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To Toll or Not To Toll

Today’s Metro Morning included a discussion of road tolls as a way to fund public transit.  Let’s put this in perspective.

The Gardiner Expressway report talks about a toll equivalent to a transit fare, and it would generate $130-million annually.  What can we get for $130-million?

  • Over 150 new buses per year, or
  • 15 to 20 percent improvement in TTC service, or
  • A 3 year project to build all of the eastern waterfront transit improvements, or
  • A 10 year project to rebuild and expand Scarborough’s transit network, or
  • A 20 year project to build the Spadina Subway to Vaughan

There is an unfortunate tendency to talk about funding sources such as tolls without putting them in context.  We know that the TTC’s own Capital Budget projections require about $1-billion annually for the next 10 years.  This includes about $3-billion worth of subway construction.

We keep talking about better transit, but we need to be honest about the amount of money involved.  $130-million a year is small change beside the Board of Trade’s estimate that congestion costs the GTA $1.8-billion.  Tolls might raise some money, but they are not going to solve all of our funding problems by a long shot, especially if we add major road projects like the Gardiner to our project list.

Any government thinking of funding transit has to face up to one basic fact:  tax revenue (whatever you call it) has to go up.  The only question is which pocket you pick.

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Toronto International Film Festival Reviews — Part 4 of 5

This installment contains reviews of:

  • Dixie Chicks — Shut Up and Sing
  • My Best Friend / Mon Meilleur Ami
  • Fay Grim
  • Grbavica
  • This Is England
  • Zwartboek / Black Book
  • Snow Cake

As the Festival wears on,  I sometimes run out of steam (only 3 films on Thursday), and there was always the fear that the best of the Festival was behind me.  No chance.  There are some excellent films in this group. Continue reading →

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What’s Up On St. Clair? (With A Glance at Spadina)

Today’s Star has an article about the ongoing woes of construction activity on St. Clair.  I will leave you to read the text yourself, but there are a few important points that deserve comment.

The intention of the right-of-way is not to save time, it is to make the service reliable.

Well, yes, but saving time wouldn’t hurt either.  Indeed, if the service is reliable, then people would not have interminable waits for a car that eventually shows up as a pack.  This will probably save more time than anything else. Continue reading →

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Margaret Wente Rides the Rocket (Updated)

Today’s Globe and Mail features an article, in the Toronto section, about Margaret Wente’s week riding the TTC.  Wente, for those of you who don’t follow that paper, has written rhapsodies to her SUV, to the joy of driving the most environmentally unfriendly car in the city, rather than taking the TTC to work at the Globe.

For one week, she forsook her car and used the TTC (well, almost a week) and discovered how the other half lives.  In the process she made several observations that won’t be news to regular users of the system, but might actually embarrass the folks who run and fund the system for one or two moments. Continue reading →

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Do We Ever Count Passengers? [Updated]

For 2006, the TTC did not produce a Service Plan because, with the shortage of buses and operators and budget, there was not much point.  Many services are awaiting implementation, but the message is “come back next year”.

One fascinating part of the annual plan was the statistics for surface routes.  I have tracked these for about 20 years, and it’s fascinating to see how often (or not) the TTC actually updates the information for each route. Continue reading →

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We Get Comments

Every so often, I get an email that says “where did my comment go” or something vaguely like that.  A few words of explanation:

All comments are moderated — nothing is visible online until I decide it is, and I almost always edit the comments a bit before posting them.

When you submit a comment, the software running this site “knows” that it’s yours and the comment is visible in your current session.  However, when you come back later (especially if you’re not on the same computer), the system has no way of knowing who you are and your comment vanishes.  You are a new user to the system, and so the comment is hidden.

There is a continuous problem with spam (yes, spammers know how to post to Blogs) and I don’t want any of that showing up online.  Some is trapped and purged, but some evades the filters and I have to delete it manually.

Some comments are, shall we say, a tad incendiary and suggest that the parentage of various politicos may be suspect (those are the mild ones) or even that they might have just a tiny conflict of interest.  While I might agree, I want this site to deal with transit, not with political mudslinging, and I also don’t want the world to think I concur with some of the sleazier comments by posting them.  Anyone who runs a Blog goes through the same thing, and some people turn comments off for just that reason (as I did when this site was getting started).

Some times, I hang onto comments for a while letting a group of related topics build up if they are worth a post of their own.  Some times I just tire of the same arguments back and forth.  It is my site, after all, and if someone wants to advocate some other grand scheme for transit, they can set up shop too.  Meanwhile, some readers have started to comment on each other’s hobby-horses, and that’s a good sign that it’s time to change the subject.

Thanks to everyone who does write.  I really do read them all, and post most of them even if I don’t always agree.  The debates about transit issues are complex and it’s worth hearing different points of view.

Now I’m going back to working on Film Festival reviews.

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All Night Subway Service?

The Transit Commissioners have forwarded a letter from another of Toronto’s long-time transit advocates, Philip Webb, to their staff for study.  The nub of Webb’s proposal is that the TTC should stop trying to conduct maintenance a few hours at a time in the middle of the night and simply close down sections of the subway for a day or two on weekends when necessary.  Continue reading →