The Star reports today that the GO Transit Board rejected a call for fare rebates in compensation for poor service. This is no surprise, but that’s not my topic.

What fascinated me in the article was this:

[Pat] Eales was initially given five minutes to make her case to the board but GO Transit chairman Peter Smith said he would allow her to talk as long as she wanted.

Her presentation, along with questions and answers, went on for more than half an hour.

Meanwhile, over at the TTC, deputations have taken on a surreal air thanks to the Draconian new rules of procedure. We get five minutes, as always, but questions are rare and motions to extend speaking time are non-existent. I was used to being cut off back in the Lastman era, but Admiral Adam runs a tight ship and I’d better finish my speech in 5 minutes.

This reached an absurb height at the last meeting when John Cartwright of the Labour Council wanted to present information about shortcomings in the Buy Canadian study done for the current streetcar tender. Because the request to speak came in late, Chair Giambrone had to ask for the Commission’s indulgence just to get Cartwright on the agenda.

When the time to hear the material came up, they got five minutes. Full stop.

Meanwhile, TTC management gets to drone on at excruciating length about whatever project they have dropped onto the agenda often with little advance notice to those who might want to comment on it.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Metrolinx has yet to discover deputations and favours instead a complex process of public feedback through their website. No opportunity for irate members of the public to call politicians or management to task for their incompetence. Just remember this as and when they take over GO or even the TTC.

You won’t be able to complain about the Queen car because nobody will want to hear you.

Somehow the golden age of transit is looking a lot like the bad old days when pensioners got cigars, the Commissioners drank from bone china cups, and the public knew their place.

David Topping at the Torontoist has a good post about the need for people to embrace the TTC and work for positive changes rather than using the current labour situation, including the “million dollar” campaign, as an excuse to bash both the TTC and its employees indiscriminately.

As I’ve said in a preceding post, I think that the million dollar campaign is weak on details, and many have commented on how it makes the union (and its members) look bad by inflating their worth. One huge gap in the analysis is that it omits the value of the billions invested in transit infrastructure without which the ATU members would not have jobs and all of the economic activity they claim for themselves would, theoretically, never have happened. I and all of my readers helped pay for those investments through taxes at all levels, and if we’re going to shut down the TTC, I want my money back.

For its part, the TTC continues to struggle with low-balling the complexity of fixing long-standing problems with service and maintenance, or even of admitting that these problems exist. Politicians, even those who are strong supporters of transit, don’t want to hear that there is so much more to be done with money that isn’t in anyone’s budget.

This may sound like a broken record, but much of what has been achieved in the past decade came from pressure on the TTC to tell us what it could do, not what it couldn’t. The ideas of actually improving service, rebalancing fares and stimulating ridership came because we concentrated on improving the system.

We need more advocacy from within the TTC and City Council, detailed information on the actual state of the system and on what can be done to improve it. Some changes — better service for one — are finally on the street, but there’s a lot more to do. Let’s concentrate on making the transit system much, much better.

I wasn’t going to comment on Marilyn Churley’s paper claiming that each TTC employee contributes $1-million to the local economy, but a remark buried in a long post at Blogto caught my eye. Specifically:

It can be a very useful source of information for pro-transit activists, and helps underscore transit’s importance (which makes sense given Steve Munro and Franz Hartmann were involved in it).

Since I seem to have been “outed” here, and am also thanked for input on page 3 of the report, I need to explain the context.

I cannot speak for Franz Hartmann (of the Toronto Environmental Alliance), but I was approached to review the document when it was in draft form. At that point, it needed a lot of work because of poorly thought out arguments. Some of my input found its way into the final version, some didn’t. I didn’t know the video existed until it appeared online. Finally, I don’t agree with all of the claimed economic benefits of the transit system’s existence — ie things that would simply disappear if there were no transit service.

That said, the problem lies more with the premise, rather than with the calculation. Personally, the TTC saves me a bundle because I can live without a car and my total transportation expense for 2007 was $1098 worth of passes (on subscription), the odd cab fare, and dinner/drinks for friends who provided chauffeur/cartage services.

Many families could not exist without one car given the problems of getting to work in transit-starved suburbia. However, a good transit system can reduce the need for every family to have two or more cars. Alas it won’t reduce road space because the highway system is so overcommitted by demand that any transit gains will only allow backfilling on the roads.

Scale up that sort of benefit across the city, and that’s money in every transit rider’s pocket.

Many of the comments on blogto are extremely one-sided being so directed at the union and the operators. Lousy service is a function of years of underinvestment in transit (new vehicles, more rapid transit) by politicians of every stripe. Lousy service is also caused by mismanagement of what’s there. Yes, some operators take advantage of this by playing games with their schedules, but they are far from the majority of the staff. Political decisions not to buy more buses, to downsize the fleet by 300 vehicles, had nothing to do with the ATU.

For decades, the TTC has claimed that it is powerless to provide better service due to traffic congestion. As reviews of their own vehicle monitoring data have shown here, congestion is only one factor, and the TTC’s solutions, aimed primarily at the core during peak periods, will not solve this problem. Huge gaps in service to the outer ends of lines are caused by bad operating practices in line management.

I agree that Local 113 has overstated its case with Churley’s report, but they don’t deserve the virtiolic remarks aimed at them by many writers. I open this post to comments with trepidation and will tell everyone in advance that I will ruthlessly expunge remarks that don’t address the larger issue of making transit better.