Bike Walk Bus Toronto

This is the second in a multi-part series where I reflect on my time that I spent in Montreal recently. There are few better symbols for the city of Montreal than an orange traffic cone. It does not matter where in the city you are, there are cones signifying construction right nearby. Some cones have even been around for sixteen years ! While the city's chamber of commerce hopes to see cone usage and construction delays reduced , summer being a season of construction is something that will stick around forever.  While every Canadian city has a construction season opposite their winter, Montreal's season is extremely disruptive. In this blog post, I will talk about some of the good about how the city mitigates construction-related issues, and some of the bad. The Good One thing that Montreal does really well is ensuring that any closures leave space for all road users. If a road has a bike lane, orange cones will mark out a rerouted bike path. If the sidewalk is blocked, then t...

  This is the first in a multi-part series where I reflect on my time that I spent in Montreal recently. I'm going to start by saying this, which I had said before: transit in Montreal is not  better than transit in Toronto. Yes, the Montreal Metro is better than the TTC subway, but the EXO regional rail network and the STM's bus services are, overall, not good. While I held that view prior to my most recent visit in Montreal, making the point of taking a wide variety of routes opened my eyes to just how many issues there really with the bus network in particular in the city. In this blog post, I will outline some of my reasons as to why Montreal's bus network is significantly lacking, and why it fails to live up to Toronto's. The reasons are as follows: Issues with frequency, span, and poor management; Incomplete network: dead-end routes and weird terminal points; Incomplete network: too peak-oriented; and Wasting of buses. This piece is a bit technical in nature, but ...

 If there's one thing to note about STM, it's that they rarely change routes. While there has been lots of growth in Montreal in the past decade, and travel patterns have quickly changed, there has been only one major reorganization in that time frame. So when STM announced that they were planning a full network redesign, noting the openings of both REM and the Blue Line, there was hope that the network would be filled it. Not long however, though, progress was stalled.  Earlier this week, the sector redesign for Île-des-Soeurs was released, as the island's new REM has an imminent opening. I was excited, as there had been lots of public participation, and the simple layout of this sector should have made the task relatively straight-forward. However, reviewing the plan, I find it is way too complicated, and there will be lots of confusion on day one. If this was the product that the planners developed on such a simple sector, I'm very concerned about the rest of the net...

 Hey pals! It's been quite a while since I wrote a blog post. I hadn't been particularly inspired, and I have been taking adventures less frequently due to it being winter. Fortunately, I have finally found a topic to talk about. Recently, I returned from a short trip to Montreal. In the bit of downtime I had, I decided that I would try out the new SRB Pie-IX, also known as 439 Express Pie-IX. This bus rapid transit installation opened in November after many years of (highly-disruptive) construction, aiming to improve finally improve service on the Pie-IX corridor. Montreal had long experimented with different services along this stretch, including the 505 R-Bus, which was removed in 2002 after a number of pedestrian fatalities. While I have a few concerns with the SRB, I think overall it is, and will continue to be, a huge success. In particular, when I compare it to York Region's VIVA Rapidways, the SRB is able to accomplish more transit-specific goals while being much si...

 Despite living quite close to the 'Shops at Don Mills' outdoor mall, it's a place a rarely go to. Even during high school, I never met the question "Want to go to Shops?" with enthusiasm. In spite of my opinion, many people seem to love this place. So, I figure it's time to explore why I consider the Shops at Don Mills a failure. And yes, it deals with my hatred of cars. A Brief History The old Don Mills Centre was a strip mall that opened in 1955, at the southwest corner of Don Mills Road and Lawrence Avenue East, in North York. Successive expansions of the mall led to it being enclosed in 1978. This mall was a typical neighbourhood mall, not unlike Parkway, Agincourt, or Sheridan. I have a vague memory of this mall, but I was so young when it was fully open. The enclosed Don Mills Centre mall. In the early 2000s, owners Cadillac Fairview decided they wanted to renovate the mall and make it an outdoor lifestyle center. This opened in 2009. I would generalize...

 Hey pals! A few months ago, I made a trip up to Port Perry. It's a cute little town, and I had a great time doing my readings on Lake Scugog with an ice latte in hand. To get into town, I went through Uxbridge on Durham Region Transit, but took GO Transit home. The infrequent, and frankly, inconvenient schedules make navigating on transit in North Durham Region difficult. In this somewhat short blog post, I will explore some of the challenges of North Durham faces, and how they can be significantly improved upon with little additional resources required. Background and Issues Two routes operate in North Durham Region.  I wish DRT made good route maps so I don't have to use this random clipping anymore. The first route is Durham Region Transit's 905B. While most 905 service stays south of Windfields Farm, service every 90 minutes runs up to Uxbridge via Port Perry, using Simcoe. This route also includes a stop at ONTechU/Durham College North Campus when travelling to and fr...

 Recently, I was reading a blog post from Youtuber RMTransit , where he spoke about how GO Transit's train offerings being west-heavy create some operational issues at Union Station. I think it's a good piece, but I wish that he had explored a bit more into how GO Transit's service overall is west-heavy. I'm not saying that service is entirely adequate (especially between Hamilton and Kitchener), but the GO Transit west of Toronto is far more useful than east of it. I bring up Kitchener and Guelph as cities that are not within the Greater Toronto Area, but instead sit in the larger Greater Golden Horseshoe. In the east, there's only one city that really comes to mind here: Peterborough. Peterborough's 85,000 residents is smaller than Guelph, but the service quality is exponentially worse. Guelph has a station on the Kitchener Line, and is served by GO bus routes 29, 31, 33, and 48. Peterborough, however, is only served by the 88 bus. You can obviously make an ar...