10.04.07
Posted in Transportation, Toronto
at 8:48 am
At last weekend’s conference for the Canadian Regional Science Association, I presented a paper on Understanding Iterative Proportional Fitting Using Log-Linear Models. At day’s end, I received the Best Student Paper award (in a tie with Marianne Hatzopolous, a Ph.D. student in my lab). Sure, it’s just a small regional conference… but I’m still happy with that outcome.
In other news, we had an interesting tour of Mississauga with former geography professor Gunter Gad. Some of my photos are on Flickr. I’ve visited Mississauga twice on bike in the past year, both times hitting up Port Credit on the waterfront and Square One, the nominal city centre. This conference was at U of T’s Mississauga campus, and I used a combination of GO Transit and cycling to attend. After seeing a broader spectrum of the streets, I’m considerably more pessimistic about the potential for change in travel behaviour or urban form in this city. It’s extremely segregated into residential and non-residential areas, and the pedestrian realm on almost all arterials is utterly bleak. Not bleak in the sense that it’s dangerous or dirty - just extremely monotonous. Given a choice, no one would walk a kilometer along a street like this - and I saw many streets in exactly this style.
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08.27.07
Posted in Toronto
at 8:03 pm
Andy Barrie (the CBC morning host, for the non-Torontonians in the crowd) gave a speech recently urging a more walkable Toronto, with better public spaces. A lot of it is familiar stuff for the pro-pedestrian crowd, but still encouraging to hear from a figure like Barrie. What I liked best, though, were his comparisons of Toronto and Montreal:
“After moving to Toronto in 1977, one of first things I noticed just walking around was that people didn’t meet your eye. Everybody I know comments on this. Nancy White, the singer/songwriter, calls Toronto the ‘city of the averted eye.’ People here just don’t look at you. In Montreal, when I first got there, I used to think that every single woman I saw in the street was coming on to me. Eye contact is a given there.
“Something I realized very soon after coming here,” elaborated Barrie, “was that Toronto was a city of strivers. The place is made up of people who wanted more than wherever they came from could offer so they went looking for a bigger arena, a better sandbox. They were very, very work oriented.
“After I had moved here a friend from Montreal asked me what it was like and I said that Toronto was like a woman you marry for her money. Montreal was like a woman everybody told you to get rid of because she’d eat you alive and yet you couldn’t pull yourself away.
Is it still accurate? Somewhat. True enough to be recognisable, and certainly matching some of my impressions when I landed back here one year ago.
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03.17.07
Posted in Transit, Transportation, Toronto
at 12:20 pm
Well, everyone else is already talking about it, so maybe I should put in my two cents.
The TTC has learned one thing: the power of an attractive map! Perhaps this is one of the concrete results of the Spacing/TransitCamp discussions. It’s just unfortunate that the map sits buried deep in the TransitCity website, and didn’t make it into many of the newspaper articles. I think it’s an extremely compelling image. And the branding is good too; it echoes Robert Cervero’s Transit Metropolis, and it is a good shorthand for what makes Toronto distinctive. Of course, a transit geek like me may not be the most objective judge of such a brand.
I haven’t dug into the meat of the report yet, or really toured the proposed corridors in person (have I ever seen much of Finch?), but I’d like to talk a bit about the strategy. I think it’s a great idea to put this bold vision out there, and see if senior governments bite. It’s ambitious, feasible, cost-effective, it serves a much broader pool of voters than individual subway plans, and it talks explicitly about connections to neighbouring regions, leaving the window open for adjacent transit systems to connect up to this network. I see this plan as a necessary condition for the eventual intensification of the former inner suburbs.
The selected alignments are interesting. The recent Official Plan defined a much larger set of “surface transit priority” corridors. Notable in their absence are the existing downtown streetcar routes: Queen, King, Gerrard, College, Dundas, Bathurst and Dufferin (as well as several more peripheral corridors). In part, this is simple political expediency—all of those routes would be extremely controversial to convert to transit right-of-ways, since the narrow streets would require substantial restrictions on downtown car use. In contrast, the Transit City corridors are all wide streets that could still accommodate two lanes of moving car traffic. In the exceptional cases, like Eglinton at Yonge, the Transit City proposal involves moving the LRT underground briefly to avoid removing auto lanes.
However, Steve Munro pointed out that the TTC is hoping to have a trial redesign of King St. to give the streetcar there a dedicated right-of-way. Importantly, they have not included this as part of the Transit City plan - they’ve essentially decoupled the downtown redesigns from Transit City. So, even if the difficult and controversial downtown plans get axed, hopefully Transit City can still go forward. Again, I think this is a wise strategy.
Anyways, there’s some very interesting discussion of the Transit City plan over at Steve Munro’s site, spread over seven posts. Check it out: Intro, East, West, North, Centre/South, Money, Conclusion.
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01.22.07
Posted in Transportation, Toronto
at 10:07 pm
I haven’t actually written much about my school experience here yet, so I thought I’d at least put up a few sentences on my experience with transportation planning here at U of T.
Last term was crazy busy, although in retrospect much of the burden was self-imposed. Since I was starting a new discipline, I was a bit unsure of myself, and worked very hard initially. Once I got a few papers and midterms back and realized that I was doing okay, I relaxed a bit. I took three courses last term:
- CIV531 (Transport III: Planning): the course crosslisted as both grad and undergrad, and hence taught in an undergrad style: weekly assignments, midterm/final, and no current research content. One half was focused on planning, and the other half on modelling. As it turned out, I already knew most of the planning side, but the modelling was useful to see in depth.
- CIV1504 (Applied Probability & Statistics): you would think I’d have covered this somewhere in my undergrad, but it wasn’t part of my engineering curriculum. While I’d done a lot of probability, I’d never learned statistical inference or experimental design. The material was by no means difficult, but we covered a lot of ground in a short time, so there was a reasonable amount of work to do.
- CIV1535 (Transportation and Development): this was a more typical graduate-level course, focused on recent research findings and a broad overview of literature. Many of the assignments were quite fun, including a book review selected from a few of the major classics. The content had a definite modelling flavour to it, but with plenty of context and insight from Prof. Miller.
I was afraid the program might straitjacket into a very narrow set of courses this semester, but my computer science degree thankfully helps me dodge a bit of the methodology requirements. In the end, it’s a very custom-designed course package, very well suited to my needs. This term I’m taking
- JPG1510 (Recent Debates on Urban Form): a comparison of three current approaches to city design, New Urbanism, Smart Growth and Compact Cities. These schools derive from different fields: architecture, urban planning and environmental/international (UN) perspectives. The readings, professor and seminar format all appeal to me quite a bit - and I’m really interested by this particular debate.
- JPG1554 (Transportation & Urban Form): another seminar course, focused on the literature on the feedbacks between transport and urban form. While CIV1535 took the modelling viewpoint, this course takes more of a qualitative tack with some support from the limited quantitative analyses that have been performed. I’ve seen some of this literature before, but it’ll be great to look at it again with a fresh eye and stronger statistical skills.
- CIV1534 (Transport Demand Analysis): a more practical modelling course, apparently quite tough, but a vital and frequently controversial part of practical transportation projects. The demand analysis conducted on many transit projects has been extremely optimistic; I’ll be curious to see if we look at any of that material this term.
Whew. Does anyone care?
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