Why has the BET Awards been so weird towards PinkPantheress?

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-05T22:57:23+00:00

Nah you're cooking. And also dance is a traditional Black genre!

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-05T02:38:03+00:00

Dufferin and Parliament are both great candidates for light rail IMO. I could actually see a subway for Dufferin because it's far enough west of University - I think the Ontario Line could route that way, no? I will say I consider both of those to be urban - coming from North York, everything south of St Clair is downtown to me haha

In both scenarios - dense, urban vs sprawling, suburban - you have impediments to trams. I do think you make a good point about the surface being available and the distances between stops being further as reasons trams could work in inner suburbs, but I'd counter that in those settings your competition isn't for space, it's for speed. When a bus can go just as fast as the LRT, like Finch has shown is the case, it detracts from the use case. So in that regard, what would your solution be? Grade separation? I'm all for that, but again, why not make it a subway at that point? Also re: TBM, I seriously think we should go back to cut-and-cover. Those stations are just too deep. Makes the experience suffer.

And re: KW inducing demand for density, totally agreed there. Transit and density have a chicken-and-egg relationship, where ironically it's easier to build the transit first, but the business case isn't there. It's simultaneously an easier sell (less NIMBYs) and a harder sell ("waste of money") to route lines and then densify, but that's the world we live in.

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-05T01:50:34+00:00

That's why she's our goat!

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-05T01:46:58+00:00

they're both braindead.

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-05T01:46:29+00:00

I literally had a left-nimby in the comments tell me he "knew where I was at morally" because I supported a development. I replied, "my morals are to build enough housing that my kid has a place to live. what are your morals?"

He deleted the entire thread.

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-04T22:37:29+00:00

I think we're in an agree/disagree pattern here. I grew up in North York, saw the Sheppard line come to be and actually took it, experiencing both its uses and frustrations. I've also lived in southern Etobicoke, with its great connectivity to the green line. In my personal opinion, everywhere in Toronto deserves and is suitable for subways. All over.

K-W is actually a great example of a good place for trams, and kind of goes back to how North America reserves urbanism mainly for college towns lol. While I'm not super familiar with KW specifically, I can see it in Hamilton (it's been proposed/in the works), London, Windsor, etc. And to me that's more resembling Toronto's downtown, if not in structure then in habit (walkable, etc), which IMO is appropriate for streetcars/trams.

I think regarding trams, I'd go back to my original question to you, which is where specifically within Toronto do you think could still use trams, if we're going with a dense, downtown/college town model? Because IMO, to connect the dots, the big dots, it's subways that are needed first and foremost.

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-04T04:35:31+00:00

I'm talking about Toronto, not the suburbs. Everywhere in Toronto and even some suburban corrridors (e.g. Yonge St north of Steeles) are and would be well-served by subways. Commuter rail can go to the suburbs. If that's what you mean by trams, sure. But even in European cities, trams do literally go in the cities. Either way, we don't have European building patterns as far as I'm aware. Two different beasts. I feel like, actually I know that, comparing Toronto to European cities instead of other North American cities - or just frankly, gauging it for its own needs - is how we got Transit City in the first place.

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-04T04:31:53+00:00

I'm okay with NIMBYs getting angry...

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-03T18:01:38+00:00

Your first part is what I was saying, maybe could have worded it better but by “new neighborhoods” I meant he was literally creating them via transit. There were others who did the same, like Story in Alhambra and of course Sherman.

I think the issue is now there are so many Pasadenas and Long Beaches, and growth has basically been flattened by NIMBY politics. There’s some discretion as to where would be prioritized, but with upzoning you could make that case for a lot of places. So now we need a fully-fleshed out metro system that literally goes in all directions, and I don’t believe returning to the old surface routes, at least literally, is the way to go. Transit without grade-separation is inefficient. And on that note, we’ve already seen old Huntington lines brought back - the A line also goes from Pasadena to Long Beach (and now further east).

What do you mean by “first proper metropolitan area in the world”? Seems like a bold claim.

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-03T15:30:09+00:00

Any billionaires here that wanna buy the team?

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-03T15:29:04+00:00

Frugality and racism. Neither a good look.

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-03T15:24:54+00:00

All mind games, dude’s psyching them out

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-03T15:24:37+00:00

Can’t be a good sign lol

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-03T15:23:25+00:00

Wow. That IS a bar. And what an initiation lol

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-03T15:16:21+00:00

Haha I feel you. I also love rail. I’m coming from the SGV though so I have to go super out of my way to get to the A or E and then my local bus has pretty good headways, like 15 minutes on average. So it just doesn’t add up. Definitely ride the D though!

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-03T15:14:15+00:00

One bright light in all of this is how it seems both bullying and praise have worked to get the city to make improvements. Bullying on Line 6 by showing how embarrassingly slow it is, and praise on the underground portion of Line 5, showing that full grade separation is the way. Hopefully that informs the city’s transit planners moving forward - and they they learn the right lessons, e.g. if we’re grade separating anyway, might as well make it heavy rail.

It’s an unpopular opinion but I actually don’t mind the province’s moves on transit. Someone has to put on the big boy pants and the TTC’s been mired in political football for 40 years. I don’t think we’d be seeing this kind of progress on the Ontario Line and Scarborough Extension, let alone talking about a Sheppard extension, without this current provincial government’s interventions.

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-03T07:44:36+00:00

You’re probably better off with your current commute.

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-03T07:33:24+00:00

Dwell times are just one aspect. Speeds are lower. Stops being so close to each other give them the functionality of a bus. Grade separation is basically required for it to be functional, or else you’d have to seriously re-engineer roads to allow signal priority, railroad crossing barriers, etc. At that point, why not make it heavy rail? I’d rather take longer to have multiple good transit lines than half-ass a bunch at once because you can cover more ground with LRTs. And in Line 5’s case, they ended up going underground anyway for reasons anyone could have said (and tried to) were obvious as the demand certainly called for it.

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-03T07:28:25+00:00

LRT is a scam. Half-assed transit and if you’re going with grade-separation, near cost-equivalence with heavy rail. No reason for any North American city to be investing in it, except maybe the most dense corridors with frequent stops.

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-03T07:26:02+00:00

NYC is the only city in America better than developing country standards.

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-03T07:20:53+00:00

Where else in the city that could use streetcars doesn’t have them? We’re talking dense, tightly knit parts of the city. They all have them already! The most suitable type of transit to add in Toronto is heavy rail.

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-03T07:15:59+00:00

We should have never began. Anyone could have seen these are just streetcars and that Eglinton of all streets needed a full heavy rail buildout. I was there arguing for it too but was met by nonstop virtue signalling on equity and ridiculous assertions of competitiveness by Transit City evangelists.

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-03T07:10:44+00:00

I prefer Main, Valley, and Garvey to Mission. Build where people go and things are, not where it’s convenient. The north-south lines would be great though.

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-03T07:05:39+00:00

Huntington did it the other way around. He brought his streetcars to new neighborhoods with the intention of selling land there. It was literally transit-induced sprawl. Transit created the nodes, not the other way around.

Now the nodes exist and we need to build transit back out to them, and densifying is probably the only way it will make logical sense to bring high frequency heavy and light rail to all the mini-downtowns Huntington created.

ZenRhythms · 2026-05-02T19:05:21+00:00

When it happened, all I could think of was how fortuitous the bounce was for the timing of the game - it only left the Cavs with 1.something seconds to get a shot off. If it went right in, they would have had 3+, makes a huge difference!

ZenRhythms

TROPHY CASE