Newsmaker
Earlier this week, Karen Stintz, the Ward 16 councillor and TTC chair, unveiled an ambitious plan to expand high-speed public transportation throughout Toronto over the next 30 years. The map that outlines the plan, dubbed One city, is a cat’s cradle of m
What is a TTC Fantasy Map?
It’s a map, usually modelled on the official TTC subway map, but completely unburdened by reality. On a fantasy map, for example, the two prongs of the Yonge-University-Spadina subway line can be joined in three places, or the BloorDanforth subway line can link up with the Sheppard subway line at a brand-new Scarborough Centre station. Never mind the fact that building any of those improvements would cost billions of dollars and would take years of work. The TTC fantasy mapmaker doesn’t care.
Where are the maps found?
The maps have been in circulation on the Web for years. Currently, the hub for the hobby is UrbanToronto.ca, a website where city-infrastructure enthusiasts can talk to each other using a public bulletin board.
Why do people bother making them?
Wish fulfillment seems like an obvious explanation. Victor Bielawski, an 18-year-old Toronto native, made his latest fantasy map after moving to Zurich and becoming jealous of the transit system there. “They have achieved things that are dismissed as impossible [in Toronto],” he says, including express and local trains that share the same tracks, and timed transfers.
Will OneCity be the map to end all maps?
OneCity has many features in common with the average fantasy map. It seems possible that amateur mapmakers have been bested, maybe permanently. But Paul Grant, a 38year-old computer program- mer who has been issuing revisions of his own fantasy map since 2005, thinks construction delays due to political and bureaucratic interference will leave room for armchair transit planners for years to come. He now lives in China, where things are a little closer to the fantasy-map ideal. “Actually, there’s a new subway being built here from Shenzhen to Guangzhou,” he says. “They started planning it a couple years ago and it’s going to be ready in a couple years.”