How good is Toronto in comparision with top american cities ?

I am planning to immigrate to Canada and live in Toronto. I have heard Toronto is not that exciting place to live and work in comparision to top american cities like NY, chicago or SF. Just wanted to get your opinion.

Where are you from? If you are from a big city and don't know any different, I would say Montreal is one of the most dynamic cities in Canada. But then, I am from there and would never live in a city again if my life depended on it. I left Montreal 40 years ago to live in the forest. Once you know what that is like you would never go back either - dirty, stinky, crowded, polluted, noisy, stressful, expensive.... but, for reasons beyond my comprehension, most people like them or don't know any better. Oh well, no accounting for taste, eh!

Toronto may not be as exciting or as dynamic as San Francisco or New York, but it is one of the best big cities to live in North America. Compared to New York or San Francisco, crime rate is low, murder rate is a fraction of what you will find in any big American city.

A few miles north of Toronto and you are in the wild country, Algonquin Provincial Park is but two hours away. While it may be backwoods compared to New York, it has all kind of cultural and entertainment activities you will find in New York (opera, ballet etc.) if perhaps on a smaller scale.

I don’t live in Toronto, and it is not my first choice to live. But if you want to live in a big city, you can’t do much better than Toronto.

Why would you want to live in a big city? In my opinion Nakusp or Cherryville would be better choices...............................although job opportunities may not be quite as good.

Just came back from a week's vacation there and I actually liked it.... a bit confusing to get around at times, but the public transit system is pretty solid. Buses, trams and subways.... and usually they all run very frequently in that usually as soon as you make it to the stop, a bus, tram or subway is arriving within a couple of minutes.

There is certainly a lot to do and see in Toronto and surrounding area, lots of diversity in regards to culture, shops, places to go etc.

Growing up I never cared much for Toronto, and the second time I visited Toronto (The first time I was old enough to remember anything) I didn't enjoy myself, but that's mainly because I wasn't there to relax, but drove from Nova Scotia to pick up my brother and drive him back.... so there wasn't much sight seeing and my energy/patience levels were zero after driving 22 or so hours there.

But this time around I had more time to see the city and if I wasn't moving elsewhere soon, I could see myself living there..... although perhaps not right down town or anything.... probably I'd check out the North York area to live since that's where we stayed.

Toronto?

You could do worse and I think things improved since 1997 (the last time I was there)

That's a first lol. Can't say I recall anyone naming North York as their preferred Toronto destination.

There is nothing wrong with North York, I have lived there for five months (I was doing a course in Computer Programming and System Analysis). It is a pleasant enough area.

I never said their necessarily anything wrong with it, it's not most peoples first destination when they come to Toronto though.

Waaaa?

Transit is top notch?

You haven't been around much have you?

Public transit in Toronto and for that matter Canada is pure crud when compared to other systems around the world.

Toronto is a city with no soul and devoid of originality.

That may be your opinion, but that is not the general opinion. Toronto and Montreal compare very favorably indeed with other big cities in the world by any survey you care to look at.

I've never been to Toronto but from what I've heard about it I have no plans to go there anytime soon. Montreal at least has a little character (if you can survive crossing the street. )

OP reads something like tr*ll-who thinks about the city before the country anyway?

It's not the general opinion?

I assume you have proof.

Montreal has a soul so of course it is comparable with other great cities.

I live 25 minutes from Toronto and I go to Montreal way more often....so much so I bought a condo there years ago with some friends.

And this from someone who lives in the armpit of southern Ontario??? LOL

I've been around enough, and compared to the Halifax Transit System.... it's a hell of a lot better.

All that's here are buses and a ferry that travels from Dartmouth to Halifax and back. You can't get everywhere in the HRM on the Transit system, certain buses only run for so long each day and then stop, while other buses only run on weekdays, thus you're stuck getting one transfer after the other and sometimes tripling the time it takes you to get to where you're going..... and with the exception of maybe one or two bus routes, you're lucky if a bus comes every half hour during rush hours, where the average bus route any other time is once every hour.

My wife and I took the TTC most of the time we were up there, and to be honest, yes, their transit system is a hell of a lot better and I personally can't think of anything I could complain about.... perhaps some of the seats could have been softer, but that's nit picking.

Well I personally don't care about other transit systems in the world. I am giving my personal experience on what I know, rather then parroting reports and studies given by someone else whom I can not confirm their information is true.

Typical stereo-typical-troll response.... the same kind of crap I hear about the Maritimes being welfare provinces, the Prairies being flat, boring and full of cowboys, Montreal full of snotty language police who'll beat you with clubs if you spit on their shiny sidewalks, shall I continue?

Point being: Generalized Stereo-Types tell a person nothing expect about the person giving the stereo-type.

I take Toronto Transit everyday and it's pretty damn reliable, I take the Yonge Subway from Dundas to York Mills and except for people jumping in front of trains, it's good.

Where people may have a problem with Toronto transit is when they are trying to get to far reaches of the city where the subway doesn't run to or there isn't streetcar routes.

Now, Avro. Care to chime in on how great the public transit system is in Durham Region? It's crap, you are more or less forced to own a car so you can get stuck on the 401 and DVP every day.

Toronto is not my preference as far as cities go. Too much traffic, too much smog. On a clear day you can see Lake Ontario.

I wouldn't live in Toronto any day. I'd rather live in Vancouver! Ocean beaches, mountains, that's a city!

Toronto is just monotone.

As I said before, look at almost any survey of big cities and Toronto (and Montreal) does very well indeed. Here is a typical survey:

City Mayors: Best cities in the world (Mercer)

This survey put Toronto no. 15 in the world in 2009, no. 16 in 2010 (out of a total of 221 big cities). Montreal ranks no, 22, still a respectable showing. Vancouver and Ottawa beat them both though.

Canadian cities do very well indeed when compared with the big cities in the world.

I'm not talking about studies, I have been fortuanate enough to travel to many places and I can assure your our transit system sucks donkey balls.

The GO train or Slow train! Are you fricking kidding me? What an embarressment.

Nope, I just don't think it's very nice, nothing to do with being a troll.

No, it tells you I've been to better cities.

It's like when lefties who go to Cuba and tout that the people there are very poor but happy. They are happy because they have never been anywhere else to know the difference.

Vancouver is very nice, Victoria even better.

I think if you look back you'll see I said transit in Canada is crud....guess where durham is?

I also have a residence in South River on Eagle Lake and own a condo in Montreal with a few other chaps.

Oshawa is where I work and my kids go to school.....and the south end is the armpit of Ontario....can't argue with that.

Toronto can be compared to downtown Budapest at midnight when comparing it to New York, San Francisco, Chicago or even Miami for that matter. Nothing beats those cities for pure entertainment.

Quote: Originally Posted by SirJosephPorter

Toronto may not be as exciting or as dynamic as San Francisco or New York, but it is one of the best big cities to live in North America. Compared to New York or San Francisco, crime rate is low, murder rate is a fraction of what you will find in any big American city.

One cannot live in fear of what might happen, life is short enough as it is.

New York is great....try London, São Paulo or Paris.

Good times.

The main attraction is the social environment: more access to many different people.

Personally I'd say that I can make more contacts in a big city and that allows me to do more...but when it comes right down to it, it's the wide variety of women I have access to. I have to say that I can dispense with everything else but if it weren't for women, I'd be in the bush...oops, well you know what I mean.

Having spent a lot of time in TO I can tell you that the general public (who don't live by their cars) usually find the transit system wanting and having seen transit systems in Europe, the TTC is really low on the scale of efficiency and quality of service. I've had people from New York (not exactly stellar in the public transit department) say that they couldn't believe how bad Toronto's transit system was.

To give you an example: I was in Barcelona recently and saw subways that seemed to have a station absolutely everywhere you could want to go--like tentacles spreading all over the city and even connecting to surrounding municipalities--arriving on-the-dot even at rush hour, all-new comfortable buses with their own divided lanes, easily-acquirable scan-based passes of all variations (no ID-based "metropasses" or "tokens"), sidewalk-level streetcars move smooth as silk and have their own Wi-Fi that make the ones in TO look like they should be in a museum...and all this for half the price the TTC charges on a city transit budget proportionally smaller than TO's (no thanks to their federal government) and still digging new subway tunnels in terrain where you bump into rock every few meters and a country has mild environmental issues allowing for all-surface routes without a problem (unlike TO). In Toronto...yes, stuff runs on time (sorta) and the few subway tunnels they have are falling apart because they weren't built to last when they were built half a century ago, like much of that city's infrastructure. (And it's hardly the best in Canada either, so let's not go saying Canadians don't know how to build a good mass-transit system.)

Not having a car in Barcelona...hell you don't need it--the transit system is a pleasure. In Toronto not having a car will limit where you can go within a reasonable amount of time...almost as much as will the city's idiotic traffic system (you'd swear they were trying to make you waste gas), should you be so bold as to drive with people famous for being among the worse drivers in the world. (I should add that even during rush-hour I could get through Barcelona--an massive old European city with high population density famous for its traffic jams back in the Franco days--in the time it takes me to get a few blocks in downtown TO rush-hour). That's putting aside the risk of you and your car disappearing into one of Toronto's many pot-holes, or practising your stunt car skills losing contact with the ground as you bounce along the patchwork of speed-bump-like road "repairs" for everything except the bloody pot-holes.

And cycling...in Barcelona the goddamn bikes have their own physically-divided (i.e. separate) lanes (like the buses do!)--it's like having your own little street to pedal away on, not to mention that some streets are blocked off to car traffic. In Toronto cycling along those painted "paths" between the parked cars and the traffic is to risk life and limb. And a street closed to cars? Oh no, that would be sacrilege against the car gods (oh right, it's Toronto...I mean giant SUV and XL-size pickup gods...well I guess the bad roads are a bit like going off-road). And again, hardly a Canadian leader in this department when you compare to a city like Montreal.

I have lived in Toronto and the choice to do so had nothing to do with how much better it was than other cities. What has given Toronto some charm is the population, some nice homely/bohemian corners of it (that are increasingly rare) and certain parkland. Other than that you have the financial district which has a NY-like feel to it (if you're imaginative), some cultural centres such as some top museums/art galleries and some pleasant-looking neighbourhoods. Most of the businesses that gave the place character are going out of business because they lack the clientele they once had and the high taxes make them unviable--the social environment is becoming increasingly yuppified/vulgarized and there's a far less sense of community.

There's little more really (just urban sprawl); you get a job/start a business, make money (if you can) and try and focus on being mediocre, much like you would in the rest of Canada. Lots of competition from hordes of young "professionals" with plenty of talent for losing money and no time to waste on anything that matters. The political climate is temperate at best so don't plan on a future as a "radical."

Compared to the European and Asian metropolises, Toronto is a glob of paint on some canvas compared to a DaVinci. But no need to go so far; Montreal and Vancouver make Toronto look like a highrise shantytown.

Granted, there's enough of the original population left and immigrants who aren't money-obsessed to make it a little more easy-going than Montrealers and less...uh...colourful than residents of Vancouver.

As for US cities, well, they have the problem that they're in the US and you have to deal with their immigration system, which is no fun. But aside from that, the US is generally a 'bigger' country in the social/political sense--more going on there so unless you're just coming to North America to work, you may find more fulfilment in those cities. That said, yanks are nuts.

Toronto is the one of 5 most popular places in North America Toronto. This is heart at the greater Toronto area.
Thanks
barton


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Last edited by Ron in Regina; Jun 25th, 2010 at 11:52 PM..Reason: SPAM Removed.