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A 10-point transit blueprint
Sep. 10, 2006. 07:27 AM
KENNETH KIDD
It certainly didn't feel much like a party.
There in the middle of a meeting room at City Hall sat Vince Rodo, budget chief of the Toronto Transit Commission, surrounded by the horseshoe of city councillors who oversee the transit system, convened for their regular, late-August meeting.
Rodo had a slide show. It was all about rebuilding and replacing the TTC's aging fleet of buses, streetcars and subways, about the deferral of other initiatives. There were numbers on the growth in ridership, expected to hit 442 million trips this year, and the costs of repairing tunnels and bridges.
By the time he got to slide number 13, there was another figure: $1.2 billion. For the sake of public decency, it came under the heading "revised problem." It is, in fact, the amount by which the TTC's base capital spending will exceed known sources of funding between now and 2010: $1.2 billion.
The councillors duly made speeches, expressed alarm and, in the end, they voted to have chair Howard Moscoe write a letter to Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty outlining their concerns.
Two days before the TTC was to mark its 85th anniversary, and the councillors were sending a letter. It is to weep.
Back when Toronto was still "the city that worked," its transit system was the envy of North America, a lesson in how transit ought to be done. No more.
As the city's chief planner, Ted Tyndorf, told councillors: "There are any number of cities around the world that have been able to achieve far more than Toronto." He talked of Melbourne, Barcelona, Madrid, London, New York and Chicago. "Even L.A. is building a rapid-transit line from somewhere to nowhere," he added, to more laughter than was seemly in hindsight.
Toronto faces no slight problem. Up to 150,000 people are now moving into the GTA every year. Imagine the congestion if they all start driving cars to work.
The city's official plan, which dates from 2002, was supposed to be about clustering new construction — the office towers and condos — where transit was a viable option, along the subway lines and major avenues.
That plan assumed Toronto's population would rise from 2.5 million to about 3 million by the year 2021. But all you need to do is survey the number of construction cranes to see the real-world problem with that timetable. Tyndorf reckons the city has already achieved half of the population gain the official plan anticipated. And there's no realistic way of turning off the tap.
"We have to plan for that future vision," Tyndorf told the councillors. "Going back to the 1940s, if the city's fathers and mothers didn't conceive of the Yonge Street subway, what would our downtown look like today? It would be a totally different city that we probably wouldn't like very much."
It's just that, this time, we'll be playing catch-up, and on a staggering scale. "We've probably got a need for $50 to $60 billion in transportation infrastructure in the GTA," says Paul Bedford, the city's former chief planner and architect of the official plan. "The last 20, 25 years have been wasted. Certainly in the city, we've hardly built anything and not much in the 905 except the occasional GO improvement.
"When this region does hit the 10 million (population) mark, which it will, all you've got to do is look around the world and the only reason 10-million regions work is because of transit. It's a critical issue. If you don't have transit, you're really in trouble."
Are we serious about transit? By some estimates, gridlock in the GTA is already costing the regional economy about $1.8 billion a year. It will only get worse.
If we really hope to avoid that fate and become once again a beacon of how public transit ought to operate, at least 10 things need to happen:
1. Be explicit:
Transit over cars
Even if you wanted to build more roads, there aren't a lot of places to put them unless you start razing whole neighbourhoods. Nobody wants to relive the battle over the Spadina Expressway.
But "transit over cars" has to be more than just a default position brought on by circumstance. The paramount nature of transit has to shape all of the city's development and it has to be publicly talked about that way.
This has long been the case in European cities, and for Ken Greenberg, a Toronto architect and urban designer, it's about time we caught up.
"I worked with the city of Amsterdam for many years, and they had a traffic reduction policy where they set themselves a 15-year goal of increasing (frequency) on their streetcar lines and gradually removing parking spaces from the borders of the canals in the city centre," says Greenberg.
"If you're gradually improving transit as you're reducing automobiles, there's a kind of quid pro quo that's very important."
This isn't just some European eccentricity. Dozens of American cities — from Portland to Phoenix — are now racing to build or extend light rail and subway systems in the wake of rising gasoline prices. And these new systems are not going unused: the American Public Transport Association reports that transit ridership across the United States is up 4 per cent from a year earlier — more than double the rate of population growth.
2. Take the TTC away from Toronto City Council and create a regional transit authority
The TTC has always been a creature of local government. That worked fine when the suburbs were slight and the provincial government paid for any expansion of transit services. But the 905 now roughly equals the amalgamated city in size, the two combining for a city-region of five million people.
"We're the only place in the world where the primary transit authority covers only half the region," says urban planner Joe Berridge, a partner with Urban Strategies Inc. in Toronto. "If you want to have the kind of transit that 21st-century citizens should be offered, the current model is incapable of doing it."
New York, London, Paris —they all have transit authorities that go well beyond the geographic confines of the original city.
Two related problems further plague the current set-up. Financially strapped, the City of Toronto can't even support the current TTC, never mind shepherding its expansion. And being a kind of anteroom to city council, the TTC is constantly buffeted by the gusts and grunts of local politics. "I know of no transit authority in the world that's run by a committee of council," says Berridge.
Politicians are, by nature, short-term animals. Elections always seem imminent and much of the city, after all, still clings to its roots in the postwar love of suburbs and cars. "You survey those 44 people on council," says Bedford. "Some of them are keen transit people, but most of them aren't. They're suburbanites. I'm not faulting them for that, but that's the frame of reference, and they don't think that transit is such a high priority, which is kind of shocking."
Shocking because, in the decades ahead, it's going to be those suburban parts of the city that experience much of the growth and hence the most acute need for future public transit. "For the newer parts of the city, it's much more of a problem because it takes so goddamn long to get transit in place," says Bedford. "The development will still come though, and it gets worse as you go out to the 905."
Traffic congestion in the 905 is already worse than it is in Toronto. That's partly because, in places like Vaughan and Markham, the roads running north mostly follow the old rural concessions, which means they're a mile and a quarter apart.
To put that in perspective, imagine the congestion if, similarly, the only major north-south roads in Toronto's west end were Bathurst, Dufferin, Keele and Jane.
Solving that won't be easy. Decades of short-sighted land use policies have covered the 905 with sprawling subdivisions and giant industrial parks — neither of which offers the kind of density you normally need for a transit system.
But transit will be the only answer as development continues. Since 2000, for instance, more than 9.4 million square feet of office space have been built in the 905 — about 10 times more than has been added in downtown Toronto. We are, in short, a region — not just a city.
Last spring, the provincial government did announce the creation of a regional transit body, the Greater Toronto Transportation Authority. The idea is to have it operate the GO system and work toward co-ordinating transit planning across the GTA and Hamilton.
It's a move in the right direction and has "huge potential," says Bedford, but only if the nascent GTTA has "the right mandate and revenue-generating tools, as opposed to just a co-ordinating, feel-good body."
Those kinds of details are still to come — perhaps this fall — but, sadly, the summer has already seen a lot of political bickering around the composition of the new agency's board, pitting municipality against municipality. It has not been an auspicious start.
3. Emphasize the long term
Everyone likes to talk about Madrid, the Iron Chef of transit building. In little more than the past decade, Madrid has opened a new subway and light-rail network with nearly 120 kilometres of track — roughly twice the size of Toronto's entire subway system. Done in what amounted to four-year plans, the system came courtesy of a single-minded regional politician, huge government financing and an array of public/private-sector partnerships, all of it backed by public will. So you can forgive Toronto's transit boosters for looking dreamily on the Spanish capital.
But the reason Madrid stands out is because it's so rare. Almost everywhere else on the planet, transit planning at its best is all about anticipating future growth in demand and laying the groundwork years in advance.We used to do that. Back in the 1980s, we had a 30-year provincial strategy called Network 2011, which would have seen new subway lines across Toronto. That plan, alas, went down along with Bill Davis's Tories and we've been mostly shy about the long term ever since.
Not so Boston, now in the midst of a 25-year plan to connect all of the transit lines that radiate from the city centre with a ring that would touch each of those lines at about the mid-point. The ring, which will connect all of Boston's major universities, hospitals and research areas, will start off life as a bus service, but as ridership increases, chunks of it will be converted to subway.
"That's the kind of thing we need to be doing — that kind of systematic, long-range planning, looking out for the opportunities and doing capital planning and operating planning and budgeting," says Greenberg, who's been heavily involved in the Boston project.
You also need that planning horizon because you're trying to change habits and wean people from their cars.
"If you have a vast glacier of human behaviour that's moving in a certain way in a region, you don't reverse it suddenly in one month or one year, but over periods of time" says Greenberg. "All of this is about changes at the margin, rather than radical epiphanies, but you've got to make investments to make it work."
4. Make funding long term
Planning a transit system for the next 20 years is akin to buying a house: you need long-term financing. The two have to move in tandem if you're going to do any kind of realistic budgeting. But ever since the provincial funding cuts of the 1990s, the TTC hasn't had that kind of secure financial base.
"We're trying to build a transit system out of spare change," says Berridge. "We do the health care, we do education, we do social services and then we say, `Oh, have we got anything left over for a subway?' And, surprise, surprise, we don't."
What you end up with is a sadly pragmatic policy like the TTC's 2003 Ridership Growth Strategy, which takes a kind of pauperism as its starting point — a "state of good repair" approach to budgeting.
Keep what you've got on the roads and rails, replace aging buses and subway cars as needed, and make as many (or as few) incremental improvements in service with whatever's left over.
So the TTC has been able to increase service in off-peak hours, and next year there could be 100 additional buses on the road during rush hour.
"It's accurate to say we're struggling," says Mitch Stambler, the TTC's manager of service planning. "It would be inaccurate to say we're not making progress."
But it's not the sort of progress that, in light of the city's burgeoning population, will inspire any anthems. The problem is not just the amount of funding, but its nature.
In 2001, for instance, the TTC derived 82 per cent of its operating budget from fares, with local government picking up the rest. In Boston, by contrast, fares accounted for only 31 per cent — the State of Massachusetts picked up 50 per cent of the operating costs.
With its capital budget for replacing old vehicles and building new transit lines, Toronto is even more handicapped. In the United States, the federal government covers up to 80 per cent of all capital spending on city transit systems. Here, the Ontario government used to pay one-third of the cost of all new vehicles, but that program was recently scrapped. And while the federal government, routinely absent in the past, had pledged to help pay for new subway cars, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty now says the money isn't "firm" after all.
That's left the TTC in the surreal position of having to order new subway cars to replace its aging fleet — lest the system shut down — but not really knowing where the money will come from.
"You have to have predictable, long-term funding," says Greenberg. "When you live in an environment where you have sporadic announcements that are related to election cycles and then very often the funding just never happens, it's pretty hard to reliably plan for transit improvements."
5. Earmarked funding
It would be grand, of course, if senior levels of government pledged long-term funding, and if succeeding government parties felt bound to uphold those pledges.
But in order to work, a regional transit authority for Toronto also has to have its own sources of revenue and they need to be visibly earmarked for transit — a constant reminder to transit's new status.
So let's start with tolls on the highways — the 400 series, the Don Valley Parkway, the Gardiner and Allen expressways and even the Queen Elizabeth Way — and direct all of that revenue to public transit. This is scarcely radical: regional transit systems around the world are already partly funded this way.
Those tolls don't need to be high or even constant to generate a large amount of revenue. You could, for instance, charge heavier tolls during the peak rush hours, but a lot less (or even nothing) during the slow periods.
And downtown, you don't need to go the London route of all but banishing private vehicles from the core. A transit surcharge on parking, no matter how nominal, would serve as a daily reminder.
6. Forget about subways
Subways are the sex machines of transit, the come-hither sirens that everyone likes to talk about. They move the most people, have the lowest operating costs and are environmentally friendly.
But they're also hugely expensive to build — about $100 million for every kilometre — and in most parts of the world it takes at least eight years to move from approval through construction to opening day.
For subways to work at their best, they need to be carrying at least 30,000 passengers an hour during peak periods, the industry standard. You get that in Manhattan, Hong Kong and downtown Toronto, but nothing like that elsewhere.
The new Sheppard subway line, for instance, features a stop called Bassarion, which may come as news to a lot of Torontonians, mostly because only about 2,200 people use that station on a daily basis.
With the possible exception of a new line along Eglinton Ave., subways don't usually fall into the "build-it-and-they-will-come" side of the ledger. You need to generate the commuter traffic ahead of subways, which is what streetcars did before the Bloor-Danforth subway was built.
The other advantage: surface transit is a lot cheaper to create, and the lead times are shorter. Instead of waiting 10 years for a subway, you can add buses within two years at cost of only $750,000 apiece.
But just putting more buses and streetcars on the roads isn't enough. You need to go one step further.
7. Give buses and streetcars their own rights-of-way
Loading up a bus with 40 people and then inserting that bus on a congested road doesn't exactly enhance the appeal of transit. You don't travel any faster than the surrounding cars, so it's hard to justify giving up the comfort of your own vehicle. What you want in return is speed and convenience.
"Our biggest liability is transit time," says the TTC's Stambler. "We can't provide highly reliable, fast, attractive service if we are forced to operate in mixed traffic."
In the absence of subways everywhere, the only solution is to give transit vehicles their own rights of way on the surface. For streetcars, that means replicating the Spadina line wherever road widths allow and giving buses their own designated lanes on major roads, at least during the peak hours.
Neither is popular with drivers — witness the fight over the TTC's planned streetcar right-of-way on St. Clair Ave. But it has to happen if we're ever going to have a transit system that's a natural alternative to driving.
And again, none of this is novel: London and Los Angeles have both been aggressive in designating bus-only lanes in recent years.
8. Encourage cycling
This may, at first blush, seem counterintuitive. Bicycles don't really replace automobiles, since those who already shun or can't afford cars are by definition would-be transit users.
But we have to be a little Machiavellian here: you encourage cyclists because they make automobile travel even more inconvenient. Anybody who has ever driven on a downtown street during rush hour knows the platelet effect that bicycles have on the flow of traffic. In the absence of designated bike lanes, cyclists tend to block up the curb lane, cars get backed up behind them and, for drivers, making a right-hand turn can mean a long wait while a stream of cyclists goes by.
That, of course, isn't the way bike-boosters would look at it, but no matter. Let's just say we need to build bicycle parking lots all over the city core and give them pride of place. It does, after all, visibly speak to options other than cars.
"One of the best things that's happened in recent years is the number of bicycles," says Greenberg. "It's starting to look almost like a European city, but again, we're not nearly aggressive enough."
9. Smart cards — making transit a way of life
Joe Berridge has a confession: "Can I tell you an amazing thing, which is an appalling thing? I have a London transit pass in my wallet. I have a New York transit pass."
Conspicuously absent: a TTC pass. The service, says Berridge, just isn't convenient enough.
"The TTC has a huge marketing challenge," he says. "It is not gaining ridership at the rate of other transit systems around the world because the quality of service it's providing is getting worse and worse."
In surveys of transit riders, convenience, comfort and speed routinely trump cost as major issues. Adding buses and streetcars and giving them separate rights-of-way will certainly help. But so, too, would issuing transit smart cards that you can load up with electronic cash. Forget about searching for that token somewhere in the bottom of your purse: flash a card in front of a scanner and you're on your way.
Several years ago, the TTC looked into transforming the Metropass into a smart card and deemed it too bleeding-edge — costly, technologically novel and unproven. That was then: smart cards are now the norm in places like New York and London. And with a truly regional transit authority in greater Toronto, you'd be able to use them from Markham to Mississauga.
Having a smart card in your wallet makes it almost a part of your identity, an emblem of transit as second nature.
"I spent six years of my life in Boston and used the subways and public transit there all the time," says Larry Richards, a professor of architecture at the University of Toronto. "The mayor of Boston used public transit. People never thought anything about it. It was just a natural thing to do."
Not so in Toronto. "I still find a surprising mindset among the upper middle class and professional classes in Toronto against using the transit system. It's a strange kind of elitist attitude."
10. Exploit the TTC brand
For all its woes — and sometimes because of them — the TTC doesn't lack for passionate followers. There are unofficial websites devoted to the city's transit system, no shortage of history buffs and even arts projects around the TTC, like the one that created a photo gallery featuring every subway stop in the system.
But here's the curious thing: None of this has been promoted by the TTC itself. There is a huge opportunity for the TTC to trade on its brand and iconic logo. London, for instance, has long mined the licensing opportunities of the Underground. So where are the Toronto shirts that say "Mind the Gap?" Where are the caps and mugs, the tea towels emblazoned with subway maps, or the reproduction posters culled from the TTC's 85-year history?
This isn't about money. Selling shirts and the like won't add much of anything to the TTC's coffers. But it is about reciprocating the public's unlikely love affair with the city's transit system, and building the goodwill needed to ensure public support for funding.
Imagine the day, in other words, when you're sitting on a streetcar reading one of those Hollywood tabloids and there it will be: a picture of some movie star wearing a baseball cap that says "Ride the Rocket." And you will smile.
A 10-point transit blueprint
Sep. 10, 2006. 07:27 AM
KENNETH KIDD
It certainly didn't feel much like a party.
There in the middle of a meeting room at City Hall sat Vince Rodo, budget chief of the Toronto Transit Commission, surrounded by the horseshoe of city councillors who oversee the transit system, convened for their regular, late-August meeting.
Rodo had a slide show. It was all about rebuilding and replacing the TTC's aging fleet of buses, streetcars and subways, about the deferral of other initiatives. There were numbers on the growth in ridership, expected to hit 442 million trips this year, and the costs of repairing tunnels and bridges.
By the time he got to slide number 13, there was another figure: $1.2 billion. For the sake of public decency, it came under the heading "revised problem." It is, in fact, the amount by which the TTC's base capital spending will exceed known sources of funding between now and 2010: $1.2 billion.
The councillors duly made speeches, expressed alarm and, in the end, they voted to have chair Howard Moscoe write a letter to Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty outlining their concerns.
Two days before the TTC was to mark its 85th anniversary, and the councillors were sending a letter. It is to weep.
Back when Toronto was still "the city that worked," its transit system was the envy of North America, a lesson in how transit ought to be done. No more.
As the city's chief planner, Ted Tyndorf, told councillors: "There are any number of cities around the world that have been able to achieve far more than Toronto." He talked of Melbourne, Barcelona, Madrid, London, New York and Chicago. "Even L.A. is building a rapid-transit line from somewhere to nowhere," he added, to more laughter than was seemly in hindsight.
Toronto faces no slight problem. Up to 150,000 people are now moving into the GTA every year. Imagine the congestion if they all start driving cars to work.
The city's official plan, which dates from 2002, was supposed to be about clustering new construction — the office towers and condos — where transit was a viable option, along the subway lines and major avenues.
That plan assumed Toronto's population would rise from 2.5 million to about 3 million by the year 2021. But all you need to do is survey the number of construction cranes to see the real-world problem with that timetable. Tyndorf reckons the city has already achieved half of the population gain the official plan anticipated. And there's no realistic way of turning off the tap.
"We have to plan for that future vision," Tyndorf told the councillors. "Going back to the 1940s, if the city's fathers and mothers didn't conceive of the Yonge Street subway, what would our downtown look like today? It would be a totally different city that we probably wouldn't like very much."
It's just that, this time, we'll be playing catch-up, and on a staggering scale. "We've probably got a need for $50 to $60 billion in transportation infrastructure in the GTA," says Paul Bedford, the city's former chief planner and architect of the official plan. "The last 20, 25 years have been wasted. Certainly in the city, we've hardly built anything and not much in the 905 except the occasional GO improvement.
"When this region does hit the 10 million (population) mark, which it will, all you've got to do is look around the world and the only reason 10-million regions work is because of transit. It's a critical issue. If you don't have transit, you're really in trouble."
Are we serious about transit? By some estimates, gridlock in the GTA is already costing the regional economy about $1.8 billion a year. It will only get worse.
If we really hope to avoid that fate and become once again a beacon of how public transit ought to operate, at least 10 things need to happen:
1. Be explicit:
Transit over cars
Even if you wanted to build more roads, there aren't a lot of places to put them unless you start razing whole neighbourhoods. Nobody wants to relive the battle over the Spadina Expressway.
But "transit over cars" has to be more than just a default position brought on by circumstance. The paramount nature of transit has to shape all of the city's development and it has to be publicly talked about that way.
This has long been the case in European cities, and for Ken Greenberg, a Toronto architect and urban designer, it's about time we caught up.
"I worked with the city of Amsterdam for many years, and they had a traffic reduction policy where they set themselves a 15-year goal of increasing (frequency) on their streetcar lines and gradually removing parking spaces from the borders of the canals in the city centre," says Greenberg.
"If you're gradually improving transit as you're reducing automobiles, there's a kind of quid pro quo that's very important."
This isn't just some European eccentricity. Dozens of American cities — from Portland to Phoenix — are now racing to build or extend light rail and subway systems in the wake of rising gasoline prices. And these new systems are not going unused: the American Public Transport Association reports that transit ridership across the United States is up 4 per cent from a year earlier — more than double the rate of population growth.
2. Take the TTC away from Toronto City Council and create a regional transit authority
The TTC has always been a creature of local government. That worked fine when the suburbs were slight and the provincial government paid for any expansion of transit services. But the 905 now roughly equals the amalgamated city in size, the two combining for a city-region of five million people.
"We're the only place in the world where the primary transit authority covers only half the region," says urban planner Joe Berridge, a partner with Urban Strategies Inc. in Toronto. "If you want to have the kind of transit that 21st-century citizens should be offered, the current model is incapable of doing it."
New York, London, Paris —they all have transit authorities that go well beyond the geographic confines of the original city.
Two related problems further plague the current set-up. Financially strapped, the City of Toronto can't even support the current TTC, never mind shepherding its expansion. And being a kind of anteroom to city council, the TTC is constantly buffeted by the gusts and grunts of local politics. "I know of no transit authority in the world that's run by a committee of council," says Berridge.
Politicians are, by nature, short-term animals. Elections always seem imminent and much of the city, after all, still clings to its roots in the postwar love of suburbs and cars. "You survey those 44 people on council," says Bedford. "Some of them are keen transit people, but most of them aren't. They're suburbanites. I'm not faulting them for that, but that's the frame of reference, and they don't think that transit is such a high priority, which is kind of shocking."
Shocking because, in the decades ahead, it's going to be those suburban parts of the city that experience much of the growth and hence the most acute need for future public transit. "For the newer parts of the city, it's much more of a problem because it takes so goddamn long to get transit in place," says Bedford. "The development will still come though, and it gets worse as you go out to the 905."
Traffic congestion in the 905 is already worse than it is in Toronto. That's partly because, in places like Vaughan and Markham, the roads running north mostly follow the old rural concessions, which means they're a mile and a quarter apart.
To put that in perspective, imagine the congestion if, similarly, the only major north-south roads in Toronto's west end were Bathurst, Dufferin, Keele and Jane.
Solving that won't be easy. Decades of short-sighted land use policies have covered the 905 with sprawling subdivisions and giant industrial parks — neither of which offers the kind of density you normally need for a transit system.
But transit will be the only answer as development continues. Since 2000, for instance, more than 9.4 million square feet of office space have been built in the 905 — about 10 times more than has been added in downtown Toronto. We are, in short, a region — not just a city.
Last spring, the provincial government did announce the creation of a regional transit body, the Greater Toronto Transportation Authority. The idea is to have it operate the GO system and work toward co-ordinating transit planning across the GTA and Hamilton.
It's a move in the right direction and has "huge potential," says Bedford, but only if the nascent GTTA has "the right mandate and revenue-generating tools, as opposed to just a co-ordinating, feel-good body."
Those kinds of details are still to come — perhaps this fall — but, sadly, the summer has already seen a lot of political bickering around the composition of the new agency's board, pitting municipality against municipality. It has not been an auspicious start.
3. Emphasize the long term
Everyone likes to talk about Madrid, the Iron Chef of transit building. In little more than the past decade, Madrid has opened a new subway and light-rail network with nearly 120 kilometres of track — roughly twice the size of Toronto's entire subway system. Done in what amounted to four-year plans, the system came courtesy of a single-minded regional politician, huge government financing and an array of public/private-sector partnerships, all of it backed by public will. So you can forgive Toronto's transit boosters for looking dreamily on the Spanish capital.
But the reason Madrid stands out is because it's so rare. Almost everywhere else on the planet, transit planning at its best is all about anticipating future growth in demand and laying the groundwork years in advance.We used to do that. Back in the 1980s, we had a 30-year provincial strategy called Network 2011, which would have seen new subway lines across Toronto. That plan, alas, went down along with Bill Davis's Tories and we've been mostly shy about the long term ever since.
Not so Boston, now in the midst of a 25-year plan to connect all of the transit lines that radiate from the city centre with a ring that would touch each of those lines at about the mid-point. The ring, which will connect all of Boston's major universities, hospitals and research areas, will start off life as a bus service, but as ridership increases, chunks of it will be converted to subway.
"That's the kind of thing we need to be doing — that kind of systematic, long-range planning, looking out for the opportunities and doing capital planning and operating planning and budgeting," says Greenberg, who's been heavily involved in the Boston project.
You also need that planning horizon because you're trying to change habits and wean people from their cars.
"If you have a vast glacier of human behaviour that's moving in a certain way in a region, you don't reverse it suddenly in one month or one year, but over periods of time" says Greenberg. "All of this is about changes at the margin, rather than radical epiphanies, but you've got to make investments to make it work."
4. Make funding long term
Planning a transit system for the next 20 years is akin to buying a house: you need long-term financing. The two have to move in tandem if you're going to do any kind of realistic budgeting. But ever since the provincial funding cuts of the 1990s, the TTC hasn't had that kind of secure financial base.
"We're trying to build a transit system out of spare change," says Berridge. "We do the health care, we do education, we do social services and then we say, `Oh, have we got anything left over for a subway?' And, surprise, surprise, we don't."
What you end up with is a sadly pragmatic policy like the TTC's 2003 Ridership Growth Strategy, which takes a kind of pauperism as its starting point — a "state of good repair" approach to budgeting.
Keep what you've got on the roads and rails, replace aging buses and subway cars as needed, and make as many (or as few) incremental improvements in service with whatever's left over.
So the TTC has been able to increase service in off-peak hours, and next year there could be 100 additional buses on the road during rush hour.
"It's accurate to say we're struggling," says Mitch Stambler, the TTC's manager of service planning. "It would be inaccurate to say we're not making progress."
But it's not the sort of progress that, in light of the city's burgeoning population, will inspire any anthems. The problem is not just the amount of funding, but its nature.
In 2001, for instance, the TTC derived 82 per cent of its operating budget from fares, with local government picking up the rest. In Boston, by contrast, fares accounted for only 31 per cent — the State of Massachusetts picked up 50 per cent of the operating costs.
With its capital budget for replacing old vehicles and building new transit lines, Toronto is even more handicapped. In the United States, the federal government covers up to 80 per cent of all capital spending on city transit systems. Here, the Ontario government used to pay one-third of the cost of all new vehicles, but that program was recently scrapped. And while the federal government, routinely absent in the past, had pledged to help pay for new subway cars, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty now says the money isn't "firm" after all.
That's left the TTC in the surreal position of having to order new subway cars to replace its aging fleet — lest the system shut down — but not really knowing where the money will come from.
"You have to have predictable, long-term funding," says Greenberg. "When you live in an environment where you have sporadic announcements that are related to election cycles and then very often the funding just never happens, it's pretty hard to reliably plan for transit improvements."
5. Earmarked funding
It would be grand, of course, if senior levels of government pledged long-term funding, and if succeeding government parties felt bound to uphold those pledges.
But in order to work, a regional transit authority for Toronto also has to have its own sources of revenue and they need to be visibly earmarked for transit — a constant reminder to transit's new status.
So let's start with tolls on the highways — the 400 series, the Don Valley Parkway, the Gardiner and Allen expressways and even the Queen Elizabeth Way — and direct all of that revenue to public transit. This is scarcely radical: regional transit systems around the world are already partly funded this way.
Those tolls don't need to be high or even constant to generate a large amount of revenue. You could, for instance, charge heavier tolls during the peak rush hours, but a lot less (or even nothing) during the slow periods.
And downtown, you don't need to go the London route of all but banishing private vehicles from the core. A transit surcharge on parking, no matter how nominal, would serve as a daily reminder.
6. Forget about subways
Subways are the sex machines of transit, the come-hither sirens that everyone likes to talk about. They move the most people, have the lowest operating costs and are environmentally friendly.
But they're also hugely expensive to build — about $100 million for every kilometre — and in most parts of the world it takes at least eight years to move from approval through construction to opening day.
For subways to work at their best, they need to be carrying at least 30,000 passengers an hour during peak periods, the industry standard. You get that in Manhattan, Hong Kong and downtown Toronto, but nothing like that elsewhere.
The new Sheppard subway line, for instance, features a stop called Bassarion, which may come as news to a lot of Torontonians, mostly because only about 2,200 people use that station on a daily basis.
With the possible exception of a new line along Eglinton Ave., subways don't usually fall into the "build-it-and-they-will-come" side of the ledger. You need to generate the commuter traffic ahead of subways, which is what streetcars did before the Bloor-Danforth subway was built.
The other advantage: surface transit is a lot cheaper to create, and the lead times are shorter. Instead of waiting 10 years for a subway, you can add buses within two years at cost of only $750,000 apiece.
But just putting more buses and streetcars on the roads isn't enough. You need to go one step further.
7. Give buses and streetcars their own rights-of-way
Loading up a bus with 40 people and then inserting that bus on a congested road doesn't exactly enhance the appeal of transit. You don't travel any faster than the surrounding cars, so it's hard to justify giving up the comfort of your own vehicle. What you want in return is speed and convenience.
"Our biggest liability is transit time," says the TTC's Stambler. "We can't provide highly reliable, fast, attractive service if we are forced to operate in mixed traffic."
In the absence of subways everywhere, the only solution is to give transit vehicles their own rights of way on the surface. For streetcars, that means replicating the Spadina line wherever road widths allow and giving buses their own designated lanes on major roads, at least during the peak hours.
Neither is popular with drivers — witness the fight over the TTC's planned streetcar right-of-way on St. Clair Ave. But it has to happen if we're ever going to have a transit system that's a natural alternative to driving.
And again, none of this is novel: London and Los Angeles have both been aggressive in designating bus-only lanes in recent years.
8. Encourage cycling
This may, at first blush, seem counterintuitive. Bicycles don't really replace automobiles, since those who already shun or can't afford cars are by definition would-be transit users.
But we have to be a little Machiavellian here: you encourage cyclists because they make automobile travel even more inconvenient. Anybody who has ever driven on a downtown street during rush hour knows the platelet effect that bicycles have on the flow of traffic. In the absence of designated bike lanes, cyclists tend to block up the curb lane, cars get backed up behind them and, for drivers, making a right-hand turn can mean a long wait while a stream of cyclists goes by.
That, of course, isn't the way bike-boosters would look at it, but no matter. Let's just say we need to build bicycle parking lots all over the city core and give them pride of place. It does, after all, visibly speak to options other than cars.
"One of the best things that's happened in recent years is the number of bicycles," says Greenberg. "It's starting to look almost like a European city, but again, we're not nearly aggressive enough."
9. Smart cards — making transit a way of life
Joe Berridge has a confession: "Can I tell you an amazing thing, which is an appalling thing? I have a London transit pass in my wallet. I have a New York transit pass."
Conspicuously absent: a TTC pass. The service, says Berridge, just isn't convenient enough.
"The TTC has a huge marketing challenge," he says. "It is not gaining ridership at the rate of other transit systems around the world because the quality of service it's providing is getting worse and worse."
In surveys of transit riders, convenience, comfort and speed routinely trump cost as major issues. Adding buses and streetcars and giving them separate rights-of-way will certainly help. But so, too, would issuing transit smart cards that you can load up with electronic cash. Forget about searching for that token somewhere in the bottom of your purse: flash a card in front of a scanner and you're on your way.
Several years ago, the TTC looked into transforming the Metropass into a smart card and deemed it too bleeding-edge — costly, technologically novel and unproven. That was then: smart cards are now the norm in places like New York and London. And with a truly regional transit authority in greater Toronto, you'd be able to use them from Markham to Mississauga.
Having a smart card in your wallet makes it almost a part of your identity, an emblem of transit as second nature.
"I spent six years of my life in Boston and used the subways and public transit there all the time," says Larry Richards, a professor of architecture at the University of Toronto. "The mayor of Boston used public transit. People never thought anything about it. It was just a natural thing to do."
Not so in Toronto. "I still find a surprising mindset among the upper middle class and professional classes in Toronto against using the transit system. It's a strange kind of elitist attitude."
10. Exploit the TTC brand
For all its woes — and sometimes because of them — the TTC doesn't lack for passionate followers. There are unofficial websites devoted to the city's transit system, no shortage of history buffs and even arts projects around the TTC, like the one that created a photo gallery featuring every subway stop in the system.
But here's the curious thing: None of this has been promoted by the TTC itself. There is a huge opportunity for the TTC to trade on its brand and iconic logo. London, for instance, has long mined the licensing opportunities of the Underground. So where are the Toronto shirts that say "Mind the Gap?" Where are the caps and mugs, the tea towels emblazoned with subway maps, or the reproduction posters culled from the TTC's 85-year history?
This isn't about money. Selling shirts and the like won't add much of anything to the TTC's coffers. But it is about reciprocating the public's unlikely love affair with the city's transit system, and building the goodwill needed to ensure public support for funding.
Imagine the day, in other words, when you're sitting on a streetcar reading one of those Hollywood tabloids and there it will be: a picture of some movie star wearing a baseball cap that says "Ride the Rocket." And you will smile.