One thing that the city of Toronto should be doing right now is to show real preparedness for winter. In major North European cities, and even in Montreal too, when it snows like this, they don’t just call it “snowmageddon” and cancel service, but roll out plough trucks in real numbers immediately and deal with it. Here they just salt, salt and salt (which is banned in most EU cities on city streets), and hope for the snow to melt away soon. When drivers (70% of whom don’t have snow tires) start having problems on the snowpacked streets, TTC has problems, and vice versa, which means traffic chaos and even more service disruptions for the streetcar and bus lines than usual. And for the streetcar lines, TTC should have special plough cars/ “track scrubber cars” like these ones in use in Helsinki (http://www.raitio.org/ratikat/helsinki/hkl/hkltyo/hkltyo.htm) where the weather conditions can be similarly bad but public transit is much more reliable.

One thing that the city of Toronto should be doing right now is to show real preparedness for winter. In major North European cities, and even in Montreal too, when it snows like this, they don’t just call it “snowmageddon” and cancel service, but roll out plough trucks in real numbers immediately and deal with it. Here they just salt, salt and salt (which is banned in most EU cities on city streets), and hope for the snow to melt away soon. When drivers (70% of whom don’t have snow tires) start having problems on the snowpacked streets, TTC has problems, and vice versa, which means traffic chaos and even more service disruptions for the streetcar and bus lines than usual. And for the streetcar lines, TTC should have special plough cars/ “track scrubber cars” like these ones in use in Helsinki (http://www.raitio.org/ratikat/helsinki/hkl/hkltyo/hkltyo.htm) where the weather conditions can be similarly bad but public transit is much more reliable.

Yesterday night at College I had to wait about 25 minutes for the Queen streetcar to come, some people had to get cabs and others walked away. Stuff like this simply can’t keep happening.

I do not know much about the TTC budget, but there are many things they could do to improve the system with little money.

Yesterday night at College I had to wait about 25 minutes for the Queen streetcar to come, some people had to get cabs and others walked away. Stuff like this simply can’t keep happening.

I do not know much about the TTC budget, but there are many things they could do to improve the system with little money.