Toronto does something right! The Red Rocket

There has always been something unique about the huge lumbering giants on the streets of Toronto, the slow, meandering backbone of the transportation system, the street cars. Somehow, for some reason, most other major cities in the west (and many in Asia) retired their street cars in favour of busses. Many argued that the cables made the cities ugly, or that building new rails wasn’t cost effective. Busses were the answer.

The Red Rocket

Not any more.

American cities are looking at the Europeans (again) for the answer. Many European cities have been developing LRT or tram systems for years, now the Americans are following them. Read more

Yet another reason why European socialism is Evil; bicycle-sharing

First, they invented public health-care, then the notorious welfare state. The latest evil to spread across Europe is Bicycle sharing. The tall athletic socialists who always win sporting events are now trying to surpass even America’s own superman with this endemic.

A red bicycle, a sure sign of commies

The idea is simple, borrow a bike from a central hub, ride it to work. Leave it at a hub, ride it home. Nobody’s going to steal it, because they can just spend 30 euros and buy a card. Read more here

Automated Vacuum Collection

Photo From Waterfront Toronto

The Automated Vacuum Collection or (AVAC) is a pneumatic garbage collections system that transports waste through underground tunnels by a vacuum to a central processing facility where it is compacted, and trucked away. There are a few of these systems in the world right now most of them are in Scandinavia and Asia. There are only two such systems in North America are in Roosevelt Island and of course the magic kingdom of Disney World. You can’t have garbage trucks, or any visible garbage in a magic kingdom now can you?

The Stockholm Bins

The system works similar to a packet switched network, transporting one type of waste at a time. The systems usually use a set of pipes or bins for the different types of waste that the system will transport. In parts of Stockholm (they sure have a lot of cool underground things) Envac installed a number of pipes which protrude from the ground in groups of three. The pipes are colour coded, blue for mixed wast, green for organics, and grey for newspapers. The computer controlled evacuation takes about 30 seconds, the waste is sucked out through the pipe network at a speed of approximately 70 km/h. Last year Hammarby Sjostad, a new waterfront community in Stockholm won a clean energy award for their vacuum based underground collection system that allows them to separate waste into organic, recyclables and other forms. The development also uses incinerators to burn any combustible garbage and return it to the waterfront community in the form of energy. The system would still need to be supplemented by occasional curb or alley based collection as you couldn’t throw a broken chair or a hockey stick into the pipe, but for regular household waste it would handle the bulk of the trash removal. A big upside for the consumer is that you wouldn’t have to remember garbage day anymore.

Madrid's collection tubes

Currently Waterfront Toronto, an organisation set up by the city, provincial and federal government to redevelop the public lands on the waterfront in Toronto are considering using the system in the West Don Lands. However the organisation is waiting on support from city officials to give it the go ahead. The general manager of the solid waste division of the City of Toronto stated that his department had no objection.

“Should they wish to proceed with that, it’s really their decision, not ours. If something like that was built, we could pick up the material at the end of the pipe. So the decision would be Waterfront Toronto’s or the developer’s.” s

The city appears to be taking a cautious approach to the idea but it isn’t dead yet so we may see this space age style of waste collection in Canada yet.

Automated Vaccum Collection Wiki

The Envac Site

Added Edit….
This just in, the city of Montreal has approved a plan to install a vacuum trash collection in the Quartier des Spectacles, a planned rennovation of the city’s old red light district. The city has given the plan the go ahead as the streets in the Quartier des Spectacles are all slated to be torn up to replace the underlying infrastructure; all the sewers, water lines, and power-lines need to be replaced anyway and the city has estimated that the cost of adding in the additional pipes for the vacuum system will only cost an additional $8.2 million.

The system will not only provide street collection but also provide services to all buisnesses and residents in the area with service. Not only that they will also be adding compost collection to the system too!

Envac System Diagram

The Waterfront Trail

A Floating Bridge on Hamilton's portion of the trail

The Waterfront Trail was inaugurated this past year after the community organization in charge of the trail. The Waterfront Regeneration Trust was finally able to strike a deal after twelve years of hard work. The creation of the trail was no small undertaking with seventy different municipalities and other groups involved. The goal of the trust is to make sure that everyone has access to the waterfront and that the waterfront is worth getting to.

The trail is designed to take into account the history of the area. Most of the shores of Lake Ontario and the portion of the Saint Lawrence River that the trail fronts on was settled by Loyalists fleeing the United States who wanted to remain loyal to the British crown. They exerted a profound influence on the social, political and business life of Ontario for more then two centuries and played a major role in the development of Canada. The trail bears witness to this history by passing a number of historical reminders; Loyalist College, Loyalist Parkway, Loyalist Township and even the Loyalist Motel.

The goal of the trail is for it to link waterfronts from Niagara-on-the-Lake to Brockville and, then eventually, to connect it with Upper New York State’s Seaway Trail. It currently includes 31 communities, 182 parks and natural areas, 152 arts and cultural heritage attractions, 37 major annual waterfront festivals, and 170 marinas and yacht clubs.

Map of the Entire Trail

The trail is designed to be a multi-use recreation trail for use by people from all walks of life. The trail is also used by 24% of its patrons to commute to and from work. Currently the trail is about 30% off road dedicated path and 70% on residential streets or the paved shoulders of major roads. Most sections of the trail are paved but some are still gravel or packed limestone.

In the future the trust seeks to complete the few portions of the trail that are as of yet secured and expand the trail through a further 52 projects along the waterfront.

For more information on the trail check out their website.

Plus Petrina, the promotions and events manager for the trust has added some great suplementary information about the trust down below in the comments section so give it a click and check out what she has to say!

Article at Pruned on Deep Water Cooling

Toronto

There is a great little article over at Pruned about proposals for Deep Water Cooling for the city of Toronto. What some people may not realise is that the city already does this, and has been doing it in a limited fashion for quite a long time, the cities water intake system is designed to use the lake water its pulling in to cool some city structures before sending it out into the city water system. There is some debate over the environmental impact of expanding the system and the impact it would have on lake Ontario. If it became the delfacto air conditioning unit for the city… however I would recommend you click below and read the pruned article for that debate.

Enwave and the City of Toronto have created an innovative cooling system that brings an alternative to conventional air conditioning to cool Toronto’s downtown core — one that is clean, price competitive and energy efficient. A permanent layer of icy-cold (4°C) water 83 meters below the surface of Lake Ontario provides naturally cold water. This water is the renewable source of energy that Enwave’s leading-edge technology uses to cool office towers, sports & entertainment complexes and proposed waterfront developments.

Continue Reading the Pruned Article

Subway, Metro, its Rapid Transit Baby!

Transportation systems are an important city network, an efficient rapid transit system will make a city much more livable by giving its citizens a way to move around without having to rely on their cars. In the world there are currently one hundred and sixty-two rapid transit systems, with more then 8,000 km (4,900 miles) of track and 7,000 stations.

I have been fortunate enough to travel on a number of these systems and experience the joys and horrors that can come with them, from the super clean and efficient lines of Fukoka, to what we English teachers termed the ‘refugee line’ in Seoul. Rapid transit systems are one of the most important circulatory systems in the urban area and come in many different configurations and capacities.

Subway systems and subway maps give an interesting perspective on the city. Many of the subway maps that we see as we use the system are conceptual and do not follow the geographic contours of the area in which they operate. However when you look at a subway map that is true to the path it traces through the urban environment you are able to see the city’s major circulatory routes. The way they spread out from the central city they tent to look much more organic then the mental perspective in their passengers minds based off the concept maps. If you take a close look you can see how the system patterns change depending on the surrounding geography. Can you tell if the city is coastal just by looking at the map?

I had put together a whole bunch of metro maps but then today I cam across this site via City Of Ember, a blog that takes a look at urban environments from underground. The site compares the world’s subway systems to scale and is worth a look.

Mass transit systems superimposed over each other

Crosswalks of the Future?

The Plasma Laser Crosswalk

Hanyoung Lee has come up with an ingenious new crosswalk design which creates a virtual wall using ‘plasma lasers.’ The lasers are at a low enough strength so as to not burn holes through cars or pedestrians, and project an image of people crossing the street in red. The virtual wall has an increase ability to slow drivers down and stop. The barrier causes what could be called an “I don’t want to drive into a wall” effect.

While its definitely going to be a while before we see any thing like this in our cities this is quite possibly what cross walks of the future could look like.

Not your average crosswalk

Epic Storm Drains

Epic Storm Drain

I have to admit I am a bit of a sucker for the monumental and, in this case, I was truly blown away by the scale of the city of Tokyo’s Storm Water System. The photos make it look like something right out of final fantasy.

The system was designed by the Japan Institute of Wastewater Engineering Technology (JIWET) in order to handle the yearly typhoons and rainstorms that hit Tokyo and the Japanese Islands on a regular basis. The storm water system is comprised of approximately 64 kilometers of tunnels linking concrete containment silos, which are 65meters deep and runs off a number of 14000 horsepower turbines which can pump 200 tons of water a second.

Lowering a Worktruck In

Like many other parts of Asia, 82% of the ward area is served by combined sewage systems in which wastewater and storm water are channeled through the same sewer line. This results in a number of issues, not least of which is the smell, but also that during times of heavy rainfall some waste water is mixed in with the rain water and is washed directly into local rivers and out to sea.

Either way, the system is of truly epic proportions and can be enjoyed, not only for its capcity and complexity, but its visual impact. Caverns like these are just begging to be used as a futuristic film set.

JIWET homepage;

http://www.jiwet.or.jp/english/

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