A
aofe11
Guest
There is a series of articles running over the next few days regarding gridlock in Toronto and how it should be fixed.
www.canada.com/nationalpo...index.html
www.canada.com/nationalpo...index.html
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D
Darkstar416
Guest
The war on public transit continues.
B
bizorky
Guest
Funny, but the first thing that I thought was if this is a National Putz article it will mention privatization as a solution. Sure enough...
Maybe Coyne could take a moment and look at how much government investment is made in transit south of the border. It makes Ontario look positively cheap.
Maybe Coyne could take a moment and look at how much government investment is made in transit south of the border. It makes Ontario look positively cheap.
C
cdl42
Guest
Yeesh, what a re-hash of the same anti-transit arguments we always hear.
Beware simple solutions to complex problems.
Beware simple solutions to complex problems.
W
wyliepoon
Guest
There's a better way to run the TTC
Andrew Coyne
National Post
Monday, October 16, 2006
Traffic congestion costs Toronto an estimated $1.8-billion a year, and a poll of business leaders last week said that fixing it should be the new city council's first priority. In the second of a four-part series exploring the causes and potential solutions, Andrew Coyne argues in favour of fixing public transit by making it private.
The Toronto Transit Commission advertises itself as "The Better Way." Dutiful urbanists that they are, Torontonians are taught to believe this, or certainly to say it. Indeed, a strange cult surrounds the system: There are Web sites devoted to it, a magazine, clubs. One particularly dedicated transit fancier spent the summer photographing every one of the city's 69 subway stations.
Their actions belie them. Transit worship may be at an all-time high, but transit ridership is still below where it was 15 years ago. What no one is allowed to say, but everyone secretly knows, is that riding the TTC is not a terribly pleasant experience: slow, crowded, slow, inconvenient, and did I mention slow? And so anyone who can avoid using the TTC generally does.
For those who see the TTC as the answer to the gridlock that now holds much of Toronto in its grip, this presents a conundrum.
The traditional solution to the problem of how to get more people out of their cars and on to the buses is more subsidy. But you could give the tickets away -- you could pay people to take them --and a great many commuters still wouldn't choose the TTC. Not so long as the private automobile alternative remains as (relatively) fast (Statistics Canada figures show it takes a transit user an average of 41 minutes longer to get to and from work than a car user), pleasant and cheap as it does. And not so long as the TTC remains so institutionally unconcerned with the needs and desires of the travelling public.
Simple arithmetic would dictate that more passengers per vehicle equals fewer vehicles on the road equals more road space per vehicle. But while mass transit is obviously part of the solution, it's not so obvious that mass transit has to mean the TTC, or at any rate not the TTC as it is currently structured. Put it this way: If we were really serious about transit, if it is as vital as we all say it is, if we wanted to make riding the bus such a delightful experience that passengers would give up their beloved cars for it, is this the model we would choose -- a monolithic, state-owned, vaguely Stalinist monopoly? Or if we did, would we let a bunch of politicians run it?
The TTC has many problems. It is notoriously underserviced: just three subway lines, 52 years after the first opened, for a city of 2.4 million people. Where there are surface routes, service is haphazard and brutish, designed more to make life easy for transit employees than the people who use the system. The commission's continuing love affair with the streetcar, decades after most other North American cities abandoned them for the bus, is a mystery, given their obvious limitations: Not only are they slow and ungainly, even by public transit standards, but by taking up so much of the road they slow everyone else down to their pace. To say nothing of their cost, frequent breakdowns, damage to roads, unsightly wires and so on.
But the bulk of the TTC's drawbacks are less owing to particular mistakes of implementation than to its very position as a state monopoly. Though the TTC is not heavily subsidized relative to most other transit systems, it is still expensive: At $300-million annually, its operating subsidy is the second-most expensive item in the city's budget, after the police. (And that's just the explicit, on-budget subsidy -- never mind the exemption from corporate income taxes, or the effects of the city's underwriting of the cost of capital, among the usual peculiarities of public-sector accounting). Strikes, given the double monopoly position its unionized workforce enjoys, are a recurring event -- though, as it has been observed, in Toronto, as in no other city, the traffic generally moves faster during a transit strike.
And of course, there's the political interference. The model of the independent, professionally run Crown corporation, insulated from meddling politicians, is not one with which Toronto's city council seems familiar. The chairman of the TTC is in fact a member of council: since 1998, it has been that most political of politicians, Howard Moscoe. The result: tired of having their decisions overruled, their positions (in labour negotiations, notoriously) undermined, the TTC's past two general managers have both resigned in disgust. Meanwhile, city council has just awarded a $700-million contract for 234 subway cars to Bombardier, without considering other bids, on the novel grounds that this would create jobs 900 miles away in Thunder Bay. Is that really the responsibility of the TTC?
So perhaps the time is ripe to look at alternatives. At a bare minimum, it is remarkable that Toronto has not considered reform along the lines many cities across North America and around the world have adopted, that is of making the city not the provider of transit services, but the purchaser. Instead of one giant public-sector monopoly, routes are put out to competitive tender, on a mix of price and performance criteria. The commission would remain responsible for the overall transit grid, but the operation of the component parts would harness competition and private-sector flexibility in an attempt to find ways to deliver better service at lower cost.
The savings can be impressive. London Transport, for example, the world's largest urban transit system, reduced costs per vehicle kilometre by 51% from 1985, the year Britain launched its ambitious transit reforms, to 2000. Once freed to think outside the TTC box, private entrepreneurs might decide it makes more sense to use nimble minivans on slightly used routes, rather than bone-shaking, half-empty buses. They might rethink the present uniform fare scheme, charging more for longer distances, less for shorter. Or not: The point is to try different approaches and compare the results.
Still, this remains a limited form of competition: The criteria for assessing performance would remain those that occurred to transit planners, rather than passengers, who would remain in the grips of a local monopoly, albeit one that had been competitively awarded. The more full-throated form of competition, as Britain opted for in cities outside London, would allow competing bus services to ply the same routes. The advantage: Entrepreneurs would have even more incentive to dream up new ways of attracting passengers. Perhaps comfier seats? More flexible routes? On-board ice cream vendors?
The disadvantage: It's not as simple as that. The experience in Britain has been decidedly mixed. While cost savings were achieved, these were not always passed on to passengers. Instead, companies have seemed to compete on frequency of service, swooping in at a given stop just ahead of their rivals, or flooding routes with buses to ward off such predation.
Does that make the whole idea misguided? Not necessarily. American economists Daniel Klein, Adrian Moore and Binyam Reja have proposed auctioning "curb rights," granting companies the exclusive right to pick up passengers at a given stop for a given period of time. A company that had invested in attracting passengers to its stops would no longer have to suffer a competitor reaping the rewards.
Whichever model is adopted, the point remains the same: It is competition, not subsidy, that is the way to revitalizing transit. Subsidy, in fact, has the opposite effect. Entrepreneurs will only lie awake at night thinking of how better to serve passengers when their entire livelihoods depend on it. To the extent that they are instead compensated by the state, that incentive is reduced.
In any event, it's unnecessary. Put tolls on the roads, as proposed later in this series, make drivers pay the full cost of their filthy habit, and taking the bus will suddenly look a lot more attractive.
*****
50 cents goes a long way in the 905
Peter Kuitenbrouwer
National Post
Monday, October 16, 2006
Before Grace Sanchez MacCall accepted her job in communications at the Town of Markham, the Toronto resident spent half a day on the telephone figuring out how to get from her home in the Beaches to Markham Town Hall, on Highway 7 East.
Her odyssey, by telecommunications and by transit, reveals much about what it takes to traverse this vast region without a car.
"If I look at it on the map, it's not really that far," she said. "But nobody knew how I could get there."
For those of us accustomed to grabbing the straps of the Toronto Transit Commission's buses and subways, it is easy to scoff at the inadequacies of transit in the 905 region. Yet there is much that the suburban networks can teach the city about public transit.
For one thing, imagine spending an entire day riding transit -- on three systems that span Peel and Halton -- for just 50 cents.
As a TTC snob, it was with low expectations that I caught the 9:30 a.m. GO Train out of Union Station, heading to Bramalea.
When I arrived at the Bramalea GO station, there was a line of 75 students waiting for a bus to York University, and another bus heading to Bramalea Centre.
"How much?" I asked the driver.
"$2.50," he replied. An inspector on the bus clarified: "If you show your GO Train ticket, you can pay 50 cents."
Thus began my 50 cents odyssey.
The bus driver handed me a Brampton Transit transfer plus a colourful map of the system. The buses -- red, white and blue -- are clean, new, quiet and comfortable. They are also fairly full.
Eric, who is a lift-truck driver, was on his way to the hospital. He pointed out another bonus -- Brampton transfers are valid for travel in any direction, plus getting on and off, for two hours. (TTC fares are good for one-way only.)
"You go up to the Beer Store, pick up a case of beer, go home, so it's pretty convenient that way," he said.
The two-hour transfer and an easier, grid-based route system are among the innovations Brampton Transit introduced last year. Brampton added 35 buses and ordered a dozen more, coming in December.
"We need to attract riders before they go out and buy a second car," said Sue Bass, general manager of Brampton Transit.
Ridership surged 25% last year and is already up 12.5% in the first half of this year.
I changed buses a couple of times and explored Brampton's downtown before jumping on another bus that took me to a transit hub at Shopper's World. There I switched to a Mississauga Transit bus, where the driver exchanged my transfer for another, valid for an additional two hours anywhere in the vast sprawl of Mississauga.
But there are drawbacks. Charles Molnar, 40, lives in Brampton and commutes by bus to his job on the night shift at Bosch Tool in Mississauga. Both transit systems shut down before his shift ends at 2 a.m., leaving him with a four-hour walk home.
I changed buses again and arrived on the north side of Square One mall, another designated transit hub. Twenty people stood in line waiting to buy tickets from a single wicket, and only a few of the 22 bus lines serving the mall actually stop near the terminal; the rest pick up passengers at stops scattered along the sidewalks.
Kelly Ordog, who lives in Mississauga and took transit to a doctor's appointment in Brampton the other day, also takes the bus to her job at Burger King.
"They've put more buses on, so it's better. Having a car these days -- gas is so expensive, and if you're a first-time driver, insurance is crazy. My husband needs a car because he works at the airport. I can just take the bus. I've been doing it since I was little."
The bus rattled along to the border of Oakville, where, at another mall, I changed to Oakville Transit.
The bus driver wore a tie and busied himself with a hole punch. The sign behind his seat said, "Passengers are asked to remain seated while coach is in motion." (They'd never have such a sign on a TTC bus: You can never get a seat.)
At 4 p.m. at the Oakville Go station, I caught a train back to Union Station.
Total bus fare: 50 cents.
The next day I checked out the new VIVA bus network, which plies the main routes of York Region.
At 12:15 p.m., on the corner of Major Mackenzie Drive and Yonge Street in Richmond Hill, a gleaming, deep blue bus smoothed to a stop.
A dozen people boarded. One, a woman who spoke little English, attempted to pay on board, but the bus has no fare box: Riders must purchase tickets from machines at each stop.
The bus driver, dressed like a flight attendant in a smart black suit with a blue cravat, bounded off the bus to show the woman how to use the new machine. They both climbed aboard, and the bus purred away.
VIVA is perhaps the region's splashiest foray into transit improvements. The Region of York hired U.S. consultants, ordered new buses from Belgium, painted them blue and set up a network of bus stops, each equipped with machines that spit out tickets.
The buses are comfortable, with huge windows and padded seats. The driver, freed from collecting fares, can move the bus more quickly, and passengers can board through every door.
The region owns the buses but contracts out the job of driving and fixing them.
Passengers seem quite happy.
"This really does save time," said Mary Bastedo, waiting for a bus in Richmond Hill, on her way to study at the University of Toronto. "I've got a car, but I don't use it. I don't like the parking, and I like to do my bit for the environment."
The number of people riding the system has jumped by 10.8%.
"There are very few transit systems in North America that can boast that kind of growth," said Don Gordon, general manager of York Region Transit, who rides VIVA from his home near Markham Town Hall to the regional headquarters.
The last leg of this 905-journey took me on the buses of Durham, just before the transit strike that now paralyzes that system. The strike results from a decision in January, when Oshawa, Whitby, Ajax and Pickering amalgamated their bus systems to form Durham Regional Transit.
"Our residents commute across municipal boundaries," points out Oshawa Mayor John Gray.
It has been a difficult marriage. The problems stem from bunching together three different transit systems into one -- a point driven home just by looking at the drivers, who don't even wear the same uniform.
The amalgamation is a tough sell for Oshawa taxpayers, who paid $5-million for public transit last year and this year, after amalgamation, pay $8.5-million for service that is unchanged or, in some cases, not as good as before.
Oshawa brought the most modern fleet into the merger, said the Mayor.
"Ajax-Pickering had a deplorable fleet. They were all rusty, they would leak when it rains. They were just rolling disasters," Mr. Gray said. "Now we are paying for all the new buses. It's killing us that way."
Even after the changes, the Mayor said his family still needs two cars: "My wife bears the brunt of taking the kids to karate and soccer and swimming, and you can't do that by transit."
Despite the troubles in Durham, I only wish that more of my fellow TTC-riding snobs had the chance to ride the many-hued transit systems of the 905.
They may yet. Last week, Transportation Minister Donna Cansfield announced a $250-million, 10-year contract to Accenture, a global consulting giant, to develop a smart card that would allow passengers to travel anywhere on the network with a single pass.
However, as my adventures show, changing among the systems is the easy part. The money would be perhaps better spent on a call centre to help people navigate across the region by transit -- and on more buses.
Andrew Coyne
National Post
Monday, October 16, 2006
Traffic congestion costs Toronto an estimated $1.8-billion a year, and a poll of business leaders last week said that fixing it should be the new city council's first priority. In the second of a four-part series exploring the causes and potential solutions, Andrew Coyne argues in favour of fixing public transit by making it private.
The Toronto Transit Commission advertises itself as "The Better Way." Dutiful urbanists that they are, Torontonians are taught to believe this, or certainly to say it. Indeed, a strange cult surrounds the system: There are Web sites devoted to it, a magazine, clubs. One particularly dedicated transit fancier spent the summer photographing every one of the city's 69 subway stations.
Their actions belie them. Transit worship may be at an all-time high, but transit ridership is still below where it was 15 years ago. What no one is allowed to say, but everyone secretly knows, is that riding the TTC is not a terribly pleasant experience: slow, crowded, slow, inconvenient, and did I mention slow? And so anyone who can avoid using the TTC generally does.
For those who see the TTC as the answer to the gridlock that now holds much of Toronto in its grip, this presents a conundrum.
The traditional solution to the problem of how to get more people out of their cars and on to the buses is more subsidy. But you could give the tickets away -- you could pay people to take them --and a great many commuters still wouldn't choose the TTC. Not so long as the private automobile alternative remains as (relatively) fast (Statistics Canada figures show it takes a transit user an average of 41 minutes longer to get to and from work than a car user), pleasant and cheap as it does. And not so long as the TTC remains so institutionally unconcerned with the needs and desires of the travelling public.
Simple arithmetic would dictate that more passengers per vehicle equals fewer vehicles on the road equals more road space per vehicle. But while mass transit is obviously part of the solution, it's not so obvious that mass transit has to mean the TTC, or at any rate not the TTC as it is currently structured. Put it this way: If we were really serious about transit, if it is as vital as we all say it is, if we wanted to make riding the bus such a delightful experience that passengers would give up their beloved cars for it, is this the model we would choose -- a monolithic, state-owned, vaguely Stalinist monopoly? Or if we did, would we let a bunch of politicians run it?
The TTC has many problems. It is notoriously underserviced: just three subway lines, 52 years after the first opened, for a city of 2.4 million people. Where there are surface routes, service is haphazard and brutish, designed more to make life easy for transit employees than the people who use the system. The commission's continuing love affair with the streetcar, decades after most other North American cities abandoned them for the bus, is a mystery, given their obvious limitations: Not only are they slow and ungainly, even by public transit standards, but by taking up so much of the road they slow everyone else down to their pace. To say nothing of their cost, frequent breakdowns, damage to roads, unsightly wires and so on.
But the bulk of the TTC's drawbacks are less owing to particular mistakes of implementation than to its very position as a state monopoly. Though the TTC is not heavily subsidized relative to most other transit systems, it is still expensive: At $300-million annually, its operating subsidy is the second-most expensive item in the city's budget, after the police. (And that's just the explicit, on-budget subsidy -- never mind the exemption from corporate income taxes, or the effects of the city's underwriting of the cost of capital, among the usual peculiarities of public-sector accounting). Strikes, given the double monopoly position its unionized workforce enjoys, are a recurring event -- though, as it has been observed, in Toronto, as in no other city, the traffic generally moves faster during a transit strike.
And of course, there's the political interference. The model of the independent, professionally run Crown corporation, insulated from meddling politicians, is not one with which Toronto's city council seems familiar. The chairman of the TTC is in fact a member of council: since 1998, it has been that most political of politicians, Howard Moscoe. The result: tired of having their decisions overruled, their positions (in labour negotiations, notoriously) undermined, the TTC's past two general managers have both resigned in disgust. Meanwhile, city council has just awarded a $700-million contract for 234 subway cars to Bombardier, without considering other bids, on the novel grounds that this would create jobs 900 miles away in Thunder Bay. Is that really the responsibility of the TTC?
So perhaps the time is ripe to look at alternatives. At a bare minimum, it is remarkable that Toronto has not considered reform along the lines many cities across North America and around the world have adopted, that is of making the city not the provider of transit services, but the purchaser. Instead of one giant public-sector monopoly, routes are put out to competitive tender, on a mix of price and performance criteria. The commission would remain responsible for the overall transit grid, but the operation of the component parts would harness competition and private-sector flexibility in an attempt to find ways to deliver better service at lower cost.
The savings can be impressive. London Transport, for example, the world's largest urban transit system, reduced costs per vehicle kilometre by 51% from 1985, the year Britain launched its ambitious transit reforms, to 2000. Once freed to think outside the TTC box, private entrepreneurs might decide it makes more sense to use nimble minivans on slightly used routes, rather than bone-shaking, half-empty buses. They might rethink the present uniform fare scheme, charging more for longer distances, less for shorter. Or not: The point is to try different approaches and compare the results.
Still, this remains a limited form of competition: The criteria for assessing performance would remain those that occurred to transit planners, rather than passengers, who would remain in the grips of a local monopoly, albeit one that had been competitively awarded. The more full-throated form of competition, as Britain opted for in cities outside London, would allow competing bus services to ply the same routes. The advantage: Entrepreneurs would have even more incentive to dream up new ways of attracting passengers. Perhaps comfier seats? More flexible routes? On-board ice cream vendors?
The disadvantage: It's not as simple as that. The experience in Britain has been decidedly mixed. While cost savings were achieved, these were not always passed on to passengers. Instead, companies have seemed to compete on frequency of service, swooping in at a given stop just ahead of their rivals, or flooding routes with buses to ward off such predation.
Does that make the whole idea misguided? Not necessarily. American economists Daniel Klein, Adrian Moore and Binyam Reja have proposed auctioning "curb rights," granting companies the exclusive right to pick up passengers at a given stop for a given period of time. A company that had invested in attracting passengers to its stops would no longer have to suffer a competitor reaping the rewards.
Whichever model is adopted, the point remains the same: It is competition, not subsidy, that is the way to revitalizing transit. Subsidy, in fact, has the opposite effect. Entrepreneurs will only lie awake at night thinking of how better to serve passengers when their entire livelihoods depend on it. To the extent that they are instead compensated by the state, that incentive is reduced.
In any event, it's unnecessary. Put tolls on the roads, as proposed later in this series, make drivers pay the full cost of their filthy habit, and taking the bus will suddenly look a lot more attractive.
*****
50 cents goes a long way in the 905
Peter Kuitenbrouwer
National Post
Monday, October 16, 2006
Before Grace Sanchez MacCall accepted her job in communications at the Town of Markham, the Toronto resident spent half a day on the telephone figuring out how to get from her home in the Beaches to Markham Town Hall, on Highway 7 East.
Her odyssey, by telecommunications and by transit, reveals much about what it takes to traverse this vast region without a car.
"If I look at it on the map, it's not really that far," she said. "But nobody knew how I could get there."
For those of us accustomed to grabbing the straps of the Toronto Transit Commission's buses and subways, it is easy to scoff at the inadequacies of transit in the 905 region. Yet there is much that the suburban networks can teach the city about public transit.
For one thing, imagine spending an entire day riding transit -- on three systems that span Peel and Halton -- for just 50 cents.
As a TTC snob, it was with low expectations that I caught the 9:30 a.m. GO Train out of Union Station, heading to Bramalea.
When I arrived at the Bramalea GO station, there was a line of 75 students waiting for a bus to York University, and another bus heading to Bramalea Centre.
"How much?" I asked the driver.
"$2.50," he replied. An inspector on the bus clarified: "If you show your GO Train ticket, you can pay 50 cents."
Thus began my 50 cents odyssey.
The bus driver handed me a Brampton Transit transfer plus a colourful map of the system. The buses -- red, white and blue -- are clean, new, quiet and comfortable. They are also fairly full.
Eric, who is a lift-truck driver, was on his way to the hospital. He pointed out another bonus -- Brampton transfers are valid for travel in any direction, plus getting on and off, for two hours. (TTC fares are good for one-way only.)
"You go up to the Beer Store, pick up a case of beer, go home, so it's pretty convenient that way," he said.
The two-hour transfer and an easier, grid-based route system are among the innovations Brampton Transit introduced last year. Brampton added 35 buses and ordered a dozen more, coming in December.
"We need to attract riders before they go out and buy a second car," said Sue Bass, general manager of Brampton Transit.
Ridership surged 25% last year and is already up 12.5% in the first half of this year.
I changed buses a couple of times and explored Brampton's downtown before jumping on another bus that took me to a transit hub at Shopper's World. There I switched to a Mississauga Transit bus, where the driver exchanged my transfer for another, valid for an additional two hours anywhere in the vast sprawl of Mississauga.
But there are drawbacks. Charles Molnar, 40, lives in Brampton and commutes by bus to his job on the night shift at Bosch Tool in Mississauga. Both transit systems shut down before his shift ends at 2 a.m., leaving him with a four-hour walk home.
I changed buses again and arrived on the north side of Square One mall, another designated transit hub. Twenty people stood in line waiting to buy tickets from a single wicket, and only a few of the 22 bus lines serving the mall actually stop near the terminal; the rest pick up passengers at stops scattered along the sidewalks.
Kelly Ordog, who lives in Mississauga and took transit to a doctor's appointment in Brampton the other day, also takes the bus to her job at Burger King.
"They've put more buses on, so it's better. Having a car these days -- gas is so expensive, and if you're a first-time driver, insurance is crazy. My husband needs a car because he works at the airport. I can just take the bus. I've been doing it since I was little."
The bus rattled along to the border of Oakville, where, at another mall, I changed to Oakville Transit.
The bus driver wore a tie and busied himself with a hole punch. The sign behind his seat said, "Passengers are asked to remain seated while coach is in motion." (They'd never have such a sign on a TTC bus: You can never get a seat.)
At 4 p.m. at the Oakville Go station, I caught a train back to Union Station.
Total bus fare: 50 cents.
The next day I checked out the new VIVA bus network, which plies the main routes of York Region.
At 12:15 p.m., on the corner of Major Mackenzie Drive and Yonge Street in Richmond Hill, a gleaming, deep blue bus smoothed to a stop.
A dozen people boarded. One, a woman who spoke little English, attempted to pay on board, but the bus has no fare box: Riders must purchase tickets from machines at each stop.
The bus driver, dressed like a flight attendant in a smart black suit with a blue cravat, bounded off the bus to show the woman how to use the new machine. They both climbed aboard, and the bus purred away.
VIVA is perhaps the region's splashiest foray into transit improvements. The Region of York hired U.S. consultants, ordered new buses from Belgium, painted them blue and set up a network of bus stops, each equipped with machines that spit out tickets.
The buses are comfortable, with huge windows and padded seats. The driver, freed from collecting fares, can move the bus more quickly, and passengers can board through every door.
The region owns the buses but contracts out the job of driving and fixing them.
Passengers seem quite happy.
"This really does save time," said Mary Bastedo, waiting for a bus in Richmond Hill, on her way to study at the University of Toronto. "I've got a car, but I don't use it. I don't like the parking, and I like to do my bit for the environment."
The number of people riding the system has jumped by 10.8%.
"There are very few transit systems in North America that can boast that kind of growth," said Don Gordon, general manager of York Region Transit, who rides VIVA from his home near Markham Town Hall to the regional headquarters.
The last leg of this 905-journey took me on the buses of Durham, just before the transit strike that now paralyzes that system. The strike results from a decision in January, when Oshawa, Whitby, Ajax and Pickering amalgamated their bus systems to form Durham Regional Transit.
"Our residents commute across municipal boundaries," points out Oshawa Mayor John Gray.
It has been a difficult marriage. The problems stem from bunching together three different transit systems into one -- a point driven home just by looking at the drivers, who don't even wear the same uniform.
The amalgamation is a tough sell for Oshawa taxpayers, who paid $5-million for public transit last year and this year, after amalgamation, pay $8.5-million for service that is unchanged or, in some cases, not as good as before.
Oshawa brought the most modern fleet into the merger, said the Mayor.
"Ajax-Pickering had a deplorable fleet. They were all rusty, they would leak when it rains. They were just rolling disasters," Mr. Gray said. "Now we are paying for all the new buses. It's killing us that way."
Even after the changes, the Mayor said his family still needs two cars: "My wife bears the brunt of taking the kids to karate and soccer and swimming, and you can't do that by transit."
Despite the troubles in Durham, I only wish that more of my fellow TTC-riding snobs had the chance to ride the many-hued transit systems of the 905.
They may yet. Last week, Transportation Minister Donna Cansfield announced a $250-million, 10-year contract to Accenture, a global consulting giant, to develop a smart card that would allow passengers to travel anywhere on the network with a single pass.
However, as my adventures show, changing among the systems is the easy part. The money would be perhaps better spent on a call centre to help people navigate across the region by transit -- and on more buses.
O
Observer Walt
Guest
I like Kuitenbrouwer's article. He's actually done some research.
His suggestion in the final paragraph of a call centre is a good one. People don't know who to call, especially if they are new to the area. Why not one "1-800" number for transit across the entire GTA, including GO?
His suggestion in the final paragraph of a call centre is a good one. People don't know who to call, especially if they are new to the area. Why not one "1-800" number for transit across the entire GTA, including GO?
D
Darkstar416
Guest
I'm not sure why I bother, but to refute a few of Coyne's comments...
Which is what our highway system is (save the 407), but he doesn't seem to be complaining about that.
Trams are the current darlings of major North American transit systems. Has he not travelled? Moreover, the streetcar's limitations in Toronto aren't because we use that particular technology, but because they are generally in "mixed traffic." Why not call for de-mixing the traffic instead?
With the exception of a few monstrously dense world cities, private transit has never really worked anywhere. He fails to mention this.
Huh? The only traffic I saw moving fast on that infamous May day was bike traffic.
Decent ideas, but not necessarily something that couldn't be achieved with a more creative public system.
I'm glad he realizes that it is also the drivers being subsidized as well, but surely one could also make the point that by making drivers pay their fair share could also provide the resources for a properly financed system in public hands and public control.
W
wyliepoon
Guest
Running behind
Katie Rook
National Post
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Seven years ago, financial analyst Lee DiMambro moved his family from the Whitby area all the way north to Zephyr, believing the Lake Simcoe area would be a great place for his teenage son to grow up.
The 30-minute commute from the Georgina area to his Aurora office was manageable, he said. Until his company moved to Markham.
Mr. DiMambro's time alone each morning in his Honda Civic has since morphed into an 80-minute headache, as he is forced to join thousands of fellow commuters creeping to work, first on narrow local roads and then southbound on Highway 404.
Being caught in traffic jams, he says, is "just a way of life. You get used to it, oblivious to it. It's very stressful, very expensive."
From Zephyr, and many places like it across the GTA, the answer seems obvious: more highways.
''It's not new to anyone who is a motorist out there: congestion exists and congestion is getting worse. Absolutely, we need reinvestment in highways,'' says Canadian Automobile Association spokeswoman Faye Lyons.
The province has committed $726-million this year to repair and expand Southern Ontario's network of hard-used and crowded highways, but that may not be enough to ease traffic congestion in areas where suburban sprawl has spread far faster than spending on roads, overpasses and interchanges.
The provincial government estimates the Greater Golden Horseshoe -- stretching from Fort Erie through the Niagara Peninsula and across to Peterborough -- is expected to grow by 3.7 million people in the next 25 years.
Georgina Mayor Rob Grossi says he expects his York Region town of about 45,000 -- which envelopes smaller towns such as Keswick, Sutton and Pefferlaw -- will accommodate a significant portion of that growth.
He says about 75% of his constituents already work outside the area, and the town has become just another GTA hostage of gridlock.
"The three main roads coming out of Georgina are bumper-to-bumper on a regular morning and a regular afternoon commute and even during the day."
York Region has grown by 350,000 people in the past 10 years, and will continue to grow by 35,000 each year for at least 25 years, he says.
"Unfortunately we don't have [enough investment] by the federal government or the provincial government to provide the infrastructure for that growth," he says. "The bigger picture is for the need for infrastructure throughout all of the Greater Toronto Area."
The government's response to congestion is, in part, outlined in the Southern Ontario Highways Program report, targeting several areas for highway extension and expansion.
Within the next five years Southern Ontario's highway system will grow by 130 kilometres, 64 bridges will be built or repaired and 1,600 kilometres of roadway will be improved, states the document, provided by the Ministry of Transportation (MTO).
Last year, 53 kilometres of highway were built in Ontario. High Occupancy Vehicle lanes were added to Highway 401, Highway 407 in Mississauga and Highway 404 through York Region and into Toronto. Highway 401 through Ajax was also widened.
More than 130,000 vehicles and $600-million worth of goods travel through Ajax daily, the highways program report states. By 2012, those numbers are expected to increase by 30%.
Working in concert with the MTO, the Ministry of Public Infrastructure Renewal recently produced Places To Grow, another report looking at how Ontario will evolve by 2031.
With the addition of about 1.8 million jobs expected in the Greater Golden Horseshoe area, Places To Grow anticipates the construction of at least two new highways, one of which will stem from the GTA to the border.
Brad Graham, assistant deputy infrastructure minister, says the new so-called transportation corridors will be built with a view to move goods more efficiently from the GTA and the Niagara region to the United States.
"They will be designed a little bit differently. For example, so as not to encourage sprawl, they won't be designed with many, many interchanges and off-ramps," he says.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, the federal minister responsible for Toronto and a Whitby MP, has himself suggested a new highway be built north of the Oak Ridges Morraine.
"The growth plan basically establishes that [new highways] are needed but the exact details will be based on more formal and detailed analysis," Mr. Graham says.
"They are more than hypothetical ... the plan does represent the government's intention for those highways, but I think it needs to be put in a broader context as well: the government's vision for the region."
"Underpinning that are a lot of economic assumptions that basically the future prosperity and growth of the Greater Golden Horseshoe is tied to a large extent to trade with the United States."
Getting to the border, however, is a second thought for commuters and truckers who must first navigate GTA traffic.
Retired trucker Peter Turner recalls driving through the GTA as a "nightmare on wheels." After 22 years hauling goods along Ontario highways, Mr. Turner turned his back on the industry, in part, because he could no longer tolerate the arduous trips in and around the country's largest city.
"Driving through the GTA has got to be one of the scariest things to do in a truck," he says.
"Most four-wheelers think of us as just a menace ... but we're trying to get through your city, to deliver."
Many of the goverment's planned GTA highway expansions and extensions do not address bottleneck zones around Toronto that concern truckers.
Having to exit at Dixie Road while westbound on the 401 is extremely difficult, for example, he says, because truckers are forced to cross five lanes of traffic from the express lanes to collectors lanes in about one kilometre.
"That's one of the most treacherous lanes to get off I have ever seen."
The lane changes must be done using only mirrors because the merge occurs on the trucker's right side, he says.
"The 427, northbound? That's just a joke. You have traffic coming off at a high rate of speed. You have off-ramps that are far too sharp. Same thing at the 400 at the basket-weave there, [on the 401 between Keele Street and Highway 400, where the express lanes and collector lanes cross over and under each other]. A lot of trucks dump there. There is absolutely no need for a corner to be that sharp and that aggressive."
Other bottlenecks occur most everywhere highways meet and where lanes narrow, he says.
Adding to a trucker's woes is a lack of courtesy and understanding on the part of drivers that it is very difficult and sometimes impossible to control a 140,000-lb. truck when there is not enough time or room, he says.
Georgina's Mr. Grossi wishes he had those kind of problems. A flawed major highway is still a lot quicker than no highway.
"Did you know that Highway 404 is the only 400-series highway that is currently dead-ended anywhere in the province of Ontario? The other ones all go through," he says.
Plans are underway to extend Highway 404 from Green Lane outside Newmarket to Ravenshoe Road in East Gwillimbury, the highway program report states. The extension is described as a change that "will get travellers to recreational destinations in the area faster."
"Highway 404 should already be in existence, extending into this community," Mr. Grossi says.
Mr. DiMambro is little encouraged by the extension. Every time he drives to work, Mr. DiMambro says he passes hundreds of new homes already springing up in the area. That's not going to ease his commute.
"They're building communities out here like crazy. I don't know if you've been up the 404. but everywhere you look they're tearing up the land and building houses and it gets worse from year to year," he says.
"Most of the people out here have at least two cars. They've all got to get to work somehow."
Mr. DiMambro says he would happily work from home, but he says the only Internet connection he can get is dial-up.
And yet, he's staying
Just 10 minutes from Lake Simcoe, he says, the Georgina-area "fits our lifestyle beautifully.
''I don't even know where my front door key is to the house, we leave the doors open that much. We were looking for it the other week," he says.
''It's like a great big family. It's nice out here. Every time I drive into the city, when I get to Highway 7, you can see the haze of the city. We breath nice fresh air out here.''
Katie Rook
National Post
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Seven years ago, financial analyst Lee DiMambro moved his family from the Whitby area all the way north to Zephyr, believing the Lake Simcoe area would be a great place for his teenage son to grow up.
The 30-minute commute from the Georgina area to his Aurora office was manageable, he said. Until his company moved to Markham.
Mr. DiMambro's time alone each morning in his Honda Civic has since morphed into an 80-minute headache, as he is forced to join thousands of fellow commuters creeping to work, first on narrow local roads and then southbound on Highway 404.
Being caught in traffic jams, he says, is "just a way of life. You get used to it, oblivious to it. It's very stressful, very expensive."
From Zephyr, and many places like it across the GTA, the answer seems obvious: more highways.
''It's not new to anyone who is a motorist out there: congestion exists and congestion is getting worse. Absolutely, we need reinvestment in highways,'' says Canadian Automobile Association spokeswoman Faye Lyons.
The province has committed $726-million this year to repair and expand Southern Ontario's network of hard-used and crowded highways, but that may not be enough to ease traffic congestion in areas where suburban sprawl has spread far faster than spending on roads, overpasses and interchanges.
The provincial government estimates the Greater Golden Horseshoe -- stretching from Fort Erie through the Niagara Peninsula and across to Peterborough -- is expected to grow by 3.7 million people in the next 25 years.
Georgina Mayor Rob Grossi says he expects his York Region town of about 45,000 -- which envelopes smaller towns such as Keswick, Sutton and Pefferlaw -- will accommodate a significant portion of that growth.
He says about 75% of his constituents already work outside the area, and the town has become just another GTA hostage of gridlock.
"The three main roads coming out of Georgina are bumper-to-bumper on a regular morning and a regular afternoon commute and even during the day."
York Region has grown by 350,000 people in the past 10 years, and will continue to grow by 35,000 each year for at least 25 years, he says.
"Unfortunately we don't have [enough investment] by the federal government or the provincial government to provide the infrastructure for that growth," he says. "The bigger picture is for the need for infrastructure throughout all of the Greater Toronto Area."
The government's response to congestion is, in part, outlined in the Southern Ontario Highways Program report, targeting several areas for highway extension and expansion.
Within the next five years Southern Ontario's highway system will grow by 130 kilometres, 64 bridges will be built or repaired and 1,600 kilometres of roadway will be improved, states the document, provided by the Ministry of Transportation (MTO).
Last year, 53 kilometres of highway were built in Ontario. High Occupancy Vehicle lanes were added to Highway 401, Highway 407 in Mississauga and Highway 404 through York Region and into Toronto. Highway 401 through Ajax was also widened.
More than 130,000 vehicles and $600-million worth of goods travel through Ajax daily, the highways program report states. By 2012, those numbers are expected to increase by 30%.
Working in concert with the MTO, the Ministry of Public Infrastructure Renewal recently produced Places To Grow, another report looking at how Ontario will evolve by 2031.
With the addition of about 1.8 million jobs expected in the Greater Golden Horseshoe area, Places To Grow anticipates the construction of at least two new highways, one of which will stem from the GTA to the border.
Brad Graham, assistant deputy infrastructure minister, says the new so-called transportation corridors will be built with a view to move goods more efficiently from the GTA and the Niagara region to the United States.
"They will be designed a little bit differently. For example, so as not to encourage sprawl, they won't be designed with many, many interchanges and off-ramps," he says.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, the federal minister responsible for Toronto and a Whitby MP, has himself suggested a new highway be built north of the Oak Ridges Morraine.
"The growth plan basically establishes that [new highways] are needed but the exact details will be based on more formal and detailed analysis," Mr. Graham says.
"They are more than hypothetical ... the plan does represent the government's intention for those highways, but I think it needs to be put in a broader context as well: the government's vision for the region."
"Underpinning that are a lot of economic assumptions that basically the future prosperity and growth of the Greater Golden Horseshoe is tied to a large extent to trade with the United States."
Getting to the border, however, is a second thought for commuters and truckers who must first navigate GTA traffic.
Retired trucker Peter Turner recalls driving through the GTA as a "nightmare on wheels." After 22 years hauling goods along Ontario highways, Mr. Turner turned his back on the industry, in part, because he could no longer tolerate the arduous trips in and around the country's largest city.
"Driving through the GTA has got to be one of the scariest things to do in a truck," he says.
"Most four-wheelers think of us as just a menace ... but we're trying to get through your city, to deliver."
Many of the goverment's planned GTA highway expansions and extensions do not address bottleneck zones around Toronto that concern truckers.
Having to exit at Dixie Road while westbound on the 401 is extremely difficult, for example, he says, because truckers are forced to cross five lanes of traffic from the express lanes to collectors lanes in about one kilometre.
"That's one of the most treacherous lanes to get off I have ever seen."
The lane changes must be done using only mirrors because the merge occurs on the trucker's right side, he says.
"The 427, northbound? That's just a joke. You have traffic coming off at a high rate of speed. You have off-ramps that are far too sharp. Same thing at the 400 at the basket-weave there, [on the 401 between Keele Street and Highway 400, where the express lanes and collector lanes cross over and under each other]. A lot of trucks dump there. There is absolutely no need for a corner to be that sharp and that aggressive."
Other bottlenecks occur most everywhere highways meet and where lanes narrow, he says.
Adding to a trucker's woes is a lack of courtesy and understanding on the part of drivers that it is very difficult and sometimes impossible to control a 140,000-lb. truck when there is not enough time or room, he says.
Georgina's Mr. Grossi wishes he had those kind of problems. A flawed major highway is still a lot quicker than no highway.
"Did you know that Highway 404 is the only 400-series highway that is currently dead-ended anywhere in the province of Ontario? The other ones all go through," he says.
Plans are underway to extend Highway 404 from Green Lane outside Newmarket to Ravenshoe Road in East Gwillimbury, the highway program report states. The extension is described as a change that "will get travellers to recreational destinations in the area faster."
"Highway 404 should already be in existence, extending into this community," Mr. Grossi says.
Mr. DiMambro is little encouraged by the extension. Every time he drives to work, Mr. DiMambro says he passes hundreds of new homes already springing up in the area. That's not going to ease his commute.
"They're building communities out here like crazy. I don't know if you've been up the 404. but everywhere you look they're tearing up the land and building houses and it gets worse from year to year," he says.
"Most of the people out here have at least two cars. They've all got to get to work somehow."
Mr. DiMambro says he would happily work from home, but he says the only Internet connection he can get is dial-up.
And yet, he's staying
Just 10 minutes from Lake Simcoe, he says, the Georgina-area "fits our lifestyle beautifully.
''I don't even know where my front door key is to the house, we leave the doors open that much. We were looking for it the other week," he says.
''It's like a great big family. It's nice out here. Every time I drive into the city, when I get to Highway 7, you can see the haze of the city. We breath nice fresh air out here.''
A
AlvinofDiaspar
Guest
I think Mr. DiMambro undermined his victim mentality beautifully. It is all the more ironic however that he helped to contribute to the haze of the city.
AoD
S
scarberiankhatru
Guest
"The 30-minute commute from the Georgina area to his Aurora office was manageable, he said. Until his company moved to Markham.
Mr. DiMambro's time alone each morning in his Honda Civic has since morphed into an 80-minute headache"
Someone tell this guy that Warden was paved a few years ago and his commute should only take him 60 minutes on a bad day...Scarborough to Georgina takes a virtually invariable 60 minutes without touching the 404.
Mr. DiMambro's time alone each morning in his Honda Civic has since morphed into an 80-minute headache"
Someone tell this guy that Warden was paved a few years ago and his commute should only take him 60 minutes on a bad day...Scarborough to Georgina takes a virtually invariable 60 minutes without touching the 404.
C
cdl42
Guest
What about the 427? And the 406 (sorta)?
Uhh... no. They were added to Hwy 403.
So, where's the calls for privatising the road system?
B
bizorky
Guest
^Funny how that didn't come up.
Maybe Coyne should remember that private corporations, being so self-interested, can certainly look doctatorial and "Stalanist" in their own right.
Maybe Coyne should remember that private corporations, being so self-interested, can certainly look doctatorial and "Stalanist" in their own right.
B
Bogtrotter
Guest
"The TTC has many problems. It is notoriously underserviced: just three subway lines, 52 years after the first opened, for a city of 2.4 million people."
No kidding it's underserviced by subway. That's the first thing I noticed coming from MTL, which has a more extensive and modern system. Indeed I believe it's the largest totally subsurface metro system in the world. They are adding three new stations in 2007 with ten more stations in the works on two other lines. The TO system direly needs another couple of lines in the core. Although Light rail along certain streetcar routes would be much more economical for our cash-strapped system.
"Where there are surface routes, service is haphazard and brutish, designed more to make life easy for transit employees than the people who use the system."
The streetcar tracks along spadina has alleviated this. What they are doing along St. Clair will help. But I agree Queen St. and Dundas will remain cumbersome in the core for a long time.
No kidding it's underserviced by subway. That's the first thing I noticed coming from MTL, which has a more extensive and modern system. Indeed I believe it's the largest totally subsurface metro system in the world. They are adding three new stations in 2007 with ten more stations in the works on two other lines. The TO system direly needs another couple of lines in the core. Although Light rail along certain streetcar routes would be much more economical for our cash-strapped system.
"Where there are surface routes, service is haphazard and brutish, designed more to make life easy for transit employees than the people who use the system."
The streetcar tracks along spadina has alleviated this. What they are doing along St. Clair will help. But I agree Queen St. and Dundas will remain cumbersome in the core for a long time.
S
Suicidal Gingerbread Man
Guest
^
Montreal's Metro still has less stations than Toronto's. In terms of kilometers of track, I believe the TTC still has more, but Montreal certainly has better coverage.
In Toronto there seems to be the idea that the subway needs to be GO-style commuter rail. That's why dense areas of the city get LRT and fields in Vaughan gets a subway extension.
Montreal's Metro still has less stations than Toronto's. In terms of kilometers of track, I believe the TTC still has more, but Montreal certainly has better coverage.
In Toronto there seems to be the idea that the subway needs to be GO-style commuter rail. That's why dense areas of the city get LRT and fields in Vaughan gets a subway extension.
B
Bogtrotter
Guest
I thought this was pretty cool: www.fakeisthenewreal.org/...ays_3.html
I wonder how accurate it is though, TO's system seems pretty small in area :\
I wonder how accurate it is though, TO's system seems pretty small in area :\