Snow SNAFU reminds us what needs fixing in city’s public transit
Nationalpost.com
March 2, 2016
By Chris Selley
“Service suspended on Line 1 (YU) between Bloor and Osgoode Stns due to power issues,” the TTC tweeted at 5:47 Tuesday morning. “Shuttle buses ordered,” it added. That’s Torontonian patois for “enjoy your walk.” The streetcars were buggered too, naturally: “505 Dundas diverting via Bathurst, College, Gerrard, Broadview.” You’d have been out of your mind to get on that streetcar.
It is good when the Toronto Transit Commission works. It is bad when the TTC does not work. On this, we can all agree. But there is a bright side to occasionally being knocked back into the Stone Age. The chaos reminds us of some basic truths about our situation. In no particular order:
1. Innovation is not the enemy. Uber was charging as much as three times its normal fares Tuesday morning, but the ensuing online outrage seemed more perfunctory than before. An Uber spokesman claims it dispatched 20 per cent more cars than on an average Tuesday.
Is it possible people are finally realizing that having a theoretically unlimited number of drivers ready to give people rides might be a good idea, and not a bad one — especially at moments of peak demand?
Is it possible, then, they might some day come around to further useful adventures in demand-based pricing? Metrolinx is studying peak and off-peak fares. High-occupancy toll lanes are on the way. And the only real way to reduce traffic congestion is to price road usage based on demand - Uber, but for your car.
2. Public transit benefits those who don’t use it. The level of congestion afflicting motorists (and transit-riders) on Toronto streets is supported by the tunnels below. Close the tunnels and the city becomes unnavigable. Dig more tunnels, or run more trains along existing at-grade rail corridors, and the congestion might not get any better, but more and more people will be able to circumvent it. This is what most everyone seems to want.
3. As this particular fiasco demonstrates beautifully, the Yonge subway line needs relief. Shut down half of the downtown loop for four hours and you’re always going to have a nightmare. But at any given rush hour, St. George and Bloor/Yonge stations are just a minor delay away from chaos.
This is not an insurmountable engineering challenge. Tuesday, GO transit kindly agreed to accept TTC fares to Union Station from Kennedy and Danforth stations in the east, and from Kipling and Bloor stations in the west end. The TTC practically begged people to take advantage. In the medium term, maximizing inbound traffic along those rail corridors —as the province plans to do through its regional express rail (RER) project, on which Mayor John Tory based his SmartTrack plan - is something everyone can get behind
In the longer term, the Downtown Relief Line is something we probably shouldn’t be thinking about in the longer term.
4. Meeting Toronto’s transit needs will require a taxpayer investment far beyond anything Tory has proposed, or that city council has been inclined to support, or that Queen’s Park or the feds have committed to. Forget new stuff. In the 2016 budget, TTC staff project $2.7 billion in unsexy unfunded projects piling up over the next decade - things like rehabilitating tunnels, buying new buses and upgrading fire ventilation.
5. The planning and political processes in this city combine to form an unholy mess. It’s not just city councillors mud-wrestling over trains and streetcars. Tuesday the city’s public works committee approved a plan to rebuild the eastern portion of the Gardiner Expressway that is devastatingly obviously the best one on offer: because it runs nearly parallel to the railway lines north of the Keating Channel, is less intrusive and wastes a minimum of valuable real estate. The mystery is why it took so many attempts to get there.
Metrolinx, the ostensibly arm’s-length provincial transportation agency, is reimagining the entire GTA’s transit reality - RER, SmartTrack, fare integration and restructuring. There will be myriad opportunities to screw things up, as Metrolinx seems to have screwed up the Union-Pearson Express. And that’s before the politicians get involved: pointedly, it was Ontario transportation minister Steven Del Duca who announced last week UPX fares would be slashed. (It’s a very short arm.)
Every city has transit fiascos, both occasional and ongoing. Not every city’s residents have such excellent reasons to mistrust the people and the process tasked with making it better, and to hide their wallets. Unless that changes, the shuttle bus is likely to remain an unfortunately integral element of the Torontonian’s commute.
