Public Bikes and Public Spaces

Back in July, Toronto announced that it would attempt to bring the Bixi bike sharing programme to the city. A big condition was that Bixi would need to have 1000 people purchase the $95 annual subscription to the service before the imposed deadline of November first. Well here we are on October 19th, and Bixi has reached the 1000 member mark, in large part due to an investment from AutoShare.

The car-sharing company AutoShare announced Monday night that it bought 100 of the $95 annual subscriptions, pushing the total over 1,000. The announcement was made to room full of BIXI subscribers gathered for a party at the Steam Whistle Brewery. “There was a big cheer, that’s for sure,” said AutoShare president Kevin McLaughlin, who called the purchase an investment in BIXI. “The bigger picture is bringing a better transportation system to Toronto,” he said.

Read more at The Toronto Star, or at Bixi Toronto.

In other good Toronto news, the University of Toronto is experimenting with the creation of new, pedestrian only spaces. The idea is undergoing a real-time evaluation by closing down little-used roads and setting up tables, chairs, and fake grass. Although one area wasn’t very successful (Devonshire between Bloor and Hoskin), the other is flourishing. Willcocks Street between St. George and Huron is being heavily used by students, faculty, and random passers-by as a place to meet, work, and enjoy free Wi-Fi. Evaluation of the concept will continue until the winter, when a decision will be made whether or not to turn the temporary set-up into something more permanent.

More information can be found at Spacing.ca.

A Newer, Gooder Website!

If you come here often, you’ll notice that the site looks different!

I just made the switch to this theme and I’m sure there are still some bugs around so if you find any, please leave a comment (after you comment you’ll see a bug…). I plan on adding some minor colour changes and add some features soon. I’ll list the features here once they’ve been implemented.

  • Tag cloud! Taxonomy is fun, check out the right side of the site.
  • Share this! Look slightly below and you’ll see a “Share this” option. Click on it to send the post to a friend or one of the more popular social websites.
  • Take good news to go! If you’re on a mobile you’ll now be better able to view Things Are Good.
  • The site should load faster.
  • If you comment, you should get a thank-you email and the page won’t have to reload after you comment
  • When reading a single post page you’ll notice relevant content from the Arkayne network under the content.

Thanks to Ricdes for the WordPress theme, it’s so good that I made only minor changes 🙂

Another thanks to the wonderful people at WordPress who continue to make my favourite blogging platform.

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