[GTALUG] I’m obviously way behind in my reading: IBM owns Redhat

[Russell Reiter]

On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 4:50 PM Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

> On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 07:02:19AM -0400, James Knott via talk wrote:
> > LRT used to be called "streetcars".  Toronto has had them for well over a
> > century.
>
> Not sure of the historical use of the word streetcar although I've used it
all my life. Most of the world refers to them as Tram's, ostensibly because
of the pole which connects them to motive power. Although, if you remember
the Red Rocket era cars, you also probably remember watching them hook
together with train couplings when one broke down. The push connection was
commonplace. The pull connection always drew a crowd, just to watch the
backup manouver. That was a show.


> And Toronto was one of the very few cities that never got rid of them.
> Sometimes being slow at jumping on trends can turn out to be a good thing.


Not sure that Toronto was one of the few that never got rid of Streetcars.
It did stand up to some very intense opposition to their retention from
industry lobbyists however, City Council kept them in service as being
essential to the core needs of residents of Toronto. I believe all of the
Canadian cities over 1M residents, have an internal rail transit system.
Although some are newer than others.

I worked for a demolition company in Calgary and I remember when the city
had to saw up and remove thousands of cubic feet of concrete, (I'm pretty
sure it was a quarter mile stretch of the blue line expansion) because the
MPA values of the pours were well below spec and would never cure hard
enough to support live loading for any extended length of time.

There are over four hundred cities in the world which currently run inter
urban transit on rails.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tram_systems_by_gauge_and_electrification

In Toronto a lot of people back in the 60's right through to the 80's
dismissed Trams as a nostalgic Heritage aspect of planning. I actually rode
the last Trolly Bus up Bay St while I was coming home from downtown in the
early am. There was a photographer on it and he took a picture of the
driver to record this historic moment for the union news.

This was the face of automotive pressure to use buses on surface routes and
push people into subways. However, one of greatest under reported reasons
for retaining Streetcars, was the automobile traffic calming measures,
which the regularized movement at posted street speeds and regular stops to
pick up passengers provided.

The flow control tokens in the people moving stream, so to speak.

This UN report introduces the reader to three Urban Planning terms City
Proper, Urban agglomeration and Metropolitan Area. An aerial map of Toronto
is the used as the visual graphic for helping to define the terms.

https://www.un.org/en/events/citiesday/assets/pdf/the_worlds_cities_in_2018_data_booklet.pdf


> --
> Len Sorensen
> ---
> Post to this mailing list talk at gtalug.org
> Unsubscribe from this mailing list
> https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>


-- 
Russell
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20200529/09540cef/attachment.html>