A Bit More Detail

• CityLab notes how the effort of exurban Innisfil to use Uber as a substitute for mass transit did not work as expected.


• HuffPost Québec looks at how the Québec government is prioritizing the REM suburban light rails over the proposed Pink Line.


• Yellowknife may see the construction of a decidedly green four-story building. CBC North reports.


• CityLab looks at the experience of Miami Beach in using public art to put itself on the map.


• Guardian Cities looks at how the city of Plovdiv, second-largest city in Bulgaria, is trying to attract past emigrants from the country.

• Although the York University station on the York extension of the subway line is heavily used, two of the newest ones are among the least used. The Toronto Star reports.


• Philip Gordon Mackintosh at The Conversation notes how, in Toronto and in other cities, traffic of whatever kind including bikes follows the routes laid out by planners.


• Spacing shares a proposal by Zack Taylor to transfer income generated by the land transfer tax from the operating budget to the capital budget, the better to husband this wealth.


• Prospective tenants in Toronto are using social media photos to try to find new homes. The Toronto Star reports.


• Former mayoral candidate Faith Goldy has been ordered to pay Bell more than forty thousand dollars, to compensate them for the costs of her lawsuit against them for not airing her ad. CityNews reports.

• Low-lying Windsor, Ontario, faces the prospect of serious flooding that might be alleviated if old features of the natural landscape like trees and wetlands were restored. CBC reports.


• Robert Vandewinkel at Huffington Post Québec makes an argument for a subway system for Québec City.


• Jason Markusoff at MacLean's, noting the referendum vote in Calgary against hosting the 2026 Olympics, suggests this vote can be best sign as a sign of this city's maturity and confidence, that Calgary does not need the Olympics to be successful.


• The Diplomat notes how costs for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics have ballooned, despite promises of an affordable Olympics.


• VICE notes the plight of the Central American refugees gathering at Tijuana, unlikely to gain asylum in the United States.

• Is a mysterious chair in Dartmouth a legacy of the Halifax Explosion? Global News reports.


• Who is Googling Winnipeg, and why? Global News reports.


• The Nunavut capital of Iqaluit faces a serious prospect of water shortages, as its water source Lake Geraldine cannot support growing consumption. CBC reports.


• Guardian Cities reports that the old Tsarist-era palaces of St. Petersburg face a grim future unless someone--artists, say--can rehabilitate these edifices.


• Guardian Cities shares photos of the subway stations of Pyongyang.

• As Bombardier announces further delays, Metrolinx announced it was halving the number of Bombardier cars it was planning to buy. The Toronto Star reports.


• It's a shame that the TTC didn't figure out a way beforehand to deal with the potential for misuse of the new art installation at Pioneer Village station. The Toronto Star reports.


• Might the NDP stop the feckless Scarborough subway expansion? One can hope. Martin Regg Cohn speculates in the Toronto Star.


• I substantially agree with Christopher Hume's argument in the Toronto Star that, though the Line 1 expansion is beautiful, it should not have been the first thing the TTC built. (Downtown Relief Line, say?)


• Transit Toronto notes how York Region Transit is adapting to the Line 1 extension.


• Tricia Wood at Torontoist takes another look at the exceptionally regional nature of commuting, with relatively few commuters crossing municipal boundaries.

• Spacing shares Ken Greenberg's take on what Sidewalk Labs could do for an evolving City of Toronto.


• Royson James reflects on what outgoing TTC head Andy Byford has done for Toronto, almost despite itself, over in the Toronto Star.


• Jim Dwyer's description of the state of the New York City subway system, something Byford will have to handle, is alarming, over in The New York Times.


• Kerry Gold shares the convincing argument of academic John Rose that Vancouver is facing not a shortage of housing but rather a shortage of affordable housing. Policies can be instituted to change this. The Globe and Mail has it.


• The Inter Press Service reports on a massive complex built in Brasilia by construction giant Odebrecht that now, in the Brazilian crisis, has been left empty. What to do with it? More here.

Toronto’s first new subway project in more than a decade is almost complete.

At a media tour of the new Downsview Park station on Monday, TTC CEO Andy Byford emphasized that the Toronto York Spadina Subway Extension, a six-stop addition to Line 1 that is scheduled to open in December, will be state of the art.

“People will look at it as just a subway extension. To me it’s way more than that,” he said, noting that in addition to the complexity involved in setting up train operations, the TYSSE will combine three major TTC projects: a Wi-Fi network, the Presto fare card system, and automatic train control. “It’s a huge accomplishment.”

Located at the north end of Downsview Park, just east of Sheppard Ave. and Keele St., there is little density in the area surrounding the station. But TTC officials said some of the land nearby is slated for future mixed use development.

Ridership is also expected to be boosted by a direct connection to trains on GO Transit’s Barrie line, which will stop at a platform between the station’s east and west pavilions.

A highly anticipated report on the Scarborough subway extension has been delayed for a second time, a development that could add to the cost of the controversial one-stop transit project.

The study of the preferred route of the extension was supposed to be on the agenda for next week’s meeting of Mayor John Tory’s executive committee. The agenda is scheduled to be published Thursday, but a city spokesperson confirmed to the Star that the report won’t be on it.

“TTC and city staff are finalizing analysis in order to bring forward a comprehensive report on the Scarborough Subway Extension later in (the first quarter of 2017) to ensure appropriate consultation and collaboration across city divisions, TTC and the province,” Wynna Brown wrote in an email.

She said she couldn’t say for certain when the report will be ready and didn’t provide any details about why it has been delayed.

But it will include a recommended alignment for the subway extension’s route between Kennedy Station and the Scarborough Town Centre, an updated cost estimate, and advice to council on a procurement strategy.

Lower Bay Station (or, as the TTC refers to it, Bay Lower) is surely the best known of Toronto's hidden underground spaces. The ghost subway station was in service briefly in 1966 when the TTC tried its interlining system, which turned the city's two subway routes into three.

One platform serviced the Bloor-Danforth Route, while the other was a stop on the Danforth-University-Yonge Route. The experiment failed for a number of reasons, and the lower platform was promptly decommissioned.

It now serves as an area for training exercises and film shoots, though it has also been opened to the public for events like Nuit Blanche in the past.

Lower Bay isn't the only ghost station on the TTC, though. Underneath Queen Station, there's the shell of a streetcar subway station that would likely have taken the name City Hall, but is now typically referred to as Lower Queen or Queen Lower.

It was partially built in anticipation of Queen Street transit line that was never built.

• blogTO notes that TTC tunnels will get WiFi in 2018.


• Border Thinking's Laura Augustín shares some of Edvard Munch's brothel paintings.


• Centauri Dreams looks at the latest science on fast radio bursts.


• Dangerous Minds shares some of the sexy covers of Yugoslavian computer magazine Računari.


• Dead Things looks at the latest research into dinosaur eggs.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting that a high surface magnetic field in a red giant star indicates a recent swallowing of a planet.


• Language Log shares an ad for a portable smog mask from China.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money takes issue with the idea of NAFTA being of general benefit to Mexico.


• Torontoist looks at the history of Toronto General Hospital.


• Window on Eurasia is skeptical about an American proposal for Ukraine, and suggests Ossetian reunification within Russia is the next annexation likely to be made by Russia.