Transportation
GO Transit
I’ve been reading Steve Munro’s blog lately, as he discusses the nitty-gritty details of transit planning in Toronto. He brought up an interesting point regarding the extension of the Spadina subway line to York University: there’s already a GO transit line that goes direct from York University to downtown, and GO is a better way [...]
Cyclist falls off bridge
This past weekend, I rode my bike down through Surrey, North Delta and Annacis Island. It was the first time I’d taken my bike across the Alex Fraser bridge, and it had a few scary moments: a narrow sidewalk, and a low railing, plus three danger spots. The freeway signposts block the path at two [...]
Bad bicycle routes
The BBC is running an entertaining photo series on bad bicycle routes, and they have a link to some other photos too.
Apparently, they’re considering amending their highway act to require cyclists to use a bike lane if present. This is an effort by cyclists there to stop that, since so many bike lanes are badly [...]
Toronto Transit Map
Last August, I put together a transit map for Vancouver using the new Google Maps API. I recently went through and updated all the code, switching it over to XML for the geographic data. Using that backend, I’ve now put together a Toronto transit map. So far, I’ve only got the TTC on there – [...]
Road rage
Spacing Wire is carrying a curious story about a road rage incident in Kensington Market, between a parked motorist and a bike courier. Normally, this would be no big deal, just another day in the big city. But Adam Krawesky captured some evocative photographs, and now the story is making the rounds on the Internet.
The [...]
Planning for Cycling
For some time, I’ve been curious to learn more about European approaches to designing bicycle routes. I’d heard the statistics: over 30% of all trips are made on bicycle in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, and even more in some Asian cities like Shanghai. But how did they make bike routes that were safe enough for so [...]
New bike
I’ve had used bikes all my life. I did own a nice one, once upon a time – in 2000, I bought a Miele racing bike for $500 used. Unfortunately, it was stolen in 2003 just before I graduated (from behind my back, as I was picking up glass off the bike lane). At that [...]
Secret Toronto subway stations
As a longtime Toronto subway user, I always liked the weird parts of the subway: the urban legends about running the tracks between stations, the “garbage pickup” trains around 2:00am, and the horrible stories about suicides and subsequent therapy for drivers. But I never heard about the secret stations beneath my feet. Apparently, Bay Station [...]
Bike & compute
I’ve been looking around for a new set of panniers to replace my current beat-up pair. (For the uninitiated, panniers or “saddlebags” are bags that strap to the rack on the back of a bike.) Since I bike everywhere, having good bags is critical – I need to move around groceries, papers, and my computer [...]
Google Transit Map
I’ve put together a Google Map of Vancouver Transit as a test of the new Google Maps API. I’m a big fan of this technology, and I really hope they keep adding to it. I think it could do for map publishing what HTML did for text publishing: democratize and simplify it. Very cool.
