10 February 2006, lunch time
We pay a fair amount of money to ride the trains here in Toronto. If you live on the subway line, and want to go somewhere on the subway line, then the TTC is quite fast. If not, then the TTC’s service is very hit or miss. Yesterday the TTC announced a hike in fares, the second in 2 years years. I’m not sure it is worth spending $5.50 round-trip to ride the TTC. However, if you don’t have a car, do you really have a choice? (That’s not a rhetorical question: the answer is no.)
We have bus coverage for much of the city—there is an express bus that goes right by my work!—but the quality of service we get from these buses is lacking at best. The bus I take home from work comes on average about once every ten minutes. This usually means two buses come back to back at 5:00, and another two at 5:30. One is usually dangerously overcrowded, while the other is empty. I understand that on the roads you never know how traffic will work out. However, one would think after running this service for so many years, the TTC would have worked out some tricks-of-the-trade. The bus I take to get to my house in Scarborough, the 130 Middlefield, doesn’t run on weekends, and holidays. I seem to remember when I was in grade school it didn’t run on weeknights as well. If I wanted to get home on a day the Middlefield bus wasn’t running, I’d take the McCowan and walk. Actually, if you live Scarborough, access to the TTC is pretty crap in general. The RT is pretty useless: Dave has stories of waiting at Lawrence East station for an RT train that wasn’t packed like a sardine, watching 3-4 pass him by before he could cram himself onto a train; that’s not good. Mezan says about half his trip to come downtown is spent on the bus from his home to Kennedy station. I think I could go on with more stories of how lame the TTC can be, but you probably get the point.
The Globe and Mail has a list of all the new fares. I think a Metropass is going to be a pretty good deal for anyone who takes the TTC on a semi-regular basis, especially since it is transferable now. The TTC should be better then it is. It benefits the city to have a viable public transit system. I’m sure more people would take the TTC if it was as fast and as efficient as the Tokyo Metro.
If you want something more insightful on the state of the TTC, you’ll have to wait for Lawrence or Matt to chime in.
[2] Toronto
25 January 2006, lunch time
Mezan sent me the following email:
Since I didn’t find the net to much help on this topic I think you shoud post it on your blog. I managed to find a big mortar and pestle that’s actually imported from Thailand at Kohinoor Foods on (1438) Gerrard St. You’d think Chinatown would be the place to look for something like that, but it turns out Indian people grind more stuff than Chinese or Vietnamese people. I was looking for where I could buy a decent mortar and pestle in Toronto but didn’t get much info. Oh, I saw some at Tap Phong too.
[4] Life | Toronto
11 October 2005, lunch time
“This ain’t the Drake.”
I guess if you haven’t been to the Drake Hotel in 15 or so years, you would be in for quite the shock. The place has changed. An old man walked in to the Drake just as my cousin and I were leaving the bar. His first words to us were, “It’s a little warm for a fire don’t you think?” The fire place was running. He then wandered around in disbelief before leaving the bar with my cousin and I. We took our time leaving to hear what else he had to say. He complained to us about yuppies before going on his way.
The funny thing about the encounter was that my cousin and I were discussing gentrification and how neighborhoods in the city can flip all of a sudden from slum to shiny-happy-land. This has happened most markedly along Queen St. West. I walked with my cousin, along this road, from the Drake all the way back downtown. This took us along pretty much all of the newly rejuvenated Queen St. West. We passed my cousin’s old street, which was down the road from a lonely-man motel he recalls was a second home to many prostitutes. (The motel is still there, I wonder if the prostitutes are?) We passed the park, where people were jogging and walking their dogs. This was a shock to him, as he recalls it being the sort of place you wouldn’t want to walk through. We actually made it all the way back to University road without crossing some tract we thought was even slightly slummy. It’s quite amazing.
Earlier, while my cousin and I were eating brunch at the Drake—the fact that I go for brunch at the Drake makes me a Yuppy and I hate myself—I was discussing Parkdale and how the neighborhood was nice till about the 1950s, got slummy after the Gardiner came up, and is now being revitalized, centered around the Liberty Village area. The bar tender, who had served my friends and I at the Sky Bar during the summer, came over to give us some water, and catching the portion of our conversation, interjected: “It is getting nicer, but I like my Parkdale. I’ll know the neighborhood is done when you can’t get a $1.25 stout.”
[3] Life | Toronto
