Recent content by junctionist

The brick seems darker than in the renderings. That's not a bad thing, but the facade feels like it needs some more accents or more contrast. Overall, though, it's a good addition to the neighbourhood.

Having transit in the middle of the highway plays a big part in terms of the lackluster feel of the area. It's not just zoning and development. Pedestrians aren't drawn to areas like most of what surrounds the Allen. There are many parts of Bloor with few towers due to zoning like the Annex...

Habitat 67 is amazing because it was built 60 years ago and is a bit more organic in its forms. It was avant garde at the time. Plus, it teases the potential of modular housing units put together to make a single building. On the other hand, there's no weaving of new and old at Habitat 67, and...

Ridley does a lot of the heritage building windows in Toronto. They've done their share of arched windows, so I wouldn't imagine it would be a problem to have a rectangular window with a bowed top.

I hate freeway-based rapid transit lines. Freeways are usually the least pedestrian friendly areas with a surrounding built form that’s almost never transit friendly. Ridership will never be that high, and the lines won’t urbanize the surrounding areas. Witness the ridership, density, and...

It's a really stupid outcome of being car obsessed as a society. People lose their safety and ability to access local shops. Local businesses lose money. It's all done to avoid inconveniencing people sitting in comfy seats, listening to the radio, and having a machine do most of the work...

The limited number of trains that serve downtown Hamilton is awful. That's where a lot of the jobs, people, stores, attractions, and transit connections are located and will be located in the future as downtown revitalizes and densifies. Downtown is also more accessible than West Harbour to...

Stopping the rail service altogether when people really need it complicates people's lives immensely. The government seems to get it with road construction. You don't just shut down a random expressway or 400-series highway every weekend for maintenance or expansion. You let people use it even...

Weekend rail closures are terrible. More people use transit than ever for everything but commuting--shopping, going out, and seeing family and friends. Subway and regional trains should continue to run during maintenance work, unless they're replacing the tracks. And even then, I bet it's still...

No one ever looks at a vast expanse of pavement like that with a smile on their face. It may look decent when new (particularly when wet), but it will leave people longing for some greenery once the clean look fades.

It's sad to see those beautiful green fields in the drone photos about to become cheap disposable sprawl, especially the ones that are still used for farming. Summertime photos of the new roads through the area are beautiful, but the wide roads and bridges are basically the nails in the coffin...

They need to find a donor for new cladding before the AI stock bubble bursts.

The condo corporation is going to have a fun time replacing this cladding after a few decades when it's in need of replacement. One hopes they'll be given blueprints or schematics for how to manufacture it again when the times comes.

Hamilton could really use a new passenger rail corridor into the downtown core, though, even for GO Transit. Getting federal funding for it would help immensely.

It would be nice to see Alto HSR go down to Hamilton and Niagara one day, though that route has seemingly seldom been discussed over the past few decades. The distances between cities are smaller in the Hamilton-Niagara region than in southwestern Ontario, and the population density is...