painting: ‘Downtown Street’, Glenn O. Coleman, 1926. Gift of Gertrude Vanderbilt via @whitneymuseum • cat avatar: from Shirley Carter Burden via @utktun
Tronno
Joined January 2009
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Ed Drass retweeted
That Ottawa leaves it to the Americans to pursue money-launderers in Canada, while the Justice Dept. spent years & countless $ demonizing @LichTamara, is your daily reminder that justice may not always be blind.
It’s remarkable that @OSFICanada and @FinanceCanada force Canadian banks to spend billions on AML practices, while turning a blind eye to the money laundering going on just across the street from said bank.
Still can’t get over the almost total disappearance of taxis in town.
At Spadina and Dundas and I have seen but two cabs in ten minutes
We are going to need some productive way forward on bike infrastructure. I think a public discussion with Dr Lam and @markrmcqueen would be a start, perhaps even worthy of a Munk debate.
However knowing the heat within some bike activists everyone may need to wear helmets.
We've learned the hard way that Toronto's approach to bike lanes isn't working:
The issue for me isn’t “cycling infrastructure,” as applied on Beacon Street in the bike-friendly Boston suburb of Brookline, for example, but the hardened barrier version that we see on Toronto’s Yonge Street. The version that prevents motorists from complying with Ontario’s Move Over law (Section 159 of the Highway Traffic Act requires drivers to pull over when an emergency vehicle with flashing lights approaches).
Hardened bike lanes were to be the difference between life and death for our cyclists. Except for the impolitic reality that the stats don’t yet support this expectation: a single Toronto cyclist lost their life in 2023; the same as in 2016.
- Toronto Fire & EMS spent an estimated 27,000 additional minutes in traffic in 2023 thanks to Toronto’s bike lanes (using 2022 vs. 2019 TFS data).
- According to the City of Toronto, the number of “serious” cycling injuries dropped by almost one per month between 2016 and 2023; one would expect that the new cycling infrastructure played a positive role. Was “one fewer serious injury a month” what City Council promised the voters who funded the additional new bike lanes?
- If society is truly interested in saving lives, while also reducing our collective carbon footprint, why have our municipal leaders prohibited motorcycles from using Toronto’s bike lanes, for example? How can we justify this ban when five times as many Canadian fathers, mothers and young people were killed on motorcycles (258) in 2022 as were lost on bikes (46)? Why does Toronto City Council permit an unregistered 265 pound electric-powered food delivery moped to hurdle down a bike lane at 30 or 40 km/hr, provided it has affixed pedals? While this so-called “loophole” means your UberEats order arrives faster, is a 224 pound gas-powered licenced / insured Honda Grom motorcycle more of a threat to cyclists – travelling at the same speed – than an unlicenced / uninsured yet environmentally-friendly moped that’s actually 18% heavier?
- City Hall’s Vision Zero leader, Sheyda Saneinejad, would have us believe their strategy is working and that “fatal collisions on Toronto's streets have been declining generally since 2016,” but that’s not true. A single Toronto cyclist lost their life in 2023…the exact same figure as 2016. And while that’s one too many, it’s also true that Toronto taxpayers built 228 kms of dedicated bicycle lanes and cycle tracks over that same seven-year period – without reducing the number of lives lost.
- the number of “major” cycling injuries dropped by just under one per month between 2016 and 2023; if we assume that improvement was entirely due to the bike lanes Toronto added during that period, was that reduction worth Toronto’s Fire and Paramedic services spending an additional 27,000 minutes in traffic last year? This is where cycling infrastructure advocates justifiably shout: “Just think of how bad it would be if we didn’t have those bike lanes!” There’s no way to contest that point, just as there’s no way of discounting that several heart attack victims died last year as a result of 27,000 minutes of bike lane-related response time delays.
How many defibrillators arrived too late to do their magic? Zero? I doubt it.
In fact, according to an Audit of Toronto’s Paramedic response times, ambulance response times have dropped meaningfully since 2019:
It’s interesting that we’ve not heard much about the fact that ambulance response times met the “legislated eight minute” target 85% of the time in 2019, but only 79% of the time in 2023. How much of that is due to added bike lanes, EMS staffing shortages, a growing population, vehicles, etc.?
Why should we care about a few minutes here and there?
According to the National Institute of Health (NIH), “most people who have a cardiac arrest do not receive treatment quickly enough to survive. A person whose heart stops must get help within 10 minutes.” Even if you realized what was happening and called 911 all within 30 seconds, it’ll take another 15 seconds to explain the emergency (chewing up 45 seconds of that 10 minute maximum window). As my random Yonge Street video showed, if your parent was in the midst of a heart attack as that ambulance struggled to arrive with a defibrillator, wasting 30 seconds at every other intersection could represent the difference between life and death for your loved one.
The difference between Ontario’s “legislated eight minute” response time and the NIH’s “10 minute” defibrillator requirement is just 120 seconds. The recent audit found Toronto’s Paramedic’s missed their eight minute target 21% of the time, and you’ll likely spent 45 of those 120 buffer seconds ensuring that help is on the way as your parent or grandparent goes into cardiac arrest while watching kids play House League hockey at Etobicoke’s Central Arena.
Why are we discussing more lane barriers, instead of fixing degrading emergency response times? Surely the latter would save more lives than anything we might do for the 1-3% of us who are truly “commuter cyclists.” #biketo
markmcqueen.substack.com/p/t…
Ed Drass retweeted
Once every ten days, a bright canary-yellow bullet train glides into Tokyo Station at full speed, yet not a single passenger is allowed to step on board.
Its windows are mostly covered from the inside, its timetable is never published for the public, and there are no ticketed seats in any of its seven cars.
In Japan, every child and every commuter knows this train by two English words: Doctor Yellow.
Since the Tokaido Shinkansen began running between Tokyo and Osaka in October 1964, Japanese bullet trains have carried more than seven billion passengers at speeds up to one hundred and eighty-five miles per hour with zero passenger fatalities from derailments or collisions.
Critics sometimes assume that kind of sixty-year safety record is a miracle of luck.
It is not luck; it is what happens when a nation builds a high-speed hospital train whose only patient is the steel track itself.
Why does Japan run a seven-car bullet train painted bright yellow with zero paying customers on board?
In the early days of high-speed rail, engineers realized that checking hundreds of miles of track on foot at night with hand gauges was too slow, and that tracks behave differently when a three-hundred-ton train slams over them at one hundred and sixty-eight miles per hour.
So Japanese railway engineers took a seven-car Class 923 Shinkansen trainset and packed every car from nose to tail with laser-optical sensors, gyroscopes, accelerometers, and high-speed cameras.
Running in the middle of the regular passenger schedule at a full one hundred and sixty-eight miles per hour, Doctor Yellow fires laser beams onto the left and right rails to measure track width, vertical dip, and curvature alignment down to one-tenth of a millimeter, about the thickness of a single human hair.
At the same time, two special observation domes built into the roof and laser pantographs check the overhead high-voltage copper wire for microscopic wear before a single spark can cause a power outage.
The instant Doctor Yellow detects a rail that has shifted by even a fraction of an inch, it beams the exact GPS coordinates to maintenance crews waiting along the line so they can fix the spot that very night after the last passenger train goes to sleep.
Because its schedule is kept secret so crowds do not pack the platforms, Japanese commuters treat spotting Doctor Yellow by chance as a genuine good-luck charm that brings happiness for the rest of the week.
Safety is never an accident when engineers check their work down to the width of a hair.
(Note: Every photograph-style illustration on my feed is created by AI.)
🤖 Made with AI
Is there a glitch in the matrix? @311Toronto
I’ve seen street cleaning machines go up my neighbourhood street 5+ times in the last hour. At one point two went by, one right after the other.
What is the standard operating procedure in autumn; how many passes are necessary based on roadway width? @StephenWickens1
Ed Drass retweeted
🚊📆 Nov. 7-8: Service Adjustments
➡️ Planned construction on Lakeshore East.
➡️ Planned construction on the Stouffville line.
➡️ Some adjustments on Friday, Nov. 6.
gotransit.com/en/service-upd…
Ed Drass retweeted
Big news for #TTC customers who use College Station.
Starting tomorrow morning (Nov. 5), it will become the TTC’s 66th fully accessible subway station, with two new elevators, a new concourse and second exit/entrance through College Park.
Thank you to our customers, neighbours, and local businesses for your patience as we completed this important upgrade.
Ed Drass retweeted
Anne Redpath often favoured a more muted palette than the vivid colours of her contemporaries. Greys became central to her work—she wrote of using it as a colour rather than a background, underscoring her belief that even the most neutral tones carry emotional and visual weight.
Ed Drass retweeted
'Thunder Cloud,' (1912) is a gem of a painting by Tom Thomson; its virtues lie in the work's remarkable structure than in vivid colours. On the face of it, it's a fairly ordinary picture, but what lifts it is the powerful composition and the handling of the paint.
Just saw a “chartered” streetcar with an ad wrap for @HomeSenseCanada — complete with candy-cane poles and red-adorned staff inside.
I guess it was heading up Spadina to the Home Sense store near King St.
Ed Drass retweeted
Oct 31, 1976: The first unified Canadian National/Canadian Pacific "VIA Rail" passenger timetable comes into effect. Canadian National train schedules were printed in blue and Canadian Pacific's in red in the combined document. 1/2
ALT The cover of the October 31, 1976 VIA timetable, the first railway timetable to include the passenger trains of both CN and CP Rail. It features a large VIA logo in blue at the top with smaller CN and CP Rail logos beside it, and a linear abstract design of blue and red stripes on a white background across the middle of the cover.
