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A modest proposal for reforming Toronto’s Land Transfer Tax
By Zack Taylor Few topics have pre-occupied Toronto’s budget watchers more over the past decade than the city’s land transfer tax (LTT). People love it or hate it. For its advocates, the LTT was the...
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LORINC: Subway upload: negotiating when you have no cards in your hand
As has been widely noted, the Ford government’s approach to nearly everything has a kind of malevolent Bozo-the-clown vibe, with an emerging record of, um, achievement that reads like case study in...
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REID: Pedestrian buttons 2 – the rise of the audible signal
Four years ago, I wrote a piece explaining the different kinds of pedestrian buttons and how they work. The piece was in response to the introduction of audible signal buttons (technically “Accessible...
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Is good regional transit planning impossible?
Image: Christof Spieler, Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of U.S. Transit, Island Press. The recent news from Vancouver is driving some to despair. A regional transit plan, agreed upon just...
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Life on the Line: Light in the Tunnel
(Alex Garant, “Midnight”) By Sarah Ratzlaff For the past month, you may have noticed a different kind of artwork gracing the...
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PODCAST: Spacing Radio 030, Toronto 2033 – Stories
To celebrate Spacing‘s 15th anniversary, and the launch of “Toronto 2033: 10 short stories about the city’s future,” we speak to the creative minds behind the book. Featuring editor Jim Munroe, and...
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LORINC: Will this council actually fix Toronto’s housing crisis?
If you did the blink test on last fall’s municipal election (disregarding all the static created by Doug Ford’s intervention), it would be fair to say the ballot question was about housing and the...
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LORINC: How reducing development charges will spur the ‘missing middle’
While city council tries to figure out how to confront a made-in-Toronto housing affordability crisis, Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government has initiated a consultation, asking for ideas...
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LORINC: What’s the big idea behind Housing Now?
John Tory’s executive committee convenes today to consider, among other items, the fleshed out implementation strategy for the first phase of his Housing Now plan, launched in December and following...
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Three areas that will help relieve Toronto’s housing crisis
George Popper is a Toronto architect While Toronto desperately needs affordable housing, I believe the first step towards that goal is to create more housing generally. Why? First, a significant factor...
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Acton Ostry Architects: 25 Years Young
While an architecture student at UBC in 1998, our class was asked to go out around Vancouver and photograph examples of ‘weather registers’, instances in the built environment where nature was...
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PODCAST: Spacing Radio 031, Toronto 2033 – Premonitions
To celebrate Spacing‘s 15th anniversary, and the launch of “Toronto 2033: 10 short stories about the city’s future,” we speak to a variety of experts to try to imagine what the city will be like in the...
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Can we stop talking about congestion? It’s not the point
This is probably a pointless plea, but can we stop talking about congestion? Our conversations about transportation in Canadian urban regions these days all centre on “congestion.” The cost! The...
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REID: Yes, the City could plow local sidewalks in the old city
The City of Toronto plows snow from local sidewalks in most of the city, but not in a “no-plow” zone that encompasses the oldest and most densely populated parts of the city. In these areas, the City...
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Book Review – Adapting Cities to Sea Level Rise: Green and Gray Strategies
Author: Stefan Al (Island Press, 2018) Many of our world’s urban centres lie along the shores of oceans and seas. As areas of rapid urbanization, critically understanding strategies that minimize the...
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Doug Ford’s TTC subway upload and Margaret Thatcher’s cautionary tale
As the province contemplates major structural change to Toronto’s transit system, I want to offer London’s rocky history with transit governance as a cautionary tale. It is a favourite pastime in some...
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Alchemy at the Gardiner Museum
A new piece of public art has been added to Toronto’s public art landscape, one that seeks to comfort, cajole, and seduce. This new piece is Shary Boyle’s ceramic sculpture Cracked Wheat, which greets...
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CodeRedTO Op Ed: Does Toronto transit need an upload? Or a download?
By Cameron MacLeod There’s been significant discussion on changing the regional transit org chart recently. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been accompanied by a realistic discussion of operating budgets...
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Did the Sidewalk Labs plot just thicken, or is the story coming to an end?
A series of exposés in recent days, in both The Toronto Star and the National Observer, revealed that Sidewalk Labs has retained a small army of lobbyists to sell what looks like a high stakes and very...
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Ford, Sidewalk Labs, and all the moving parts on Toronto’s waterfront
Through his brief career as a city councillor and now as premier, Doug Ford has returned repeatedly to the fantasy that the private sector will happily pay for his rapid transit wish list. All those...
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