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There are about 13,000 jobs and 12,000 residents in the area around STC. That's a good number, but one that could be served by a couple LRT lines, or an extension of the Bloor-Danforth line. In other news, Karen Stintz is making some positive statements in the Globe:

The real turning point came when Peterson decided that we needed to do all transit planning with a GTA perspective. Previously whatever the city had proposed, the province had agreed to pay for 75% of. It's true that transit is a regional matter, but it also meant far more competition for...

Transit City will not benefit everyone, but going with subways means an overbuilt system for some and nothing for many. Far better to build a properly scaled system for many.

The proper grain for determining relative density is a difficult issue. Finer isn't necessarily better. To take it to its furthest extend, at any one time each person takes up about one square meter of space. That means you could fit all 2.5 million Torontonians into only 2.5km. Less than 1% of...

RTES was never a full transit plan, and my understanding is that it was never adopted by either city council or the province as such. it was an assessment of whether there should be new subways and if so where they should be. Something to inform a future plan down the line, but not a complete...

Network 2011 was dead more than a decade before Miller was elected. It was killed when Peterson's Liberals refused to fund it in 1990. 2011 was first proposed in 1985, Transit City came about in 2007. In those 22 years much had changed with the city, and it was clearly time for a new plan.

This claim can be checked by looking at the census data. Toronto covers 630 km2.If we take only the densest 63 km2 of census tracts, the population is 730,000, or about 30% of the total. To get to your 50% of the population, we have to get to 141 km2, or 22% of the total.

You might consider it obvious that malls are great trip generators, but the numbers suggest otherwise. Yorkdale is the 5th largest mall in Canada, but it's subway station is only the 35th busiest on the network. It might not have as many TTC feeder routes, but is home to a major GO and Greyhound...

Are malls such a great trip generator? If they are why doesn't Yorkdale station have vastly more riders than the others along the Spadina line? Or why don't the buses to Sherway have much higher ridership? Suburban malls are fundamentally car oriented developments, and even great transit won't...

The general problem with the outer urban growth centres is that established neighbourhoods don't want intense development. As a result, outside of the core, high density is only zoned in areas where people don't already live. The problem is that there are reasons people haven't chosen to live in...

With the exception of heritage structures, and maybe a couple hundred buildings that are too large to be economically replaced, that means just about every part of the city is "developable." I agree that growth will happen where it makes sense, but good transit alone will not turn an unpopular...

Is it really? In 35 years downtown, the area with less vacant land than anywhere, added over 200,000 jobs. Yonge-St Clair, Yonge-Eglinton are also spots that have grown. By contrast areas with plenty of vacant or underused land like SCC, ECC, and East Danforth have had disappointing growth...

Here is a map from 1974 showing how many job were planned to be at each centre by 2001.: Downtown and Yonge and Eglinton have exceeded targets. NYCC is somewhat below, and SCC is less than half what was planned for.

Very true, but only NYCC is really high density. The "tower in a parking lot" design of SCC does not lead to much density. Over the entire area it's 6400 people per km2, that's only somewhat above the overall city average of 4000 people per km2. A subway to SCC might get two stations with 6400...

I sure do. You can't just zone a bunch of parking lots for office towers and expect it to become a new downtown. Here are some numbers on how many workers there are per employment district: Downtown - 420,000 North York City Centre - 35,000 Yonge-Elginton - 32,000 Scarborough City Centre -...

Yes, it seems to have been built because it was the cheapest section of the plan and could serve the dual purpose of a possible York University extension. On another track, here's another map of transit dreams. This time it's from 1960 envisioning the transportation network in 1980, including...

Thanks for the fixes. It should make more mention of the Spadina extension, I'll do some more reading to try to find out exactly how it was that Downsview station ended up getting built.

We will still have above ground lines using the same equipment on the legacy network, so it won't be quite so different. Just an extended version of the Queens Quay tunnel. Another interesting map I ran across in my researches, a fanciful vision of Toronto in 2009 created in 1984: Some...

More on Ford's fiscal plans. From the Post: Ruling out service cuts, user fees, and property tax hikes. That pretty much leaves raiding reserves, commercial rates, and magic.

For interest, here are maps for the other grand transportation plans from that era: GO-Urban - Davis Conservatives, 1972. Let's Move - Peterson Liberals, 1990 Rapid Transit Expansion Program - Rae New Democrats, 1993. The Scarborough RT was the only final product of the 1972 plan. The...