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Is Hume right?

Today's Hume: TTC fiasco a reminder of Toronto's unpaid infrastructure bill: Hume

Toronto, in other words, is a wannabe 21st-century city clumsily grafted onto a mid-20th-century infrastructure. The population has more than doubled and needs have changed, but Toronto lurches along, hobbled by its inability and unwillingness to keep up with itself.
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Essentially I agree with him. Now if he only would shut up about increasing downtown density and height as he does without ever mentioning how it all impacts on transit, sewage, hospitals, emergency services ... Instead it's all about how beautiful this or that glass podium is.
 
Ex-Montreal Girl said:
Today's Hume: TTC fiasco a reminder of Toronto's unpaid infrastructure bill: Hume



Essentially I agree with him. Now if he only would shut up about increasing downtown density and height as he does without ever mentioning how it all impacts on transit, sewage, hospitals, emergency services ... Instead it's all about how beautiful this or that glass podium is.
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Much better than his last rant.

What Toronto needs to do is build. Build and don't stop. We're 40 years behind where we should be. Our lack of infrastructure is the single biggest threat to our future. I don't care how much it costs, just get to building the infrastructure we desperately need.
 
The lack of expansion is a budget issue with the province and their lack of dollars. I think that can be traced to healthcare and it's cannibalization of the percentage of money spent. It's increased rapidly over the last decade, it isn't sustainable and is pushing out other important services.

I know the immediate answer is that Europe has generous healthcare AND awesome transit. They do healthcare much more efficiently though (and have generally higher taxes). We need structural changes and then the province can adequately spend on transit (and other services).

Of course the easier thing to do is just find some new revenue streams, which they're doing now. I don't mean to derail the conversation into a battle over healthcare, just providing an explanation as to why transit isn't being funded adequately.
 
Having not been around then, I find the nostalgic claims that the TTC was some kind of model transit system in the 1970s or whatever very suspicious. I suspect such claims were less the result of rigorous self criticism and more a kind of triumphalism that the TTC avoided the worst outcomes of the de-urbanization and racial segregation trends which most American cities saw during that time.

I doubt very much that the TTC today is really any worse than the TTC was then.

More over, sometimes I do think people have unrealistic expectations of the TTC. In a lot of cases, public transportation is by default somewhat slow. Even incredibly well run systems like that in Tokyo, which is probably the benchmark for most people, average commute times are still hugely long. Given a diffusion of origin-destination pairs, even the most built out networks will tend to result in indirect and circuitous routes full of transfers.

Maybe it's not a solution for all of Toronto, but at least in downtown TO I think active transportation will have to become more prominent. Even ignoring transfers and wait times and access times, the average speed of most streetcar routes is no faster than a leisurely bike ride. According to the TTC the St Clair car, with its ROW, can do a return trip in about 52-56m. That's literally the same speed as bicycling! Even if the Queen and King cars got similar ROWs that suggests those routes will struggle to even match leisurely bicycling in average speed. Once you consider all the other factors, bicycling would be clearly faster.

I feel weird saying that since I never actually use my bike to commute, and am usually suspicious of arguments that Toronto's winter shouldn't deter cycle commuting. Relative to the Big Move however hardly any money gets spent to make bicycling more enjoyable. I realize there are other political complications (taking road space away from cars for bikes), though. Presumably less space would have to be taken from cars for bikes than if the King n Queen cars were to get full ROWs.
 
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I live within short walking distance of a subway station and several bus routes. I hardly ever take the TTC. When it comes down to it, the fact is that Toronto is a geographically vast and largely un-congested city. You know those cool London subway maps you get when you are a tourist? They barely cover an area between Lake Ontario and St. Clair if transposed onto our map.

The TTC is also not necessarily expensive as suggested by some here when you consider that there are people taking 20 km rides on a system for less than 3 dollars in one of the richest countries in the world.

So yes the TTC does kind of suck so I encourage those who want to make the system better make yourselves heard! Personally, I'm not holding my breath and I suspect my millions of neighbours aren't either. We are all slowly and silently shifting our living and working patterns to adapt to the system we have and the demographic pressures that are causing change.
 
TrickyRicky said:
I live within short walking distance of a subway station and several bus routes. I hardly ever take the TTC. When it comes down to it, the fact is that Toronto is a geographically vast and largely un-congested city. You know those cool London subway maps you get when you are a tourist? They barely cover an area between Lake Ontario and St. Clair if transposed onto our map.
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This is so wrong it hurts. I lived in London for five years. I lived in Hampstead, on the edge of travel zone 2 and 3 (out of 6 back then where the Tube went). Most lines make it out to Zones 5-6. The distance from my Tube Station to Trafalgar Square was roughly the distance from Yonge and Eglinton to City Hall. You can see many metro maps to the same scale here: http://fakeisthenewreal.org/subway/

More over, sometimes I do think people have unrealistic expectations of the TTC. In a lot of cases, public transportation is by default somewhat slow. Even incredibly well run systems like that in Tokyo, which is probably the benchmark for most people, average commute times are still hugely long. Given a diffusion of origin-destination pairs, even the most built out networks will tend to result in indirect and circuitous routes full of transfers.
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I have to admit that when I lived in London, my commuting time was about 40 minutes each day. In Toronto, it is between 1hr and 1.5 hours. But, I travelled the same distance in London as I do in Toronto. I have to admit, though, you're right about the transfers. I make the SRT to Subway transfer every day and I think nothing of it because compared to transferring in Green Park or La Sorbonne (in Paris), it's a breeze.
 
I don't think you can compare Europe or Japan with us, given the shorter distances and greater population density there. Plus both evolved differently from us. Both had infrastructure that was wiped out during WW2. Both populations were not car-oriented with expansive suburbs. Both faced higher fuel costs. Both were more walking and/or biking cultures. Oh, and last but not least, both were accustomed to tolls.

Regarding Toronto transit, there are two main issues IMO.

First, the congestion in the core. Putting more streetcars or buses or whatever out there is not going to alleviate the congestion. It will add to it. The trick is to get the cars off the roads so current transit can function more efficiently, streetcars don't bunch up etc. One badly-parked or double-parked car on King or Queen can screw up an entire line if there's no room for the streetcar to pass. It happens after every snowstorm. (And seriously, is this city incapable of clearing snowbanks???)

That said, the downtown relief line would help. It already sort of exists via the 72 bus, which goes from Union St. to Pape St. via Cherry, Commissioners and Carlaw. It's like a big secret that nobody knows about. It should run every 5 minutes if not more frequently.

The second issue is the inefficiency of getting in from the burbs to the core, or from burb to burb. One friend lives in the Beach and works in Scarborough. It takes her, on average, 90 minutes to take transit one way. How is that even possible??? No wonder she drives. There needs to be better bus (or LRT) service across the northern parts of town so people can get from the airport area to Scarborough and that sort of thing without clogging up other parts of the system.

So many obvious fixes to me don't exist. Imagine what a bus from Union St. or the new Cherry Loop up Bayview to Eglinton St. might accomplish. Maybe Leaside folks would be more inclined to leave their cars behind.

Incidentally, I *was* around in the 70s and I remember the electric buses on Bay St. The system was much less taxed then.
 
I'm tired of comparing Toronto to other cities. I don't care how bad or good public transit in other cities is. I only care how bad or good it is here in Toronto. I have to say that for the most part I think it is way behind. It's still (somewhat) clean and safe and if you live along the subway line it can get you downtown or crosstown with usually no problem (outside of rush hour, of course). And the new trains are a great improvement. But, we have an antiquated fare system (we shouldn't STILL have tokens and cash fare and everything should be automated either through Presto or something similar) and the subway doesn't cover the city that it needs to cover (no it doesn't). Blame this on the suburban dream of the post WW2 which didn't see the need to service thouse in the suburbs as they had cars.
 
SgtBullmoose said:
This is so wrong it hurts. I lived in London for five years. I lived in Hampstead, on the edge of travel zone 2 and 3 (out of 6 back then where the Tube went). Most lines make it out to Zones 5-6. The distance from my Tube Station to Trafalgar Square was roughly the distance from Yonge and Eglinton to City Hall. You can see many metro maps to the same scale here: http://fakeisthenewreal.org/subway/
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Thank you for this site! I've been looking for this.
 
TrickyRicky said:
You know those cool London subway maps you get when you are a tourist? They barely cover an area between Lake Ontario and St. Clair if transposed onto our map.
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Erm, yes it does. Plus, they cover more east/west. Plus, they cover areas in-between — something the TTC simply does not.
 
Xray_Crystal_Junkie said:
The lack of expansion is a budget issue with the province and their lack of dollars. I think that can be traced to healthcare and it's cannibalization of the percentage of money spent. It's increased rapidly over the last decade, it isn't sustainable and is pushing out other important services.
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Corporations have received massive tax cuts. Time to raise them again. And do what every sane juridstiction in the world has done, and apply road tolls.

Problem solved.
 
diminutive said:
Having not been around then, I find the nostalgic claims that the TTC was some kind of model transit system in the 1970s or whatever very suspicious. I suspect such claims were less the result of rigorous self criticism and more a kind of triumphalism that the TTC avoided the worst outcomes of the de-urbanization and racial segregation trends which most American cities saw during that time.

I doubt very much that the TTC today is really any worse than the TTC was then.

More over, sometimes I do think people have unrealistic expectations of the TTC. In a lot of cases, public transportation is by default somewhat slow. Even incredibly well run systems like that in Tokyo, which is probably the benchmark for most people, average commute times are still hugely long. Given a diffusion of origin-destination pairs, even the most built out networks will tend to result in indirect and circuitous routes full of transfers.
Click to expand...

Yes. I feel that many people are expecting too much of transit expansion. Of course there are massive improvements that must be made, but unless the TTC becomes the Toronto Teleportation Commission, there is no way that somebody in deep Scarborough is going to get downtown in 30 minutes.
 
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