Toronto LRT Information Blog

I was going to post about this when it first came out in early December, but I thought I would wait until an electronic version was available.
Regional and local councillor Vito Spatafora made use of an image originally from this site in his Fall-Winter 2009-2010 newsletter. While credit for the image would have been nice, it is not necessary as this site’s copyright notice allows the non-commercial use of photos and diagrams created by myself (hold you mouse over a photo or image on a non-blog page and a tool-text will appear telling you if it was me, the page author, or someone else).

I can’t speak for his position on LRT development, aside from the Don Mills/Leslie extension of the Transit City Don Mills line. I have sent him a message through his website (my email bounces when sent to the Town of Richmond Hill) but have yet to hear a reply.

I cannot express enough thanks when I receive contributions to this site. Sometimes they come in the form of pointing out errors or providing updated information. All of these help in trying to keep information that is up-to-date and useful for everyone.

Occasionally, I get contributions that are quite substantial. The Calgary page was quite low on content until Aman Hayer contacted me an offered to take more photos of the system.

Recently, I was contacted by James Greenhalgh who provided me with new photos for the Dallas page and the Buffalo page. I finished the update of the Dallas page in the past week, and will be doing the same for the Buffalo page soon. In addition to this, James had material for a couple of new cities that were not already featured on this site. He offered to create the entire pages for these and I am pleased to announce that the first such page is now online: San Diego.

Once again, many thanks to James and Aman, and all the others who have contacted me with updates and corrections.

The first part of a two-part article on transit issues appeared this week in local newspapers printed by the York Region Media Group. This first part covers the LRT alternatives for York Region as outlined on this site (here).

I invite others to post there comments here, on this blog.

I have been grappling for awhile with an appropriate term for what we know as subway. In most every case, when one uses the word in the GTA, they are referring to the TTC’s HRT: the Yonge-University-Spadina line, the Bloor-Danforth line, or the Sheppard line.

But if you take a light rail line, and run it in a tunnel, isn’t that a subway? Or do you call it a streetcar-subway, or an LRT-subway?

Merrriam-Webster defines subway as:

an underground way; as
a: a passage under a street (as for pedestrians, power cables, or water or gas mains)
b: a usually electric underground railway
c: underpass

Meanings a and c are clearly not what we are talking about, but both HRT and LRT in a tunnel are described by definition b.

Referring to the YUS and BD lines as HRT avoids this confusion, but many are unfamiliar with the term HRT. To add another complication, some will use HRT to also include Commuter Rail (like GO Trains).

So, here is the nomenclature I have decided to use throughout the Toronto LRT Information Page and this blog:

subway: a tunneled section of a transit line, whether for HRT, LRT,  or even BRT

Subway: part or all of the TTC Subway network; as in, extending the Spadina Subway to Vaughan

Clear as mud? I just need to avoid starting a sentence with the first use.

I would like to encourage more comments on topics posted here, whether you agree or disagree with points made on this site. While it is nice to receive comments from people supporting Light Rail, I am interested in reasons why people are either against or simply apprehensive about LRT. One of the purposes of this site is to provide information on the benefits of LRT can be more effective than subway expansion. It is helpful to know where the concerns are.

I have recently added the need to enter a code word to post a comment. If you think spam email is an issue, just start a blog and see what kind of spam comments you start getting. Up until now, I have simply turned off the ability for people to post comments on a topic after a certain amount of time. This was working reasonably well, as the bots that go searching for blogs to post spam to were more or less selecting older topics, but this has recently been changing.

If you get an image that you cannot see the whole word (this occasionally happens), before you type your comment press your browser’s refresh button and the page will be redrawn. When typing in the code word, you may type it in upper- or lower-case characters.