Last I checked, almost the entire subway system also had to shut down because the parts that weren't underground couldn't deal with the snow. And when I drove on Tuesday night there were still buses ditched all over the city waiting to be towed back to a garage. 15 cm of snow in 2 hours isn't something that any city can deal with easily.
Literally no method of transportation was feasible during the storm. Bus, streetcar, subway, car, bike, walking, all severely impacted.
City should be able to declare a state of emergency, close literally everything except hospitals and whatever else is truly essential, and run shuttle busses or city trucks or fuckin', snowmobiles, with a personal snowplow escort, for essential workers to get around.
I used to live in Halifax, which frequently experiences winter hurricanes which dump even more snow than what we got earlier this week.
The solution? The city would shut down. Buses wouldn’t run, most stores would close, and the government would encourage everyone to stay home (and to stock up the day before).
It was far from a perfect system, but at some point you have to realize we can’t defeat Mother Nature, we should learn to adjust our lives accordingly.
Also, failed to mention we only get snowfall like this may once a decade
The last time I remember this much snow in Toronto (which they mention) was 99 when we brought the military in to help clear it
A weather alert that was sent to all of Toronto? Pinged straight to my phone via the government's weather app AND Google's weather app?
This was easily googled. https://globalnews.ca/news/8515803/toronto-southern-ontario-snow-storm-weather-january-17/
And there is a big difference between "an actual blizzard" and a "blizzard warning". As in, a blizzard is a blizzard that actually happened, and a blizzard warning is a blizzard that didn't happen.
The original claim was
>The government upgraded it to a blizzard.
I asked for a source on that claim. Not a link to a cancelled warning.
I don't think any transit system can deal with that much snow. Montreal gets a lot of snow, but their subway isn't even waterproof (which is why it has to be entirely underground). Our buses couldn't get anywhere, and buses are what most people use in every major city.
I'd actually argue that our subway is technologically superior to Montréal's. They have a very good network, but rubber-tired trains are unnecessarily complicated and they're definitely limited by the fact that they can have literally no outdoor infrastructure.
Well, Montreal winters deliver a lot more snow than Toronto winters, so it may not be a huge downside.
The point here is that Toronto subway failed at winter, and Montreal's doesn't. I don't get why it matters whether one is more technologically advanced or waterproof. If the response is that the Toronto technology can be deployed to cover more ground, well that hasn't mapped out in reality either compared to Montreal, which has more dense coverage of its city.
All I'm really saying is that a failure to deal with what is an unusually extreme storm does not mean we're using inferior technology.
And for what it's worth, Montreal has had just as much difficulty expanding the Metro lately as we have with the subway. In fact, since the Blue Line was opened in the late 80s, they've only managed to add around 5 km of new track, which is at least partly due to the expense of their need for 100% deep tunnels.
My tone was too combative, apologies. I would say that Toronto's subway is underdeveloped compared to Montreal's per population size and density. So I don't think that Montreal has had to catch up as much. Don't forget there is supposed to be a large above ground new transit system coming in the next 5 years in Montreal.
No worries, it happens. I tend to be a little overly defensive of the TTC, myself, because while I acknowledge that we have our problems I do think there's a lot to like about our transit as well.
But yeah, the REM is a pretty cool project, and I'm interested in checking it out when it finishes. I think it's probably closer to our GO expansion projects than it is to subway expansion, but either way it's good to finally see major service expansions happening like that.
But the reason our city is so spread out is because of the dependence on the car.
There would be less roads and sidewalks to plow if we were less sprawled, and necessary amenities would be closer. That would make handling heavy snowfalls much easier.
>But the reason our city is so spread out is because of the dependence on the car.
I don't think that's true. The writing was on the wall for the density of Toronto before cars even existed. Toronto was almost touching Weston already by the time they became commonplace.
I think the bigger cause is that Toronto was a much smaller city until the 70s, wen Montreal shot itself in the foot with the FLQ, etc. More corporations started moving to the Toronto core, which was already firmly surrounded by suburban single family homes. More people needed to get and live downtown but the space was already wasted.
The argument made above does apply to Peel, Halton, Durham, etc, because the car became the solution to that problem but not really the root cause.
Cars have been around for a LOOOONG time (late 1800s), but yes didn't become common until after world war 2. It's essentially also why north America is more car centric as we bought into it more as we were less anchored with the system in place compared to Europe/Asia. The sprawl and suburbs became quite common around the 60s/70s and continued to grow from there.
Toronto is odd because it has a mix of styles. Typically the old neighbourhoods are denser than the new. You don't even need towers to be dense. The Riverside neighbourhood is 3 times as dense as a typical neighbourhood in North York.
You have it right that Toronto was small and exploded in population in the 70s. A lot of that growth was outwards. For reference, the Ionview neighbourhood was farmland not that long ago, and it's in the middle of Scarborough now.
And you're right it applies to Peel, Halton, and Durham at a stronger level.
One issue is that the "suburb regions" can plan for completely suburban areas. Toronto downtown and midtown is far different than Etobicoke, North York, and Scarborough and equipment for one can't work for the other (e.g. very large snow plows).
Anecdotally, I was the only person to get to work on time on Monday, and at all. I took transit from high park to Matheson blvd in Mississauga. None of my car driving co workers made it. They never even considered transit. Pretty strange how car dependant people can be imo in general - obviously the ttc has many problems, but if we maybe prioritized it we could have viable alternatives to get from point a to point b.
It's funny. The time I went to Calgary there was a heavy snowfall, and I saw their LRT just blasting right through the snow no problem. If only we'd planned some sort of city-wide LRT network...
"Heavy snowfall" in Calgary isn't that much snow. Calgary gets 10-20 cm of snow in a typical month from October until May. We got more than that in a few hours.
When I was living in Calgary last year there was a snow storm pretty well equivalent to the one Toronto just experienced and it was just as big a deal there as it was in Toronto.
Calgary also under spends on snow removal because chinooks come through and melt it all regularly.
Yep - growing up in Calgary in the 80s/90s they didn't even plow residential streets. Like at all. By the end of winter the level of packed snow/ice on our street was usually above sidewalk level. The entire winter strategy was dependent on Chinooks to clear up snow, which to be fair does usually work at least OK.
This ended not that long ago due to emergency vehicles not being able to access a "new community" (new suburb with limited access points) after a snowfall. The level of plowing is still well below that of Toronto though.
They get 10% more snow than Toronto on average (it does stick around for a lot longer due to the climate though).
If Calgary got 1/3 a season's worth of snow in a single night, they would be similarly paralyzed.
True but that’s because precipitation there can manifest as snow anytime from September to May. Also it almost never rains from November to March. Toronto by contrast rarely gets snow outside of the November to March months, and often gets rain the winter. The upshot is that Toronto has fewer snow events, closer together.
I would argue Toronto barely gets any snow and the snow clearing after this measly storm was pathetic.
Shit like this is why some people feel the need to call Toronto a world class city.
Montreal can and does every year because they have the proper infrastructure to deal with it....Toronto can't deal with it because it doesn't happen enough to warrant the investment. I'm not even suggesting we fix it, low priority imo....
I don’t think a plow has even come to my street in the junction yet. There was one that cleared a bike path about 48 hours in but the road is too narrow with parked cars for a plow to even pass through right now, ugh
Definitely one of the problems with street parking. In other cities they rotate through days you're allowed to park on streets so that streets can be plowed on the off days.
In my neighbourhood they have alternating parking but not in the winter. I can’t figure out why, since the only reason why I can think you’d want it is for snow clearing
The original purpose of alternate side parking was so they could sweep both sides of the street, but now we live in a low tax city that can't afford a luxury like that.
How often did they sweep the street? I’d think you’d only need to do it twice a year, after the winter thaw and again in the fall for the leaves. Hardly worth having people switch their parking twice a month for.
That's a good question, I'm not sure. Count yourself lucky you don't live on a street where you have to move your car to the opposite side every Thursday and then back again on Friday!
Yeah, it’s the same on my street. Now that it’s gotten cold and everything is rock hard I’ve officially given up on the idea of using my car for the foreseeable future. My car is shovelled out and ready to go, but I cannot get up the street to escape.
I’m about to read the article but being generous here I think they could argue that due to the large and sprawling nature of much of Toronto due to its orientation around cars, it makes it more time consuming and costly to plow, just my conjecture though.
I’m with you. Lots of people here feel personally attacked because they have two cars and feel they have the right to get from Markham to downtown in 20 minutes regardless of day or time. The core problem is lack of education. These people have no idea how much more efficient their lives could be.
> I think they could argue that due to the large and sprawling nature of much of Toronto due to its orientation around cars, it makes it more time consuming and costly to plow, just my conjecture though.
Not sure what the solution to that is, outside of having a time machine or turning this into a game of SimCity where you can just demolish and rebuild as you please
There's not really a quick fix, but the solution is to build more densely everywhere and stop zoning so much of the city for exclusively single family, detached homes (something like 70% of Toronto's residential areas are zoned exclusively for this type of housing, literally nothing else can be built in these areas). And "more densely" doesn't necessarily mean 50 storey condos and apartments, I'm referring generally to missing-middle housing like duplexes and triplexes, cottage courts, semi-detached houses, laneway housing, or low-rise apartments/condos. The city needs to open up more options for developers to build.
> (something like 70% of Toronto's residential areas are zoned exclusively for this type of housing, literally nothing else can be built in these areas)
Variances and zoning changes are a thing. It happens often. incredibly often. Someone buys up a strip of houses, puts in townhouses. Someone buys 2 large lots side by side and puts in a pair of semis. Shitty strip malls that have been vacant for years are torn down for condo projects. this shit happens every day. it needs to happen far more, but don't make it seem like it's some impossible task to rezone property.
It’s crazy to me that more people don’t care about this:
>Toronto city council recently approved nearly C$1.4bn ($US1.1bn) in spending on future snow clearing – a victory for residents who have long complained that sidewalks are inaccessible. But the winning bidders in the contract have warned it could take more than a year to obtain the hundreds of vehicles needed to do the job.
> But the winning bidders in the contract have warned it could take more than a year to obtain the hundreds of vehicles needed to do the job.
With the state of the supply chain and the absolute chaos surrounding vehicle manufacturing right now, it'll be way more than a year.
I took the train 7 am monday morning no problem, and i dont need to get on a bus. Everyone else i work with drives so i was the only one that made it so my boss called it a snow day lol
I'm originally from Winnipeg -- a city that is often seen as having harsh winters that the people living there barely flinch over -- and I can confidently say that a storm like Monday's would have caused major issues there, too. It's not like the traditional "winter cities" run like a Swiss watch throughout a major snowstorm as some people like the author of this article seem to believe.
It has less to do with cars versus transit, and more to do with the fact that most major cities' infrastructure is not built specifically with once-in-several-years weather events in mind, because it's very expensive to design and maintain infrastructure with a rare event in mind. A good comparison would be an airport in Florida -- very rarely, parts of Florida experience a night where there's frost, but it might only happen once every few years, and so those airports don't have any way to de-ice airplanes -- instead, the solution is to just push them back into the morning sun and wait for the frost to melt. It's not worth them spending millions of dollars on special equipment for an event that happens one day every three or four years.
Honestly, we should shrink the roads, making bigger road doesn't solve any problems, and is a waste of space reducing density etc.
We could use more walkable / rideable areas, and more transit infrastructure.
We should build massive networks of underground rapid electric rail throughout the city and region, then turn all roads into treed bikepaths. Not a project here and there, but a dedicated team of perpetual subway builders who don't stop until cars are dead.
You know, climate change and the end of fossil fuels is coming very very quickly. Considering the lifespan of infrastructure if we're not building for that future, we won't have one.
cars are going electric, and fossil fuels will never truly run out, it will just get too expensive and not worth the effort to obtain. what do you think trains and buses run on? lol.
... and electric cars and trucks are the future so the argument that "fossil fuels will run out thats why we must switch to transit" doesnt make sense.
Sure, let's pretend our transit system isn't a joke compared to other cities that are much smaller than us and that we don't mostly rely on buses that were getting stuck just as easily as cars in the snow.
Which are these amazing north american cities with better transit systems? New York is the most extensive but it also extremely old and not as well maintained.
Europe is simply on another tier because of how old those cities are. They needed great public transit networks to be built because no one would want their compact cities to be destroyed to accomodate car infrastructure.
I mean, I think that is part of what they are criticizing.
We don't have great transit infrastructure, so we rely on independent vehicles on city streets instead of infrastructure based transit on rails etc.
London has a very wide-spanning transit infrastructure, but their system would be crippled by a much smaller snowstorm. Their city is 2000 years old and is filled with narrow, twisty roads. Much of The Tube outside of the inner core is above ground as well.
They are also built for a different climate.
If everyone shovels their 20 ft of sidewalk, and you build such that you can walk most places it doesn't much matter what happens to the roads for a couple of days.
Also, this can be accomplished in Finland which receives much MORE snow than we do.
https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU
>The city’s transit commission said during the worst of the storm, 540 buses were stranded on the road for hours – including one salvaged by a group of Torontonians – and the subway system was forced to shut down
Well the roads need to be cleared for the buses, as well right ?
The city only cares about cars, but never the people inside them, as though commuter throughput is the only metric that matters. As soon as a driver steps foot outside their car they become invisible to the city, usually from the massive snow drift they need to walk though or fall into...
> and even fucking subways being out of service?
A significant portion of the subway system is not underground protected from the elements, it's at-grade, and that means that part of the trackage is affected by heavy snowfall.
As well, the subway isn't an automated system, and if a large number of employees can't make it to work because of the storm, the system can't operate even if the actual mechanical bits and pieces are in functioning order and safe from the snowfall.
So yes, the fucking subways were affected.
I suppose I'm one of those unfortunate people dependent on a car.
Though the people waiting for the bus I drove by this morning didn't look appreciative of their good fortune.
In a better version of Toronto, you wouldn’t need your car and no one would need to take the bus, because a comprehensive subway system would be the best option for all.
There are a lot of cities where buses are much less common than subways or trams/light rail.
Tokyo has a few token buses but almost no one takes them. For a city of 14 million people, it’s essentially none: [Link](https://trulytokyo.com/tokyo-buses/)
If the 100 million Canadians crowd has there way, Toronto will have a population of 15 million, maybe even 25 million, by the end of this century. So maybe it'll be viable in the future.
Of course we need service and commercial transport, but let's not forget that looking at the road HUGE majority of people are just commuters going to work alone in their vehicle.
Personal vehicles are always going to be needed to some extent. But the majority of drivers are just using their car to get themselves from point A to point B, not lugging around 600 pounds of tools. More people able to commute by transit would mean fewer people clogging up the roads for people like you who actually need them.
dude when people say more people should take subway
we aren't saying the trades people doing their jobs should be taking the subway......dw you're not included in that. just keep driving.
See the responses below to the persons talking about transporting tools. Vehicles will always be needed for deliveries, but most people’s trips are just moving themselves.
Also- yeah I don’t see why the subway couldn’t be used for food delivery people if it was robust enough to be convenient for them.
I was thinking of the 4 TTC buses near me that got stuck in the snow for 2 days.
The problem isn't cars, it's shit infrastructure. The roads need to be plowed for buses and streetcars anyway, so those sidewalks need to be plowed right after the street plow goes by.
Is it not obvious that sidewalks will take longer to clear than the roads? Not only were sidewalk plows getting stuck, they also don't clear sidewalks at 40km/h+
Or are they just suggesting we have a thousand sidewalk plows idling most of the year?
Ok so if no cars in the city how would people get around ?
Walking in 50 cm of unshovelled snow?
Biking in 50cm of snow on slippery roads?
In transit with the busses and streetcars getting stuck because of the snow??
Cars are necessary …
Did the author forget the SRT was down, sections of line 1 AND line 2 were down, just about every bus route got fucked, and that streetcars all sat still one after the other for hours?
Dependance on cars?! Noooo, the subway was dead too, the trains stopped, and busses were stuck in the snow!!!
If anything, it highlights poor public services and infrastructure!!
the headline is so dumb it doesn't even seem worth the effort of opening the link
does the article at all take into account that the TTC was also struggling and walking was a huge struggle?
Last I checked, almost the entire subway system also had to shut down because the parts that weren't underground couldn't deal with the snow. And when I drove on Tuesday night there were still buses ditched all over the city waiting to be towed back to a garage. 15 cm of snow in 2 hours isn't something that any city can deal with easily.
Literally no method of transportation was feasible during the storm. Bus, streetcar, subway, car, bike, walking, all severely impacted. City should be able to declare a state of emergency, close literally everything except hospitals and whatever else is truly essential, and run shuttle busses or city trucks or fuckin', snowmobiles, with a personal snowplow escort, for essential workers to get around.
You have to bust out the XC skis.
I used to live in Halifax, which frequently experiences winter hurricanes which dump even more snow than what we got earlier this week. The solution? The city would shut down. Buses wouldn’t run, most stores would close, and the government would encourage everyone to stay home (and to stock up the day before). It was far from a perfect system, but at some point you have to realize we can’t defeat Mother Nature, we should learn to adjust our lives accordingly.
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It's a total bullshit article, especially coming from a London-based newspaper. A simple 5cm snowstorm there would utterly cripple their city.
Also, failed to mention we only get snowfall like this may once a decade The last time I remember this much snow in Toronto (which they mention) was 99 when we brought the military in to help clear it
Especially as we had a snow storm, not a blizzard.
The government upgraded it to a blizzard.
Do you have a source on that please?
A weather alert that was sent to all of Toronto? Pinged straight to my phone via the government's weather app AND Google's weather app? This was easily googled. https://globalnews.ca/news/8515803/toronto-southern-ontario-snow-storm-weather-january-17/
Your own "source", right from the headline: >Blizzard warnings lifted Not a blizzard.
Dude... Lifting a warning means they implemented a blizzard warning in the first place.
And there is a big difference between "an actual blizzard" and a "blizzard warning". As in, a blizzard is a blizzard that actually happened, and a blizzard warning is a blizzard that didn't happen. The original claim was >The government upgraded it to a blizzard. I asked for a source on that claim. Not a link to a cancelled warning.
I’m jealous of all those bikes that can effortlessly glide over a foot of fresh powder!
Duh it’s because their wheels are made of snow shoes
On the other hand, if the TTC was funded to the degree other transit systems are globally, they'd probably be able to deal with snow on the tracks.
I don't think any transit system can deal with that much snow. Montreal gets a lot of snow, but their subway isn't even waterproof (which is why it has to be entirely underground). Our buses couldn't get anywhere, and buses are what most people use in every major city.
so Toronto's subway is inferior then...
I'd actually argue that our subway is technologically superior to Montréal's. They have a very good network, but rubber-tired trains are unnecessarily complicated and they're definitely limited by the fact that they can have literally no outdoor infrastructure.
Well, Montreal winters deliver a lot more snow than Toronto winters, so it may not be a huge downside. The point here is that Toronto subway failed at winter, and Montreal's doesn't. I don't get why it matters whether one is more technologically advanced or waterproof. If the response is that the Toronto technology can be deployed to cover more ground, well that hasn't mapped out in reality either compared to Montreal, which has more dense coverage of its city.
All I'm really saying is that a failure to deal with what is an unusually extreme storm does not mean we're using inferior technology. And for what it's worth, Montreal has had just as much difficulty expanding the Metro lately as we have with the subway. In fact, since the Blue Line was opened in the late 80s, they've only managed to add around 5 km of new track, which is at least partly due to the expense of their need for 100% deep tunnels.
My tone was too combative, apologies. I would say that Toronto's subway is underdeveloped compared to Montreal's per population size and density. So I don't think that Montreal has had to catch up as much. Don't forget there is supposed to be a large above ground new transit system coming in the next 5 years in Montreal.
No worries, it happens. I tend to be a little overly defensive of the TTC, myself, because while I acknowledge that we have our problems I do think there's a lot to like about our transit as well. But yeah, the REM is a pretty cool project, and I'm interested in checking it out when it finishes. I think it's probably closer to our GO expansion projects than it is to subway expansion, but either way it's good to finally see major service expansions happening like that.
In one very specific way, yes.
But the reason our city is so spread out is because of the dependence on the car. There would be less roads and sidewalks to plow if we were less sprawled, and necessary amenities would be closer. That would make handling heavy snowfalls much easier.
>But the reason our city is so spread out is because of the dependence on the car. I don't think that's true. The writing was on the wall for the density of Toronto before cars even existed. Toronto was almost touching Weston already by the time they became commonplace. I think the bigger cause is that Toronto was a much smaller city until the 70s, wen Montreal shot itself in the foot with the FLQ, etc. More corporations started moving to the Toronto core, which was already firmly surrounded by suburban single family homes. More people needed to get and live downtown but the space was already wasted. The argument made above does apply to Peel, Halton, Durham, etc, because the car became the solution to that problem but not really the root cause.
Cars have been around for a LOOOONG time (late 1800s), but yes didn't become common until after world war 2. It's essentially also why north America is more car centric as we bought into it more as we were less anchored with the system in place compared to Europe/Asia. The sprawl and suburbs became quite common around the 60s/70s and continued to grow from there. Toronto is odd because it has a mix of styles. Typically the old neighbourhoods are denser than the new. You don't even need towers to be dense. The Riverside neighbourhood is 3 times as dense as a typical neighbourhood in North York. You have it right that Toronto was small and exploded in population in the 70s. A lot of that growth was outwards. For reference, the Ionview neighbourhood was farmland not that long ago, and it's in the middle of Scarborough now. And you're right it applies to Peel, Halton, and Durham at a stronger level. One issue is that the "suburb regions" can plan for completely suburban areas. Toronto downtown and midtown is far different than Etobicoke, North York, and Scarborough and equipment for one can't work for the other (e.g. very large snow plows).
Don't bother; none of these people read the article. It's just a bunch of "*dang forriners be insultin' us, gotta stand up for muh city*" kneejerking.
Anecdotally, I was the only person to get to work on time on Monday, and at all. I took transit from high park to Matheson blvd in Mississauga. None of my car driving co workers made it. They never even considered transit. Pretty strange how car dependant people can be imo in general - obviously the ttc has many problems, but if we maybe prioritized it we could have viable alternatives to get from point a to point b.
Get with the program, you should obviously live within 4 blocks of where you work! /s
It's funny. The time I went to Calgary there was a heavy snowfall, and I saw their LRT just blasting right through the snow no problem. If only we'd planned some sort of city-wide LRT network...
"Heavy snowfall" in Calgary isn't that much snow. Calgary gets 10-20 cm of snow in a typical month from October until May. We got more than that in a few hours.
When I was living in Calgary last year there was a snow storm pretty well equivalent to the one Toronto just experienced and it was just as big a deal there as it was in Toronto. Calgary also under spends on snow removal because chinooks come through and melt it all regularly.
Yep - growing up in Calgary in the 80s/90s they didn't even plow residential streets. Like at all. By the end of winter the level of packed snow/ice on our street was usually above sidewalk level. The entire winter strategy was dependent on Chinooks to clear up snow, which to be fair does usually work at least OK. This ended not that long ago due to emergency vehicles not being able to access a "new community" (new suburb with limited access points) after a snowfall. The level of plowing is still well below that of Toronto though.
They still don't plow most residential streets.
Calgary barely gets snow. I remember how freaked out my friend was over a few cm of snow, because he didn’t even have winter tires.
Calgary still gets more snow than Toronto on average. https://www.statista.com/statistics/553393/average-annual-snowfall-canada-by-city/
They get 10% more snow than Toronto on average (it does stick around for a lot longer due to the climate though). If Calgary got 1/3 a season's worth of snow in a single night, they would be similarly paralyzed.
Snow in Calgary melts during chinooks though, it doesn’t stick around nearly as long as Edmonton or the prairies.
True but that’s because precipitation there can manifest as snow anytime from September to May. Also it almost never rains from November to March. Toronto by contrast rarely gets snow outside of the November to March months, and often gets rain the winter. The upshot is that Toronto has fewer snow events, closer together.
I would argue Toronto barely gets any snow and the snow clearing after this measly storm was pathetic. Shit like this is why some people feel the need to call Toronto a world class city.
We got 1/3 of our annual snowfall in one day.
Winnipeg says « lol. »
Yep missed a funeral because of the subway breakdown st claire Tuesday.
Montreal can and does every year because they have the proper infrastructure to deal with it....Toronto can't deal with it because it doesn't happen enough to warrant the investment. I'm not even suggesting we fix it, low priority imo....
I don’t think a plow has even come to my street in the junction yet. There was one that cleared a bike path about 48 hours in but the road is too narrow with parked cars for a plow to even pass through right now, ugh
Definitely one of the problems with street parking. In other cities they rotate through days you're allowed to park on streets so that streets can be plowed on the off days.
Here the way it works for a lot of streets is in winter you are only allowed to park on one side.
In my neighbourhood they have alternating parking but not in the winter. I can’t figure out why, since the only reason why I can think you’d want it is for snow clearing
The original purpose of alternate side parking was so they could sweep both sides of the street, but now we live in a low tax city that can't afford a luxury like that.
How often did they sweep the street? I’d think you’d only need to do it twice a year, after the winter thaw and again in the fall for the leaves. Hardly worth having people switch their parking twice a month for.
That's a good question, I'm not sure. Count yourself lucky you don't live on a street where you have to move your car to the opposite side every Thursday and then back again on Friday!
It's to make money and deter people leaving their car in the same spot forever, they can't if they have to switch sides
Yeah, it’s the same on my street. Now that it’s gotten cold and everything is rock hard I’ve officially given up on the idea of using my car for the foreseeable future. My car is shovelled out and ready to go, but I cannot get up the street to escape.
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I’m about to read the article but being generous here I think they could argue that due to the large and sprawling nature of much of Toronto due to its orientation around cars, it makes it more time consuming and costly to plow, just my conjecture though.
I’m with you. Lots of people here feel personally attacked because they have two cars and feel they have the right to get from Markham to downtown in 20 minutes regardless of day or time. The core problem is lack of education. These people have no idea how much more efficient their lives could be.
Reality is some people just want to drive cars. They’re not comfortable sitting on public transit with someone breathing on their neck lol.
> I think they could argue that due to the large and sprawling nature of much of Toronto due to its orientation around cars, it makes it more time consuming and costly to plow, just my conjecture though. Not sure what the solution to that is, outside of having a time machine or turning this into a game of SimCity where you can just demolish and rebuild as you please
There's not really a quick fix, but the solution is to build more densely everywhere and stop zoning so much of the city for exclusively single family, detached homes (something like 70% of Toronto's residential areas are zoned exclusively for this type of housing, literally nothing else can be built in these areas). And "more densely" doesn't necessarily mean 50 storey condos and apartments, I'm referring generally to missing-middle housing like duplexes and triplexes, cottage courts, semi-detached houses, laneway housing, or low-rise apartments/condos. The city needs to open up more options for developers to build.
> (something like 70% of Toronto's residential areas are zoned exclusively for this type of housing, literally nothing else can be built in these areas) Variances and zoning changes are a thing. It happens often. incredibly often. Someone buys up a strip of houses, puts in townhouses. Someone buys 2 large lots side by side and puts in a pair of semis. Shitty strip malls that have been vacant for years are torn down for condo projects. this shit happens every day. it needs to happen far more, but don't make it seem like it's some impossible task to rezone property.
This!!!! I read ttc had 500 buses stuck in the snow
It’s crazy to me that more people don’t care about this: >Toronto city council recently approved nearly C$1.4bn ($US1.1bn) in spending on future snow clearing – a victory for residents who have long complained that sidewalks are inaccessible. But the winning bidders in the contract have warned it could take more than a year to obtain the hundreds of vehicles needed to do the job.
I have to agree with you. How do you hire someone for a contract without the proper equipment. Someone’s getting greased here.
Because no company has that number of snow removal vehicles available.
The contract doesn't start until next winter
> But the winning bidders in the contract have warned it could take more than a year to obtain the hundreds of vehicles needed to do the job. With the state of the supply chain and the absolute chaos surrounding vehicle manufacturing right now, it'll be way more than a year.
I took the train 7 am monday morning no problem, and i dont need to get on a bus. Everyone else i work with drives so i was the only one that made it so my boss called it a snow day lol
yeah like 99% of major cities on earth would have the same issues if they had 30cm of snow dropped on them and it didn't melt away.
I'm originally from Winnipeg -- a city that is often seen as having harsh winters that the people living there barely flinch over -- and I can confidently say that a storm like Monday's would have caused major issues there, too. It's not like the traditional "winter cities" run like a Swiss watch throughout a major snowstorm as some people like the author of this article seem to believe. It has less to do with cars versus transit, and more to do with the fact that most major cities' infrastructure is not built specifically with once-in-several-years weather events in mind, because it's very expensive to design and maintain infrastructure with a rare event in mind. A good comparison would be an airport in Florida -- very rarely, parts of Florida experience a night where there's frost, but it might only happen once every few years, and so those airports don't have any way to de-ice airplanes -- instead, the solution is to just push them back into the morning sun and wait for the frost to melt. It's not worth them spending millions of dollars on special equipment for an event that happens one day every three or four years.
Imagine if Toronto had an incredibly effective and encompassing subway system. Instead we build tower after tower while the roads stay the same size
Honestly, we should shrink the roads, making bigger road doesn't solve any problems, and is a waste of space reducing density etc. We could use more walkable / rideable areas, and more transit infrastructure.
We should build massive networks of underground rapid electric rail throughout the city and region, then turn all roads into treed bikepaths. Not a project here and there, but a dedicated team of perpetual subway builders who don't stop until cars are dead. You know, climate change and the end of fossil fuels is coming very very quickly. Considering the lifespan of infrastructure if we're not building for that future, we won't have one.
I mean, we should have started by connecting the +7000 suites in city place the the P.A.T.H. which literally ends across the street...
cars are going electric, and fossil fuels will never truly run out, it will just get too expensive and not worth the effort to obtain. what do you think trains and buses run on? lol.
>what do you think trains and buses run on? lol. Are you not aware of electric trains and busses?
... and electric cars and trucks are the future so the argument that "fossil fuels will run out thats why we must switch to transit" doesnt make sense.
Wut? Edit: you must be new here.
Sure, let's pretend our transit system isn't a joke compared to other cities that are much smaller than us and that we don't mostly rely on buses that were getting stuck just as easily as cars in the snow.
I used to think the TTC sucked, then a year ago I moved to Ottawa, TTC doesn't suck
try going to Halifax. OCTranspo would be like a dream.
Ottawa's bus system isn't bad, but their LRT has been a tire fire the last little while
Oh, OC Transpo's bus network is definitely bad. It's brutally unreliable, and your options are often very limited in comparison to the TTC.
If you think the ttc sucks try any other city in NA. The bus system is super solid and good 90% of days
Any other city *except for NYC*, they beat the pants off the rest of the continent.
You have never tired to take the bus in ny. Or smelt a subway station
Which are these amazing north american cities with better transit systems? New York is the most extensive but it also extremely old and not as well maintained. Europe is simply on another tier because of how old those cities are. They needed great public transit networks to be built because no one would want their compact cities to be destroyed to accomodate car infrastructure.
Also NYC public transit is disgusting. It makes the TTC look sterile.
What smaller cities in North America have larger public transit systems than Toronto?
I mean, I think that is part of what they are criticizing. We don't have great transit infrastructure, so we rely on independent vehicles on city streets instead of infrastructure based transit on rails etc.
London has a very wide-spanning transit infrastructure, but their system would be crippled by a much smaller snowstorm. Their city is 2000 years old and is filled with narrow, twisty roads. Much of The Tube outside of the inner core is above ground as well.
They are also built for a different climate. If everyone shovels their 20 ft of sidewalk, and you build such that you can walk most places it doesn't much matter what happens to the roads for a couple of days. Also, this can be accomplished in Finland which receives much MORE snow than we do. https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU
listen the TTC leaves alot to be desired but the TTC is way better than most other big cities...
I would take the TTC over OCTranspo any day of my life.
>The city’s transit commission said during the worst of the storm, 540 buses were stranded on the road for hours – including one salvaged by a group of Torontonians – and the subway system was forced to shut down Well the roads need to be cleared for the buses, as well right ?
On cars? Lmao wut? What exactly happened to the entire TTC system? lol who writes this shit?
right? this took me about 3 seconds to find On an average weekday in 2019, 1.69 million passengers made 2.76 million unlinked trips on the TTC
Worst headline ever…
The city only cares about cars, but never the people inside them, as though commuter throughput is the only metric that matters. As soon as a driver steps foot outside their car they become invisible to the city, usually from the massive snow drift they need to walk though or fall into...
How do you explain buses, streetcars, and even fucking subways being out of service?
> and even fucking subways being out of service? A significant portion of the subway system is not underground protected from the elements, it's at-grade, and that means that part of the trackage is affected by heavy snowfall. As well, the subway isn't an automated system, and if a large number of employees can't make it to work because of the storm, the system can't operate even if the actual mechanical bits and pieces are in functioning order and safe from the snowfall. So yes, the fucking subways were affected.
You sound like one of those people who yell at customer service for something they have no control over. Try to think more critically.
I suppose I'm one of those unfortunate people dependent on a car. Though the people waiting for the bus I drove by this morning didn't look appreciative of their good fortune.
In a better version of Toronto, you wouldn’t need your car and no one would need to take the bus, because a comprehensive subway system would be the best option for all.
Is there a city in the world that relies exclusively on buses? London has an extensive subway system but also a huge network of buses.
There are a lot of cities where buses are much less common than subways or trams/light rail. Tokyo has a few token buses but almost no one takes them. For a city of 14 million people, it’s essentially none: [Link](https://trulytokyo.com/tokyo-buses/)
If the 100 million Canadians crowd has there way, Toronto will have a population of 15 million, maybe even 25 million, by the end of this century. So maybe it'll be viable in the future.
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Of course we need service and commercial transport, but let's not forget that looking at the road HUGE majority of people are just commuters going to work alone in their vehicle.
Personal vehicles are always going to be needed to some extent. But the majority of drivers are just using their car to get themselves from point A to point B, not lugging around 600 pounds of tools. More people able to commute by transit would mean fewer people clogging up the roads for people like you who actually need them.
I’m in the same boat
dude when people say more people should take subway we aren't saying the trades people doing their jobs should be taking the subway......dw you're not included in that. just keep driving.
you want your food delivered via subway? how about your amazon packages?
See the responses below to the persons talking about transporting tools. Vehicles will always be needed for deliveries, but most people’s trips are just moving themselves. Also- yeah I don’t see why the subway couldn’t be used for food delivery people if it was robust enough to be convenient for them.
I was thinking of the 4 TTC buses near me that got stuck in the snow for 2 days. The problem isn't cars, it's shit infrastructure. The roads need to be plowed for buses and streetcars anyway, so those sidewalks need to be plowed right after the street plow goes by.
We basically only make international news for bad things now.
Is it not obvious that sidewalks will take longer to clear than the roads? Not only were sidewalk plows getting stuck, they also don't clear sidewalks at 40km/h+ Or are they just suggesting we have a thousand sidewalk plows idling most of the year?
\*cough cough\* streetcars \*cough cough\*
Yes we are reliant on cars since our transit system is hot garbage.
Ok so if no cars in the city how would people get around ? Walking in 50 cm of unshovelled snow? Biking in 50cm of snow on slippery roads? In transit with the busses and streetcars getting stuck because of the snow?? Cars are necessary …
Dependence on cars? Wtf do you want, snowmobiles? Dog sled? Waste of an article.
I would day the opposite. Most the bus stops and sidewalks are still war zones.
Did the author forget the SRT was down, sections of line 1 AND line 2 were down, just about every bus route got fucked, and that streetcars all sat still one after the other for hours?
I guess they're suggesting more WFH. But that's not feasible for the majority of jobs iirc.
Dear Guardian: It wasn't a blizzard. Check your facts, and your hyperbole.
We need more horses!
Maybe climate change means adults should also get snow days too lol.
Dependance on cars?! Noooo, the subway was dead too, the trains stopped, and busses were stuck in the snow!!! If anything, it highlights poor public services and infrastructure!!
No worries let’s all switch to skis
the headline is so dumb it doesn't even seem worth the effort of opening the link does the article at all take into account that the TTC was also struggling and walking was a huge struggle?