Street hockey could soon be legal (if your neighbours are cool with it)

Toronto may soon allow street hockey in some areas, as long as residents have the stamina for what sounds like a painstaking bureaucratic process. Last May, Josh Matlow and Mary-Margaret McMahon proposed that the city create a procedure to exempt some residential streets from the bylaw (since the games are happening anyway); after mulling it for a year, city staff will present their ideas to the public works committee next month. If the staff proposal is adopted, residents hoping to lift the ban on their street would need formal support of 80 per cent of the neighbouring households, and the street would have to have a speed limit of 40km/h or less and fewer than 1,000 vehicles passing by a day, plus each gap between vehicles would have to average a minute or more and the sightlines would have to allow oncoming vehicles to stop in time (whew!). Seeing as the current ban isn’t regularly enforced, it sounds like it might be easier to just keep the bylaw in the books and let residents flout it at will. [Toronto Star]