Results tagged “bloorstreeteast”

At 10:01 a.m. this morning, one of the five green-jacketed police officers standing on the corners of Yonge and Bloor walked confidently but carefully into the middle of the road. The traffic lights at the intersection had just been deactivated, and were now blank, and, after stopping cars in all directions, he waved one direction of cars through, then stopped it, then waved through the other. It was a brief moment of forced acclimatization for the drivers and reassurance for the pedestrians waiting on the tips of the corners: another officer a few minutes earlier had joked to pedestrians that "you don't want to be the first one to be hit by a car." A second later, the traffic lights were all back on, a solid red for all drivers in all directions, and the little stickmen beamed white from every pedestrian signal box. Inside a stopped van, one male driver gestured to his female passenger back and forth across the intersection in front of him, explaining what this all was, and the pedestrians followed his lead.

Though they only last for three hundred metres so far, this is no small victory for cyclists. Bloor Street East, between just west of Yonge and just east of Church, has just gained freshly painted sharrows on both sides of the street. From what we saw today on the recently renovated roadway, they seem to be doing their jobs already: motorists are giving cyclists a bit more space than usual, and cyclists have moved a bit more into the road rather than towards the curb. That the painted-on sharrows literally impress cyclists' place on the road will, as they spread around the city and along Bloor, hopefully go a long way towards changing everyone's attitudes towards who our streets belong to—the correct answer being everyone.

Torontoist Environment Editor Chris Tindal is currently engaged in a federal by-election campaign. This weekly column is an attempt to offer a behind the scenes glimpse into what it's like to be that mysterious Other: a politician.

How will this space-age family's future lose its balance?

Near Manulife Financial: Bloor East citizens would like less poo in their public spaces. With condo fever gripping the still-shabby southeast corner of Bloor and Yonge due to the future One Bloor 80-storey tower, the Bloor East Neighbourhood Association (BENA) met Wednesday night at the Rogers Centre (333 Bloor Street East) to discuss how their little stretch of street could be transformed to rival the world-class reputation of Bloor West. BENA, representing ratepayers along...

People queue up for a chance at a condo. The condos at One Bloor Street East range from $300K to $2 million, so remember, kids: lines aren't just for poor people and the Nintendo Wii any more!

It features our busiest subway station, it's got one of the most trafficked intersections in Toronto, and it's the psychological split between uptown and downtown. Despite such importance and notoriety, Yonge and Bloor has remained inexplicably dingy and architecturally bland.