Elections

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Will The TTC Board Ever Discuss Policy, or, Good News Is Not Enough (Updated)

Updated January 21, 2014 at 2:20 pm:  The description of the loading standards introduced with the Ridership Growth Strategy has been corrected.

The election season is upon us in Toronto, and transit made an early appearance on the campaign with mayoral candidate David Soknacki’s proposal that Toronto revert to the LRT plan for Scarborough.  I am not going to rehash that debate here, but there is a much larger issue at stake.

The Ford/Stintz era at Council and at the TTC has been notable for its absence of substantive debate on options and alternatives for our transit future.  Yes, we have had the subways*3 mantra, the palace coup to establish Karen Stintz and LRT, for a time, as a more progressive outlook on the TTC Board, and finally the Scarborough debate.

But that’s not all there is to talk about on the transit file.  Do we have a regular flow of policy papers at Board meetings to discuss what transit could be, should be?  No.  Ford’s stooges may have been deposed, but the conservative fiscal agenda remains.  Make do with less.  Make sacrifices for the greater good, whatever that may be.  Show how “efficiency” can protect taxpayer dollars even while riders freeze in the cold wondering when their bus will appear.

Every Board meeting starts with a little recitation by the Chair of good news, of stories about how TTC staffers helped people and the good will this brings to the organization.  There is ever so much pride in improved cleanliness and attractiveness of the system – a worthwhile achievement, but one that should become second nature to maintain.  It should also be a “canary in the coal mine”, a simple, obvious example of what happens when we make do with “good enough”, with year-by-year trimming to just get by.

If the bathrooms are filthy, imagine the condition of the trains, buses and streetcars you are riding.  I’m not talking about loose newspapers blowing around, but of basic maintenance.  From our experience in the 1990s, we know how a long slide can take a once-proud, almost cocky system to disaster, and how hard it is to rebuild.

In a previous article, I wrote about the threat to basic system maintenance posed by underfunding of the Capital Budget, an issue that has not received enough public debate.  Part of the problem is that the crucial maintenance work that must occur year over year is treated the same way as new projects.  Maintenance competes with the glamour projects for funding, and may be treated as something to be deferred, something we don’t need yet.  Couple that with starvation of funds for basics like a new and expanded fleet and garage space, and there’s a recipe for a TTC that will decline even while more and more is expected of public transit.

The budget isn’t the only issue that deserves more detailed examination, and many other  policies should be up for debate.  Within a month, the TTC will have a new Chair as Karen Stintz departs for the mayoralty campaign.  Within a year, Toronto should have a new Mayor, one whose view of transit is not framed by the window of his SUV.  At Queen’s Park we may have a Liberal government with a fresh, if shaky, mandate to raise new revenues for transit construction and operation, or we may have a populist alternative with a four-year supply of magic beans.

In the remaining months, the TTC Board has a duty to lay the ground for the governments to come, especially at City Hall.  The 2015 budget debates should be well informed about the options for transit, if only for planning where Toronto will need to spend and what services the TTC will offer in years to come.  Will the TTC rise to this challenge, or sit on its hands with a caretaker Board until the end of the current term?

Here is a selection of the major policy issues we should be hearing about, if only the TTC would engage in actual debate to inform itself, Council, the media and the voters.

  • Fare structure:  What is the appropriate way to charge fares for transit service?  By time, distance, week, month?  How does smart card technology change the way fares are collected and monitored?  What are the implications for regional travel and integration?
  • Service standards:  What loading standards should be used to drive service improvements?  Should the TTC build in elbow room to encourage riding and to reduce delays due to crowding?  Should there be a core network of routes with guaranteed frequent service?
  • Service management:  What goals should the TTC aim for in managing service?  Do the measures that are reported today accurately reflect the quality of service?  Are bad schedules to blame for erratic service, or does this stem from management indifference or from labour practices that work against reliable service?  What are the tradeoffs in the relative priority of transit and other traffic?  What are the budgetary effects of moves to improve service?
  • Budgets and Subsidies:  Both the Operating and Capital Budgets have been cut below the level recommended by TTC management.  These cuts will affect service and maintenance in the short and long term, but there has been no debate about the effect, especially if these are not quickly reversed in a post-Ford environment.  The Capital Budget faces a huge gap between available funding and requirements.  Over ten years, the shortfall is 30% in available financing versus requirements, and this is back-end loaded so that the shortfall rises to 50% in later years.  The proposed level of City subsidy is barely half what would be needed if Queen’s Park returned to its historical 50% capital funding formula.  Hoped-for money from Ottawa is more likely to finance major projects such as new subway lines, not the “base” budget for capital  maintenance.  The budget, especially capital, is not well understood by the TTC Board or Council in part because of the confusing way in which it is presented.  Toronto cannot begin to discuss subsidy policies if those responsible for decisions cannot understand their own budgets.
  • The Waterfront:  While battles rage over subway and LRT proposals for the suburbs, a major new development on the waterfront is starved for transit thanks to cost escalation, tepid interest by the TTC, and the perception that waterfront transit can be left for another time.  The pace of development may be threatened if good transit does not materialize on Queens Quay, and later to the Port Lands, but meanwhile this project sits on the back burner little understood by most members of the TTC Board and Council.
  • Rapid transit plans:  The artificial distinction between GO and the subway (or even higher-end LRT operations such as the proposed Scarborough line) will disappear as GO becomes a frequent all-day operation.  There will be one network regardless of the colours of the trains.  GO service to the outer parts of the 416 is particularly important as an alternative to subway construction serving long-haul trips to downtown.  Subways, LRT and BRT each has its place in the network, but electoral planning must not leave us with fragments of a network rather than an integrated whole.
  • Accessibility:  The need for accessibility extends all the way from the severely disabled who require door-to-door service, through a large and growing population who have some degree of independence, to those whose only problem may be bad knees or a weak heart.  Neither the TTC nor the City has taken the issues of accessibility particularly seriously in recent years.  There may be good words, but the budget and service policies clearly limit the growth of the parallel Wheel Trans system.  Meanwhile, retrofitting the system for full access is delayed thanks to funding limitations at both the City and Queen’s Park.  What we do not know is the true extent of the need for accessibility on the TTC and what this means for service and infrastructure.

Continue reading →

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Who Will Reunite Toronto?

Mayor Rob Ford’s term began with a blowhard’s populist address at the inaugural City Council meeting.  An invited guest, Don Cherry, played to his sports jock patron with references to “left-wing pinkos” and “kooks”.  Clearly from Day 1 bellicose ignorance was to be the hallmark of the Ford administration.

Many of us thought, oh well, it’s just Rob Ford being Rob, although his brother Councillor Doug Ford quickly emerged as even more hot-headed, badly-informed fool.  If only he were just one more Councillor, out in the cold as Rob once was, it wouldn’t matter.  Still, there was hope that Council as a whole would prevail.

That was too much to ask.

The Ford style is to embrace your friends and destroy your enemies, preferably with open contempt.  It is not enough to win, but you must leave your opponents face down in the mud, demoralized, with the sure knowledge that the same or worse will follow in any rematch.

The “pinko kooks” found themselves outside the doors of City Hall, but so did many others, any who dared to disagree with the political aims of the Ford Brothers and their supporters.

Many Councillors must share blame for this.  Moderates who might be expected to take a stance mediating between the factions gave the new Mayor the benefit of the doubt.  Some eventually tired of his follies and embraced a truly independent moderate stance, while others sought favour at court and threw in their lots with the administration.  The vitriol of the Fords began to infect the language of many others who felt emboldened.  Insulting someone is easy when you’ve got two big brothers standing behind you.

To many, the words “pinko kooks” meant “downtown”, the “latte sipping elites” whose influence under former Mayor David Miller would not just be destroyed, but vilified at any opportunity.  Miller enjoyed broad support until the garbage shutdown provided the issue to turn the city against him and all of his policies.  He was portrayed as a downtowner, an enemy of right-thinking people all through “Ford Nation”.  The politics are far more complicated than that, but sound bites rule elections.

Three years in, after an on-again, off-again, on-again flirtation among transit technologies, we come to the Scarborough Subway debate that goes back to Ford’s campaign promise to build subways, not LRT.  True to his word, he killed Transit City on the day he took office, even though he had no authority to do so, and Council meekly stood aside.

Ford’s influence waned for a time, and a faction led by Councillor Karen Stintz engineered a coup to wrest the transit file back to Council’s control re-affirming support for the LRT network.  A year later, the same Councillors claimed that subways were the answer, and one could be built in Scarborough for only a small amount more than the LRT.  Some of that claim was creative accounting, but it set the stage for what would follow.

The recent by-election in Scarborough saw the subway issue turned into blatant pandering, a litmus test of how dedicated a candidate or party might be to Scarborough’s sense of being downtrodden, ignored, short-changed in the municipal parternership.  Scarborough’s mortal enemy, voters were told, lies downtown with those folks who already have their subways.  They want to foist second-class rattle-trap streetcars on the burbs, just like the Scarborough RT, the great-grand-daddy of rattle-traps, was so many years ago.

That’s hogwash, but it shaped the election.  By implication, someone who was pro-subway would be pro lots more to make Scarborough great.

Now we are back to a subway plan with the endorsement of Council by a 24-20 vote.  I could pick a few Councillors whose support might have helped keep the LRT plans alive, but it would have been a close vote either way.  Whoever lost, they would claim that “but for a few” their scheme would have prevailed.  Refighting that vote, if it happens at all, is a battle for another day under a new administration.

Possibly there will be less favourable projections of the subway’s cost that forces a rethink of this project and others in the transit network.  I am not counting on that outcome, and indeed, any decision to shift away from a subway and back to LRT must be based on more than the swing of a few votes on Council.  This cannot be a battle where two armies spend years fighting over a few hundred yards with the front lines never really moving.

The real tragedy in the subway debate was the outright hatred spewed by some members of Council for “downtown”, a block seen as working to undermine the suburban dreams of a Scarborough that would rise to its true place in the GTA.  If a Councillor wants to pitch a subway as an “investment in the future”, that at least is a positive outlook whether it fits with the likely outcome or not.

There is a good argument that “the future” won’t arrive if we do not prepare the ground with municipal investment.  After all, isn’t that what we are doing on the waterfront, that most “downtown” of projects.  There, ironically, all we want is an LRT line but nobody will front the money, less than a fifth the cost of the Scarborough Subway, to build it.

Land use planning is a tricky business.  Sometimes it is a function of who owns property and where, who stands to benefit from a swampland-into-goldmine transformation that generous zoning and heavy public infrastructure investments can bring.  Sometimes it is a statement of civic pride, the idea that former suburbs that were farmland in living memory can become centres in their own right.  They have been waiting a long time.

We need only look to North York Centre, Etobicoke’s Six Points or to Scarborough Town Centre where development, if any, is far less than original hopes.  Meanwhile, “downtown” thrives not because of an evil plot, but because that’s where developers found a market.  Indeed, much of the thriving was under conservative pro-development regimes.  The suburban centres, once the focus of regional planning, may come into their own, but not necessarily in the form expected — symbiotic office and residential clusters with local rather than regional travel demand.

I sat in Council Chamber listening to the debate, and as a “downtowner” heard myself and hundreds of thousands of my fellow citizens derided for being fat and happy and feeding off the contributions of suburban taxpayers who weren’t getting their fair share of the spoils.  The debate included disinformation and outright lies, but the worst was that these were directed at “downtown” as a class, not at advocates of a specific position on the issues.

There were moments when I could happily have sold Scarborough to Durham just to get rid of their politicians, but that would only perpetuate the rift.  There are good people in Scarborough both as voters and as politicians, but on this issue the argument turned very nasty indeed.  Was it really necessary to resort to such tactics?  To invent a polarized city with downtowners hating suburbanites?  That’s not what Toronto is really about, but will this be the 2014 election campaign theme?

Is tearing apart the city for real or invented inequities to be the badge of every politician?  Are a few subway lines the issue which should pit neighbourhoods against each other?  Whatever happened to social issues and services, severe problems all over Toronto, not just in Scarborough or Rexdale or Downsview or downtown?  Will the politicians so eager to promise subways in the future do anything about the quality of bus service today?

The Ford brothers are all about divisions, about heavy-handed, take-no-prisoners politics where winning is all that matters and whatever happens along the way, happens.  I don’t want my city to be collateral damage in the Ford wars.

Where is the will to talk about a united vision of anything more than tax breaks that favour well-off landowners far more than poorer tenants?  Where is the will to unite Toronto in a common purpose beyond hating those who live south of St. Clair?

I want leaders who can win my support with strong, positive arguments, not thugs and demagogues.

I want politicians who can lead all of the city, not just the cherry-picked wards where an isolationist, me-first attitude can lead to election victory.

Where are they?

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Will Scarborough Get A Subway?

May 2013 saw Toronto Council, in a fit of almost unprecedented irresponsibility, reverse its previous support for a Master Agreement with Metrolinx for the construction of four LRT lines.  Instead, Council decided that it preferred that a subway replace the Scarborough RT rather than a new LRT line.

The primary reasons given for this change of heart were:

  • The subway is “only” $500m more expensive than the LRT option.
  • The LRT option would require a four year shutdown of service on the SRT corridor while conversion was underway.
  • The transfer between modes at Kennedy Station is an unpopular factor that would be eliminated with through subway service.
  • Greater future demand is projected for the subway option.

Without rehashing the details at length:

  • The difference in cost to the City of Toronto between the subway and LRT options is now known to be roughly $1b, although the exact components differ depending on the assumptions in the calculation.
  • The shutdown period would be at most three years, although this is still a very substantial service outage.
  • The revised transfer arrangements at Kennedy would place the LRT platform much closer to the subway platform and in a weather protected area.
  • Although subway demand is projected to be higher than for the LRT, the subway will serve a smaller walk-in market and will be more dependent on the bus feeder network.
  • Extension of the subway is highly unlikely.

Political Fallout

Metrolinx is rather perturbed that a sudden change of policy will affect procurements now in progress for the Eglinton-Crosstown project (which includes the SRT to LRT conversion) and the planned carhouse on Sheppard at Conlins Road where cars for the new Scarborough LRT would be based. Metrolinx has asked for clarification of Council’s position by August 2, 2013.

That is one day after the coming by-elections which have thrown any reasoned consideration of the issues out the window. All political parties and Councillors supporting the subway option blatantly pander to Scarborough voters. At Queen’s Park, statements by Metrolinx can be contradicted by the Minister of Transportation, if only by his absence of a definitive position. Vote-counting for both the by-election and the 2014 general election(s) has politicians falling over each other to prove their deep concern for Scarborough’s welfare.

Some of these pols held directly opposite, pro-LRT positions within 2013, but that is of little matter in the bid to give Scarborough only the best possible rapid transit money can buy.

Premier Wynne has been silent and absent from this debate, a marked contrast to her hands-on approach to her “new government” agenda. The opposition parties are no better preferring to bash the Liberal government rather than addressing the fundamental issues of the form, cost and funding of transit expansion.

Continue reading →

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Tim Hudak Has A Plan (Updated)

Updated October 16, 2012 at 8:30 pm:

The Toronto Star reports that Tim Hudak has pledged to redirect all of the money earmarked for a Toronto LRT network to subway construction if he is elected Premier.  This is a truly bizarre stance for someone who claims to be trying to save Ontario money when we consider that almost none of the pledged $8-billion plus has actually been spent or committed, and this is all net new money, new borrowing Ontario will have to undertake.

Hudak was playing to his audience of Ford-friendly councillors who do not have control of Council on the transit file, but who seem to be attempting an end run around Council by having Queen’s Park support his position unilaterally.  Anyone who thinks they will get a full-blown Eglinton subway, and a Sheppard line (STC to Downsview) and a BD extension to the Scarborough Town Centre for these funds is dreaming.  Sadly, however, Toronto has a bad habit of wanting more than it can afford especially when someone else will foot the bill.

If I try to put myself in a conservative mindset (and that’s with a small “c”), I would be asking how much of that $8b actually needs to be spent at all, or spent on transit rather than some other portfolio.  That would be a common sense thing to do, the kind of approach we might expect from Mike Harris.  Alas, “common sense” also includes buying off local politicians by keeping their pet subway projects alive.

But no, Tim Hudak wants to spend $8b he doesn’t have on overbuilding a partial subway network apparently because he thinks this will play well to Ford’s base.  He might want to think about the uproar over paltry hundreds of millions wasted on shifting power plants out of Liberal ridings and consider whether the lure of the megaprojects has clouded his vision.

Of course, all this depends on “affordability” which is tied to the end of the provincial deficit, and so Hudak will likely never have to borrow that $8b whatever he might spend it on.  All he will achieve is even more delay in building any transit for Toronto.

Thanks to the Liberals’ tinkering with project schedules and love for P3 implementation, little work will actually be tendered by the time the government falls sometime in 2013.  Cancelling the Finch and Sheppard LRT lines will be child’s play, and the SRT upgrade will probably morph into an unbuilt subway while the SRT lies at death’s door.

Toronto Council needs to wake up and remind Mr. Hudak that the Mayor does not speak for the City.  Does Hudak even care, or is he just giving his pal a chance to say “screw you” to his opponents?

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Three Platforms, Little Promise (Update 4)

Updated September 30, 2011 at 5:40pm:  Urban Toronto’s interview with Conservative transportation critic Frank Klees has now been posted.

Updated September 29, 2011 at 2:35pm:  Urban Toronto’s interview with NDP transportation critic Cheri DiNovo has now been posted.

Updated September 28, 2011 at 12:00nn: Urban Toronto will be posting interviews with the three parties about their transportation platforms.  The interview with Liberal Kathleen Wynne is now online.  I will link to the others as they appear.

The NDP has announced that they would commit to electrifying the Air Rail Link from opening day rather than implementing it as a diesel operation and converting later.  This is an ambitious plan, but it has the advantage of forcing GO Transit’s hand.  We hear a lot from Metrolinx about “if” they will electrify, but “when” is a target somewhere in the mists of the future.

Updated September 20, 2011 at 10:45pm:  The calculation of the effect of the NDP proposal has been revised to take into account additional revenue from new transit riding, presuming that this actually materializes in the face of constraints on service.

The original post from September 11 follows below.

Election time in Ontario brings out a fresh batch of promises from political parties, promises they hope will lure our support on voting day, promises that will inevitably be broken no matter who is elected.

Transportation is not at the top of anyone’s priority list in an era of bad economies.  The big ticket items (both for votes and for dollars) are health care, education and jobs.  Transit gets the leftovers if it is mentioned at all.  For many ridings, transit isn’t even an issue, if transit has any presence.

What would the three major parties bring us after October 6?

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How Essential is the TTC?

In the past week, the TTC board and City Council have voted to ask the Ontario government to make the TTC an “essential service”.  During the debate, this action was opposed by both the TTC’s management and union on the grounds that this will only complicate labour negotiations.  Issues will go to arbitration that might otherwise be bargained between the parties, and costs will increase through the typically higher wage settlements granted to workers who do not have the right to strike.

Those who favoured essential service status argued that this is, de facto, the way things work anyhow.  When a transit strike occurs, it takes a few days, but the machinery of back-to-work legislation doesn’t take long to restore service.  Why, then, endure the upheaval of a short work stoppage if legislated arbitration will be the result?

This is an attractive argument, except when one looks at the context.  Toronto Council and the Mayor’s office has changed from the most pro-labour group any union could expect to see to an administration that makes little secret of its will to reduce the influence and effect of organized labour in Toronto.  Got a problem with garbage workers?  Privatize the service.  Got a problem with transit workers?  Make them “essential”.

Such actions may satisfy the urge to show the unions who is boss at City Hall, but they may not be the best policy for the city.

There is no question that the civic workers’ strike of 2009 was a turning point in Toronto politics.  Not only was it a lengthy strike, but one which saw contentious relations between union members and the very people — the voters — those members needed to gain political support for their position.  They failed miserably.  Much was written about who “won” the strike, and the union managed to convince everyone that they came out on top even though they conceded on the key issue of future sick benefit payouts.  The problem, at the end, was that voters endured a strike that seemed to have solved little (although the outgoing administration and city finance officials will tell you differently), and the voters were fed up.

Stir into this the wide perception that TTC workers are at odds with the people they serve.  The “sleeping collector” front page [RIP] was not the Toronto Sun’s finest moment, but the photo and the anti-union sentiment it provoked cut right across the city.  Relations between TTC staff and riders took on an “us vs them” feel that has reduced somewhat, but they remain less than ideal.  Some operators, a few, really are jerks.  Stories of buses held hostage while an operator claims harassment by a passenger still crop up.

Service on the street isn’t what it might be.  We can always use more buses and streetcars, but there are enough cases of operators fouling up service that this minority can easily be blamed for many service problems.

All that said, making the TTC an “essential service” won’t improve manners among the rotten apples, and won’t make the Queen car or the Dufferin bus run on time.  That takes an organizational will to provide service that’s as good as possible rather than always blaming problems on someone or something else.

The TTC and its new Chair, Councillor Karen Stintz, hopes to make Customer Service a top priority in the coming term.  The TTC must regard its customers as vital, its raison-d’être, not as pesky travellers who need to be taught how to behave properly on transit vehicles.  This is a question of attitude, not of labour negotiations.  Indeed, the organizational culture isn’t only on one side of the bargaining table.

Finally, the problem will land back in Council’s lap with the inevitable call for better transit funding, if only to keep up with inflation, system growth and the inevitable wage increases arbitration will bring.  How “essential” will transit be then?

The opportunity for a vindictive attack on transit workers and labour relations was probably the most “essential” part of this whole affair.  The new regime had a chance for chest-beating and a quick win that will probably do little, on balance, to improve transit.

In coming months, we will hear budget debates at the TTC and at Council.  Those who worship the holy grail of tax cuts will give long speeches about efficiency and belt-tightening, about how riders will have to make do with less service and higher fares, about how “the taxpayers” (as if they are not also transit users themselves) cannot be expected to bear a greater burden.

If transit really is essential to the economic health of Toronto, then Council must be prepared to spend and spend generously on this service as an investment in the city’s future.  We will see just how “essential” transit is to our new Council when the bills come due.

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Apologize, Now!

In a piece of political theatre utterly unworthy of Toronto, Mayor Elect Rob Ford invited Don Cherry, a loudmouth sports celebrity who is paid a small fortune to pontificate about hockey, to address the inaugural meeting of Council today.  Cherry proceeded to insult over half the population of Toronto, those who didn’t vote for Ford, those “left-wing kooks” and “pinkos”.

If I or any member of the public, let alone a member of Council, had made remarks like that, they would have been summarily silenced by the chair and possibly thrown out of the room.  This bozo was there as the Mayor’s guest, telling it like it is.

Mayor Ford allowed the important ceremony of his investment in office to be cheapened into a political slam against all those folks, the downtowners, the latté-sippers, the people who like streetcars, and who knows how many other groups who have yet to learn just how small-minded our Mayor really is.

The words may have been Don Cherry’s, but they were said with Mayor Ford’s blessing.

Cherry is an asshole who has no place in Council Chamber, a clown who cannot understand the difference between the entertainment of a break in a hockey game and the serious business of Canada’s largest municipal government.  He is no doubt thrilled to death with the exposure.

The Mayor has a duty to all of the people, and to the Council itself.  He ran on a campaign of respect for taxpayers.  That doesn’t mean just the ones who voted for him, but all of us.  I shouldn’t have to produce a photocopy of my ballot to get attention at Rob Ford’s City Hall.

The institution of Council has already been sideswiped by Ford’s one-man show on municipal policy, the attitude that his “mandate”, all 47% of of it with a 53% voter turnout, gives him the right to rule by edict, not by agreement.  Now, by inviting Cherry to speak and failing to censure what was said, Ford has insulted all of Council and the voters — all of them.

Mayor Ford:  Prove to us that you’re not the boneheaded idiot 53% of Toronto thought you would be when they voted against you.  Apologize, unreservedly, now.

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Rejigging Transit City

The entire purpose of this post is to hold comments dealing with possible alternate transit plans that were originally left in the thread “Why I’m Voting For George”.  That thread is becoming polluted with issues that are far from the mayoral campaign, and I will move all related comments to this new stub.

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Why I’m Voting For George

On September 25, 2009, David Miller announced that he would not seek a third term in office leaving many, including me, in a state of shock and mourning for the incomplete work of his Mayoralty.

TTC Chair Adam Giambrone picked up the torch, but his campaign flickered out a few months later thanks to a personal scandal.  At issue was not his love life, but how he handled the revelations.  His apparent treatment of his public partner as an election prop raised serious questions about integrity and trust.  The final blow was his incomplete withdrawal speech where page two, the vital end of the statement, had to be read by his aide Kevin Beaulieu.

Enter Joe Pantalone, Deputy Mayor and 30-year Council veteran, as the man who would carry on the Miller legacy.  More about Joe later.

Miller’s departure opened the race to many hopefuls who wouldn’t run against “his blondness”, but were happy to contest an election against others.  Fairly quickly, the frontrunners emerged.

Continue reading →

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Vital Signs 2010

Today the Toronto Community Foundation released its “Vital Signs” report for 2010.

The report reviews many aspects of Toronto’s economy using that word broadly — hard services like transportation, the benefits of environmental and cultural initiatives, the challenges faced by a community diverse in origins and income.  This report will be the framework for a Mayoral candidates’ debate tonight (October 5) at the Glenn Gould Studio in the CBC Broadcasting Centre on Front Street.  This will go live-to-air on Radio 1 at 7:30 pm.

The debate will have three major themes: incorporating newcomers to the city, a vision for transit and the need for a Mayor with a global view.

Vital Signs includes observations about transit and transportation:

  • Weekday vehicle traffic entering Toronto has grown by 56% from 1985 to 2006.  This is measured at the city boundary (the outer edge of the 416).  However, from similar sources we know that there has been almost no change in the number of vehicles entering the core area.  All of the growth is in the suburbs where land use favours car trips and transit has not kept up with the growth in demand.  This is precisely the area where a substantial number of lower-paid jobs are located and where poorer families live.
  • Toronto “ranks last” in congestion with the longest average commute time of major cities.  This statement has been challenged before on the grounds that the methodology and information are inconsistent from city to city, but without question Toronto’s sprawl and low transit share (on a regional level) are major problems.
  • Although several revenue sources have been proposed to generate the billions of dollars needed annually to construct and operate an extensive transit network, the commitment from Queen’s Park is lukewarm.  “… the current level of funding requires postponing (perhaps indefinitely) a planned 22.5 km of track and 25 stations that would serve some of Toronto’s poorest neighbourhoods, and delays construction of four other major projects by several years.”
  • Transit fares are very high in Toronto relative to other cities because of the comparatively low rate of subsidy.
  • Growth in the transit system has been almost nil while population and potential demand for transit soared.

Vital Signs contains much other information reported previously, but consolidated here in one document.  Whether our mayors-to-be will address the information, or simply trot out their tired campaign speeches remains to be seen.