Walking south from Steeles

Today a couple of friends and I walked south from Finch station (i.e. the end of the Yonge line) to Queen station.

The original plan was to head all the way to the lake, but our group lost structural integrity at Queen: no big loss there.

I'd never really been north of Sheppard on Yonge outside of the blinding confines of a car before. It was an interesting experience. The most interesting thing that I learned is how it's not really that far to Finch; the whole walk took just over 3 hours at a fairly leisurely pace.

Downtown Relief Line

Excuse my bar-napkin drawing of the new subway line, obviously inspired by the downtown relief line post at spacing.

The city has decided to look at putting in a new subway line on the East end, presumably after the transit city plans are all done. Neither plan offers transit improvement to those living downtown. My inner cycling advocate has trouble seeing either plan coming to fruition within their proposed time frames.

Every Torontonian considers "downtown" to be something different. It's generally something like "South of Bloor and between Bathurst and Sherbourne." To me, there is no dividing line, but the areas most well served by subways are definitely more urban. Hopefully running a subway line up through the East end will help to intensify the area. Still, it is unlikely that it will ever be consistently worthwhile to go east of Bay st. during my lifetime.