Toronto Makes it to No. 3 (Ahead of Paris) in Global City Rankings
28 Replies to “Guess Who’s First And Second”
The quickest way to get ahead of London and New York is to not go in the same direction they are.
No offence but is one of the criteria which city has the most Muslim immigrant infidel haters?
>No offence but is one of the criteria which city has the most Muslim immigrant infidel haters?
That, plus the pride parade must boosted them way up there. If the G20 riots had happened there last year, they’d be #1.
These rankings are obviously based on criteria thought up by an idiot. I’ve lived in Toronto and near enough to New York to know that both places are impossible to get around in and populated by stressed-out liberals living paycheck to paycheck. I see no reason to doubt that London and Paris are the same.
More and better transit just make the middle of a city more and more impossible to get around in, and New York City is the cast-in-stone embodiment of that. If they had stopped building transit in 1950 the place might not have become the clapped-out butthole that it is now.
The only thing keeping Toronto from going the same way is the lack of trains, the QEW and the 401. You can’t get enough day-trippers in and out to utterly ruin the place just yet, and the ‘burbs are pretty well full.
Toronto. Old Indian word for ‘where men squat’.
This is perhaps the most idiotic “story’ that the Wall Street Journal has ever published. I’ve lived in Toronto for 4.5 years, and may God help me; and I lived in one of the banlieues of Paris for 4 years. Toronto is the antichamber of Hell; Paris, if you can avoid the Muslims (usually easy) is more like an introduction to Heaven.
i know that Torontonians have been trying for many years to pass themselves off as dwellers in a great city, but it always miscarries. How much did they pay for this latest?
The heart of the Canadian comedy is that Toronto claims to be the intellectual and cultural centre of Canada; the essence of the Canadian tragedy is that it might be true.
The traffic in Toronto is unreal. Your GPS says 20 minutes to destination, and on a very good day, you’ll be there in 40.
When I lived there, I had a place within walking distance of work.
Phantom wrote:
“More and better transit just make the middle of a city more and more impossible to get around in, and New York City is the cast-in-stone embodiment of that. If they had stopped building transit in 1950 the place might not have become the clapped-out butthole that it is now.”
You know, I have little time for my hometown’s insecure bleatings, but I have to say that I’ve read that sentence several times over, and it still doesn’t make any sense. Toronto’s downtown is covered in pre-1950 transit technology (streetcars) and anyone here will tell you that City Hall’s stubborn fetishization of this out of date technology is one of the reasons why the city’s downtown is a tangled mess. If we’d bothered building a downtown subway it might have been better, but we simply roughed in a station or two and forgot all about it. The LACK of any modern transit is one of the things that makes this ridiculous assessment of Toronto as “#3 in the WOOOORLD!” patently ridiculous.
Vancouver is a WORLD CLASS CITY.
I read a massive banner on the Orpheum a long time ago that told me so.
These surveys are really silly. I mean does anyone actually read these pieces below the headline.
What The Phantom says.
My youngest daughter lives in NYC. When I visit, in the first 2 days I’m thinking, “man, the energy, I gotta move here”. On the 3rd it’s “get me out of his mad hellhole … NOW.” Never fails.
Said daughter once told me that New Yorkers consider everyone who doesn’t live in NYC as “camping out”. That’s Delisle or Vancouver.
Phantom wrote:
“More and better transit just make the middle of a city more and more impossible to get around in, and New York City is the cast-in-stone embodiment of that. If they had stopped building transit in 1950 the place might not have become the clapped-out butthole that it is now.”
Look, I have little patience for my hometown’s insecure bleatings about its “world class” status, but I’ve read this sentence over several times now and it still doesn’t make any sense.
Toronto’s downtown is a mostly impassable traffic mess precisely because City Hall has perversely committed itself to a pre-1950 transit technology (streetcars) instead of building the modern downtown relief subway line it’s needed for decades, and which the powers-that-be have finally agreed is a necessity. It’s not that we’ve built more transit, but that we’ve stubbornly kept with the wrong one, and if you lived here you’d know that, and now that high-rise development is about to gift us with some truly Manhattanesque population densities, it’s going to get worse.
Which is why this ridiculous “We’re number THREEEEEE!” evaluation is so farcical, as the cities on either side of us have superior transit infrastructure, which they’ve committed to updating for the last 60 years. Look, Toronto sucks for a lot of reasons, but please try to get the reasons right!
(Ooops, sorry for the double post. Browser issues.)
Which leftist group? Did this drug induced hallucination grow out of? Every Marxist perversion must be included. Its certainly not economic.
Calgary is a terrible place to live so don’t come here. For myself, I’ll stay put and take one for the team.
Better anyone thinking of moving go to Toronto or Vancouver.
Oh, and the skiing, hiking, climbing, kayaking, golf and theatre in this area is terrible. And never mind the beef in the restaurants; its reputation is all BS. Do yourselves a favor and stay away.
I have to agree with DrD, Calgary sucks so do yourselves a favour and don’t move here, move to Toronto or Vancouver or, if you have to come to Alberta, Edmonton.
DrD @ 5:56 PM – You forgot how bad the music scene is.
Calgary was fun. Was there in ’96 and remember going to the Hard Rock Cafe, shortly after it opened. I remember it had a guitar in the roof, or something. That was fun.
I’ve heard since that it was shut down because it was too ‘wild’. I can imagine that. That giant guitar was kind of crazy.
Then we got on the wrong C-Train, which deposited us on the wrong side of McMahon stadium. That was fun, too.
Finally, after a few days, we got back in the car and continued west. That was the MOST fun…
ok >
“yes we know history how american get super rich”
Yea, it’s called working hard, inventing things and then selling them to people who want them.
Instead now we import the Third World by the millions and are losing our own standards and services to becoming losers like the third world.
Islamic countries have offered the world nothing but problems and poverty. The west has given Islamic nations everything they enjoy by way of modernization and economic wealth for whatever it is today.
You say America needs to get out of Islamic countries and I agree 100%. In return Islamic people need to get out of America and the west, we don’t need you.
What is this Toronto you speak of?
The history of the world is the history of evolving cultures, trade, and technology. Those who will not trade or learn can only hope to control a region through use of culture. When cultures meet, they (in effect) have sex. Sometimes it’s mutual enjoyment, and something more than the “parents” can emerge. Sometimes it’s rape, with stunted, bastard, useless offspring. America has gotten rich by allowing cultures more freedom than they’ve enjoyed anywhere else, and letting the resulting trade and technology free reign.
This age of openness is over. The US gained investment funds from around the world when they were the tax haven. Open markets made US businesses that wanted to survive the most efficient in the world. This is the US that weathered the stock market crash during Coolidge’s presidency and enjoyed the roaring twenties (after the government stayed out of things and let the market fix itself). This golden age came to an end with Hoover and the interventions after the stock market crash during his presidency. The more controls the government put in place, the worse the depression became. The US that resulted would have been unimaginable or a cause for war to the citizens of a century before. Now that lawyers are in control, risk (and its resultant rewards or punishments) are not tolerated nearly as much as they had been. There is still more capacity for personal growth and advancement in the US society than in pretty much any other society on earth. And the cultures are still breeding merrily away, ensuring a steady supply of new ideas (and the physical products that they can produce) that still leads the world.
That, OK, is a brief summary of why the US grew rich and powerful.
Ok >
“…there is 1.2 billion muslim live in all world if you think can luck your door to all muslim and segrage yourself and luck your doo again show you are not have smart mind”
But you think you want to lock out America from Muslim country. Funny you want America to go away but you say we are forced to live with you here? F*ck off, the west will fully understand Islam over time and those that live and fight for Islam in the west will pay a very big price.
Corruption in the West? Muslim countries exist on nothing but corruption, from the little thief in the streets to local businesses, the police, and their leadership at the top.
All Muslim people live from birth to death in lies and corruption, and have done so long before the west ever found them and fed them with our economies and technology. If the west disappears the Muslim nations go back to the deserts with their tents and camels.
rick mcginnis said: “It’s not that we’ve built more transit, but that we’ve stubbornly kept with the wrong one, and if you lived here you’d know that, and now that high-rise development is about to gift us with some truly Manhattanesque population densities, it’s going to get worse.”
Rick, IMHO, and I’m not a city planner for sure, it isn’t the number of people who -live- in the city center that make it crap. Its the number who come in for the day and leave again. New York City has an -extensive- train network, huge subway, huge highways, tunnels, ferries, two airports and a freakin’ helicopter port.
Its insanity. There so many people you can’t move, and everybody is in Terminator mode. Everybody hates everybody. People drive like Ben Hur. Horrible place.
Toronto, because they’ve managed to completely bollix the mass movement of people, is not yet the hellish nightmare that NYC has been since the 1970’s. They’re trying hard, but due to basic incompetence of the NDPee-heads they’ve managed to avoid the efficiency that destroyed NYC.
Dumb can be good!
Would that Toronto be also known as Hogtown?
So, who beat Toronto-the-Good? Pyongyang and Tehran?
Detroit and Mogadishu rolled up a respectable 4th and 5th place.
What I’ve noticed is that the bigger cities get, the worse they become. On place I would never live is Toronto. It’s just too damn big. Vancouver was a great place to be 32 years ago when I first moved there. Then it was discovered and seemingly half the population of China moved there and it’s now a shithole. Calgary was great in 1987 when I lived there for a few years as one could actually drive places; something impossible to do in Vancouver. The last time I drove in Calgary I was very pissed off at myself for forgetting to pack some Ativan as the traffic seemed to be as bad as in Vancouver.
At least in the interior of BC I’ve got room and the traffic hasn’t become too horrendous yet. By the time it does, I’ll move out into the country. For me livable means being able to get where I want easily, not having to deal with crowds of people and having good internet access. What’s the point of having theoretical access to local stores when it takes a day to make a trip to and from the store? Right now courier services are providing me with the same shopping online with far fewer hassles. In theory, it’s nice to be able to see good bands in a large city, but in practice I’ve missed out on getting tickets for every show that I tried to take in when living in Vancouver. Vancouver nightclubs won’t check your knife when you come in and demand identification. Where I live now, my favorite hangout for live music has bouncers that I’ve gotten to know and their metal detection seems to be set at a level that only a desert eagle mass would set off.
I now view large cities as flyover country where one might happen to stop briefly to change planes. Fortunately for me, a substantial majority of the population seems to have the need to live in very close proximity to each other. They’re welcome to their lifestyle.
That list looks more like the list of cities I never need visit again.
What leftist tripe…
I walked down Younge Street a couple of years ago and all I could smell was piss. Toronto needs a good power-wash.
The quickest way to get ahead of London and New York is to not go in the same direction they are.
No offence but is one of the criteria which city has the most Muslim immigrant infidel haters?
>No offence but is one of the criteria which city has the most Muslim immigrant infidel haters?
That, plus the pride parade must boosted them way up there. If the G20 riots had happened there last year, they’d be #1.
These rankings are obviously based on criteria thought up by an idiot. I’ve lived in Toronto and near enough to New York to know that both places are impossible to get around in and populated by stressed-out liberals living paycheck to paycheck. I see no reason to doubt that London and Paris are the same.
More and better transit just make the middle of a city more and more impossible to get around in, and New York City is the cast-in-stone embodiment of that. If they had stopped building transit in 1950 the place might not have become the clapped-out butthole that it is now.
The only thing keeping Toronto from going the same way is the lack of trains, the QEW and the 401. You can’t get enough day-trippers in and out to utterly ruin the place just yet, and the ‘burbs are pretty well full.
Toronto. Old Indian word for ‘where men squat’.
This is perhaps the most idiotic “story’ that the Wall Street Journal has ever published. I’ve lived in Toronto for 4.5 years, and may God help me; and I lived in one of the banlieues of Paris for 4 years. Toronto is the antichamber of Hell; Paris, if you can avoid the Muslims (usually easy) is more like an introduction to Heaven.
i know that Torontonians have been trying for many years to pass themselves off as dwellers in a great city, but it always miscarries. How much did they pay for this latest?
The heart of the Canadian comedy is that Toronto claims to be the intellectual and cultural centre of Canada; the essence of the Canadian tragedy is that it might be true.
The traffic in Toronto is unreal. Your GPS says 20 minutes to destination, and on a very good day, you’ll be there in 40.
When I lived there, I had a place within walking distance of work.
Phantom wrote:
“More and better transit just make the middle of a city more and more impossible to get around in, and New York City is the cast-in-stone embodiment of that. If they had stopped building transit in 1950 the place might not have become the clapped-out butthole that it is now.”
You know, I have little time for my hometown’s insecure bleatings, but I have to say that I’ve read that sentence several times over, and it still doesn’t make any sense. Toronto’s downtown is covered in pre-1950 transit technology (streetcars) and anyone here will tell you that City Hall’s stubborn fetishization of this out of date technology is one of the reasons why the city’s downtown is a tangled mess. If we’d bothered building a downtown subway it might have been better, but we simply roughed in a station or two and forgot all about it. The LACK of any modern transit is one of the things that makes this ridiculous assessment of Toronto as “#3 in the WOOOORLD!” patently ridiculous.
Vancouver is a WORLD CLASS CITY.
I read a massive banner on the Orpheum a long time ago that told me so.
These surveys are really silly. I mean does anyone actually read these pieces below the headline.
What The Phantom says.
My youngest daughter lives in NYC. When I visit, in the first 2 days I’m thinking, “man, the energy, I gotta move here”. On the 3rd it’s “get me out of his mad hellhole … NOW.” Never fails.
Said daughter once told me that New Yorkers consider everyone who doesn’t live in NYC as “camping out”. That’s Delisle or Vancouver.
Phantom wrote:
“More and better transit just make the middle of a city more and more impossible to get around in, and New York City is the cast-in-stone embodiment of that. If they had stopped building transit in 1950 the place might not have become the clapped-out butthole that it is now.”
Look, I have little patience for my hometown’s insecure bleatings about its “world class” status, but I’ve read this sentence over several times now and it still doesn’t make any sense.
Toronto’s downtown is a mostly impassable traffic mess precisely because City Hall has perversely committed itself to a pre-1950 transit technology (streetcars) instead of building the modern downtown relief subway line it’s needed for decades, and which the powers-that-be have finally agreed is a necessity. It’s not that we’ve built more transit, but that we’ve stubbornly kept with the wrong one, and if you lived here you’d know that, and now that high-rise development is about to gift us with some truly Manhattanesque population densities, it’s going to get worse.
Which is why this ridiculous “We’re number THREEEEEE!” evaluation is so farcical, as the cities on either side of us have superior transit infrastructure, which they’ve committed to updating for the last 60 years. Look, Toronto sucks for a lot of reasons, but please try to get the reasons right!
(Ooops, sorry for the double post. Browser issues.)
Which leftist group? Did this drug induced hallucination grow out of? Every Marxist perversion must be included. Its certainly not economic.
Calgary is a terrible place to live so don’t come here. For myself, I’ll stay put and take one for the team.
Better anyone thinking of moving go to Toronto or Vancouver.
Oh, and the skiing, hiking, climbing, kayaking, golf and theatre in this area is terrible. And never mind the beef in the restaurants; its reputation is all BS. Do yourselves a favor and stay away.
I have to agree with DrD, Calgary sucks so do yourselves a favour and don’t move here, move to Toronto or Vancouver or, if you have to come to Alberta, Edmonton.
DrD @ 5:56 PM – You forgot how bad the music scene is.
Calgary was fun. Was there in ’96 and remember going to the Hard Rock Cafe, shortly after it opened. I remember it had a guitar in the roof, or something. That was fun.
I’ve heard since that it was shut down because it was too ‘wild’. I can imagine that. That giant guitar was kind of crazy.
Then we got on the wrong C-Train, which deposited us on the wrong side of McMahon stadium. That was fun, too.
Finally, after a few days, we got back in the car and continued west. That was the MOST fun…
ok >
“yes we know history how american get super rich”
Yea, it’s called working hard, inventing things and then selling them to people who want them.
Instead now we import the Third World by the millions and are losing our own standards and services to becoming losers like the third world.
Islamic countries have offered the world nothing but problems and poverty. The west has given Islamic nations everything they enjoy by way of modernization and economic wealth for whatever it is today.
You say America needs to get out of Islamic countries and I agree 100%. In return Islamic people need to get out of America and the west, we don’t need you.
What is this Toronto you speak of?
The history of the world is the history of evolving cultures, trade, and technology. Those who will not trade or learn can only hope to control a region through use of culture. When cultures meet, they (in effect) have sex. Sometimes it’s mutual enjoyment, and something more than the “parents” can emerge. Sometimes it’s rape, with stunted, bastard, useless offspring. America has gotten rich by allowing cultures more freedom than they’ve enjoyed anywhere else, and letting the resulting trade and technology free reign.
This age of openness is over. The US gained investment funds from around the world when they were the tax haven. Open markets made US businesses that wanted to survive the most efficient in the world. This is the US that weathered the stock market crash during Coolidge’s presidency and enjoyed the roaring twenties (after the government stayed out of things and let the market fix itself). This golden age came to an end with Hoover and the interventions after the stock market crash during his presidency. The more controls the government put in place, the worse the depression became. The US that resulted would have been unimaginable or a cause for war to the citizens of a century before. Now that lawyers are in control, risk (and its resultant rewards or punishments) are not tolerated nearly as much as they had been. There is still more capacity for personal growth and advancement in the US society than in pretty much any other society on earth. And the cultures are still breeding merrily away, ensuring a steady supply of new ideas (and the physical products that they can produce) that still leads the world.
That, OK, is a brief summary of why the US grew rich and powerful.
Ok >
“…there is 1.2 billion muslim live in all world if you think can luck your door to all muslim and segrage yourself and luck your doo again show you are not have smart mind”
But you think you want to lock out America from Muslim country. Funny you want America to go away but you say we are forced to live with you here? F*ck off, the west will fully understand Islam over time and those that live and fight for Islam in the west will pay a very big price.
Corruption in the West? Muslim countries exist on nothing but corruption, from the little thief in the streets to local businesses, the police, and their leadership at the top.
All Muslim people live from birth to death in lies and corruption, and have done so long before the west ever found them and fed them with our economies and technology. If the west disappears the Muslim nations go back to the deserts with their tents and camels.
rick mcginnis said: “It’s not that we’ve built more transit, but that we’ve stubbornly kept with the wrong one, and if you lived here you’d know that, and now that high-rise development is about to gift us with some truly Manhattanesque population densities, it’s going to get worse.”
Rick, IMHO, and I’m not a city planner for sure, it isn’t the number of people who -live- in the city center that make it crap. Its the number who come in for the day and leave again. New York City has an -extensive- train network, huge subway, huge highways, tunnels, ferries, two airports and a freakin’ helicopter port.
Its insanity. There so many people you can’t move, and everybody is in Terminator mode. Everybody hates everybody. People drive like Ben Hur. Horrible place.
Toronto, because they’ve managed to completely bollix the mass movement of people, is not yet the hellish nightmare that NYC has been since the 1970’s. They’re trying hard, but due to basic incompetence of the NDPee-heads they’ve managed to avoid the efficiency that destroyed NYC.
Dumb can be good!
Would that Toronto be also known as Hogtown?
So, who beat Toronto-the-Good? Pyongyang and Tehran?
Detroit and Mogadishu rolled up a respectable 4th and 5th place.
What I’ve noticed is that the bigger cities get, the worse they become. On place I would never live is Toronto. It’s just too damn big. Vancouver was a great place to be 32 years ago when I first moved there. Then it was discovered and seemingly half the population of China moved there and it’s now a shithole. Calgary was great in 1987 when I lived there for a few years as one could actually drive places; something impossible to do in Vancouver. The last time I drove in Calgary I was very pissed off at myself for forgetting to pack some Ativan as the traffic seemed to be as bad as in Vancouver.
At least in the interior of BC I’ve got room and the traffic hasn’t become too horrendous yet. By the time it does, I’ll move out into the country. For me livable means being able to get where I want easily, not having to deal with crowds of people and having good internet access. What’s the point of having theoretical access to local stores when it takes a day to make a trip to and from the store? Right now courier services are providing me with the same shopping online with far fewer hassles. In theory, it’s nice to be able to see good bands in a large city, but in practice I’ve missed out on getting tickets for every show that I tried to take in when living in Vancouver. Vancouver nightclubs won’t check your knife when you come in and demand identification. Where I live now, my favorite hangout for live music has bouncers that I’ve gotten to know and their metal detection seems to be set at a level that only a desert eagle mass would set off.
I now view large cities as flyover country where one might happen to stop briefly to change planes. Fortunately for me, a substantial majority of the population seems to have the need to live in very close proximity to each other. They’re welcome to their lifestyle.
That list looks more like the list of cities I never need visit again.
What leftist tripe…
I walked down Younge Street a couple of years ago and all I could smell was piss. Toronto needs a good power-wash.
On the other hand:
“Worst traffic list puts Vancouver, Montreal before Toronto
Los Angeles leads TomTom Congestion Index”
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2012/10/12/canadian-traffic-survey.html
Mark
Ottawa