An Unfortunate Interlude

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I know I said I wasn’t going to write about politics in Toronto while living down here in Los Angeles in my self-imposed exile. And I know what I’m about to write has already been written about by others, more than just a few others, so I’m just echoing in the echo chamber. But I feel this is something that needs to be said, said often and said by many.

SmartTrack and John Tory.

SmartTrack was always bullshit, right from the very start. It was never a transit plan. It was an election strategy, to elect a candidate who was unprepared to stand up to the ridiculous politicization of transit planning that had overcome the city during the Ford years. SmartTrack was simply just another sharpie line drawn on a magic marker map of vote-getting transit… no, not ideas, that gives them far too much credibility. Schemes. Plots. crayondrawingFlights of pure political calculation.

One penny spent on studying the feasibility of SmartTrack was a penny too many, and Toronto has spent hundreds of millions of pennies already studying SmartTrack. Each new report reveals it to be the sham that it is, shrivelling its desiccated frame even further, to mere whiffs of its former self, fragments, shards. The once vaunted heavy rail Western spur, gone. The 22 new stations now down to 9, then 5, maybe 4.

SmartTrack as a figment of a campaign team’s lack of imagination. We need to do the exact same thing as the other guy except different. Be Bold. Assail your critics. We can fix it later, patch it together in editing.

Now as mayor, with his signature transit platform being picked clean, John Tory wants us to credit him for listening to the experts, gleaning the facts and figures and being willing to change plans, adapt and accommodate, reach a consensus. (Something his immediate predecessor was never able to bring himself to do, Mayor Tory reminds us.) I say, fuck that. cuttothebone1None of these ‘new’ facts or figures now emerging from staff reports are in any way new or unforeseen. SmartTrack’s non-workable components were obvious from the get-go, the timeline dubious, the scope and cost highly suspect. As a candidate, John Tory swatted away these criticisms as little more than a symptom of our culture of ‘No’, a timidity, a lack of Vision.

So, give him no credit for changing his tune. It is nothing more than a cynical ploy, another cynical ploy to add to the mountains of cynical ploys that have plagued transit planning in Toronto for decades now. This is not an example of being reasonable or adaptable. The mayor continues to blow smoke up our asses and wants us to thank him for some sort of colonic treatment.

Besides, SmartTrack is far from being dead and buried, a painful relic. Professor Eric Miller, a SmartTrack champion from the outset, grading it an A+ during the 2014 mayoral campaign and, as director of the University of Toronto’s Transportation Research Institute, hired by the city to assess its feasibility, isn’t backing down on his bold claims. wishfulthinking“The Stouffville (GO) line [the eastern leg on the SmartTrack map] has the potential to become the Yonge St. [subway line] of Scarborough — a strong, north-south spine upon which one can then hang effective east-west lines,” Professor Miller told Tess Kalinowski of the Toronto Star.

That statement comes with plenty of qualifiers. “If it’s operating in a competitive way…”, Miller believes SmartTrack can be as important a component to redefining public transit in Toronto as the long vaunted relief line. If it’s run at subway-like frequency. If there’s rail capacity to do so and capacity at Union Station to handle such an increase. If there’s proper integration with GO fares and SmartTrack service is delivered at a TTC price.

That’s a lot of ifs that have plagued SmartTrack from the very beginning, and have yet, nearly two years on, to be satisfactorily answered. fingerscrossedAs Stefan Novakovic pointed out in Urban Toronto, the continued studying of SmartTrack’s viability may well be negatively affecting actual, honest to god, necessary transit plans like the relief line. Instead of running that line down along the King Street corridor where ridership numbers warrant, plans are brewing to put it under Queen Street instead, in order to avoid overlap with the possible southern swing of SmartTrack if that were to happen which remains in the highly doubtful category. Is SmartTrack stunting the relief line even further, as Steve Munro suggests, by threatening an over-build of rapid transit in Scarborough, with its eastern leg competing with the proposed Scarborough subway extension, combining to squeeze out a more sensible northeast passage of the relief line?

Just more questions to add to the many existing questions that continue to point to SmartTrack as an obstacle to Toronto’s public transit future rather than contributing any sort of positive solution.

So yeah, unless Mayor Tory steps up and admits that his SmartTrack is a terrible idea, was always a terrible idea, and the only reason for its existence was to get him elected mayor of Toronto, he deserves zero credit for his willingness to change course now. californiasunshine3Any iteration of SmartTrack will be a setback for transit building in this city, and if the Toronto Star’s Royson James is right, and what we have on the table now is as good as it’s going to get, then John Tory will have succeeded only in cementing the politicization of transit planning for decades to come, generations even. The mayor deserves no reward for that.

And now, back to our regular scheduled, southern California programming.

re-calmly submitted by Cityslikr

Just Don’t Expect Any Actual Answers

I would say that Tuesday’s #AskMayorTory event couldn’t have been scripted any better for the mayor if his staff had written it themselves.
Which I’m sure they didn’t. Why would they go to all that trouble when, instead, they could just plunk him down at a local venue, in this case, a church in the Bayview/Lawrence area, and watch him express his views on hyper-local issues like tree cutting and sidewalks. navelgazingWho doesn’t want to know what the mayor of city of 2.5 million people thinks about basement flooding?

(Spoiler alert: Mayor John Tory cares a lot about basement flooding.)

Nothing reinforces the highly parochial nature of municipal politics like a local town hall meeting. The city would be a much better place, better run and function better, if every neighbourhood was just like [fill in your neighbourhood here]. Or, the flip side of that. [Fill in your neighbourhood here] is so much different than that neighbourhood. We’re historically different. We couldn’t possibly change or adapt.

Did you know that, according to one local resident, the Bayview/Lawrence area of Toronto has a ‘rural character’?

It’s impossible to sit through an hour of one of these town hall gatherings and not come away amazed that this city has budged an inch from its high agrarian, 18th-century roots. Change is for other people, other places! nimby1Or maybe I’m just not cut out to follow along so closely to the nuts-and-bolts of local governance. Not because I find it boring. It just reveals an unlikeable self-absorption in so many of us.

It’s also impossible to watch these sorts of public meetings and not see clearly why John Tory was the choice of so many to step in and calm the civic waters after the turbulent Ford era. The man challenges few of our presumptions or approaches to doing things. He soothingly feeds our biases. Does almost nothing to question the status quo.

Even when Mayor Tory takes on a just cause, like he has with the Syrian refugee crisis, it’s somehow posed like it was Tuesday night in opposition to the most extreme view from the other side, that of Rob Ford. Although the mayor said that he didn’t want to mention his predecessor’s name too much, he raised that specter whenever it was convenient. Right from the outset, he was assisted in this by co-moderator, thisguyRoyson James of the Toronto Star, who began the evening regurgitating something Ford had said about the city not being able to cope with new refugees, blah, blah, blah.

So we get to sit for nearly 10 minutes, listening to Mayor Tory say all the right things about making a home here in Toronto for whatever number of refugees come our way, all the while thinking, Man, imagine if Rob Ford was still mayor of this city. Wipes our brow and gives a collective sigh of relief.

That was the high point of the mayor’s performance on Tuesday night. After that, it was pretty much business as usual. Users of the TTC should expect annual fare increases because, well, it costs money to deliver the service. Even so, the mayor pointed out that a transit ride was “still subsidized by the rest of the taxpayers”. To the tune of the least subsidized of almost every other transit system in North America. Still. Subsidized.

As for similar expectations on car drivers, when asked by an audience member about instituting tolls to pay for the roads they use, Mayor Tory swatted the idea aside. “It’s a tough issue,” he said, pointing out that many drivers believe they already payemptyspeech their share through gas taxes and licensing fees, proving only that if you’re a powerful enough voting block, pandering politicians will let you believe whatever it is you want to believe regardless of how untrue that belief may be.

This double standard of the mayor’s went largely unchallenged until Royson James came back to this notion of fee-for-use about 30 minutes later. Curiously, the comparison he used was between TTC fares and water rates which he pointed out, to rebuild crumbling infrastructure, had been going up 8, 5, 3% year after year. Why not do that with the TTC? Which is pretty much exactly what Mayor Tory is proposing with annual fare increases, isn’t it?

Royson proved himself to be pretty much that kind of paper tiger in the mayor’s presence, leading me to wonder exactly what he was doing up on the stage in the first place. I was given my answer when, in the last segment of the show, James competed with Mayor Tory in  a game of Idiot Questions or whatever it was called. cricketThe other co-moderator, filling in for a sick Cynthia Mulligan, asked the two men trick questions like… You don’t really give a shit, do you? Let me just say, it was 3 or so minutes I’m never getting back.

Three or so minutes the mayor could’ve taken answering the last question posed from the audience about his SmartTrack plan. How would it help those transit users who are already packed tightly on the Yonge subway line? SmartTrack, Mayor Tory assured the gentleman, would serve as a ‘relief line’.

It won’t. Nobody else except for Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker makes such a ludicrous claim. And Councillor De Baeremaeker will say anything about public transit that he thinks people want to hear.

Remember how he loved the idea of a Scarborough LRT?

And then how he hated it?

But on Tuesday night, Mayor Tory got to run with the line about SmartTrack being a relief subway line, unchallenged, because time had expired and the final 3 minutes or so were needed to play Idiot Questions or whatever.

Turns out #AskMayorTory is more of an exercise of Listen To Mayor Tory. lotsofquestionsDon’t challenge Mayor Tory. Don’t question the statements he makes, the hyperbole he uses, the crass hypocrisy he employs.

#AskMayorTory shows the mayor, casually plopped down on his bully pulpit. There’s no back and forth, no actual discourse. Just questions lobbed up and batted back in the direction he wants to send them. Mayor Tory wants you to know, Toronto, that he hears you. He’s just not really listening if your voice doesn’t already have his ear.

— into-the-voidly submitted by Cityslikr

Once Upon A Time There Was A Transit Plan…

Transit planning in Toronto is becoming more and more like one of the fables of yore. Tales told to teach children a valuable moral lesson. grimmFailure to absorb said counsel would result in rather… a-hem, a-hem… grim doings like throwing an old blind woman into an oven or cutting off your toe to fit into a shoe. Not so much happy-endings as, can you fucking believe what just happened?!

Read yesterday’s Toronto Star article from Royson James, Politicians ignore disaster coming down the track, and decipher the moral of the story, if you dare. Massaged ridership numbers. Deliberately downplayed costs. Overt political meddling in the planning process. What glimmer of enlightenment do you glean, standing as we do right now in the dark, foreboding forest?

Here, Little Red Riding Hood. Take this basket of goodies to your ailing grandmother. grimm1Take the shortcut to grannie’s house through that wolf-infested thicket of woods.

What could possibly go wrong?

Which is exactly where we’re sitting, waiting for staff reports to come back this fall on the feasibility of Mayor John Tory’s signature SmartTrack plan as well as the alignment of choice for the Scarborough subway. Here, Toronto. Take this basket of goodies to your transit ailing system. Please ignore the wolves at your door.

What could possibly go wrong?

Now, it’s easy to cast the villain in this tale. Emerging from under the bridge, Rob “Subways, Subways, Subways” Ford plays the ogre. Once with the perceived power to do so (what politicians like to call their ‘mandate’) in his grasp, he killed off a perfectly good and provincially funded transit plan with no realistic alternative in place. grimm3Just killed it dead. Because he could.

The fact is, however, Rob Ford is nothing more than the inciting incident of this story. His madness could’ve been stopped in its tracks by people wielding far more power than he did. While city council was probably correct in not forcing him to bring his Transit City Dead motion immediately up for a vote during his brief but impressive ascendancy, and handing him an “official” stamp of approval, others could’ve stood firm in the face of his onslaught.

That is the real moral of this story. Political cravenness and calculation in the face of inchoate populism. Good governance brushed aside for good poll numbers. Doing the right thing? Define the word ‘right’.

Lies added to lies, multiplied by lies to the power of three. Compounded lies, all in the service of expediency and to the detriment of public policy. Everyone became a subway champion (under and above ground). Remember. grimm2Don’t take what you think is the best course possible. Take the one that’s most popular.

That’s the lesson of Toronto’s transit fable. Have no conviction. Disregard facts and evidence. Cater first and foremost to popular opinion. (I mean, come on. It’s not like I’m the only person advocating we burn the witch, am I right? Burn the witch! Burn the witch!!) Never, no matter what, whatever you do, stand up to a bully especially if he really, really popular. No good can come of it.

It’s a morality tale devoid of any morality or ethics. A story with far more villains than heroes. Taking and retaining power is all that matters, kids. If you want to get ahead in this life, best void yourselves of scruples as soon as you can. Integrity and principles are for suckers, boys and girls. Learn that now and save yourself a boatload of anguish and misery later.

The End.

grimly submitted by Cityslikr