All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

Transit Intransigence

Posted on October 30, 2015 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Just a quick (here’s hoping) update on the post yesterday re the Brampton city council rejection of the north of Steeles section of the proposed Hurontario-Main LRT, and the ugly horrors the intrusion of parochial interests have on transit planning. (Still looking at you, Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker).

I late linked to a more in-depth article about the Brampton debacle from Sean Marshall at Marshall’s Musings. If you didn’t catch it then, I advise you to do so now. Here’s a snippet.

The Hurontario-Main corridor was selected for LRT simply because it is one of the busiest transit corridors in the Greater Toronto Area outside the City of Toronto; it connects three GO lines and several major bus corridors, it would help urbanize south Brampton and several neighbourhoods in Mississauga. It’s part of a larger regional network, yet six city councillors in Brampton, looking out for narrow, local interests, sunk it.

Earlier in the post, Marshall points out that the line at its proposed southernmost terminus, at the Port Credit waterfront, had been snipped off in a similarly, if less dramatic fashion, due to what he called “community opposition”.

This brought to mind stories our Los Angeles correspondent, Ned Teitelbaum, told us about the obstacle that city faces in its transit plans, a place called Beverly Hills, swimming pools and movie stars. It is one of 88 municipalities in Los Angeles County, home to 35,000 of the county’s 10 million people, and yet it has the heft to be constantly throwing up road blocks to wider regional projects. Bike lanes? Forget it. Rush hour dedicated bus lanes? No way, José. As for a westward subway extension tunneled under Beverly Hills High? Ummmm…

Yikes!

What often times gets lost in the back-and-forth debate over transit planning and proposed projects, all the wonkery and nerd talk pushing it from polite conversation, is any discussion on class and race. The northern portion up into Brampton of the HMLRT was opposed by that city’s well-heeled living in big houses on Main Street. This group included former Ontario premier Bill Davis. Terms like ‘heritage preservation’ or ‘maintaining neighbourhood character’ get tossed around but it’s hard to avoid looking at the deeper context. Public transit is for other people.

Rarely do you hear those who depend on public transit — many, economically and socially marginalized — complain that the service is too close to where they live. That it negatively impacts the character of their street. That it threatens the heritage of their neighbourhood. How the overhead wires interfere with their view. Those kinds of concerns are for other people.

Equally, just how much say should we be giving to individual communities when it conflicts with wider objectives? Yeah, I’m talking about the greater good here. As Marshall writes in his post, the proposed Hurontario-Main LRT was chosen because it runs along “one of the busiest transit corridors” in the GTA and “connects three GO lines and several major bus corridors”. And it gets tossed aside because a handful of elected officials, listening to a handful of voices, albeit persuasive ones, don’t want it?

It’s a prickly situation, to be sure. I’m advocating for the railroading, so to speak, of local opinion because it’s acting as a detriment to a wider regional transportation plan for no other discernible reason aside from self-interest. But I’m at a loss how else you put the ‘we’ ahead of ‘me’ when it’s the emphasis on the latter that’s got us all bogged down in the first place.

— classically submitted by Cityslikr

CAPITALIZING The Future

Posted on June 9, 2015 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

“Realistically cars are NEVER going to disappear.” [Capitalization ENTIRELY the author’s doing.]

So proclaimed former city councillor and transit advocate, Gordon Chong, in this weekend’s Toronto Sun, and in one sentence putting out there EVERYTHING that is wrong with the Gardiner East’s “hybrid” supporters – led by Mayor John Tory — argument.

They cannot get see a future that will not be exactly like the past, their past.

That no one I’ve ever heard (or, at least, taken seriously) has stated that the private automobile is going the way of the dinosaur is of no consequence to “hybrid” proponents. Hyperbole and the assigning of extremely held beliefs to opposition voices is the hallmark of those pushing policy that lacks any sort of evidentiary base. The entrenched status quo sees any change as wild-eyed and unthinkable revolution. Utopian. Idyllic. Latte-sipping.

The fact that driving patterns have changed since the Gardiner first went up seems of little consequence to unabashed automobile enthusiasts like Gordon Chong. The number of drivers using the Gardiner, the ENTIRE Gardiner, during peak commute hours has remained relatively stable since the 1970s despite the explosive growth the GTAs have seen in the period. Why? Because there is only so much road space. Only so many cars can fit onto it at any given time.

So people use alternative methods to get around the city and region. Public transit, for one. There’s where you’ve seen a corresponding EXPLOSIVE GROWTH to our population boom. Despite what the TTC CEO called this morning “a chronic lack of funding” for public transit in this city, people in greater numbers keep using it. Still, “hybrid” supporters don’t think it’s up to the task of accommodating whatever overflow may occur if the elevated portion of the Gardiner East is removed.

Which is a funny position to take because, looking at the morning rush hour to downtown (that is where the Gardiner east is located), there isn’t a ward in the city that has more than half its commuters driving. (h/t Laurence Liu). Fun fact? In Ward 2, the beating heart of Ford Nation, transit users coming downtown in the a.m. outnumber drivers, 77%-22%. You read that correctly. Unfortunately, I can’t capitalize it for emphasis.

Driving has become only a component of how people move around the city and not the primary one either, certainly not downtown. There is a shift in our relationship to automobiles. Many more of us aren’t experiencing the freedom we’re promised in car ads. Trends suggest more people are settling down into the core. Driving becomes less desirable.

That’s before we even get to the hard charging technology of driverlessness which promises to alter not only the occupant’s experience but the efficiency with which traffic flows. Will it? Who knows? But pretending it won’t possibly be a factor is tantamount to suggesting computer chips haven’t changed how we live our lives.

Refusing to accept reality, though, is a big part of the “hybrid” game plan. It’s no mistake in his speech yesterday to the Empire Club Mayor Tory raised the spectre of Fred “Big Daddy” Gardiner, the first chair of Metro Council and the political architect of urban expressway building in Toronto. The mayor talks Gardiner, and speaks of cars and driving, while ignoring process.

Gardiner (the man) threw his energy into making Toronto car-friendly because he was operating on the best available evidence of the time. The private automobile was about the future, with cheap gas and limitless land in which to build our suburban getaways as far as the eye could see and the mind imagine. It’s easy, with more than half a century of hindsight, to roll your eyes. What were they thinking?!

Unless, of course, you support the “hybrid” option. You can’t let go of that thinking. As it was, so it must ever be. Mayor Tory touts Fred Gardiner. Who can argue with Big Daddy, am I right?

In their mind, as expressed by Gordon Chong in the Toronto Sun, “ …an expressway under Lake Ontario is the REAL VISIONARY FUTURE [capitalization mine], much like the Bloor Viaduct was decades ago.” Build more car infrastructure! Screw the cost (BOSTON) or technical nightmares of tunneling near water (SEATTLE). This ‘guerilla war fought against the car for decades’ must come to an end. Driving is not the source of congestion. Not enabling more driving is.

It’s not that cars are NEVER going to disappear (although, it seems, they do if you take road space away from them). It’s the zombie-like belief Gordon Chong, Mayor Tory and all the other “hybrid” supporters hold in the primacy of cars as the transportation mode people will use that refuses to die or, at least, face reality. Driving habits have already changed since the time of Fred Gardiner. Evidence heavily suggests it’s a trend that will continue into the future. Investing unnecessarily to fight congestion in the name of cars is doing nothing more than fighting the future, and investing in a dream Fred Gardiner had more than 50 years ago.

As it turns out, a dream that has not aged particularly well.

— submitted by Cityslikr

Picking Sides

Posted on December 22, 2014 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

It’s difficult for me to determine which of this is the most dispiritingly fucked up. The number of civilians killed by law enforcement officers in the United States since… well, pick a number, any number. Incredibly, these kind of statistics aren’t routinely kept. The execution style shooting of two New York police officers over the weekend. Or the statement issued in response to the shooting, allegedly by the inaptly named Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, one of the NYPD’s unions:

“The mayor’s hands are literally dripping with our blood because of his words, actions and policies, and we have, for the first time in a number of years, become a ‘wartime’ police department. We will act accordingly.”

It is the latest twist in the uneasy saga between New York mayor Bill de Blasio and the city’s police force, going back to the election campaign when he talked of reform. The police have viewed his not critical enough opinion of the protests which emerged in the city after yet another unarmed black man, Eric Garner, was killed at the hands of the police and yet another grand jury refused to pursue prosecution.

Not to diminish anyone’s deaths here, not the slain police officers, not the hundreds of civilians killed annually by police and law enforcement officers but the above statement has to be as close to treasonous as you can get if that’s possible in a non-military situation. Officers sworn to uphold the rule of law declaring war, essentially, on those who have granted them that right. ‘We will act accordingly’ uttered threateningly in the direction of an elected leader.

How can that not be the most shocking element in this already shocking story?

The fact that no solid record or numbers have been kept in terms of civilian deaths at the hands of police forces is shocking.

The blind eye we as a society turn to excessive force and brutality from our police officers is shocking.

The ease with which a convicted criminal with acknowledged mental health problems could access a firearm is shocking.

But little undercuts a democracy more than the idea of armed insurrection by those expected to serve and protect.

Am I missing something in those ‘wartime’ words?

I ask this from my privileged perch where my last interaction with the police was getting the speed reduced on a ticket I received in order to avoid losing points. I am not unaware that large segments of our society already see the police in a much less benign way than I do. People of colour. Those with mental health issues. The poor, the indigent, the outsiders.

Police baring their teeth at them is nothing new.

But we, those of us on the safe side, collectively shrug. It’s a dirty job, right? Where angels fear to tread…

Increasingly however, the net of undesirables has seemingly widened. Somehow expressing understanding of mostly peaceful protests against the death of another unarmed black man has made the mayor of New York complicit in cop killings. You’re either with the police or you’re with the police killers. Levelling any sort of criticism of the men and women in blue is now akin to levelling a gun at their temple.

Toronto’s police union president got into the frenzy, penning an editorial in the Toronto Sun, pointing his finger at ‘anti-police rhetoric’ as destabilizing. Carried to the extreme – “police officers are the enemy”, McCormack puts in quotes, although I’m unsure exactly who he is quoting – can only lead to the tragedy we witnessed in Brooklyn on Saturday. Police actions have no consequences. Criticisms of those actions, which amount to anti-police rhetoric, do.

The murder of police officers is indeed a tragedy. But so is the murder of every person who dies at the hands of our police. To say those deaths are beyond questioning, or the anger that arises when those deaths are not properly investigated and prosecuted is somehow anti-police, threatens, if not democracy, maybe that’s too broad a stroke, it undermines the quality of justice.

Some lives are more valuable than others. Everyone is not equal in the eyes of our law. That kind of eats at the heart of our democracy.

This isn’t about us-versus-them. It’s about order-versus-justice. Some of us think out of the former will come the latter. Right now, I’m seeing very little evidence of that. Instead what we’re witness to is that without justice, there is no real order.

— unYuletidely submitted by Cityslikr