Monthly Archives: August 2010

Meet A Mayoral Candidate XXVIII

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It’s that time of week with another Friday upon us to Meet A Mayoral Candidate! So come on down: Michael Flie.

We’re going to mix it up this week, juggle the format around a little. Instead of waiting until the end of the post to ask the question we’ve been asking all the candidates, we’re going to begin with it.

Mr. Flie? If our current mayor would like to see his legacy as that of the Transit Mayor, how would a Mayor Flie like to see his legacy written?

Michael Flie: “I would like to see my legacy written as the ‘People Mayor.’ A representative for the people by the people. A Mayor who will bring about change that will transform this great city into a shiny example of a major metropolis that supports its people and its needs without incurring huge debts to do so.”

OK, now wait a minute. I believe candidate HiMY SYeD has already taken the moniker of the ‘Peoples’ Mayor’. ‘The People Mayor’ may well be a mayoral descriptor infringement. Let us confer with the judges and we’ll get back to you.

Also? The ‘for the people by the people’ riff may be a little too American for our tastes. You might need to tone that down a bit.

Moreover, as a legacy, it’s all too broad. You have to be pithy. Short, sharp and to the point.

To be fair, this is a failing many of the mayoral candidates are exhibiting in the campaign this year, both front runners and lesser knowns. Prone to broad generalities and meaningless platitudes that ultimately make little impression and offer nothing to hold on to. It’s impossible to tell exactly why it is they want to be mayor.

The one exception of course is Rob Ford. He has boiled down his legacy maker into an easy to remember mantra that he punches out relentlessly and mindlessly with little regard to context that brings to mind autistic Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. Stop the gravy train! We don’t have a revenue problem. We’ve got a spending problem!

It’s no coincidence that he’s now leading the pack.

This lack of focus on the part of candidate Michael Flie is something of a surprise since he’s a Marketing and Advertising Specialist. If anyone should be able to boil down a legacy to its barest essence, you’d think a marketing and advertising specialist could. So let’s unleash Mr. Flie from the legacy mode and allow him freer rein.

Michael Flie, Guardian for the People. “I will ensure that the police get better training, better equipment, multi-purpose helicopters that will perform such duties as transportation of equipment and people, search and rescue, recon, surveillance, high speed pursuits, fire support, research and crowd control.”

Michael Flie, Financial Protector for the People. “My goal to establish a balanced budget, and pay off the debt within a 10 year period at a fixed interest rate with the Bank of Canada.”

Michael Flie, Entrepreneur for the People. “I will establish new industries and new business for our City that will generate revenue strictly for Toronto and thereby offset our debt and curb the need to increase taxes. The goal to make our city more financially independent so that our city operates in the black not in the red.”

Michael Flie, Muse for the People. “My goal would be to create more support for Theatre, Ballet, Opera, and Music. Allowing people to expand their options in their pursuit of their career. As well as optimize the opportunities that are being created here by Hollywood for the creation of movies and tv shows.”

Things begin to crystallize about the Flie For Mayor campaign. He is a fiscal conservative, partial to a more aggressive police force but socially liberal with an eye towards the arts as a way of keeping the city vibrant. Flie favours “european style bike lanes and sidewalks and roads … as part of the New Urban and Planning Progam” although he feels “some roads downtown can not be expanded to accommodate bike lanes due to safety reasons. Compromise … might be a ONE WAY bike Lane.” In his view, taking the TTC is too expensive and some privatization may be in order although he’d first try something like a “Balanced Budget Allocation … and increase efficiency to expenditures allowing the TTC to sustain or increase its logistics without requiring pay increases.” What exactly that means, we’re not sure but will take the blame for the lack of comprehension.

For what it’s worth, Michael Flie states that “as Mayor, my stance on marriage for all the citizens of Toronto is covered already in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms: Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination…” He would aggressively deal with helping the homeless and the victims of abuse. All of this he would pursue while freezing property taxes – the city’s main source of revenue – for 2 years. How exactly would he do that? “Increase the city’s economic independence by implementing several businesses that are designed to generate revenue strictly for the city of Toronto.” We await word of what exactly those businesses would be.

It seems to us here that the problem with focus for Michael Flie is that he is endeavouring to be all things to all people. Deficit hawk for the Rob Ford crowd and socially enlightened for all the rest of us. That’s a mighty tough tightrope to walk. Many have tried. Few have made it successfully to the other side.

But at least Mr. Flie’s intentions in running for mayor are honourable and inclusive as he circles back in for another attempt at a legacy landing. “My legacy will be a city that will always shine and prosper because of my action and because of the people of this city.”

— dutifully submitted by Cityslikr

Drive, He Read

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To avoid any appearances of a conflict of interest or accusations of log rolling, I have been tapped to write this post today. I am not a reviewer of books. My métier of TV and movies is more passively pleasing to me. But since both Acaphlegmic and Cityslikr are, if not friends, than certainly amiable drinking companions of Tim Falconer, it was felt that perhaps we needed a more objective take on his 2008 book, Drive. My lone encounter with Mr. Falconer was just after he’d had a pedicure and kept demanding to see my feet which didn’t make me partial to liking his book.

Although of all of us who toil away here under the All Fired Up yoke, there’s little question that my voice is loudest when it comes to making anti-car noises. So Drive is really up my gasoline alley, as it were. It’s almost as if Mr. Falconer wrote the book with me in mind. Quite a feat since we had never met during the course of the writing.

But the author and I do share a similar non-car background. He didn’t get his full on, non-learners driver’s licence until his late-30s. I got mine when most red-blooded males did back in the day. At the age of 18 when you needed it as picture ID to get into bars and buy booze in the stores. I’ve not had much use for it since, living as I do, along with Mr. Falconer, in downtown Toronto and its wide range of transportation options. (Note to ed.: I don’t live with Mr. Falconer but rather we both live in downtown Toronto. In completely separate abodes.)

Unfortunately, a few years back Falconer broke down and sold out, buying a 1991 Nissan Maxima despite considering himself first and foremost a pedestrian. In it, he headed off on a 9-and-a-half week, nearly 15,000 K road trip from Toronto to the heart of car culture, Los Angeles, and back again; a journey that is the narrative basis for Drive. Like any good road trip (and I would never claim that there can’t be good road trips), the tale Falconer spins is a meandering affair, never doggedly adhering to a rigid map route. Along the way, we get a thorough history of the automobile and its immense impact on the development of society especially after World War II.

The subtitlely thingie of Drive is “A Road Trip Through Our Complicated Affair With The Automobile” and truer words have never been written after a book’s title. What was most startling to me while reading this book was, for every sane person who either hates cars or doesn’t put much thought at all into their existence, there seems to be a dozen who absolutely love them. I mean, really, really loves them. These self-proclaimed car nuts never outgrow their adolescent fascination with their toys.

If there’s one complaint I had with Drive, it’s that too much time is given over to these car freaks which, to my deaf ear on the subject, began to sound all the same. After yet another outing Falconer takes with the Rocky Mountain Mustangers or Gateway Camaro Club, I found myself growing increasingly irate and finally snapping. I KNOW HOW MUCH YOUR CARS MEAN TO YOU, PEOPLE! BUT THEY’RE JUST THAT! CARS! I COULDN’T GET ENOUGH OF CRACK COCAINE EITHER. I JUST HAD TO STOP DOING IT FOR THE SAKE OF EVERYONE AROUND ME!! YOU SHOULD TOO!!!

The beauty of Drive is that it seems to anticipate that reaction in many readers and delights in turning the tables on them… er, me. It’s not surprising that I reacted so violently negative to yet another pot-bellied, middle-aged car jockey waxing nostalgic about his Ford Falcon because early on in the book, Falconer provides data that shows Canadians are more prone to see their cars as little more than appliances to be used in getting to where they need to go. Americans revere their cars and treat them accordingly as potent symbols of freedom and mobility. So naturally, I’m going to see them as completely out of touch with reality and vile, brainless materialists. Thus, Falconer deftly manages to shine a glaring light on my prejudices.

That makes the real heroes of the book the ones Falconer meets who have a much more rational approach to the car conundrum than I do. Hell, some of them even like driving but have concluded that urban planning around the needs of cars is the surest way to inflict the greatest amount of damage on cities.  There’s James Kushner, a teacher at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles and perhaps the only Angelino who does not own a car. His two books, The Post-Automobile City and Healthy Cities are in the mail as I write, destined to the growing pile of books I need to get to in order to truly start understanding urban dynamics. Donald Shoup, ‘America’s Parking Guru’ (and who we featured here back in March. You may recognize my colleague’s dining and discussing partner) is a joy to listen talk so academically about the problems of parking and how to fix it. (Heads-up: we aren’t paying nearly enough for it.) His book, The High Cost of Free Parking is already on my book shelf.

But the nucleus of the post-automobile future city truly emerges in the last 8 pages of Chapter 16 (San Francisco, Man versus the Internal Combustion Engine). Mr. Falconer talks with two members of the Sierra Club. John Holtzclaw chairs the organization’s Transportation Committee and Tim Frank is the chair of the group’s Challenge to Sprawl Campaign Committee. Together they put together an urban environment where private vehicles will slowly and naturally be squeezed out or, at the very least, be severely reduced in importance. How will this come about? Our growing urbanization and need for higher density. (A ‘variety of densities’, according to Holtzman.)

Presently, density is a hot button issue but those resisting it appear to be on the wrong side. Frank argues that density could, ironically, wind up uniting right and left. He sees density appealing to the left because of its tendency toward social justice if things like mixed income housing are part of the plan. The right will take to it as denser communities make various government services less expensive to deliver and need fewer people to deliver them. Increased density equals smaller, more efficient government.

More exciting still for those of my political stripe, John Holtzclaw believes that increased density creates a more tolerant, liberal-minded society. “People who live closer together and are less dependent on the automobile develop a different attitude toward citizenship and activism,” concludes Falconer. So take heart, all you who grow dismayed in the face of Rob Ford’s spike in popularity and Stephen Harper’s relentless push to neo-con Canada, for they are fighting a losing battle. The slow march of history is on our side.

How cool is that? A political manifesto rising up from a book about cars. That’s quite something to pull off but is exactly what Tim Falconer does in Drive. So run, don’t walk (and certainly don’t drive although cycling is encouraged) and pick up your copy. The revolution (or – a-ha, a-ha — the rpms) has begun.

— car-freely submitted by Urban Sophisticat

TTC: The Bitter Way

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Customer service has not been a top priority of the TTC in recent years

Followed by a chorus of “No shit, Sherlock.”

I come not to the praise the TTC but to bury it… under pages and pages of Customer Service Advisory Panel report.

Obviously an organization of the TTC’s size and importance in the functioning of the city should undergo occasional institutional scrutiny in both official and, let’s call it, PR capacities. The latter if for no other reason than to give the appearance of listening to the transit using public, those who feel that they are footing the bill. That this particular review was forced forth due to a series of embarrassing front line employee missteps, let’s call them, earlier this year makes me doubt its ultimate importance.

Yes, wouldn’t it be nice if every time we stepped up onto a bus or streetcar or dropped a token into the box before pushing through the turnstiles, we were greeted with a big smile and a hearty ‘Hey, how are ya!’? (Gestures, I’m sure, all us passengers make toward those taking our fares.) Setting such a tone would help make the TTC experience a more pleasant one.

But as has been noted extensively throughout the interwebs, it’s not the GAP we’re talking about here. Our interaction with public transit comes largely out of necessity as we go about our daily business, getting from point A to point B as needed. For most of us, time spent on public transit is that interminable period between where we’ve been and where we need to get to. Bubbly engagement and enthusiasm shouldn’t be what we’re demanding from TTC employees. Just get us where we’re going as quickly and efficiently as possible. Charm is entirely optional.

It’s that ‘quickly and efficiently’ expectation that is key here. Unless the TTC’s front liners are impeding that, everything else is mere window dressing. Immediately you’ll set upon me, pointing out that the bus driver who took an unauthorized break or the one driving while impaired both clearly impeded quick and efficient travel. Sure. Let’s factor that in. But is miscreant employee conduct the major reason that our transit system has fallen so far behind our needs? I defy you not only to answer that question with a ‘yes’ but to prove it with credible data.

I might argue, in fact, that such flare-ups of poor performance are symptomatic of a system under duress. We are placing great demands on the TTC without adequately giving it the tools to meet them. Of course, I’m talking financially. For more than a decade now, the TTC has had to exist without the traditional funding for its operational budget from the province. Do more with less. That fact is so obvious and often talked about that it barely receives notice anymore.

At least as significant as that, the TTC also suffers mightily from overlapping jurisdictions and perpetual shifting sands of competing visions and ideologies. The grand plan of bringing accessible transit to more people and neighbourhoods in Toronto, Transit City, is now under threat from our slew of front running candidates who, sensing the political winds blowing around them, are declaring that subways are now the way to go. With varying degrees of believable detail, they would replace much of the current plan with more crowd pleasing subways. So, once more, we’re back to the drawing board of transit planning.

Of course, the real knife in the back for Transit City was the province reneging on a big chunk of its commitments earlier this year. Just like the province killed the plan to build an Eglinton subway back in the `90s by pulling funding after they’d already agreed to it. Until Queen’s Park ceases drawing more money from this city than it puts back in, transit planning here will always be subject to their whims and changes of mind.

Moreover, until our federal level of government gets involved in the issue of public transit, we’ll all be simply spinning our wheels. Hiding behind the smoke screen of municipal transit being within the provincial domain, the feds have sat on their hands as this country’s transportation infrastructure has fallen further and further behind the rest of the world. Unless we have some big event that shines an international light upon us (like, say, the Olympics), our representatives in Ottawa have been non-players in the public transit portfolio.

Embarrassingly, we are the only so-called developed nation not to have, and never have had, an official national transit strategy. You don’t think that matters? Go and take transit around other cities that do. Paris. Tokyo. Madrid. New York City. A national focus on transit is integral to having a fully functioning, viable system.

Until we have that (and I’m not holding my breath, waiting for it to happen), we can conduct all the customer satisfaction surveys and Advisory Panel reports we want. Nothing much is going to change. We will continue to fuss and fret, bitch and moan, and point accusatory fingers at all the wrong people.

— dismayedly submitted by Cityslikr