Public transit won’t get better faster until we can trust politicians with our money

nationalpost.com
July 3, 2015
By Chris Selley

Metro Vancouver’s half-per cent transit tax having been thumpingly rejected in referendum results announced Thursday - 62 per cent said no - many transit-boosters are suggesting a plebiscite was the wrong way to go about it in the first place. You wouldn’t hold a referendum on hospital funding or other social essentials; why hold one on transit?

Others have suggested Vancouverites were simply underinformed. In a statement, the pro-transit group Move GTHA stressed the need for “more public education about the value of transit and active transportation...to secure support for dedicated revenue tools. This has also been the case in many American cities that voted ‘yes’ in...referendums.”

Maybe. But most people know what it’s like to be stuck in traffic, and most people know what it’s like to whiz past or underneath it. Other cities have approved such measures, as Move GTHA noted: in 2008, a supermajority of Los Angeles County voters approved a half-per cent transit tax for 30 years.

And Vancouverites have been pretty clear as to why they were voting no. In February Angus Reid asked for opinions on TransLink, Metro Vancouver’s much-derided regional transit authority: with a range of answers on offer from “very positive” to “very negative, TransLink is very broken and needs a complete overhaul,” 39 per cent chose the latter and only 12 per cent felt positively. Of five potential reasons for voting no, 61 per cent chose “TransLink can’t be trusted with the extra funds.”

That’s sobering news for those of us in Toronto who think the solution to our transit shortage is, basically, to take people’s money and build transit. John Tory largely abandoned that position, which he had espoused at Civic Action, when he threw in his hat for mayor; Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, too, jettisoned her “revenue tools.” And it’s not difficult at all to imagine a similar referendum (in a hypothetical Metro Toronto) coming to grief for the same reasons: go on Twitter whenever the Toronto Transit Commission suffers a serious meltdown and tell me otherwise. It is widely seen (unfairly, in my view) as genetically incompetent, both in day-to-day operations and project management, and the province (much more fairly, in my view) equally so.

I can hear the campaign now: “Can we really trust the government that (insert Liberal mismanagement scandal) to spend billions on transit properly? Can we trust Toronto city council to approve a project and stick with it?” I would have to answer “eek, maybe?” and “definitely not.”

That’s not to say opposition is entirely rational. Toronto wallows in defeatism with the best of them. Dramatic improvements are met less often with applause than with an “it’s about time.” But it must be said, the city is on a roll just now. On a glorious Friday morning I rode a nearly brand-new subway car to a brand-new platform at Union Station, with its strange and rather compelling public art installation. I poked around the shiny and airy new York Street GO concourse, and I hiked up to platform level to take in the magnificent new translucent train shed - a rare case where the real thing actually lives up to the renderings. When Union Station is finished and someone competent is hired to fix the outrageously bad signage - I’ve lived here most of my life and I didn’t know which way was up - it will be a proper gateway to the city.

From Union you can take the new UP Express to the airport - the impossible dream, realized. On Friday I took a brand-new streetcar west along a brand-new Queen’s Quay, hopped off at Harbourfront Centre and watched tourists gape at what over time has become a truly striking waterfront area that perfectly befits Toronto. No, it’s not Grant Park. But we’re not Chicago.

Those great things happened because we paid for them, even if despite ourselves. But if we want more great things to happen quicker, we’re going to need people to trust their money will be used responsibly and competently. Reminding ourselves of how far we’ve come thanks to past investments might help. But much like public transit in the Greater Toronto Area, trust in government is at crisis levels - for some bad reasons, but also for a lot of good ones, ranging all the way from e-Health to the Scarborough subway. I doubt you can bridge one trust gap without bridging the other - and there are no short cuts. Governments simply have to be better.