Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says that the company plans to put self-driving cars back on the road “within the next few months.” The transportation company suspended tests in March after one of its vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona. The incident is believed to be the first human death from an autonomous…
Yesterday evening in Toronto, 10 people were killed and another 15 injured by a van driving erratically in the Canadian city. The driver, 25-year-old Alek Minassian, is being held on 10 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of attempted murder.
For all I know, Uber’s food delivery service UberEats is a perfectly fine method of ordering food. But the stomach-turning product that a Canadian couple claims showed up at their door instead of pizza ensures that I’ll be thinking twice about placing an order.
Pedestrian shaming has long been a way for cities to prioritize cars over people, from the invention of jaywalking to blaming walkers for their smartphone use. In Toronto, an ad campaign telling pedestrians that their clothes make them more likely to get hit by cars is getting serious backlash—and rightly so.
Manhattan’s rails-to-trails High Line sparked a global trend of turning old transit infrastructure into parks. But a new breed of public spaces aren’t waiting for the transportation around them to stop running—they’re transforming the ground below the still-active elevated tracks.
In preparation for construction work, a routine archaeological dig at the site of Toronto’s former waterfront has resulted in the discovery of a 200-year-old schooner. It’s one of the oldest ships ever found in the city.
Maps seem like the most utilitarian of objects, but hidden in between all that functional information there are some strange stories. Here's how a 19th-century postal service bureaucrat hid a snub against France that's still in Canada's modern map.
A "large, sophisticated" tunnel was recently discovered near York University in Toronto. Unlike regular, non-spooky tunnels built for known reasons, the Toronto Mystery Tunnel was forged by hands unknown, for deeds unknown. Maybe it was Drake?
Canada. Hockey. Poutine. Maple Syrup. All such truly wonderful things! Also wonderful? Toronto. Here's a hyperlapse from Ryan Emond that shows the sparkling skyline of the lovely city to our north.
A Toronto local is jazzing up the "Neighborhood Watch" placards of the city. Andrew Lamb's affixing superheroes, action stars, and everything else under the sun to the signs. Who'd mess with the neighborhood protected by Buffy?
London's plan to grow up might go down, Elon Musk's quest to make electric cars cool, and funny anti-Rob Ford ads appear in Toronto. Plus: Learning from streets in Vietnam, Paris, and Manhattan. All this and more in this week's Urban Reads.
Cities change: skyscrapers go up, row houses are torn down, neighborhoods gentrify, earthquakes destroy. Vintage photographs of cities can be fascinating in and of themselves, but the familiar unfamiliarity of these time-warped photographs are especially intriguing.
We'll give you a hint: The first of these 2,300 data points appeared at the intersection of Yonge and Bloor back in 1924.
December 21, 1936: People dressed as robots at a Toronto children's festival. Photo by Arthur Goss via the City of Toronto Archives.
Toronto was one of the first cities to be reclaimed, and while the CN Tower no longer dominated the skyline, it served a new purpose, to separate the commercial harbor from the overgrown residential district. Artwork by Mathew Borrett.
Last night in Toronto, Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei presented a new version of his incredible Forever Bicycles installation. As the centerpiece of this year's Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, the all-night contemporary art event that takes over city streets, 3,144 bicycles, the most Weiwei has used of this work to…
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, part of a family of drug dealers, smoked crack cocaine while one of his young pals recorded video. Since then, Gawker and a Toronto newspaper have confirmed the video shows Ford smoking a crack pipe, and Ford has denied the video exists. But Toronto vice cops knew about it before the media did.
You'd imagine that it would take quite a few plows to clear a snow-covered highway, but not quite this many. Keep count as they go through and you'll see a whole 21 plows in formation (and a couple of sand trucks) painstaking passing piles of grey road-sludge to the right and to the right again and to the right…
Remember the last time you were at a noisy party — the kind of party where you have trouble understanding what the person next to you is saying? Scientists call this the "cocktail party problem," and use it to describe the difficulty that humans have understanding speech in the presence of background noise.
Here are some videos of the new crazy tourist ride at the top of the CN Tower in Toronto. No matter how strong that harness is, I know I will be freaking out. And loving it. [Thanks Karl!]
