Urban Affairs

by

Mayor Tory Fights Congestion, Maybe

Updated December 8, 2014: This article has been updated with a list of the intersections where traffic signal retiming has been done in 2014 and where it is planned for 2015. See the end of the article.

Original article from December 5, 2014:

Mayor John Tory unveiled a six-point plan to tackle congestion problems in Toronto. The text of his remarks is not yet available on his city web page, but the points were tweeted from his account @johntoryTO:

  1. Strict Enforcement Of “No Stopping” Regulations On Major Roads
  2. Enhance Road Closure Reporting
  3. Launch A Multi-Organizational Traffic Enforcement Team – Deploy 40 additional cameras on arterial roads, Another 80 in 2016
  4. Accelerate The 2015 Traffic Signal Retiming Program From 250 Signals To 350 Signals
  5. Establish More Stringent Criteria & Higher Fees For The Closure Of Lanes And Boulevards By Private Development Projects
  6. Speed up Public Sector Construction Projects By Extending Work Hours And Reducing The Duration Of Construction On Major Roadways.

Mayor Tory will also head up a co-ordination committee to ensure that conflicts between construction projects, service closures (such as subway shutdowns), and major events are avoided.

This all sounds good, in the tub thumping way one might expect of a former radio talk show host for whom the details are always someone else’s problem. What are the likely benefits? Will people actually see an improvement in their travel times?

Noticeable by its absence is any reference to Transit Signal Priority. Reduced congestion will help all road users, including transit, but there are transit-specific improvements that should be addressed.

There are three vital points that must be acknowledged for any plan to address traffic:

  • Congestion is a GTHA-wide issue that extends deeply into both Toronto’s suburbs and into the 905 regions beyond. Tinkering with a few streets downtown will not address the vast majority of the problem, but too much of the discussion seems to focus on this small part of the road network.
  • Congestion does not affect only a few peak hours a day, but a much broader period including weekends. The trucking industry, for example, is an all day operation affected just as much, if not more, by “off-peak” congestion as it is during the official “rush hours”.
  • No congestion-fighting regime is possible without a clear philosophy regarding the use of street space. If every squeaky wheel gets an exception for their business, their attraction, then “congestion fighting” is little more than a quaint slogan.

Toronto must recognize that we cannot “fix” congestion with a few tweaks here, a bit of new technology there. Always there is the sense that we can get “something for nothing”, that our problems will go away without someone making a sacrifice. That’s the sort of dream world that brings us tax-free service improvements and rapid transit construction with mythical pots of other people’s money.

The solutions, such as they may be, to congestion downtown will be very different from those in the suburbs, and a one-size-fits-all approach transplanted between locations will not work.

Continue reading →

by

The Dubious Planning Behind SmartTrack (Part I)

As I reported in a previous article, Mayor Tory has launched a study process for his SmartTrack scheme via Toronto’s Executive Committee.

One intriguing, if not surprising, admission to come out of this process was for Tory to admit that SmartTrack “was not his idea” and was simply a repackaging and rebranding of the provincial RER (Regional Express Rail) scheme. However, during the campaign, SmartTrack was regularly described as something that experts had studied, a solid proposal, not simply a line on a napkin.

The origins of a “Big U” looping from Markham through downtown and out to the northwest predates Tory’s campaign and can be found in three papers:

If we are to understand the claims made for SmartTrack, we need to understand its origins, and the degree to which campaign rhetoric and fantasy may have diverged from the earlier detailed planning. Also, of course, there is a basic question of whether the studies had the same goals for rapid transit network design as those that should inform the planning process in Toronto and the GTHA beyond.

This article reviews the 2011 paper on the changing location of office space in the GTA.

Continue reading →

by

John Tory Launches SmartTrack Study

At the December 5 meeting of Toronto’s Executive Committee, Mayor Tory walked a motion onto the floor to launch a study process for SmartTrack in conjunction with various agencies and consultants. Of particular interest is paragraph 2:

2. City Council authorize the City Manager to retain the following specialized services to support the review of the SmartTrack plan:

a. the University of Toronto to support the planning analysis and required transit modeling;

b. Strategic Regional Research Associates for assessing development scenarios along the SmartTrack alignment; and

c. Third party peer reviewers of all SmartTrack analysis.

Paragraph 2.b refers to an organization, SRRA, which has been involved in proposals that evolved into SmartTrack before. Iain Dobson, a member of the Metrolinx Board, is listed as a co-founder of SRRA in his bio on their website. He is also listed as a member of the Advisory Board to the University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute.

I wrote to Metrolinx asking whether Dobson has a conflict of interest with the consulting work contemplated by Tory’s motion and his position on the board. Here is their reply:

Metrolinx has strong policies guiding Board directors and employees on conflict of interest

• This matter has arisen today and discussions are underway to determine what is the appropriate course of action, after gathering and considering the facts

• In considering this, the most important factor is protecting the public interest

• While a final direction is being determined, the Board director will not be involved in discussions involving Regional Express Rail and SmartTrack

[Email from Anne Marie Aikens, Manager, Media Relations]

Background reports that led to SmartTrack can be found on the Canadian Urban Institute’s website and on the SRRA Research site.

What is striking, in brief, is that SmartTrack arose from a desire to link many potential development sites, some on the fringes of Toronto, while ignoring large spaces in between. Moreover, the claimed ridership is based on a high level of commuter market penetration and a level of service more akin to the core area subway system than to suburban nodes.

I will review these papers in a future article.

by

John Tory Discovers Buses

John Tory’s election campaign had a single focus: his SmartTrack plan for service on GO Transit lines to link Markham, Scarborough, Union Station, the Weston corridor and the Airport. With the election over, Tory has been briefed by senior staff in various agencies including the TTC, and to his credit is now looking beyond SmartTrack at the larger system.

In his State of the City address today (November 27), Tory spoke quite openly about the damage to the transit system through funding cuts imposed during the Ford era in 2011 and 2012. (Full video of Tory’s remarks is available from CP24.)

To his credit, he wants those cuts reversed, subject to the usual caveat of whether Toronto can afford to spend more. That, of course, is as much a question of what Toronto wants to afford as we have seen through both the elimination of the Vehicle Registration Tax and the levying of the Scarborough Subway Tax.

I wrote recently about the crisis in service capacity, but for the benefit of the Mayor Elect and the incoming Council, a refresher course about what might be done with transit service.

Continue reading →

by

Transportation in Toronto: Achievements & Prospects

On November 18, 2014, I spoke as part of a panel on this subject at the University of Toronto. Other speakers were Leslie Woo from Metrolinx and Stephen Buckley from the City of Toronto.

The text linked here was my originally prepared text from which I departed somewhat in spots either due to comments made by other speakers, or time pressures.

UofT_2014.11.18

by

Another Look at A Grand Plan

Warning: This post will be offensive to those with sensitive egos.

In recent months, probably thanks to the election campaign, I have acquired a few “followers” who have enough working brain cells to put together rants on a daily basis. They decry my antipathy to anyone-but-Chow, subways, SmartTrack, and various other schemes claiming that I am eminently unqualified to run this blog. One regular writer even claims that I should “resign” so that some more enlightened soul can be “elected” by the readership to mind the store.

One wonders what part of a personal domain name this person (or persons) does not understand, or the idea that the marketplace will determine whether writings here have credibility and influence.

Those with nothing better to do but criticize almost certainly have not put in the decades of watching, commenting, advocating, consulting and even occasionally getting paid (!!!) for their thoughts on transit. Early in this blog’s history, back in March 2006, that little agency called “Metrolinx” did not yet exist, and in anticipation of its creation, I wrote an article about how the region’s transit should evolve.

I gave credit to other organizations, notably the Toronto Board of Trade, as well as the army of professionals and amateurs with whom I have discussed transit over the years.

The plan included:

  • Much more extensive use of the rail network for improved GO service.
  • Much improved service on the surface bus and streetcar network including an increased bus fleet and purchase of an accessible low-floor streetcar fleet.
  • An Eglinton LRT line including an underground section from Leaside to Keele including service to Pearson Airport.
  • A Don Mills / Waterfront east line [Since 2006, I have come to think that a full subway would be better south of Eglinton as the line would be entirely grade separated anyhow. As for the waterfront, the planned development between Yonge and the Port Lands is now much more extensive and requires far more than a DRL or SmartTrack station to serve the entire site.]
  • Various other LRT lines including one in the Weston corridor using the space that has now been consumed by the UPX trackage.
  • A Yonge subway extension north to Steeles.

… and much more.

The plan isn’t perfect. My opinion of some lines has changed over the years, but the basic premise has not. Toronto must think of transit as a network with many parts, not just a bauble here and there to get someone through an election, or a showpiece for one municipality or transit operator.

Yes, I’m an advocate for LRT, a mode that other cities were building while Toronto wasted four decades on the anything-but-LRT attitude that dates back to Bill Davis. I make no apology for that, and only wish we had built more over the years rather than pursuing pipe-dreams and fighting over the selection of new routes.

By now, we could have had a network of LRT lines plus frequent GO service in two or three corridors serving Scarborough. What we got was the Toonerville Trolley to STC.

Some folks see me as a critic, a nay-sayer who denigrates new plans and opposes “progress” (a word that usually means building what they want). I have seen plans come and go, a lot of false starts, and too many cases where small-scale, short-term thinking wasted opportunities for real progress on transit. Far too many hobby-horses, far too much vote-buying, and far too much fiscal fantasy about something-for-nothing transit systems.

So the next time you feel like leaving a really snotty comment here about how I don’t care about anyone outside of downtown, how I am single-handedly responsible for the decline of civilization as we know it, take a few moments to polish off your resumé. Tell us all what you were doing for the past 40 years, and how carefully you have thought about the transit system. Then start your own website.

by

Why I Voted For Olivia

On the first day of the Advance Poll, I was down at City Hall queued up to cast my vote, and it went to Olivia Chow.

Why Olivia? Just for starters, she is the only candidate talking about the quality of transit service, not simply pie-in-the-sky plans for rapid transit lines we might build some day, if only a whole army of Tooth Fairies descends on Nathan Phillips Square.

Full disclosure: I was asked to advise about better bus service back at the start of the campaign, but what I advocated and what wound up in the platform were quite different. Chow’s platform was rightly criticized as being inadequate to the problem, and this was compounded when the TTC started shooting holes in her proposals. I can just imagine how a Tory or a Ford would have reacted to a city agency undermining their campaigns, but Chow just soldiered on and even bought a chunk of the TTC’s position.

Olivia Chow believes in LRT lines even in the teeth of a brigade of Scarborough politicians who convinced their voters that only subways are good enough, and not just for Scarborough but for all of Toronto. I agree with Olivia, and fully expect that one or two election cycles from now, people will be wondering where all those promised transit improvements are.

Riders will still be out in the cold waiting for a bus that never shows up or a jammed streetcar because a Tory or Ford mayoralty means more of the starvation diet for the TTC, more cutbacks in the name of watching taxpayer dollars. Earth to Mayor’s Office: transit riders pay taxes too, and we also pay a good chunk of the cost to run the TTC.

Olivia Chow also believes in subways, where they are justified, notably on a Relief Line, whatever pseudonym we use to disguise construction south of Bloor Street from the jealous suburbs. Indeed that whole suburbs vs downtown fight is a political creation brewed up not to benefit the city, but to pit factions against each other with the eventual result that nothing gets done.

Olivia isn’t just about transit, although that’s one big plank in her platform. I’m not going to walk through every portfolio here, but the common thread is that Olivia cares about the city, about all of the people who live here, and about making Toronto better for everyone.

The advocates of strategic voting caution that I am wasting my vote, that a true blue anti-Ford vote has to go to John Tory. There are several reasons I won’t go down that path.

First off, lest anyone think I am soft on the Fords, I believe that they are a blight on Toronto that must be expunged. Yes, people voted for Rob and they will vote for Doug, in many cases because they don’t see anything better on the ballot. They’re entitled to their view.

Toronto does not need four more years of a pitched battle among Council factions and the Mayor’s Office. It won’t be smiles all around, but we certainly should not be facing rampant incompetence and bullying in our city leadership, let alone the need for Council to seize control of the Mayor’s powers.

Second, John Tory can be a nice guy, friendly, he chats with lots of people, but he can also be maddeningly thick on basic issues. His classic radio interview starts with a long, error-filled polemic which the hapless guest spends valuable time trying to correct.

On the transit file, he has one answer, SmartTrack, that will solve everything. It doesn’t matter where you live, or what your travel plans might be, SmartTrack is the ticket. Heck, it might even be a solution to world peace. In fact, most of SmartTrack is cribbed from the Metrolinx “RER” plan, and the one significant add-on is a poorly considered, unbuildable fantasy on Eglinton West. For funding, see “Tooth Fairy” above. What has become clear as the campaign wore on is that Tory’s “experts” more or less made up the plan on the back of an envelope, notwithstanding their glossy literature. They don’t have the detailed answers anyone with an $8-billion plan should be more than willing to provide.

Tory’s standard response to criticism is that this is just naysaying, a preference to carp and obstruct rather than believing in Toronto’s future. Well, John, wrapping yourself in the flag is an old trick, but it’s a poor response especially to people like me who want to improve transit plans generally regardless of who is Mayor. If you assume that you are right and everyone else is not just wrong, but can be ignored as disloyal to the cause, well, that’s no way to build a collegial environment at City Hall.

I do not play golf, other than mini-golf in my now-distant youth. It did not qualify as a career-advancing move.

I am a strong supporter of the arts both as an essential part of the city, an industry deserving of support in its own right, and for the benefits arts can bring not just to the big-ticket “high culture” companies, but to neighbourhoods across the city. Even in his arts platform, Tory drags in SmartTrack claiming that resentment for arts spending downtown is caused by the fact people can’t get there as consumers. He is silent on whether SmartTrack will provide better access to golf courses so that the deprived among us can build better business networks.

Tory may talk a good line about communication and co-operation across the political aisle, so to speak, but the ability to compromise or to even consider alternatives during the election is notably absent. If we have a Tory administration, I hope it’s not just Rob Ford policies with Rosedale manners. We need a mayor who really will work with Council, not dictate an agenda that brooks no dissent, criticism, or improvement.

John Tory will probably be Mayor, but I am convinced he has more than enough votes to defeat Doug Ford without my help.

Olivia Chow should have as strong a showing as possible. There’s an outside chance she could win, but placing second would show Toronto that Ford isn’t even good enough to be second choice. She is my candidate, my first choice for Mayor.

by

SmartTrack: That Pesky Curve in Mount Dennis (Updated)

Updated October 17, 2014 at 4:15pm:  Information from Metrolinx about the revised design for the Air Rail Link spur line from the Weston subdivision to Pearson Airport has been added.

John Tory’s SmartTrack proposal has been roundly criticized by various people, including me, on a number of counts. When one looks at the scheme, it is the technical issues — the degree to which SmartTrack will crowd out the Metrolinx RER scheme (or simply take over its function), the question of capacity at Union Station, the route along Eglinton from the Weston rail corridor to the airport. But the biggest challenge is the link from the rail corridor to Eglinton itself.

Let’s get one issue out of the way up front. Writing in the Star on October 6, Eric Miller states:

And it’s interesting to note that very little criticism deals with the basic merit of the proposal as an addition to Toronto’s transit network. The design logic to address major commuting problems is self-evident; analysis to date indicates high ridership and cost-recovery potential that is expected to be confirmed by more detailed post-election studies; and it is modelled on successful international best practice.

Criticisms have, instead, focused on the line’s “constructability” where it meets Eglinton Avenue W. and on Tory’s proposed financing scheme. As already briefly discussed, however, the constructability issue is truly a tempest in a teapot. And with respect to financing I would suggest that all three mayoral candidates and most of the popular press still have this wrong.

In fact, constructability and the technical issues are precisely what could sink this proposal. Dismissing this as a “tempest in a teapot” is a neat dodge, but it is the academic equivalent of “you’re wrong because I say so”. Many who support Tory’s campaign see criticism of SmartTrack as the work of naysayers who, like so many before us, doom Toronto to inaction.

This is tantamount to saying we cannot criticize the plan because doing so is disloyal to the city’s future. Never mind whether the plan is valid, just don’t criticize it.

Miller’s comments in his op-ed piece (linked above) also don’t line up with statements in the “Four Experts” article of October 9 where he and others talk about what SmartTrack might do. Miller is much less in agreement that SmartTrack could achieve what is claimed for it. Should we dismiss his comments as being irrelevant or counterproductive? Of course not.

This article deals with the challenge of getting from the rail corridor to a point under Eglinton Avenue West at Jane Street, the first stop on the journey west to the airport. To put all of this in context, it is vital to look at the details of both the Eglinton Crosstown LRT (including amendments) and at the Metrolinx Georgetown South project in the rail corridor.

Continue reading →

by

Olivia Chow’s Lost Momentum on Transit

That I would prefer Olivia Chow, of the three major candidates, win the Toronto mayoralty is no secret. All the more disappointing that her campaign has aimed low playing to the “no new taxes” mentality of the Ford years rather than showing ambition for what the city could have if only someone had the leadership to actually pay for it.

My comments, as with those on the Tory and Ford programs, are on the Torontoist site.

Updated October 12, 2014 at 2:00 pm:

The Chow campaign objected to an original remark I had made:

… missing from her proposal is the substantial capital funding needed for stopgap repairs to old buses, and to permanently increase capacity by purchasing additional vehicles and adding more garage space. Moreover, Chow’s plan is silent on the streetcar network, where service has not improved much in 20 years.

Details of a capital funding plan were included in an early September announcement about a proposed bump in the Land Transfer Tax. Unfortunately, Chow took the TTC’s August proposals for service improvements uncritically and simply plunked down $184-million that would purchase:

  • The missing half of the funding for McNicoll Garage ($100m).
  • 10 additional streetcars (part of the proposed 60-car add on, $60m).
  • 40 additional buses ($24m).

Most of this money would not in fact allow Chow to provide the service improvements she proposed, but would simply backfill holes in the TTC’s long-range capital plans. 40 buses won’t go very far especially with a peak service of over 1,500, and with a delivery date out  in 2018.

The most disappointing part of this? Chow could have demanded that the TTC be more responsive and show what it could do. It’s hard to imagine a mayor Tory or Ford putting up with a shrug and “we can’t do it” as an answer from staff, especially when alternatives should be on the table at least for discussion.