Letter to Stephen Holyday

Last night, February 28, Councillor Holyday convened a meeting to discuss the Bloor Street bike lanes. The discussion revealed a number of things, including some of the illusions cherished by advocates for the car in this city. One thing the meeting made particularly clear was the extent to which transportation has evolved into a political and cultural issue, the way so many issues, in so many people's minds, have fused together into a picture they project, to themselves and others, of who they are. Thirty years ago, the fiercest cycling advocates I knew were ardent conservatives; today, despising bike and cycle lanes has become part of a prepackaged identity labelled "conservative". It doesn't have to be this way.

 In response to my observations at this meeting, I have written an open letter I am sending to Councillor Holyday, my own city councillor, and the mayor of Toronto. You can read it after the jump.

Subways and suburbs

When I read comments posted by defenders of the suburban dream, I usually find some variant on space mentioned. A large back yard, a big house, a quiet street, room to breathe: these define the allure of the suburban experience. And real estate developers have used these talking points to sell suburban tracts since before the explosion of suburbia and the attendant highway building that followed the Second World War.

Subway construction requires dense development and predictable travel patterns. Subways require tens of thousands of workers leaving small houses or apartments, or parking their cars at suburban parking centers, and taking the trains to work in dense commercial or industrial centers. If subways require density, and suburbs require open space, then the suburbs, by their very nature, should not have a subway, right?

Well, at least according to Rob Ford, wrong. I do not know whether or not Mayor Ford wants to build a subway just to keep transit out of the way of private cars, or whether he agrees with Joe Warmington, the Sun columnist who seem to think that building subways to Scarboro shows we consder the people who live there important. Mr. Ford's stated position holds that we can build a subway with private money, and that if the city builds the line, the dense development will magically appear. I have one question for the people who believe this: why do you want dense development appear in a place so many people found attractive precisely because of its open space?

Subways

I usually agree with Royson James, the Toronto Star urban affairs columnist, but I think his column on subways versus surface light rail transit has a logical flaw. He writes that he, unlike Rob Ford, will agree to pay for the subways that mayor wants Toronto to build. He indicates that Mayor Ford thinks the public will not agree to pay for the subways.

I agree with that part. It seems to me that Mr. Ford and his supporters have the approach to subway building that many teenagers have to household budgets: they want subways the way a fifteen year old wants the cool new cell phone. The parents have a credit card, so why can't they have it now? Mr. Royson, by contrast, takes an adult approach: if everyone gets a new phone, we can't afford a sixty inch plasma TV this year, so which do we want most? That puts him well ahead of the simplistic argument that we should have subways simply because people want them, regardless of expense, but I would argue he doesn't go far enough. Unlike families, cities operate in an environment of existential competition. If your son doesn't like his phone or the TV or the car, he can't usually go to live with the family next door. But cities do have to attract, and keep, businesses and the talented work force businesses require. Those businesses and people have alternatives, so the city has to provide good facilities at an acceptable cost. If a city fails at that task, its residents can face a bleak economic decline.

A city council contemplating a major capital investment such as a subway line needs to do more than simply agree to pay for it. They also have to do the work of planning, to make sure the money they spend buys services that enough people will use to justify the expense. Otherwise, the city tax base ends up saddled with debts for unused infrastructure, which means residents and businesses pay more taxes for the services they do use. This in turn creates an incentive for businesses and workers to locate elsewhere, leaving a declining commercial and residential base to carry the debt. This explains why, in urban transportation as most other things, those who fail to plan, plan to fail. Against this hard economic logic, claiming the people want subways, or even that current Toronto residents will agree to pay taxes in order to get subways simply does not suffice.

An important statement

John Tory, the man not running for mayor and currently head of the Toronto City Summit, made an important point: the cities and towns of the greater Toronto area need to think of themselves as part of an interconnected region. That needed saying, and the city councils and officials we elect next November need to act on it, if we hope to prosper in an increasingly competitive world.

Unfortunately, saying it also pointed up one of the current mayor's greatest failings: in 2006, he admitted at a public meeting that he could not get the other governments in the GTA to sit down and work out a transportation policy. A press officer for Mr. Miller tried to address this with a textbook non-denying denial:

"Talk radio hosts are obviously entitled to their opinion."

Well, yes. Actually, you don't need a radio show to have a right to your opinion. But neither the initial comment nor the indignant clarification from the press office involved answered the important question: do the cities and town of the GTA need a regional vision for planning, has the current mayor succeeded in fostering such a vision, and if he has failed, does he plan to take any steps to try and remedy the problem before he leaves office? I don't need a talk radio show to see the importance of regional planning, and if the current mayor has come up short, it makes sense for him to try to fix the problem.

...and illustrating another classic dud argument

Terence Corcoran's piece on George Smitherman and Rocco Rossi also provides the fodder for another in my series on classic dud arguments. Mr Corcoran the proposal by Mr. Rossi to "review" the transit improvements proposed for Toronto and the GTA:

Mr. Rossi wants to reform city financial planning and has called for a full review of the monumental Transit City plans for billion-dollar streetcar runs.

Here Mr. Corcoran provides an excellent example of the fallacy of hidden costs. Just because doing something has a price tag you can see, it does not follow that doing nothing has no cost either. The OECD has estimated that traffic congestion costs the economy of the Toronto area a billion dollars every four months. To focus on the "monumental" cost of building better transit while ignoring the steady hemorrhaging of time, money, resources and quality of life in an unending traffic jam fits the classic phrase "penny wise and pound foolish" perfectly.

Accepting a large cost in opportunity and time to avoid a much smaller cost in actual money: example number two in the series on of a dud arguments.

To my friends at the TTC

I use crosswalks on Jane just above Bloor a lot. On a brief errand down to Bloor one day a few weeks ago, as I pressed the button, a southbound bus slowed quickly to let me cross. I felt the driver had gone beyond the call in showing respect for pedestrian safety, so I went into the station to thank him. His warm response made my day. I give TTC employees respect, and most of them give it back with a bonus. They do a boring but exacting job and do it well. I cannot even begin to compare the level of simple decency most of us get from TTC employees with the rude, incompetent, and sometimes deadly driving that most of encounter in our cars. As a group, the workers of the TTC have nothing to apologize for.

The few times TTC workers have done a bad job in my presence, I have remembered it. I have bought over twelve transit passes since the transferable pass came out, but I remember the one time I went to buy a pass and a collector treated me like a nuisance, rather than a customer, telling me how to count out my bills and throwing back the extra bill I passed him. A tourism consultant once told me that people tell more of their friends about their bad experiences than their good ones. Certainly, I never took a picture of the driver who went out of his way to respect my safety at the Jane Street crosswalk, and the Sun will never publish such a picture. If we don't tell the stories about the good workers at the TTC, we will never get a true picture of the service.

However good the service, it can always stand improvement. That means respecting the customers who pay the costs of the TTC and want service and courtesy. It means that some workers need to improve their skills, or their habits, or both. Apart from anything else, if the minority of workers who deliver bad service clean up their act, the atmosphere at the TTC should improve for the good workers. That makes the recent news, that some workers at the TTC want to force the public to appreciate them by holding a job action, very hard to understand. The union cannot solve the problem. In fact, part of the public irritation, fair or not, with the few bad workers at the TTC stems from the conviction that the union will protect its members no matter how far below the mark they fall. The transit worker's union could not make a worse mistake than to take action against the rider, mostly fellow workers of theirs, who want decent service. Some TTC workers need to change. The service, while excellent, can use improvement. The union can play an important part in that process. If it does not, then it will simply increase the sense of frustration felt by many of us who have witnessed or experienced bouts of bad service.

Pennies from heaven

...if Ottawa feels flush enough to lower the GST, that money should have been handed over to cities.

So said Christopher Hume; based on the context, I can only assume that he meant the federal government ought not to lower taxes, and instead write a big cheque to the governments of the city of Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and perhaps a few other municipalities.

Pennies from heaven, taxes that someone else levies and takes the heat for, make some politicians very happy. The idea of one level of government (the "bad guy") taking the heat for taxes, and then cutting a cheque to the "good guy" level that provides the services also appeals to ideologues and advocates. But the process of justifying taxation by providing services provides one of the few assurances of good government we have. A politician who can shower services on the electorate without specifying the cost will enjoy a spurious popularity and a license to indulge in mismanagement or outright corruption; a politician forced to justify raising taxes will have to ensure the public gets value for its money. Moreover, the process gets the public involved: debates over how to spend our money focus the attention like few other things.

Recently, Hume has written about the high cost of car addiction and the ways it skews our priorities, as well as the reluctance of drivers to pay their share. In this sense, Christopher Hume gets it. So why, in his article calling upon the federal government to fund the cities, does he say of the finance minister: "...in fact potholes are his concern." If we demand that the federal government pay to fix the damage to our roads caused by drivers, then how can we ever expect to change the habits of people in our city? Making it the responsibility of the federal government to pay for fixing potholes sends precisely the wrong message to drivers: it defines their auto habit as something so important that the federal government has a responsibility to pay for it. If we eve hope to reduce automobile use, we have to send the opposite message, and define driving as a private indulgence, for which the individual has the obligation to pay the full cost.

Cities do currently pay the cost for some services that the federal government has an obligation to at least share. These include immigrant services and services for urban First Nations people. However, fixing potholes does not belong on this list. As someone who disagrees with Canada's current government, and will work hard to defeat it in the next election (roll on the day) I hate having to agree with anything the minister of finance has to say, but in this case, has has simply told the truth. Moreover, he has provided us with an opportunity. The prospect of having to raise taxes to cater to the demands of drivers might change the minds of people such as Rob Ford and Case Ootes. Goodness knows, the sneers of progressives haven't affected them.

Short But Ugly...

I witnessed a short but ugly incident on the TTC Monday night, at the start of a night that came with a jolt after seven months of "daylight savings time".

After running an errand in South Parkdale, I got on the eastbound street car at Dufferin and King. Right after we passed Spadina, the driver made a request over the public address for the last passenger to come up to the front and pay the fare. Did the driver mean the person on a cell phone beside me? I knew he didn't mean me; I had boarded several stops back. The driver spoke again, describing the passenger's jacket. He then said: "the fare is $2.75, not 66¢". We sat quietly, unsure of what to do. The driver then announced that the streetcar would not move until the passenger came up and paid his fare. That produced some rumblings of discontent from the rear of the car. Several more passengers boarded, only to find that the driver did not intend to move the car. At least they got out of the rain.

Then a young man pushed brusquely to the front of the streetcar. The passengers in front of me blocked the view of what he said to the driver, but I could hear the exchange. The passenger said he had no more than the money he had put in the box and had explained this to the driver; the driver replied that he hadn't heard him say that. After a couple more exchanges, someone apparently offered to pay the fare. The driver made a remark about a charity case, then demanded the passenger's student card. The argument then escalated, with the young man making increasingly free (though not imaginative) use of profanity. The streetcar stayed put. After a short time, the driver ordered the young man off, and the passenger stormed out, slamming into the front doors along the way.

After a very short pause, the driver then announced that the front doors had jammed open, and the streetcar would not move anytime soon. The car then emptied; some of the passengers who left by the front door expressed sympathy with the driver, while others abused him, the transit system, and the union.

I left with decidedly mixed sympathies. I can understand the position of the TTC; they depend on the fare box. Making fares optional would shut down the system, although, when I got caught in Mississauga at night with my bicycle, a friendly bus driver let me ride with a short fare, even when I offered to put a $5 into the fare box. I sympathize with TTC drivers; they do a necessary but boring job every day, and should not have to worry about abuse. I've also seen TTC employees throw their weight around with people of colour in ways I don't think they would with, say, David Miller.

In the end, I didn't much like the way any of us behaved. I didn't like the way I sat and did nothing, I didn't like the way some of my fellow passengers abused the driver, I didn't like the way the driver's insistence on two dollars and nine cents led to an incident that tied up a Toronto street and three streetcars (two that got stuck behind us), and I certainly didn't like the way one arrogant young man shorted the fare without apology or even an attempt at politeness.