the agency refused to remove subway ads that critics say are racist propaganda sanctioned by the Chinese government.
“These ads basically portray Tibetans as backwards, as undeveloped and dirty,” said Sonam Chokey, national director of Students for a Free Tibet Canada. “Basically they are trying to legitimize the colonization of Tibet.”
The TTC says the agency had no choice but to run the ads because they’re not in contravention of any law or of the transit agency’s advertising policies.
The posters, which have been on the transit system since Nov. 28, depict two images of Tibet. One is colourless, and shows a clutch of ragged tents and faceless figures in a barren valley, while the other is in colour and shows a modern city in the same mountain setting. The accompanying caption is “Old Culture, New Tibet.”
The posters direct readers to the internet address for the China National Tourist Office.
You never know who you’re going to sit next to on the TTC. But as of this week, your seatmate could be an undercover transit officer watching to make sure you’ve paid your fare.
In an effort to push down fare evasion rates, the TTC has given the green light to a plan to use plainclothes special constables to help nab fare cheats on streetcars.
Chief Special Const. Mark Cousins, head of the TTC’s transit enforcement unit, said in an interview the covert enforcement officers won’t be engaged in “undercover drug takedown stuff,” but will be there to point out people who haven’t paid to the TTC’s uniformed fare inspectors. The inspectors will still be responsible for writing tickets.
Cousins wouldn’t say how many undercover constables will be deployed, or when they’ll start. “As a riding customer I’d just assume that they’re out there right now. So continue to pay your fares, and we’ll go from there,” he said.
According to a report that went before the TTC board on Tuesday, the streetcar network had a fare evasion rate of about 2.7 per cent during the first six months of 2016. That’s above the industry standard of 2 per cent.
A Vaughan home that sold for $400,000 over the asking price this week drew so many viewers that people lost their shoes at the open houses.
It's not unusual for homes to sell for tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars over the listed price in the frenzied Toronto area real estate market.
Despite its dated condition, the estate sale property, which sold on Monday for $1.1 million, attracted about 800 visitors over the course of three open houses — and 50 offers ahead of the designated offer presentation time.
It was a deliberate decision to price the 2,670-sq. ft. detached house near Dufferin Rd. and Steeles Ave. at an unusually low $699,900, said agent Steven Atsaves of Royal LePage Grange Hall Realty.
That, combined with a shortage of listings in the pre-holiday period, pulled in the crowds at the open houses, he said.
For residents of Cathedraltown, the news was nothing short of a Christmas miracle.
After nearly a decade of seeing the towering Slovak Cathedral of Transfiguration in Markham closed to the public, local resident Mayrose Gregorios couldn’t believe it when she heard the news from two men doing cleanup work on the property one morning: the church would be open for weekend mass.
For as long as Gregorios had lived in Cathedraltown, a quiet subdivision near Major Mackenzie Dr., and Highway 404, whose name was inspired by the adjacent European-style cathedral, the empty building had cast a dark shadow on the community. The last service in the cathedral, which broke ground more than three decades ago, took place in 2006.
The reasons for the closure are believed to be twofold: The first, a decade-old dispute between the developer Helen Roman-Barber and the Eparchy for Catholic Slovaks of the Byzantine Rite in Canada, over the title to the land, left the cathedral without a congregation.
But in recent years, Roman-Barber, head of King David Inc., told residents the cathedral, with its magnificent 14-storey bell towers and cupolas plated in 22-karat gold, was closed so that the numerous detailed mosaics planned for the inside could be completed. An anticipated deadline of December 2015, set by Roman-Barber in a Markham staff report, came and passed. Residents stopped hoping for good news.
So two weeks ago, Gregorios woke up early and waited for the 18-tonne bronze church bells, built at the prestigious Paccard Foundry in France, to ring and announce the momentous occasion. When she didn’t hear them toll that day, she walked over to the cathedral, saw people streaming in and joined them.
“They said it was a private mass, but couldn’t stop anyone who wanted to worship,” she said, adding there were about 200 people in attendance. “It was a beautiful moment: the mass, the singing, the spirit of it all,” said Gregorios, who said the mass was in Arabic and English.
When Chicago was still celebrating the end of the Civil War, the city had a population of roughly 200,000 people. The most memorable structure from that era, the Water Tower, was still three years from construction. Today, 150 years later, the city’s population has grown by more than 1,200 percent, and the city’s tallest building, the Willis Tower, is more than 1,300 feet taller than the height of Chicago’s tallest building in 1866.
This is all to say a lot can change in 150 years. Which makes our question, from engineer Bill Muscat, pretty challenging:
What do we do in 150 years when our current buildings are too old? What do we do with an old Willis Tower?
Bill asked because he’s noticed that some of Chicago’s earliest skyscrapers — buildings he considers iconic — have been demolished recently. The first generation of skyscrapers is about 120 years old, so he picked a timeframe of 150 years, figuring that the Willis Tower would be pretty worn out by then. The tower was originally constructed in 1973 for the Sears Roebuck & Company headquarters, then renamed in 2009 by Willis Holding Group, who obtained naming rights as part of a lease agreement.
Bill’s question is based on the premise a building can become “too old.” That’s only partially true. The structural steel in a building like the Willis Tower could last for thousands of years, as long as it is climate-controlled and protected from the elements. The building’s cladding and systems (electricity, plumbing, HVAC) can certainly wear out, but they can also be maintained indefinitely, and even updated, as long as the building owners can afford it.
Bill’s question’s appealing because it gives all of us license to become amateur futurists, but in a focused way. As we reported an answer for Bill, we heard that when you think about the future of tall buildings in cities, it’s useful to consider why we build very tall buildings in the first place.
In 1900, architect Cass Gilbert famously described a skyscraper as a “machine that makes the land pay.” While tall buildings are certainly impacted by demand for space, client or city image, it’s economics that truly drives the construction of skyscrapers. Developers seek to maximize the rent that a single parcel generates. Urban districts with expensive land tend to have tall buildings, because those buildings have more floors, more square feet, and therefore, more revenue potential.
But calculations about whether a particular skyscraper “makes the land pay” are deeply entwined with the fate of the building’s immediate neighborhood, and the city in general. The building, its neighborhood and its city — each can change, and so can the relationships between them.
The already glaring gap between property taxes in Brampton and Mississauga compared to Toronto, is getting even wider.
The GTA’s second and third largest cities just passed their respective budgets for 2017 last week, and things continue to look grim for homeowners, with tax hikes above inflation and questions about how Mississauga and Brampton will manage the coming onslaught of infrastructure needs, many of which are already being put off.
With the latest budget increases, in 2017 a Brampton home with an assessed value of $500,000 will cost owners about $5,278 in property taxes; in Mississauga a home with the same value will have about $4,498 in property taxes; and in Toronto a home assessed at $500,000 will cost you $3,495 in property taxes (which includes $940 for the education portion and $15 for the transit expansion levy.)
The overall property tax increase Mississauga homeowners will see in 2017 is 2.9 per cent, but this includes the Region of Peel share and the provincial education share. The recently approved increase for just the city’s 2017 portion of the tax bill, which is blended into the overall property tax, is 5.7 per cent.
Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie said it’s unfair to compare her city’s property tax rate to Toronto’s because the two are not operating on an equal footing.
“We cannot build a city on the property tax alone,” Crombie told the Star Monday. “Mississauga should not be treated unequally in relation to Toronto.”
She said Mississauga, like most other Ontario municipalities is too heavily reliant on the property tax base as a revenue tool, while under the provincial City of Toronto Act, Ontario’s largest city is the only one with the option to use special revenue tools such as: a municipal land transfer tax, a sign tax, a personal vehicle tax, an alcohol tax, a tobacco tax, an amusement tax, a parking tax and road pricing (tolls or a congestion charge).
Internet giant Amazon Web Services has opened a cluster of data centres near Montreal due to the ready availability and cost of hydro-electric power in Quebec.
The company, which is notoriously secretive about its data centres, said there are now at least two data centres just outside Montreal to offer web-based services to the “Canada Region.” Canada joins 15 other regions around the globe from which Amazon is running data services on behalf of clients.
Teresa Carlson, vice-president of public sector with Amazon Web Services, said the cost and availability of hydro-electric power is ultimately what made Amazon choose Quebec as its Canadian home.
“We picked the area that we did because of the hydro power,” said Carlson. “We did find them (Quebec) to be very business friendly.”
Carlson said Amazon conducted a thorough review of various options within Canada, including Ontario, that involved looking at a number of factors, including the price of electricity. She also said Amazon is keen to source green energy where it can as the company is attempting to get all of its data centres on renewable energy sources.
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