TTC chair-to-be Josh Colle favours practical rather than sexy service improvements
Second-term Councillor Josh Colle, Mayor John Tory’s pick for TTC chair, wants more service on the street sooner.

TheStar.com
Dec. 2, 2014
Tess Kalinowski

Josh Colle is like most Torontonians. The second-term centrist councillor (Ward 15, Eglinton-Lawrence) has strong opinions about getting the TTC working smarter and faster.

But he says he’s not about to launch another “holy war” by proposing changes to transit plans already on the books — at least not on the day before his appointment to the high-profile TTC chair goes to a council vote expected on Wednesday.

If he gets the job — as new Mayor John Tory’s choice it’s a near certainty — Colle, 41, says he’ll focus on TTC service. For most riders that means less crowding and shorter trips.

He wants to look at creating dedicated bus lanes like Ottawa’s on some of Toronto’s wider roads, so transit vehicles aren’t delayed by traffic.

“If you want quick rapid transit — I know it’s not sexy — but, if you track back to Transit City, a lot of those proposed (LRT) routes would have made more sense as dedicated bus lanes,” said Colle who rides the TTC regularly and grew up navigating the city from the St. Clair West and Eglinton West stations.

On all-door boarding for streetcars and buses: “I would do that yesterday,” he said.

While the TTC waits for the money to hire enforcement officers to police payment on what would essentially become an honour system, Colle says he would use an “education” team and redeploy other staff to ease the transition.

On Presto electronic fare payments, which aren’t due to roll out across the entire TTC for another two or three years: “We really have to pick up the pace,” he said.

“No transit rider cares about which government agency is to blame,” he said, declaring himself among those fed up with the finger-pointing between the province and TTC.

On express buses alternating with all-stop local service on the same busy TTC routes, an idea Colle proposed in March: “I still don’t understand why that couldn’t be done in a matter of weeks.”

He knows, however, that the TTC needs more vehicles to boost its service and is already looking at leasing buses and garage space to make that happen faster.

Asked how he reconciles the TTC’s stated support for a relief subway to take some crowding off the Yonge line with Tory’s SmartTrack plan, Colle says “I’m so past that — the religion around certain lines.

“At this point I love any transit line that can get built. I don’t know when we got to a place where certain lines and certain expansion projects became qualitatively evil or good. We’ve just got to build so, to be honest, they’re both priorities that will probably be set by council.”

Asked why he supported the three-stop Scarborough subway over the seven-stop LRT, Colle says he thinks the replacement for the Scarborough RT was only ever considered as an LRT to facilitate alternative financing. He believes the traditional model where the municipal, provincial and federal governments share the cost, used on the Spadina subway extension to York region, is justified in Scarborough.

As for the subway’s reach: “We always talk about (how) it’s supposed to be a network. I think it does serve many neighbourhoods if you have buses running to subway stations.”

Colle says he may not be as dogmatic about transit technology as some people. “At some point in the city with a certain transit intelligentsia, subways just became bad things . . . I’m agnostic.”

Because the mayor has talked about a fare freeze for 2015, Colle says the TTC will have to live with that but he doesn’t know if it’s realistic in the longer term. It might be time to set a schedule for the next 10 years.

When a reporter points out that the TTC approved regular fare increases a couple of years ago, he admits, as with so many transit issues, politics interfered.