Toronto’s downtown core has been gridlocked for days, and drivers have been trumped in their efforts to move around efficiently.
Several city blocks were closed, and remain closed at the time of this writing, because the useless antenna on top of Trump Tower, is unstable, and might fall.
The antenna issue is frustrating, no doubt about it. But I’m more frustrated by the lack of anything resembling a plan on how to deal with this, and get our city moving once again…
I filmed that video around 9am on Monday morning, and I figured I would end up deleting it, since this would be a non-story by the time my next scheduled blog post was supposed to roll out on Wednesday.
But to my surprise, we awoke on Tuesday morning to find that several downtown city streets in the middle of North America’s 4th largest city were still closed off.
It’s gridlock.
Absolute mayhem.
Here’s a video I shot on Tuesday, looking south from the intersection of Richmond & Bay:
I’m not a city planner.
I don’t profess to have the answers.
But once again, I feel as though Toronto has been exposed as something of a joke. How many other major cities would close off their downtown core for two days because an antenna is swaying in the wind?
I’m not an engineer.
I don’t know how to fix this.
But I would like to think that we are capable, as a city, to remedy this situation in a timely manner.
Whose responsibility is this?
The City of Toronto? Or Trump Towers?
And what do the folks at Trump Towers have to say about this?
Neil Labatte, President & CEO of Talon International, who built Trump Towers, said the following:
“Talon’s technical specialist was quickly dispatched to the area, and found that the concerns were unsubstantiated. Talon is continuing its due diligence and is now awaiting a final report from its technical team. As soon as Talon has the final report, the police department will be notified.”
Wow, that almost sounds pompous.
“As soon as Talon has the final report, the police department will be notified.”
So we’re sitting around waiting for Talon’s engineers to issue a report?
And who is paying for the police services, and fire department?
I certainly hope it’s not Toronto tax-payers.
Am I the only one who feels that Talon International, and/or Trump Towers should be charged for all the municipal services that were required to respond to this situation?
Maybe I’m just blowing off steam here.
But I have to think other cities would have handled this a lot better. Bay Street has been a coffee cup convention for two days now, as police, fire, and other municipal workers stand around and drink coffee while staring up in the sky, waiting for something to happen.
Well, at least if the antenna fell, nobody inside the building would be hurt…….since the biggest real estate failure in the history of Toronto is half-empty…
AndrewB
at 7:45 am
When I saw the story on CP24 my first thought was “I wonder if David is going to write about it”. In my opinion the building should pay for it, not the city or taxpayers.
In regards to your other points David, I’d have to concur that the city seems baffled and crippled by little issues. NYC has construction among other things like movie sets, large volumes of traffic, etc and yet they can manage to maintain the city while keeping the hustle and bustle going. Toronto needs to start acting like the world class city it’s dying to be viewed as.
jeff316
at 10:50 am
I think part of the reason New York seems to manage it all a bit better is resident expectations.
Everyone expects New York traffic to be terrible and driving to be a crapshoot.
Here we expect 2015 New York density with 1982 Mississauga traffic.
Boris
at 12:53 pm
no we dont. We expect gridlock. We get turbo gridlock.
Lynette
at 12:36 am
thanks for the quick response!!!!is there a way to read out the iagems in a higher resolution than 72dpi directly from the pdf? with $im->setResolution(300, 300) i can change the resolution afterwards, but the source output still is 72 dpi. But since we are dealing with vector graphics within the pdf heremust be away to excerpt those in a higher quality. or not?with $im->resampleimage() i can change the resolution afterwards too, but i cant fit the source resolution the density property on the console makes this magic’ thing
Septiana
at 12:16 am
thank you, Koppanen.I just refered your blog and coeufirgd the MAGICK_HOME.then the error message is :Error: /undefinedfilename in (72 72)Operand stack:Execution stack: %interp_exit .runexec2 nostringval nostringval nostringval– 2 %stopped_push nostringval nostringval nostringval false 1 %stopped_pushDictionary stack: dict:1154/1684(ro)(G) dict:0/20(G) dict:70/200(L) Current allocation mode is localLast OS error: No such file or directoryGPL Ghostscript 8.63: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1Fatal error: Uncaught exception ImagickException’ with message Postscript delegate failed `C:\web\intra_malabs_com\1.pdf in C:\web\intra_malabs_com\test.php:3Stack trace:#0 C:\web\intra_malabs_com\test.php(3): Imagick->__construct(‘1.pdf’)#1 {main} thrown in C:\web\intra_malabs_com\test.php on line 3Do i need to change the delegate.xml?
Mike
at 9:30 am
New York does it all the time.
Most famously when One57 was being built and the crane was damaged by Hurricane Sandy. They shut down 57th for almost a month.
Fortunately human safety “trumps” convenience every time.
Jimbo
at 12:08 pm
Canada in general handles things in the most embarrassing way, our levels of government always pass the buck.
Utah has been a real eye opener. I can’t believe I spent all of those years thinking Americans were stupid….