[Conference-attendees] A reminder about travel plans

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Thu, Jun 08, 2006 at 01:20:24PM -0400, Jon Erdman wrote:
> 
> Just chiming in that in my experience the public transpo in TO is night
> and day from that in the US. The upshot being that you could probably
> take the "Go train" or a bus from Pearson to get downtown without much
> difficulty, provided you left yourself some wiggle room time wise.

While mass transit in Toronto is indeed very good, I should warn you
that the transit from the airport is a bit of a pill.  Here are the
details, though.  If you're a public transport geek (yes, I'm afraid
I am a bit of one), then this might interest you.  But if you've just
had a long flight, your better bet is probably a taxi or the private
shuttle bus (the latter is relatively cheap, and drops you about a
block and a half from Ryerson -- details on the conference web site).

By the way, if you're going to be hanging around Toronto for some
vacation time as well, one thing you might want to check into are
either the TTC day passes or the transferrable weekly TTC pass. 
These are unlimited-travel passes, so if you're making a lot of stops
and want to take the TTC to several places, they can be worth it. 
Details on this are available through the TTC's web site (which is
incredibly ugly, and apparently laid out in much the way Jackson
Pollock painted, but has a fair amount of information beyond the
front page): http://www.ttc.ca. 

One way from the airport is to use the regional commuter service,
which is called the GO system.  A GO bus runs fairly regularly from
Pearson to York Mills station.  York Mills is an interchange to the
subway, but the two systems are not integrated, so you'll have to pay
the GO fare and the TTC fare.  (By the way, York Mills is also where
the Afilias offices are located.)  Once you get into the subway, you
take it south to Dundas station.  When you get out, you can either
walk over to the ICC or take a streetcar one block (if you want to
take the streetcar, make sure you get a transfer in York Mills
station.  You can't transfer to surface routes using a transfer
issued at the station where the surface route intersects with the
subway.  Rules, rules).  I'd just walk -- it's very close.

The other way from the airport is to take the TTC all the way.  The
TTC runs a bus route from the airport to the end of the
Bloor-Danforth subway line.  Then, you get into the Bloor-Danforth
subway.  You take that over to Yonge station on the Bloor line (which
is, you'll be unsurprised to know, Bloor station on the Yonge line),
and transfer to the southbound Yonge train.  Take that to Dundas
station.  The rest of the trip is just like above.  This trip will
take you a long time, note: the airport is not convenient to downtown
at all.  There are plans afoot to fix this with a direct rail line to
the airport, but they haven't built it yet.  Every time they start,
another chain reaction of administratium[1] happens, and no trains move.

There's information about this on the conference site, too.  If there
are other details people want to see there, or if any of it is
confusing, please let me know so I can fix it.

A

[1]http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/administ.htm

-- 
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs at crankycanuck.ca
It is above all style through which power defers to reason.
		--J. Robert Oppenheimer