In a flight of fancy which even the most ardent conservatives on this blog have never attempted, Lawrence Solomon wrote in yesterday’s National Post about the creation of suburbia. It’s all the fault of megaprojects by governments to build transit to the hinterlands. Really!
He starts off with the Statscan report that more trips are taken by car today than in years gone by, moves on to the BC $14-billion announcement for transit expansion and finally turns his sights on MoveOntario’s $17.5-billion. All of this encourages sprawl according to Solomon.
In Toronto, it’s all the TTC’s fault:
Before the province of Ontario directed the Toronto Transit Commission to service Toronto’s outer suburbs in the early 1950s, the suburbs were largely rural and undeveloped, with densities so uniformly low that they could support but a handful of public transit lines. Only after the province stepped in by creating Metropolitan Toronto as a vehicle for massive infrastructure spending in the suburbs did sprawl on a grand scale unfold. Within a decade, the TTC’s route mileage increased by 75%, almost all of it to accommodate the suburbs and almost all of it uneconomic. In the process, the TTC — until the advent of Metropolitan government a self-sufficient enterprise that helped make Toronto one of the continent’s most compact cities — became a burden for city taxpayers and an arch agent of sprawl.
This convenient rewriting of history ignores the fact that we didn’t even have a subway on Bloor Street until 1966, and then only from Keele to Woodbine. Suburban bus expansion got underway seriously after the subway was extended into Etobicoke, Scarborough and later North York. The real financial crunch for the TTC came in 1972 with the elimination of the zone fares at the insistence of suburbanites whose tax dollars were helping to pay for the TTC. By then, suburban sprawl was well-entrenched.
Solomon’s feet completely leave the ground with this gem:
… when politicians first started promoting a Greater Toronto, they recognized that the city’s transit systems, then privately owned, were a great deterrent to the desire for the rapid outward expansion of the city that was then in vogue. Privately owned public transit companies were interested in providing service to paying customers, not in developing routes that met the development dreams of local politicians.
… Only after the government did, indeed, seize the private transit companies could dreams of a Greater Toronto be realized. With profits from transit diverted from private shareholders to a public purpose — uneconomic routes servicing low-density areas — sprawl made its debut in Toronto.
In case anyone hasn’t noticed, the TTC has in been in public hands since 1921, and it was created because the predecessor Toronto Railway Company refused to extend service in such unprofitable, low-density suburbs as North Toronto, the Danforth, Bloor West Village and St. Clair Avenue West. Moreover, the city system was falling apart thanks to years of disinvestment, a classic problem with a private sector more bent on maximizing profits than on providing service.
With the creation of Metro Toronto in 1954, the TTC took over the small private bus companies serving the old suburbs, but major service improvements would not come until the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those companies couldn’t possibly have funded the scale of suburban service expansion we have seen, and even the TTC did a less-than-stellar job. “Leading development with transit” was a phrase heard only in planning seminars, not at Council tables, as the suburbs grew.
The solution to everything would, of course, be an expressway network, not a transit system, and that juggernaut wasn’t stopped until nearly two decades after Metro came into being.
I have no problems debating the merits and faults of public sector investment in transit expansion, but the idea that somehow we wouldn’t have had suburbs sprawling beyond Barrie, Oshawa, Guelph and Burlington without transit is utter nonsense. Sprawl was built by and for the car, and transit has little chance of ever catching up.
Steve Munro 
That is some pretty shoddy journalism. Bordering on revisionism, it sounds almost like a conservative transit planner’s version of Intelligent Design.
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Clearly this article’s main premise is nonsense. In all of these cases, urban sprawl preceded transit development. Transit development came after the original development in order to catch up with the urban sprawl. The urban sprawl was the result of car-mania and misguided public policy which gave it (and continues to give it) the green light. Most suburbanites do not take transit.
However, this article does point out the huge inequality between our funding of transit in suburbs, and the funding of transit downtown. Transit service in the suburbs has grown enormously – since the 1960s, we have built the north Yonge and Spadina subway extensions, and the Scarborough RT; the TTC and suburban transit systems have massively increased the number of bus routes; and created GO Transit.
In contrast, transit service downtown, excluding GO (which serves the suburbs, not downtown residents), has had almost NO investment since the opening of the Bloor-Danforth subway was built. Since 1966, there has been NO investment in downtown transit except for the Spadina and Harbourfront cars. Service, in fact has DECLINED despite significant growth in the core. Many streetcar lines were abandoned; except for Yonge and Bloor, all of those have been replaced either by less frequent bus service (e.g. Bay) or the bus service which replaced the streetcar has been killed entirely (e.g. Church). Those streetcar lines which survived now have much less service than they did in 1966.
Transit in the suburbs did not cause urban sprawl – incompetent urban planners did. However, the LACK of transit investment downtown since 1966 might well be a cause of sprawl. Let’s spend some money investing in transit downtown and help reverse this trend.
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While the conclusions drawn by the article are wrong and the premise rather faulty, it does accidentally trip over a few useful points.
I have no time for any report which dismisses or diminishes the substantial and indeed overwhelming role played by the automobile/expressway phenomena in creating and facilitating urban sprawl. However, I must admit that I sometimes feel bad twinges about GO service to Barrie and other like places more than 70km from downtown Toronto and clearly intended for commuters.
I do wonder, periodically about the logic of spending great sums of money to faciliate commuting over great distances. There is no magic number, we all understand that people will not all live within walking distance of their workplace. But while commuting 10km makes reasonable sense, even in a sprawl-free world; and 20km may be justifiable in the one we live with; I do wonder whether its not time to tell people that are living more than an hour’s drive (in ideal conditions) from their place of work that their behavior is just absurd.
Should we as a society subsidize that behavior? I do realized we’ve subsidized it with expressway building. That wasn’t the right idea either.
Should we compound the error? Or should we just tell people if you live more than 50km from downtown your expressway will never be widened again, and no trains (daily-rush hour) for you! Move to where you work already! Or at least within 50km!
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In the 1950’s, streetcars were considered obsolete and buses the way to go. The bus was promoted as the modern way for transit. Unfortunately, the bus instead led to the decline in transit all across North America.
Here in Toronto, the new suburban developments only acquired bus service. The Bathurst streetcar went no further north than St. Clair. Why don’t they replace the Bathurst bus with streetcars? Because the bus was modern and the streetcar was old.
The old city of Toronto border was the great wall the streetcar could not cross. Even today, that old border exists: Junction 40 bus goes no further west than the Runnymede loop (old Toronto border). Carlton 506 goes no further east than Main. Why not to Victoria Park? Queen 501 goes no further east than Neville Park (old Toronto border).
Today, cities in the U.S. are re-introducing streetcars and LRT. And they are finding out that they are underestimating the ridership with the introduction of the LRT. And overestimating the ridership with the BRT.
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Wow the National Post has fallen to a new low. I’m sure even the most heated LRT and BRT fanboys can agree that this article is totally off-base. It is wrong on so many levels. Who wants to submit a counter argument to the post. Let see what I can put together …
It may be true that the original “Streetcar Suburbs” of the late 1800’s were sprawl facilitated by transit but the true enabler of far flung suburbs in the modern sense is the automobile. I actually thought that this was the angle that he was going to take but no he does even worse. If transit was causing sprawl why is it that transit mode shares are so dreadfully low in suburban areas? Transit is not even close to being competitive. The automobile is required to function in the current suburban environment.
Has the author been to cities without rapid transit? Los Angeles’ sprawl has been doing fine without any significant rapid transit … oh wait their new toy subway is causing all the problems. I guess we should build tons of expressways. That will stop the sprawl.
Steve: Actually, Los Angeles was built by the Pacific Electric and the expressways came later. The big difference with transit based sprawl is that it is concentrated around major corridors to avoid long walks or the need for extensive local services feeding the main lines.
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It’s absolutely true that the interurban/streetcar networks enabled the first sprawl in the 1910s and 1920s. For example LA used to have one of the most impressive interurban networks perhaps in the world. The private streetcar companies would then buy up land along the lines and develop them for a profit. It was also true that the streetcar companies were owned by electric companies that powered the rails, essentially creating a vertically-integrated structure (it’s true that many of Japan’s private rail companies run in a similar fashion).
Incredibly, this guy neglected to even mention this fact and even thinks that it’s convenient to, say, live in a post-war cul-de-sac in Scarborough 10 minutes from the nearest bus route and expect to take transit on every trip. Pre-war sprawl is caused by transit, but post-war sprawl is much more massive and much more intense since it was created by a four-wheel machine subsidized by a government beholden to the auto/oil/rubber lobby.
With peak oil just around the corner (it’s likely the results will be dire for auto-dependent suburbs), only by building transit in existing and established suburbs can the results be mitigated.
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I think the safest approach is to never read the National Post. It is a very biased medium and is probably the most distorted voice in our City. The Toronto Star also has it’s “Point of View”, but if its distortion is 10 on a scale, the National post is 20 or 30.
This newspaper is “down for the count” in the internet age. (It has never made a profit.) I love newspapers, and think the good ones will thrive for a long time (despite the internet). This one is pathetic and will die.
I had the opportunity to subscribe for a whole year on a promotion for $66. I only could take it for two weeks and I cancelled. Thinking people should not read this paper. It is not even an opportunity to see how others think (such as the Sun.) It is just biased people speaking untruths.
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I’ve looked through Saturday’s Post … perhaps I’m missing something. What page is this on?
Steve: According to the online version, the publication date was Friday.
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The problem here is there are two types of sprawl.
Auto based and transit based.
Transit “sprawl” is far more dense, with apartments, houses closer together, walkable streets (with sidewalks etc), and other such amenities. Usually with small “town centers” or other such places closer to the primary transit stops along the line. Stretching from those stops are apartments, houses, condos, etc.
Auto “sprawl” are huge tracts of widely separated rarely walked grass ridden lawns with huge oversized and “cheap” in quality houses everywhere. Walking is unreasonable and fatnes pervades like a sickness because of the excessive use of automobiles. Even for a mere couple house jog, usually done in a car and not particularly with a “jog”.
These two are both often created with Government planner types proposing this or that and going with whatever constituent has more say and power at the time.
Natural market based housing and expansion however tends to follow the transit sprawl, I mean, that’s at least what history would show us. Even in car centric areas the nicest and high value areas are more relateable to the transit sprawl oriented development than the auto based sprawl.
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Find it hard to believe that that piece of fantasy writing is called journalism. Ever since I can remember, transit has always been playing catch up with sprawl, not vice-versa. Maybe the York Extension of the Spadina line will precede the development of Vaughan but I always felt that this was good urban planning and is not the norm for subway construction.
The Peel region is in dire need of rapid transit, Peel has over a million people now — Mississauga alone has over 700,000 residents. I think that as Vaughan grows it won’t be left stranded and left behind in having some infrastructure for rapid transit like Mississauga is presently experiencing. I heard (I can’t reference this memory though) that it will cost much less per/km to build a subway in an undeveloped area then a built up area such as Mississauga has become.
On another note if you want to see an interesting film on what happened to Los Angela’s great streetcar system – watch “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”. I know it is fiction but the film touches on some real issues surrounding LA’s decision to tear up all their streetcar tracks way back when.
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Look at today’s big stores and how they cater to the automobile. They discourage transit use.
Ikea on the Queensway near 427 has its back to the road and bus stop. The Queensway Cinema has an asphalt desert to endure from the bus stop. A lot of stores have parking lots in front of them that discourage transit use. It’s a challenge to use transit at a big box store.
I had a friend in a hospital, and I also wanted to do some shopping after I visited. Try to walk from Erin Mills Town Centre to the Credit Valley Hospital, which is at the opposite corner of Eglinton Avenue and Erin Mills Parkway in Mississauga, in winter. Good luck. Walking from the Eaton Centre to St. Michael’s Hospital is much easier.
New developments continue to be auto oriented. They should be transit oriented by putting entrances right beside the transit stop.
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In terms of “streetcar suburbs”, it’s also worth pointing out that they lend themselves well to intensification. Yonge and Eglinton was once the old streetcar suburb of North Toronto, and is now a high-density node. The street patterns of car-oriented sprawl would make this sort of place much harder to construct. And to go back to the article’s premise, I bet Yonge and Eglinton is one of the areas where the TTC can still turn a profit.
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Thanks all for slicing up Mr. Solomon – once upon a time his books were worth reading, and I’m not certain when he became derailed. But maybe this will finally embarrass Energy Probe enough to sever connections.
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This article plays off the fears of residents of small cities on the edge of the big cities’ spheres of influence – cities such as Barrie. On the people who see rapid growth and the transition of their towns from small, independent cities into sprawling suburban messes dependent on the big city an hour away. Most of them have seen what happened to Brampton, and what’s happening to Milton or Georgetown.
In these cases rapid transit expansion is often seen as an enabler of this growth. Logical or not, the heavy congestion of the 400 is seen as a disincentive to growth in Barrie, slowing it down a bit, and the GO train extension is a bypass to this and an incentive to resume uncontrolled residential growth. This impression is not helped by the fact that the trains only go one way.
Now, logically, we all know that Barrie will grow anyways, and that those new residents will brave the 400 every day even as they add to its congestion, and that those riding the new GO train have largely lived in Barrie for years and grown tired of the mess on the 400. Even most residents are aware of this, but still hate becoming a bedroom community and will react negatively to rapid transit expansion. Even those that themselves commute to Toronto would rather live in a real city rather than a leapfrogged suburb.
It is interesting that they bring up BC’s Fraser Valley, which has been debating this very issue for many years. There’s a strong pro-transit faction arguing for rapid transit as far up the valley as Chilliwack, upset by being excluded from Translink and the recent system expansion announcement. This faction includes the Rail for the Valley initiative that proposes resurrecting the old interurban lines. However, there are many locals concerned by this, worried over recent explosive growth and that by making getting to Vancouver easier it would facilitate “bedroomization” – a process that’s been happening without commuter rail for decades anyways, but which is conveniently ignored.
When you look at it from the local point of view, it is a legitimate concern. When GO Transit builds a parking lot with a train station in the middle, all it does is encourage driving to the station; once you’re in the car you may as well drive to the grocery store, and hence, live in a classic suburban subdivision, built because it’s an easy drive to the GO. The alternative is compact bedroom nodes such as those along the Sheppard subway. Both are very visible and neither is viewed as particularly desirable by the layperson. Growth has to happen somewhere, but NIMBYism kicks in pretty quickly.
The real flaw of the article is how they use the TTC’s expansion to the outer 416 as an example. Apples and Oranges.
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Steve: According to the online version, the publication date was Friday.
Odd – when I go to the website, it kept saying “Published: Saturday, February 02, 2008” even on Saturday. Did someone see the print version? I don’t often get the Post, but I had Saturday’s, as it’s the only thing I could find in the stores by the time I realised the Globe was never going to arrive. But my recollection is that there used to be 2 Financial Post sections in the Saturday paper, and I could only fine 1 … I much prefer to read stuff like this on paper, than on the website.
Steve: Hmmm .. I could swear it said Friday when I looked it up, but you’re correct, it was Saturday. As for where it was in the paper, well, that’s a daily whose politics I could never stomach, and I don’t have a hard copy for reference.
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LOL, someone should remind this guy that friday was Feb 1 not Apr 1. As that is the only logical explanation for publishing this article.
The streetcar suburbs of early toronto were much more compact than the car suburbs of modern times. The fact is horribly lost on this guy.
But I have to wonder if GO transit is enabling further sprawl. Early GO lines served fairly dense compact areas, but now recent additions to the system have been serving areas with absolutely no ideas about transit based developments. The stations are surrounded by giant parking lots, in some industrial wasteland, with little or no transit service.
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I am glad to hear your rant Steve against the idea that Toronto consider having a private company run transit in Toronto or even a public private partnership. I too have been aware for years of the sheer greed and lack of respect the Toronto Railway Company had for truly meeting the transit needs of Torontonians. That’s why the Toronto Civic Railway had to be created to allow outer parts of the city to be served.
Then there was the fact that much of the track was left to go to waste, which of course led to the newly formed commission being forced to replace all of the track in the municipality not only due to disrepair but to also allow the then new Peter Witt Cars to safely pass each other through the widening of the devil’s strip. Sometimes I’ll borrow Mike Filey’s book from 1996 on the TTC’s 75th birthday and at the front of the book it shows pictures of transit service and infrastructure in Toronto before the TTC being unsafe, overcrowded and obsolete.
Sadly when I’m at St. George station on the Bloor Danforth platform and I see the wear and tear that has befallen the station after over 40 years of service along with having some H-6 pull in with the windows being covered in Scratchiti it does make me feel a bit concerned.
But of course it was the decades of post war urban sprawl that eventually led to the newly christened 905 region being able to gain the power to elect a certain Ontario PC provincial government back in the mid 1990s that would then give them the power to reward the residents of that region who elected them. All of this of course coming at the expense of the inner region. An inner region with two certain streetcar lines along King and Queen St that still carry more passengers than all of GO Transit.
Sorry for the fuming and ranting.
As for the argument that transit is to blame for sprawl, I encourage anyone reading this to read the book “Transit Villages in the 21st Century” by Micheal Bernick and Robert Cervero. It talks about how Los Angeles and many other North American cities planned their then new neighborhoods around transit oriented development (back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and how developers paid for the privilege to have their neighborhoods built around say an interurban line.
Of course we all know that the big three automakers came along after the second world war and laid ruin to Canadian and American railroading and the many many municipal streetcar systems only for those automakers to face financial ruin now in the beginning of the 21st century, what with Asian imports and a new found love for LRTs in North America (never mind the Canadian federal government’s recent launch of a study into the feasibility of deploying a high speed rail passenger service in the Quebec City-Windsor corridor, a service that could potentially be accomodated by Bombardier’s jet trains which could then save on the cost of overhead catenary).
Well ladies and gentlemen I say good riddance!
Sincerely
Jordan Kerim
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“Spreading Sprawl”
Print date: Saturday, February 2, 2008. Page FP15.
Now I don’t mean to start another thread, but the Sunday Star’s lead editorial also may make some transit observers uneasy:
Budget crunch at Queen’s Park Feb 03, 2008 04:30 AM
snip:
“Under the circumstances, Duncan likely will have to put off many of the improvements the Liberals campaigned on last fall or take the bold, but politically risky, decision to run a deficit in order to keep the province on a more ambitious track.”
I wonder how possible it is for MoveOntario to be curtailed — and we still end up with the the Spadina subway extension.
Steve: Putting on my best political hat, I will observe that MoveOntario2020 is all supposed to be built with funny money (ie borrowing) and expensed as a capital investment over many years. This is a classic piece of private sector accounting.
Paying off the debt does not even show up on the books until after the next provincial election. How anyone can justify this sort of accounting and then have cutbacks in money we haven’t even borrowed yet, much less spent, is a huge mystery.
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Steve, everything I’ve read about the TRC’s under-investment was due to the fact that it’s franchise wasn’t going to be renewed to allow the TTC to take over, not to maximize profits. It’s a gross overstatement to say that a profit-maximizing firm is going to underinvest in the capital that brings in its profits.
Steve: The TRC had refused to extend its network beyond the 1891 boundaries of Toronto long before the TTC takeover, and that’s why the city chose not to renew the franchise. A problem with any franchise is that as the end date gets closer, any capital investment must be recovered over a shorter term to guarantee profitability. Firms can work wonders in the early days of a long franchise because they have plenty of time to recover costs, but toward the end, investment will be made grudgingly if at all.
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For those who have more patience for complex arguments than the editors at the National Post, there is an excellent book, called Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto’s American Tragedy, that describes Toronto’s suburban development in the early 20th century in detail.
The book makes it clear that it was a combination of factors, including cultural preferences for owner-built single houses, anti-apartment zoning laws, location choices by employers, and unwillingness by the City of Toronto to annex or extend services like water, sewer, and street paving to outlying areas, that led to low-density “sprawl” in the pre-Metro era.
In fact, at that time, Toronto was actually less sprawling than other cities on the continent because private developers here, unlike in many other cities, were unsuccessful in extending streetcar lines to service new subdivisions. In many cities, railways ran at a loss, propped up by profits from land speculation.
By the time Toronto’s sprawl really got going in the 1950s, it was the auto, not transit, that drove it, and this continues to be the case today now that we have built an entire urban region premised around automobile travel. In this context, transit merely plays catch-up to grab the tiny share of trips that aren’t served by the private car.
Of course, government played an important role in creating our present circumstances. But the reality is far more complex than Solomon is willing to admit. Cultural factors like individualism and optimism for a new era of freedom, not to mention the desire of big business to create and expand markets for cars, were certainly at least as important as government in creating a sprawling region, and indeed the interplay of those factors helped shape government policy.
Steve: Another important factor is that Toronto sprawl happened decades later than much of the classic sprawl in the USA when such things as streetcar suburbs were a common real estate development tool. By the time Toronto really exploded, car-oriented sprawl was a real possibility, something that would have been economically impossible for the typical 1920s population when cars were still a luxury.
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Hi Steve:-
Actually, you and Mr. Soloman concur on the city owned TTC for he did state just before you pulled out his quote, ‘100 years ago’. Earlier in his article he was talking about Metro but this quote was referring to an older City. He was correct in stating, as you were, that the City wanted to expand into newly annexed neighbourhoods and the private Toronto Railway Company was loathe to go to fields before there were homes and businesses to service, citing that their charter only required them to supply transit service to the city of 1893. Ergo, years of fractious relations between the City and the private company and thus the building of the Toronto Civic Railway, the Municapal Government’s second foray into public ownership and a precursor of the Tororonto Transportation Commission.
I agree with you that what he has writtten is a bit of a stretch. With only minor developments worthy of any town or identifiable municipal characteristics of any kind were the communities that ‘improved’ with the coming of the Radials. But here too, were existing communities that the radials wanted to serve, tap and profit from, and they were all privatly owned profiteering companies, not public. Successes were the Junction, now a totally swallowed up entity, the also swallowed Weston, Richmond Hill and Port Credit. I’m positive though that the latter had little success from the radial as the vice versa was also true here, but it almost made it as a connection right through to Niagra. The Toronto Suburban’s reach west of the Junction was an utter failure and merely existed so that MacKenzie and Mann’s empire might make inroads where the Grand Trunk and CPR already were firmly established. The towns and villages that the TSR serviced hardly noticed its presence and or its disappearance.
These radial lines were soundly reduced to scrap and memories by the automobile of all things. Road users all. Not publicly funded transit schemes. This is where Mr. Soloman truly does go off the rails, for these established communities that had, while it was in vogue, electric rail service, actually wanted it, for they didn’t want their communities bypassed when progress was at hand with these suburban/interurban lines in their burgs! Usually it was found easy to let them go with little more than a whimper when the ‘CAR’ proved itself the new wave of the future. In the climate that once was York County and the Lakeshore communities, these were natural developments.
But that was then and this is now. The sprawl that the auto wrought on the burbs is coming to roost and now needs attention paid it. Back to Mr. Soloman’s premise that making the city bigger, 1870s to 1910s, then creating Metro and now witnessing a huge GTA with elastically bulging boundaries having been created by transit is indeed ludicrous. Too was this chicken or egg? Did the municipalities and province, 50 years ago anyways, really expand for the sake of expansion, or was expansion happening in spite of them and now reaction from and by them is the way of the world? That we now have to funnel many millions of dollars into transit to address this inequity is reality. Doing it in a way that allows core routes to be fed by feeder routes and making them, not pay financially because in this day and age it can’t happen as it once did when there was little other alternative to the streetcar, but pay dividends to users and the communities at large by reasonable ridership levels on each line of a well planned system. This is where the debates and crystal balls need to be honed to perfection, for if that crystal ball can’t see every nuance that could befall each and every new line, then 20/20 hindsight will sure as shootin’ point out those follies in spades. Such will be Transit Ctiy’s biggest challenges.
One well known Toronto transportation historian though did point out in talks and in an as yet unpublished paper, a factually supported supposition that Torontonians’ need to go to cottage country was fuelled by the ease with which the Toronto and York Radial Railway’s Lake Simcoe line could speed them north after their week’s work ended. Once roads improved and the radial cars were left empty, the ‘Motorist’ could go further afield than the stale old Jackson’s Point. Could this be what Mr. Soloman was referring to? If so the Radials are guilty as charged.
Dennis Rankin
Steve: I have a big problem with the implication that sprawl arose from rapacious governments seizing precious dividends out of shareholders’ hands. Solomon uses events from the 1920s to imply that a phenomenon we know from the 50s and beyond arose from the same zealous beginnings. Those Tory radicals led by Leslie Frost did it all when they created Metro!
As for the Radials, they were built long before the creation of the TTC, and one of them (the line to Woodbridge) had already closed. The takeover of the TRC had nothing to do with it.
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Thanks to my free two-month subscription to the National Post, I can tell you that the article was in the Saturday Post on page FP15.
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Hi Steve and Mike Haddad:-
True the City did not want to renew the TR’s franchise, but not solely because of refusal to extend routes. That was only one factor. The other major one was the overcrowding on the infrequent cars. The City was being pressured by its residents and ratepayers to get the TR on board with their needs by increasing the number of vehicles and thus reducing crush loading. A constant source of bad press and legal and civic wrangling that the TR endured. For crush loading it was as the TR had a staff of white gloved ‘Gentlemen’ who pushed passengers onto the cars at heavy transfer and loading points so that each streetcar could carry the loads of folk who showed up at the carstops.
This was undoubtedly a major public relations win the new Toronto Transportation Commission had with its riders for the immediate discontinuance of employed ‘Gentlemen’ occurred Sept. 1st 1921 with the introduction of new larger modern cars to supplement the existing TR fleet. The City though proved that through their own stubborn refusals to let the TR widen devilstrips (the distance between streetcar tracks) from the origanally adequate 3′-6″ to the 5′-4″ at present made it difficult for the new Municipal operator to run the new cars on very many routes until hundreds of thousands of 1920s dollars had been spent. No one played nice in the sand box at all! Some of that money the TR had been willing to shell out themselves, but couldn’t for they wouldn’t service ‘nothing’ with unprofitable extensions and the city wouldn’t accomodate the road way changes the TR wanted and the TR wouldn’t build more cars and, and, and, and………. There were many, not just these, truly complex and vexious issues between these guys that filled the papers, the TR’s board room and City Hall for almost 30 years.
Maybe the TR would have been able to introduce new and wider cars thus not only seeing more cars available, but cars wide enough to carry more people more comfortably if there wasn’t such animosity between the two civic partners. They were both pigheaded and the TR at the time was justifiably correct in their stance of not compromising their profitable existence by wasting resources, almost solely funded from the farebox, in areas where the farebox would only see spider webs and no coin. But similarily too, their need for profit doomed them to their decisions to not increase the fleet size. For here, spending hard earned cash on more cars, that then would need more crews to be paid for few if any more riders, unsqueezed though they may be, was a balance wire they fell off of and ultimately cost them the renewal.
Mind, the King barn fires did not ingratiate the TR with the riders as their scant vehicle resources became scanter as it went up in smoke. Some of the destroyed cars in the second fire were only months old. This meant that really decrepit pieces of rotted wood and rusted metal were pulled out of the scrap line, varnished and nailed over to augment the remaining cars. Some of TR’s woes were not of their making!
Dennis Rankin
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Ah! Found it!
Interesting read. I suppose next week they’ll be pointing out that the high cost of gasoline is also increase sprawl and congestion – because it results in smaller cars, and thus make it appear you can fit more cars on the roads …
Steve: You forgot the other obvious claim: With larger cars, you can’t have as many of them, and even with their higher fuel consumption, maybe the total fuel used is less than with more small cars. It’s the sort of argument I would expect.
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Pravda is alive and well, it lives at the National Post!
Steve, you forgot to mention that the city did extend street car service into the suburbs prior to the lapse of the TSR/TRC franchise. The Toronto Civic Railway (TCR) is the precursor to the TTC started sometime around 1912. The TCR was owned by the city and provided service to some of the growing suburbs. Transferring from one system to the other required an additional fare. The two fare requirement was not all that popular based upon what I’ve heard.
The owners of the TRC (MacKenzie and Mann) also had other problems to deal with, their Canadian Northern Railway was not a roaring success.
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Further to the points made above about the growth of the streetcar suburbs vs. car-based suburbia…
The streetcar suburbs grew incrementally along the fringes of the existing city, connecting to the infrastructure, and being immediately connected to the core by the transportation system. As the city core was already quite dense, the city naturally grew along its outer edges. People moving there could work nearby or get to the city centre by streetcar.
Car-based suburbia on the other hand, was basically created by government engineering to reduce density by pushing “settlers” into the middle of nowhere by building a subdivision in rural farmland, far away from the natural city fringe. The only way to get to the employment of the city, or in industrial suburbia, was to drive.
Nobody would CHOOSE to live in the middle of nowhere, but through its social policy (ie. the CMHC and the Veterans Land Act), government encouraged building in the middle of nowhere. It was supposed to build up Canadians’ “moral fibre”. You can read more about this in “Toronto Sprawls”, which came out last year. An interesting read, and certainly bears out the view that extensive suburban expansion into low-density suburbs put an immense financial burden on the TTC. The TTC’s expansion into those suburbs ALWAYS followed the development of an area, not the other way around.
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Cause and effect relationships are always tricky.
However, it is undeniable that transit can sometimes help fuel sprawl, especially when, as some have pointed out, the land use planning framework is weak.
Commuter train stations located outside of established centres and designed to be accessed primarily by car can make low-density suburban living more attractive than if a congested highway is the only other way of getting to work. However, these train services can also help maintain the primacy of the central city – the end destination of commuter train services.
So once again, transportation and planning really go hand in hand. Bad transportation compounds the impact of bad planning, and vice-versa.
Take a look at SCATTER – Sprawling Cities And TransporT: from Evaluation to Recommendations – an EU research project on this very issue.
Project site: http://scatter.stratec.be/
From the summary at http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/projects/projectDetail.asp?ID=32:
“Urban sprawl is endemic to urban growth. It induces a high level of car use and congestion on roads particularly in and around major centres. To limit the damage caused by urban sprawl in terms of congestion, air pollution and energy consumption, many European cities are implementing suburban public transport policies involving heavy or light rail. But by improving accessibility, they create an incentive for a new wave of urban sprawl. Therefore, in parallel with new public transport services, accompanying measures have to be implemented to prevent, mitigate, and control further sprawl.”
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I liked that last comment. Growth is inevitable in countries that are growing, and even totalitarian countries like China have found it impossible to eliminate sprawl entirely. We can either totally give in, like in Phoenix, or at least try to maintain a vibrant urban center like in Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco, and other places. Comparisons to European experience in this regard are not accurate, in my opinion, because no European country (maybe with the exception of the UK) has a growing population, and even if they did it would not come close to the growth of the US or Canada.
I think in the next 20 years the problematic area will not be the central city, which has come back in a big way in a number of areas, but the inner ring suburb, which seems to have neither the advantages of outer suburbia nor the advantages of the central city. One of the great benefits of Transit City will be the strengthening of these inner ring suburbs, although they won’t serve as many people as building additional subways to downtown would, or attract as many car commuters as the Spadina subway extension will.
Steve: Yes, that is an important part of Transit City — the 416 “ring” has a demographic that should be strong transit users, but the service isn’t up to the level it could be. Transit is not just about maximising ridership but also about doing so in areas where there will be the best overall benefit.
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So where did this guy get his disinformation? Sure, transit (especially rail) did cause a fair amount of growth but it was much more orderly than the Frankenstein that it has long since become due in no small part to the automobile and it’s related policies. As for the TRC, it’s been my understanding that the City of Toronto could have owned the transit system back in 1916 but a certain Mayor named Tommy Church thought the terms of buying out the MacKenzie and Mann interests were too generous thus leading him to reject taking over the TRC at the time.
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I have a question for you Steve, I figure if anyone has an answer to this question it would be you.
I was at the West LRT planning study in Calgary and someone in the audience blurbed out why don’t we build the line as a subway rather than as an LRT line – I am not sure if he meant the entire line, or just the downtown section. The city planners were quick to note that Calgary can’t support a Subway because of our population. I don’t doubt their claim and I generally believe that LRT is the better option, but it did raise a question in my mind:
Toronto when it opened the Yonge Subway Line had a population of 1.2 million, Calgary’s current population is 1 million. So how is it that Toronto was able to support a Subway System at the time? Or is it that Toronto can’t support the existing subway system?
Steve: When Toronto proposed the Yonge Subway, the level of car ownership was much, much lower per capita than it is today in Calgary, and the population was packed into an old, conventional streetcar city. The Yonge corridor south of Bloor, made up of at least the Bay, Yonge and Church Street services (and trippers that made their way into downtown via other routes) was already carrying well over 10K passengers per hour with much potential for growth.
The Bloor-Danforth streetcar, before the subway opened, ran a one-minute headway of two-car PCC trains, and many of the riders both from the west and the east transferred into the Yonge line to go downtown. This is loosely equivalent to 20 full 3-car C-trains per hour, bothways outbound from downtown, as the demand before the Bloor subway even opened. The demand on Yonge was even higher.
Another thing about Toronto, as I heard hilariously described at a lecture in Edmonton many years ago, is that Toronto is only “half a city”. Where Edmonton and Calgary both spread out roughly in a circular form, half of what should be Toronto is in the lake. With downtown not at a centre, but at one edge fed from two directions, and a built form that predates the auto-suburbs, that 1-million people in Toronto concentrate into the Yonge corridor much more than they would if we had a “round” city. We would instead wind up with radial lines feeding from various directions into the core, much like Calgary, although probably still with higher density given the age of the city.
In Calgary, I very much doubt that you have a single corridor that comes close to that sort of riding density let alone future potential.
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So what you are saying then is that in Toronto it was simply the density which resulted in the Subway being supportable. Although I was wondering then, would it ever have been possible to have found an LRT solution for the Yonge Line – either at the time or hypothetically today if some how the Yonge Subway were unable to continue operating as a Subway.
My next question would be, say if Calgary one day discovered a planning policy which is more Transit Oriented – which could be possible looking at the West LRT redevelopment plans and the Suburban Development Ban – and the city ended up having the same kind of density around the existing or future LRT lines which Toronto had around the time. So then would it be possible to keep running the existing system as an LRT line.
Or if overnight Calgary’s population ballooned to something similar to what Toronto is today – could we still operating the system as an LRT or would we have to convert the main lines into a Subway System (all the current lines plus the future West LRT)?
Steve: The Yonge Street corridor was already in subway territory the day it opened when you consider the parallel routes feeding into the core. Also, the surface operations were at maximum capacity and there would be no point in simply replacing old Peter Witt trains with what would then have been brand new PCC trains. The biggest constraint would have been the close grid of streets, the limited speeds and the pedestrian congestion caused by having a route with over 10K per hour running down the main streets.
Comparing Calgary to Toronto, you have to remember that Toronto had a very strong transit riding habit in the years before the Yonge line was built, and this carried into the 1960s with the building of the Bloor subway. The Bloor car was carrying about 8K/hour at peak. Also, as I mentioned before, the Yonge line was fed from both east and west as a single line into downtown. In Calgary, the more likely pattern would be two separate lines radiating out from the core, and this would split the demand.
For the future, the biggest constraint in Calgary is the shared trackage downtown, and my understanding is that there are plans for a north-south LRT subway to relieve the pressure on that segment. If one of the LRT corridors reaches the point it cannot handle the demand, yes, you might need a subway, or you might need to determine whether the demand can be split onto another LRT line. Without knowing the detailed traffic flows and routing options, I can’t comment, but it will come down to a question of how much money is available, and what benefits flow from each scheme.
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I heard a rumour the other day that Canada’s Wonderland is planning to move to the Niagara area because the land they occupy now has become so valuable for development that it is worth far more than they could ever make from amusement park fees. I don’t see transit being there first as factoring into this future sprawl at all.
Just a little food for thought.
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