Bike Walk Bus Toronto

 I have talked about this regularly in past posts, but I hate when people visit another city, come back to Toronto, and say "oh, Toronto sucks!" I don't disagree that Toronto has many, very serious issues, but takes like this lean into what I like to call 'tourist vision'. You view Toronto negatively because you experience the short falls across the city, especially since you probably have to experience a commute. You view other cities positively because you are only seeing the curated image that the city puts on. If you spend all your time in Le Plateau, of course you will see Montreal only positively. You never have to experience a commute from Pointe-aux-Trembles to West Island, so you don't care to give those negatives space. The REV along St-Denis. While Montreal has had a lot of success with their pedestrian- and cyclist-first policies, uneven distribution of safe infrastructures across the city create a gradient of what parts of the city are more import...

  Hey besties! This blog post follows along a walk that I had taken in early November 2021. Just a quick note, my captions for pictures say 'left' and 'right' and they may not appear that way on mobile. Sorry in advance! Bessarion Station, on Line 4, has long been critiqued as being a useless station. Named after a short residential street, in, at the time of opening, a very open area, most see it as a place they will never have to venture to. It even spawned a YouTube video that set out to find where exactly Bessarion Station is. For those who have yet to see it, I have attached it below. However, as the area around the station has begun to fill in, ridership slowly begins to increase. Obviously, there are  still many issues  at play around the station, but things are changing. Bessarion is no longer the least-used subway station, and in was actually never the least used rapid transit station: Ellesmere on Line 3 always had lower ridership. In Toronto, however, subway ...

  Hey pals! This blog post is kind of an essay? I'm super open to having discussions about this, so if you're interested, hit me up! Recently, I've seen a few Twitter threads talking about how city-building and good planning are concept foreign to North America: we admire them, we desire them, yet we never actually make these ideas reality. The focus of these threads tends to be walkability. For those unfamiliar, walkability is defined as how friendly an area is for walking, and it is very subjective. The end goal are broad health benefits on both individual and societal levels.  Those who live in North America are very familiar to how automobility is entrenched within our urban landscapes, so much so that walking in many cities is viewed as being impossible. Walking is not the norm, and occurs in mass only in a few select locations. In addition, the North American political landscape is so devolved into perpetuating capitalist structures that the financial wants of automob...