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UK Tories, the BBC and Portland, Oregon

Mike Gordon sent me a link to a recent piece on BBC Newsnight called Where the car is not king.  It has a short print version and a 14-minute video extolling the virtues of transit and urban planning as practiced in Portland, Oregon.

The amazing part about this piece is the “reporter” — Sayeeda Warsi who is the vice-chair of the Conservative Party, those folks who will take over whenever Labour manages to lose an election in the UK.

One intriguing reference that isn’t fully explained deals with “public-private partnerships”.  Over here, the 3P approach usually means that the public pays for an asset, the private sector is subsidised to run it, and they may even get to keep it.  In Portland, the partnership works like this:  the public sector builds the transit infrastructure and expects the private sector to build development in a form that supports a transit-bike-pedestrian-skateboard lifestyle.  The public infrastructure creates the environment in which the private sector can build saleable developments.

The print version of the article is here and you can link from there to the video.  This was posted on August 15.

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Fleet Street Follies

We talk a lot in this town about how progressive and pro transit we are, but there are times I wonder if anyone at City Hall really cares.

The project to rebuilt Fleet Street which was part of the TTC’s planned capital program since last fall has been held off to 2007.  Why?  It seems that Toronto Hydro and the City Works Department have not managed to get their designs and staffing plans in order, and there is no way that the work can be done this year.

Streetcars will continue to plod over some of the worst track I have ever seen in Toronto until, at best, next spring when we may finally see the reconstruction of Fleet Street and its conversion into a transit right-of-way.

This change was so last-minute that the original detailed announcement of the September Schedules (on which I reported in another post) included the Fleet Street project, but the service summary for September shows the service going to the CNE.  If you look closely, you will see a reference to Union Station service on the 511, but this is left over from the original version of the schedules.

The September Service Summary is available on the TTC website here.

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Suddenly Transit’s A Big Issue Again (2)

[This post continues a thread started last week on the re-emergence of transit as a major political issue.  For part 1 of this item, click here.]

What To Do About Sprawl?

The Province of Ontario intends in its Places to Grow report that suburbs will develop in a form that can better sustain public transit and reduce our dependence on the automobile.  This idea is hardly new, and people have been talking about transit-oriented development for decades.  One major problem is that all that talk had no effect on what was actually built. Continue reading →

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Thunder Track and the Wonder of Queen’s Quay

Today’s jaunt to the St. Lawrence Market took me on a small detour to see the revamped Queen’s Quay complete with bicycle lanes, flowers and grass.  There are some great photos by Peter Hud here.

If we believe the prophets of doom who claim to be traffic engineers in these parts, those photos should be full of fire and brimstone as the wrathful traffic gods rain down on the lost roadspace.  At least there should be a lot of cars.  Strangely not.  A few errant tourists managed to drive east along the transit right-of-way while I was there, but otherwise the calm morning was broken only by sounds of people strolling by, bicycles whirring by and, oh yes, streetcars roaring by. Continue reading →

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A Short Trip to Long Branch

A few days ago, I set out to visit friends in darkest Long Branch (for an East Ender, Long Branch is near the edge of the planet).  My destination, roughly, was Lake Shore and 32nd Street.  I had a few choices of how to get there from home base at Broadview Station:

  1. Subway to Kipling, 44 Kipling South to Lake Shore, 501 Queen to 30th Street
  2. Subway to Islington, 110 Islington South (30th Street branch) to Lake Shore
  3. Subway to Dundas West, 504 King to Sunnyside, 501 Queen to 30th Street

Being a streetcar fan, and trusting on the speedy service available on the broad boulevards of Queensway and Lake Shore, I chose option 3. Continue reading →

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Service Changes Coming in September

For September 2006 we will see many service improvements although these fall largely in the off-peak period as the fleet size constrains the TTC’s ability to run more peak service.  Looking through the long list, I noticed that the Service Planning folks have been squeezing every drop they can out of the available budget by, in some cases, only adding a few extra trips here and there rather than a service change for an entire operating period.  Typically, this extends the shoulder of the rush hour rather than, say, improving service all day long.

Some service improvements originally planned for early 2006 but deferred due to budget deliberations are finally in the schedules, while others remain on hold for future implementation.  Next year’s budget brings with it the big jump in the bus fleet and a concurrent need for additional operating subsidy.  We will see whether the Budget Advisory Committee, Council and the Mayor are willing to put their money where most of their mouths are on transit improvements.

In the long section that follows, I do not give the details of the changes (for that, you can look at the TTC’s own site when they are posted), but only a general idea of what is happening.  I have omitted the minutiae such as garage reassignments and operational changes that do not affect headways. Continue reading →