As part of our ongoing coverage of the TTC, we'd like to call your attention to a really interesting video, produced for the 2007 APTA Rail Rodeo Conference (Yeehaw!) held in Toronto in June, 2007. The video has been posted to the TTC's site in Windows Media and Real Media formats, despite the image promoting it being a screenshot of QuickTime Player, so make sure to bust out your legacy viewing app of choice before hitting the page. We'd post it to YouTube (hint hint), but it says right on there that the video is:

Not to be copied, reproduced or broadcast without the express written permission of the Toronto Transit Commission - Copyright 2007.

So, we'll leave it as an exercise to someone else who feels like tangling with the TTC's legal team. In the meantime, watch for the amazing old footage of the streetcars, the cool rebuild of a streetcar's drive system, concept footage of the new Light Rail and Subway cars coming in the next ten - fifteen years, and talk of the new transponder system currently being installed which allows for the nifty automated station announcements and (ominously?) for the possibility of automated train control. Is it just us or does the TTC's new command centre remind you of 1983's War Games (that was twenty four years ago?!)? And also, where are all the women in this futuristic nerve centre?

It's great to see material like this which goes deeper than a simple puff piece to really give a sense of the complexity involved in running North America's third largest transit system (following New York City and Mexico City). Suddenly makes it seem entirely reasonable that they have trouble paying for it when you realize that it's not just about having buses and subways run but about all of the infrastructure that goes into running them.