Rapid Transit Effect on Economy

Metropolitan Toronto: The Transit/Development Connection
388.428 M265 1987 Metro Toronto Urban Affairs Library

From Page 1:

Metropolitan Toronto saw more new construction between 1954, when the first subway opened, and now, than wa previously in existance during the first 120 years of incorporation of the City of Toronto. Since the formation of Metropolitan Toronto the rapid transit system has played an important role in determining the location of aproxmately $30 billion in new buildings - $10 billion along the north-south subway and $20 billiion adjacent to the east-west line. A conservative estimate for the dollar value of future growth in Metropolitan Toronto where rapid transit will be a major factor is $20 billion to the year 2001.

From Page 9:

Almost everyone directly involved in planning the future will agree that rapid transit is a prerequisite for orderly growth and development. They recognize that rapid transit has a profound impact on local and national economies. Transit attracts new development and new business, increases property values and tax revenues, boosts retail sales, generates jobs and improves the quality of life.

SGML CALS Table Model in XHTML

I discovered recently that the CALS Table model is used for tables in HTML 4.01 and XHTML. This is most useful for their original purpose in marking up tabular data, like uwto.org - Transit Facts

This means that <thead>, <tfoot>, and <tbody> have been part of the HTML standard since 1999.

<table>
<thead>
</thead>
<tfoot>
</tfoot>
<tbody>
</tbody>
</table>

A couple of years ago I redesigned my uwto.org site and reformatted any pages that used tables for layout purposes to one using CSS 2.1 stylesheets.

Now that we have CALS stuff to use, I've been experimenting a bit with it. For example, with CALS you can define a header area using and when that table is printed and flows past one page, the browser printer engine willl automatically reprint all the column header and footer labels on each page. This is similar to how you can "lock" a column or row in a spreadsheet and scroll through while leaving the headers in place.

I've also experimented with the <colgroup> and <col> related tags. They're supposed to allow formatting for alignment of numerals. It works in IE 6 but surprisingly not in the more HTML standardized Mozilla/Firefox browsers. Someone posted a hack that uses Javascript but I'd rather not get into programatic ways of displaying web documents if I can help it, excepting a CMS system.

There is a long-standing (7 yrs.!) non-implementation bug report filed as BugZilla #915

Manitoba Hydro Tower

Manitoba Hydro announced this week that demolition has now started for their downtown office tower.

They said the reason why demo didn't start earlier (it was slated for February) was that they didn't want to make a mess of the street while the 2005 Juno Awards were being held.