Next time you’re in Stockholm, be sure to venture down into the subway system. They’ve got some stations that are seemingly the antithesis of most subway stations. Typically you’d expect the kind of architecture which tries it’s best to create a normative building interior experience deep below grade level. Typically you’d be right. In Stockholm, however, you’d be quite wrong. For some of the stations here they had to carve the interiors out of solid rock and decided not to mask or over-detail the resulting surfaces, letting the inherent cave-like atmosphere remain.

Today the Toronto Transit Commission drops the hammer with its new fare hike but there is a growing group of businesses who don’t want that to discourage you from opting for public transit. They are going to treat your Metropass as a discount card and give you lucky people some added benefits for your public transit ways. Isn’t that nice of them? The only down side is that it is such a shame when public initiatives do a better job of encouraging public transit than municipal ploys. We just hope that the TTC lawyers don’t get the taste for vengeance again and seek to destroy this program.

Howard Moscoe (Chair of the Toronto Transit Comission) is proposing that condominium developers in Toronto provide free transit passes to residents of condos erected near subway lines in order to both generate revenue, and encourage use of public transit. The move would also see a rate hike for those buying on-the-spot passes. While this seems like an interesting proposal it is wrought with potential potholes. If it can be refined and developed in earnest then we might see it fulfill some potential. Could this be the first step towards free public transit for all; paid for as a common good of the state?This could also further consolidate interests of public transit with those of urban development. This motion was approved yesterday by the TTC in order for them and the Toronto planning department to study it in detail.

The Toronto Community Foundation has unveiled their plans for the new subway revitalization scheme by Diamond & Schmitt architecture who we had always assumed would propose something more … ‘tasteful’. That’s what you get when you get involved in that kind of shallow cash-grab paint job seduction scheme though.

If you have an underground railway (not the slave-liberation kind necessarily) and want to map it out with class there are a few precidents you ought to be aware of. There are also several people who might be able to help you out as the underground railroad cartography community is not as big as one might initially imagine. Fortunately for you, Peter B. Lloyd has made some relevant information available to you.