Here we are on January 30, 2022, the sixteenth birthday of this blog. We’re getting all grown up and respectable these days, at least in some quarters. I was recently referred to as “an elder” in the best sense of someone whose age and knowledge inform those who come after. This is, I think, a promotion from “guru”, or even worse, an “expert”, a common description/epithet that comes my way.

This site is not just me and my opinions, but the contributions of many to the discussions over the years. As I write this, there are over 2,500 articles and almost 56,000 comments. You have all been busy!

Back in 2005, I received the Jane Jacobs Prize as an “unsung hero” of transit advocacy, and not long afterward this blog, swans and all, was born. Many of you have been with me on that journey, and I have no plans to put down my quill.

These are not easy times. Looking back on last year’s article, I cannot help quoting its optimistic conclusion:

With luck, we will all be back here a year from now still recovering from a wild New Year’s Bacchanal. There will be real optimism, the sense of a better future after a dark past.

Things didn’t quite work out that way, although there is hope that the imminent re-opening in Ontario will not drive us back into another dark age huddled around our electronic hearths.

I must continue that closing message from last year, one that still applies ever so strongly in an age of political opportunists for whom a world-wide disaster is nothing more than a chance to score cheap political points at the cost of thousands of lives.

We will get there through the efforts of many people in the front lines who keep the wheels turning in so many aspects of our city, people we often take for granted. We will get there thanks to a combination of technological near-miracles, belief in facts and science, and the dedication of thousands whose lives we depend on.

I remember when modern genetics began with the discovery of DNA, and later RNA, as well as more recent advances in understanding of the immune system. The thought that many of us remain in good health thanks to technology based on that knowledge is breathtaking. Anyone who downplays or naysays the accomplishment is at best a fool, at worst a menace.

In the political arena, I will be quite blunt. I have reached the point where the so-called conservatives, the neo-Trumpists, the anti-vaxxers are collectively a group for whom I have utter contempt. No quarter should be given, none, to those who in the name of “personal liberty” would imperil their neighbours. Those who yearn for political power by exploiting their support have never represented a majority in Canada and gain office only thanks to a divided opposition.

In Ontario, there is hope that opposition will coalesce to drive the Premier and his band of incompetent fools from office. Whether we will get a new band of fools remains to be seen, but a Toronto, an Ontario in which nobody named “Ford” has any power is long overdue. Simplistic, populist slogans and dogma are no replacement for competent, dare I say, inspiring government.

This year I really do want to look forward, even with some misgivings on the social and political landscape.

At a most basic level of creature comforts, it will be good to return to eating food someone else cooks in restaurants filled with equally happy visitors. Sitting in a theatre with real musicians and actors is a treat we have lost, with only a too brief respite. I long to be part of a live audience laughing, crying, applauding, even cheering (through a mask) for people I have seen only online for far too long.

Delectable though an online recipe might be, you cannot eat a picture of brunch. Like the theatre, take out is not the same, and the experience is shared only briefly with staff, not with fellow diners.

Online performances have been a blessing through these two years. They have been a way to support some of my favourite artists, but there is a siren song calling, a voice from darkened theatres where only the ghost light shines.

Everyone will have their own yearned-for experience, and I wish you all joy in getting back to favoured haunts.

The transit portfolio is only one of many that face a long, hard climb out of the economic and social chasm the pandemic created. To many it is not even a top tier issue because transit is something other people use, that only “city” or “downtown” folk care about. Even without that cultural problem, there are desperate issues in Health and Long Term Care, not to mention Education, that have a society-wide call on resources.

Within the transit realm, there is the short term problem of paying to keep service attractive while ridership recovers. The longer term challenge is to both rebuild that ridership and grow well beyond pre-pandemic demand levels. The typical “solution” involves spending lots of capital on new facilities and vehicles while ignoring the need to actually operate them to provide service.

What happens if the flow of capital dollars is reduced or redirected to other areas? Are we politically capable of talking about transit in terms that do not involve billions in new builds? Will we ever try to make what we have today work better on a large scale, not just a priority signal here and a red lane there?

What is the TTC’s plan for growth? Modest. Small scale. No plan for substantial service improvements beyond just getting back to pre-pandemic levels. This is echoed in the City’s transit budget where the goal of more service in the environmental plan is not reflected in provisions to fund the changes.

I cannot avoid talking about a key part of TTC operations: the quality of service. There have always been excuses for ragged service, and the pandemic has brought its own additions to the TTC’s repertoire including buses that nobody can see or track, and claims of reliability that are completely at odds with actual data.

Of course there are interruptions from traffic accidents, sick passengers and breakdowns, but these do not explain nor excuse rampant problems with uneven service. The TTC has standards that are not achieved, or which give an overly rosy picture at odds with daily rider experiences. Metrics descend from a scheme that basically entrenched “how we’ve always done things”, and even then the TTC does not routinely hit the mark.

We have a transit board that is loathe to meddle in operational matters, and does little to ensure that management is making the best use of system resources to provide reliable service. For that most basic function of a board, budget review and planning, there is no budget committee. The board seems happy to have new budgets drop out of the air with no policy input until the last minute when nothing can be changed until, maybe, “next year”.

This is an abdication of responsibility. If we are to take “ridership recovery” seriously, it will have to start with some real goals, clear policies about budget direction and hands-on measurements that the governance level of the TTC can trust and enforce.

Meanwhile, on the provincial level, we have Metrolinx, an agency whose arrogance has only grown under a government that wants results, now, and without debate. We are building major projects of dubious worth that will pre-empt work and funding on many other deserving undertakings for years to come. The Metrolinx board meets rarely in public, and when it does, the sessions do little more than cheer on the great works of management. Any substantive debate occurs in private.

All of our transit planning will be coloured by the work-from-home shift and the degree to which transit travel changes permanently both in place and in time. I do not subscribe to the idea that “downtown is dead”, and we really have not yet had a chance to see what its work-day population will be once people are no longer afraid to travel and to work together.

There may be a less floor space per worker with a move to hotelling, but if anything that is more of a threat to the demand for net new office space as vacancies beget move-ins. The effect will vary from place to place, but whatever the result, there will still be a demand for transit to get workers to and from jobs.

Less than half of TTC’s pre-pandemic ridership came from work trips with the rest split broadly between education, shopping, entertainment and other personal travel. As each aspect of our community reopens, those trips will re-appear even if the conventional home to King-and-Bay office trips take longer to return. Anyone who rides the TTC today can see the effect of school re-openings. Locations with concentrations of jobs that cannot be worked from home already produce regular reports of overcrowded buses.

The problem is that too much of that travel is not concentrated on a few subway lines, but is hidden away on routes where riders have little choice but to await the next convoy of buses. Politicians and especially management who downplay this problem do not deserve to be in charge of a transit system.

Many people and communities have worked as advocates for better transit among a wide variety of portfolios where the long, hard slog becomes tiring. There are little victories separated by periods of despair that real change will come.

Something critical to citizen participation has been lost over the two pandemic years: in person contact between communities and those who govern them. Tightly managed Zoom calls with pre-scripted presentations and filtered questions are no replacement for in person meetings where there is a communal sense and strength in numbers. It is easy to dismiss critics one at a time, not so easy when they come by the room full.

I end this year’s greetings in a feisty mood. Yes, we should celebrate the return of some vaguely “normal” day-to-day life to the extent it is possible, but the time for muddling through, for making do with half measures is over.

Without advocacy, nothing happens, and the fight must go on.

A happy 2022 to all my readers whether you comment profusely (sometimes at greater length than I will publish) or just lurk in the shadows watching the debate.

Here we are at the end of January 2021. The days are getting longer. There is a vague sense of hope in the air for the spring to come not just with flowers and warmer weather, but a more civilized political climate and the beginning of the end of the Covid pandemic. That, at least, is an optimistic view.

January 30^th is this blog’s birthday. A year ago none of us had any idea of the year to come and how much the landscape would change.

Each of us has been affected in different ways. The social and economic effects will be with us for many years, not just from the disease, but from the acceleration of changes that were already well underway. The context for many debates has shifted, become more urgent, and the future of our city does not lie in “business as usual” approaches.

In Toronto, transit continues to operate at a reasonable capacity level, although not without problems, because various governments regard this as a critical service. Riders in many cities are not so lucky. Less certain is the future when special subsidies evaporate and Toronto must make hard choices about what transit we need and how much we can afford.

The shift in travel patterns puts this question in a very different context than in years past. The TTC contemplated a multi-year service plan with quite modest demand growth coupled with the opening of a few new rapid transit lines. The plan was not “aspirational”. It did not ask “how much better could transit be and how can we achieve this”.

Such an outlook is rare in Toronto’s transit planning because the starting point is always “we can’t afford it”. This in a city and province happy to commit billions to road and subway construction of dubious merit. Better bus service? Not so much.

“Better” has a new meaning in 2021, and this includes:

• The ability to board buses without fear of overcrowding.
• Reliability of service to ensure travel is not delayed.
• Coverage of service to areas beyond the classic core-area office towers.
• Provision of service for work hours beyond the classic 9-to-5 pattern.

These have always been present, but they take on extra meaning for public health. Ridership beyond the core has always existed, but transit’s big job was that peak commuting demand. With that stripped away, the shortcomings in what remains are more evident.

Demand on the TTC’s bus network fell back from about 50 per cent of “normal” to just under 40 in the last quarter of 2020, with comparable drops on other modes. Compared to pre-covid times, streetcars and subways have consistently run below the bus network because work-from-home shifts affect their service areas much more. GO Transit, whose market is almost exclusively the core area commuter, sits at 5 per cent.

In this context, the plans for massive network expansion have a surreal quality, and yet they are still discussed as if the economic crisis we now face does not exist.

From one point of view, forging ahead with plans for growth is essential if only to make up for lost time and to provide badly-needed headroom when riding returns to “normal” levels. Whether it will, and how quickly this will occur in various markets, remains to be seen.

For many years, “normal” on the TTC meant overcrowded service where cost containment took precedence over real provision for growth. That is not a condition to which we should aspire. We should aim higher.

GO Transit’s challenge is more difficult because of its narrower market. The very people that have kept the TTC busy – workers in industry and essential services – are not GO Transit’s base. Even if commuter demand returns, growth on that network is hamstrung by the entrenched park-and-ride model used as the primary “last mile” access for GO customers. Local transit might assist, but this will be compromised by auto dominance and spending priorities in regions outside of Toronto, coupled with a Provincial attitude that local transit service is not their problem.

Last year, I wrote:

There is finally a recognition at Toronto Council that transit simply cannot get by on the crumbs that so-called inflationary spending increases produce. There is a huge backlog of spending required that, for many years, the City and TTC kept hidden from view lest the borrowing it would trigger frightened passing financial analysts.

But that is only half of the problem. Surface routes both inside Toronto itself and in the GTHA beyond have long been neglected as a vital part of the transit network. We cannot move everyone everywhere on a handful of commuter rail and subway lines.

[…]

[A] bigger challenge than getting a new rapid transit line, regardless of the technology, is to get money for better service everywhere, not just on whatever new bauble we manage to open once a decade.

From: Fourteen, January 30, 2020

Every government is entering a period where there will be calls to spend for recovery, but there will be limits, some political, some financial, to how much money is really available. Toronto is lucky to have a “City Building Fund” already baked into its taxation plans for the next five years, but that would be a harder sell today now than when Council approved the scheme to fund some of the transit and housing capital shortfalls.

There is no plan for new revenue to support day-to-day operation and service. For now, the City and TTC are propped up by very large provincial and federal subsidies. These will not last forever, and they might not last through 2021. Toronto has a “plan B” to get through the year, if need be, with reserve draws and trimmed capital spending, but that is no permanent solution.

I will not attempt to foresee what awaits us later in 2021 and beyond. However, without a substantial return to transit riding as we once knew it, the momentum for continued improvement will be hard to sustain. This has a compounding effect. If people stop believing in transit as a viable way, indeed the only reasonable way we can handle travel demands on a metropolitan scale, political support for better transit could evaporate.

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Changing hats from transit, and looking at my own life, 2020 was a difficult year, but not critical for me as a retiree. Many have lost incomes, or must continue to work in dangerous circumstances, while managing family needs and an uncertain future.

The Internet, for all its wealth of resources, is not the same as being at real events be they a night at the movies, a play in a theatre, or a concert in a large hall surrounded by a living, breathing audience and artists. I long to be there again when it is safe, and fervently hope that as many organizations and venues survive as possible.

The performing arts community is in a deep recession. For all the joy that they bring, they are not “essential” in most political calculus. This is only one example of how the economic landscape had changed, and is unlikely to return to “business as usual” soon. There are many more, and they are all part of the city’s economic activity and drivers of transit demand.

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Where do we go from here?

Much depends on the speed with which we collectively wrestle the pandemic to a manageable level if not to extinction. Only with a renewed economy and lifting the burden of extra health and social service costs can a city like Toronto start to think beyond just getting by.

Absent a major shift in government policy, I do not expect to see much change in spending plans. Big construction projects are bound up with a lot of political ego, and are hard to alter in the best of times. Today, they are sold as essential for economic recovery. Whether they build what is the most needed is quite another matter. Digging the hole takes precedence over where and why.

For 2021, I plan to continue my dogged pursuit of service quality. The TTC has a lot to answer for in the mismanagement of service reliability and in the under-utilization of its fleet. The gap between ongoing rider complaints and sunny management tales is too persistent and too wide to be ignored.

I also do not expect much change in support for the boring-but-necessary day-to-day transit service. We will get by somehow, but any capacity increase will be consumed by latent demand.

Few will run on the slogan: “Toronto deserves better bus service”.

Toronto deserves better politicians.

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With luck, we will all be back here a year from now still recovering from a wild New Year’s Bacchanal. There will be real optimism, the sense of a better future after a dark past.

We will get there through the efforts of many people in the front lines who keep the wheels turning in so many aspects of our city, people we often take for granted. We will get there thanks to a combination of technological near-miracles, belief in facts and science, and the dedication of thousands whose lives we depend on.

January 31, 2020 marks the fourteenth birthday of this blog.

Back in those early days, I posted both transit commentary and film reviews, but the latter fell aside as online reviews by everyone crowded the field, and governments got into the bad habit of making major announcements just when I would otherwise have some time free to write about TIFF or HotDocs. It was a dastardly plot!

In the mid 2000s, urban affairs were brewing again, and a new generation of civic activists found their voices. Many of them now have moderately influential positions as writers both online and in print, a much endangered medium.

When I started out, my thoughts were to delve into issues at a level the daily press could not, and to provide a place where people could discuss whatever was going on in the transit world from a more detailed technical level. Little did I expect that this would evolve to the breadth of followers here and on social media, much less that I now have fans!

Two factors in the evolution of this blog have been most rewarding:

First is that new generation of activists fighting for a better city and a better transit system. We are not alone, and there are many thoughtful, well-informed voices in Toronto and the region beyond. If only more of us could be in government, I could be happier, but our time will come.

Second, I have evolved from a professional IT person who attends an inordinate number of cultural events and dabbles in transit issues on the side, to a writer, albeit of technical material, and moderator of a very long-running transit salon. This was never an ambition all those years ago when my transit advocacy began as part of the Streetcars for Toronto Committee.

There are now 2,300 posts on this site, and almost 53,000 published comments from you, dear readers. Well, most of you are dear, and the ones who are not tend to invite a click on “Delete” with accompanying laughter and scorn.

A special thank you to those who “lurk” – you know who you are – and the occasional private thank you lets me know the reach this blog has.

Where is transit going in Toronto?

The near future has the sense of a gloomy night with the first hints of a dawn to come. There is finally a recognition at Toronto Council that transit simply cannot get by on the crumbs that so-called inflationary spending increases produce. There is a huge backlog of spending required that, for many years, the City and TTC kept hidden from view lest the borrowing it would trigger frightened passing financial analysts.

But that is only half of the problem. Surface routes both inside Toronto itself and in the GTHA beyond have long been neglected as a vital part of the transit network. We cannot move everyone everywhere on a handful of commuter rail and subway lines.

The assumption that transit’s main goal is to get people to and from King & Bay has not been valid for decades, but that is where almost all planning and political capital was focused. Even calls for more suburban subways claimed that riders needed to get downtown where the good jobs are, and left those wanting to travel elsewhere to their own devices.

Speaking of capital, a bigger challenge than getting a new rapid transit line, regardless of the technology, is to get money for better service everywhere, not just on whatever new bauble we manage to open once a decade. Nobody holds photo ops and press conferences to announce better service on the Queen car or the Finch bus because the money required to make a real city-wide difference is substantial, and usually comes 100 per cent from local tax dollars.

Changing that outlook and increasing transit’s share of trips beyond the rail rapid transit network will be a hard slog. Travellers will not give up their car-oriented patterns both from convenience and from a long-standing distrust that transit will ever amount to more than an occasional, inconvenient bus intended to move a few seniors to and from the local mall.

Left to their own devices and revenues, local governments are not going to invest in better transit, and the provincial government shows no indication of moving into this arena either.

There is plenty to do. Politicians to elect and others to send to a well-earned and thumping defeat. But there is more than just elections, there is the vital need for new policies that will address a city-region where transit must take a much bigger role. The alternative is traffic strangulation, an environmental nightmare, and economic decline.

Lest this sound a too gloomy end in what should be a festive post, I will leave you with a swan gliding in the summer sun on the Avon in Stratford. For those who still have not figured out where the Twitter handle @swanboatsteve comes from, please read A Bold Initiative for Don Valley Transport.

Today, January 31, 2018, marks the twelfth anniversary of this site.

Sitting down to write my annual celebration, I have mixed feeling this year. Two elections are staring at Toronto and its transit systems, with only middling prospects for improvement in the years ahead.

Depending on the outcome, the damage that was started by Rob Ford’s crew and continued by John Tory, not to mention the meddling from Queen’s Park, might continue us on a downward path, or our transit fortunes could turn around.

Downward path? With so much happening on transit?

What I see is a love of spending big dollars on capital projects, and the price per photo op is well into the millions. Tell people you are building what they want and deserve. Buy those votes.

Actually providing better transit is quite another matter. Toronto’s obsession with lower property taxes hogties transit growth both for physical infrastructure, basics like buses and garages to house them, and service on the street. Queen’s Park doles out new subsidies rarely, and promptly claws back part of their generosity with requirements that municipalities help to underwrite Metrolinx projects. Ottawa occasionally finds spare change in its pockets for infrastructure “stimulus”, but imposes timelines on projects that leave needed work unfunded simply because it does not fit their political calendar.

Through all of this, there are glimmering spots in a cloudy sky.

The Relief (Don Mills) subway line is now recognized as a necessity, and not just as a little shuttle between Danforth and downtown, but as a true parallel route to the Yonge line. Whether the money for this will ever appear is a mystery, but at least detailed engineering work is underway to figure out where and how the line might be built. Commitment to actual construction will be a few years closer than forever sitting in “we need a study” mode.

Parts of Transit City might actually be completed in my lifetime. With them (and other LRT lines to open in Ottawa, Kitchener-Waterloo, Mississauga and Hamilton) lies my great hope that Ontario will finally be past its vain idea that a “missing link” in transit technology needs to be invented. Ontario forced Toronto to buy what we now know as the SRT rather than simply getting off the shelf LRT technology common around the world then, as now. A network Toronto could have begun in the 1970s (with a TTC plan from the 60s) might start to take shape half a century later.

Even Metrolinx shows signs of thinking beyond the classic downtown commuter market, although their electrified “RER” (Regional Express Rail) network is many years and at least one more election cycle in the future. However, the supposedly “regional” agency still leaves the finely-grained local service to local municipalities, and focuses on parking lots as the solution to the “last mile” problem facing transit in the dispersed suburbs.

We hear a lot about how the GTHA is one network, but that’s code for “let’s take over the TTC”, not for a truly region-wide push to make transit competitive beyond central Toronto. Local service is a big issue in Toronto especially with the concentration of new residents and jobs in the “old” city, but also in the outer 416 and beyond where many, many riders rely on the bus network for most or all of their journeys.

You, gentle readers, are a big reason this blog exists. Without an audience, even a critical one, there is no point to spending my time like an actor on a stage in an empty theatre. We are close to 2,100 posts over those 12 years, but also in striking distance of 50,000 published comments!

If only we could get the politicians to address transit needs that don’t involve a subway station in their ward or a GO station in their riding.

Fools and cretins with paper-thin dedication to transit remain, but theirs is not the only voice. The quality of transit debates I hear in many quarters – media, academics, a growing generation of young [well, some of you] urbanists, professionals and [gasp!] even politicians – rises year by year. That theatre has a buzz in the house, and many new players on the stage.

Toronto and the GTHA can rise to have “the best transit system” not because someone gives us an award, but because transit is truly valued, even loved, as an integral part of the city region by the people who live here.

For my part, I will keep writing – sometimes on policy, sometimes on arcane technical matters, and very occasionally on Swan Boats.

Happy reading!

On January 31, 2017, this blog celebrates its eleventh birthday. Collectively, we are up to 1,965 posts and 47,462 comments. Two big landmarks are coming up!

This is a very difficult time politically on many fronts for transit and for informed political dialogue in general with two critical problems running through all debates:

• Nobody wants to pay for anything, even if it might benefit them, but instead there is an endless search for “efficiency” that will deliver more for less.
• “Facts” are whatever someone claims they are, and those who dispute an opinion are at best simple-minded fools, and at worst enemies of the public good.

Regular readers have probably noticed that some of my writing, both here and on social media, has become less tolerant, less willing to accept the premise that the politicians who serve us are simply misguided and open to reasonable argument. That’s total bullshit, and the pols are as self-serving as ever, facts be damned. “Playing nice” only invites the assumption that one can be ignored.

The most recent news, that Premier Wynne has decided that investing in transit should not cost people anything, is only the most ridiculous in a long line of crazy plans for municipal transportation and financing. As reported in The Star:

“I know that people are having a hard time keeping up with the rising cost of living. I hear it from people everywhere I go,” Wynne told reporters Friday at a Richmond Hill bus yard.

“We need to make sure that investing in transit isn’t costing you more money,” the premier said, noting gas taxes will not rise as a result of the change.

Provincial transportation policy for the last decade has focused on voters in the 905, some of whom might actually use transit. Long ago, when “The Big Move” master plan was still a new idea, it was clear, and acknowledged by Metrolinx, that this plan would at best keep congestion from getting any worse than today by diverting most growth onto new transit lines. The Big Problem, however, was the plan’s concentration of capacity on trips bound for Toronto’s core while largely ignoring trips between the outer 416 and within the 905 region and beyond.

Local transit was somebody else’s problem, and only recently has Metrolinx acknowledged that their fully built-out network cannot work without a robust set of local services to ferry people to and from the GO stations. And if you don’t live on a rail corridor? So sad. We might run a bus now and then.

Metrolinx itself is a huge problem. It is a secretive organization meeting only occasionally in public, and then with carefully choreographed sessions in which there is far too little critical discussion of policy options. The organization, especially under the current Minister, seems to exist primarily as a provider of photo ops. The operational side, GO Transit, muddles along providing service within a constained budget, while follies such as the Union Pearson Express and Presto burn through millions with little accountability.

A few years ago, Torontonians might have thought “thank goodness, we survived Rob Ford”, but his political strategies and mindset live on. Promise everything, but expect someone else to pay. Concentrate on keeping property taxes low. Set the suburbs against the old city, the rich against the poor. Play on the politics of “we deserve”.

But John Tory came into office and things did not change much beyond leaving the Press Gallery without their favourite source of civic scandal. Tory governs with Ford’s ghost lurking just over his shoulder, and leaves the civic bureaucracy to find creative ways to stretch artificially constrained revenues.

Tory’s big election promise was “SmartTrack”, an ill-considered scheme to replace every transit improvement in the known universe with one line that would, somehow, solve every transit problem. That’s how it was pitched, along with a transparently unworkable financing scheme that would give con artists a bad name. Bit by bit, SmartTrack dwindled to a set of six new GO stations to be funded by Toronto, and there is no guarantee that these will actually be built.

After he took office, Tory discovered that Ford had cut transit service, and set about repairing the damage. However, the funding to sustain this did not all materialize, and at the current rate of budgetary constraint, the TTC will be back to pre-Tory days in short order.

At the TTC, circumstances have improved somewhat under Andy Byford, but there is still a penchant for only telling “good news” stories, a holdover from the Ford-Stintz era. Despite the cleanup of major projects like the Spadina subway extension and the Yonge-University-Spadina resignalling, major issues remain in the customer service area notably the adequacy and reliability of service, the raison d’être of any transit system. Byford wants to run the “best system in North America” by the end of 2017, but how is that even defined, let alone measured? Will he simply declare victory with riders still waiting in the cold for their buses to arrive?

The TTC, unwilling to rock the boat with calls for added funding, finds ways to trim its budget and give the impression that there is always more to save. They are comparatively silent on how the system might be improved. By implication, what we have is good enough, and any strategy to encourage riders is neither affordable nor even required. Recent political focus is on riders who might not be paying enough, not on services that could benefit everyone.

What is needed?

Above all, Toronto has to separate fact from fiction in its plans for transit and other services. What can the city do, what can it not do, and what choices does it simply avoid? Can we even have a debate about priorities when the cupboard is bare, and too many expensive promises have been made? This will require the “Civic Action” version of John Tory (presuming that was ever anything beyond a convenient shell) – the ability to speak honestly, to avoid the us-against-them rhetoric and to put hard choices about the city’s future before the public.

In the short term, the best we can hope for at Queen’s Park is that there will be no further retrenchment in transit commitments. How this will fare, especially if the Liberals are defeated in 2018, is difficult to say. The Tory caucus is not exactly an urban one dedicated to support of municipal services. The NDP talks a good line, but is often captive to its own fascination with “the middle class” and tax relief. Their platform’s importance lies more in what they might demand or support in a minority government, not as policy for a government-in-waiting.

Does Toronto really want a good transit system? Do we even know what a “good system” would look like? With so many other issues swirling around us, including basic questions of democracy and the future of society, transit advocacy can easily be drowned out among many voices.

From time to time, I am asked “why do you do this”, and my response, especially lately, is prefaced with a sigh and much rolling of the eyes. But a good city is worth fighting for, worth calling for better services from which all citizens will benefit, and worth calling out the charlatans who thwart that goal for their own political benefit. The debates, both here and in other venues, can be bracing, but the result is that everyone gets to hear a variety of opinions even if we don’t all agree.

Thank you all for reading and writing, even those of you who lurk out of sight, and may 2017 see more progress than posturing.