PDP #188: Inside a Metro Liner

The bus rapid transit Metro Liner system is one of the newest public transit options in Los Angeles today. While I was there I had a chance to check out the Orange Line, which at the time was the only active Metro Liner service - the Silver Line started operations the day I left California, and I wasn't about to risk missing my flight so I could ride a bus around. The Orange Line exists mainly due to political wrangling, and I didn't cover it in my latest Tunnel Visions post because, really, these buses don't got rails. Since it was night when I rode it, I didn't see much.

The buses themselves aren't that bad, though. This same model, North American Bus Industries' 60-BRT, is also used on Metro's Local and Rapid bus services. What I found particularly interesting were the scrolling digital clocks mounted on the roof, and the televisions jutting from the walls, playing Metro-focused programming. A system like that might be something for the TTC to consider - TVs on the buses and streetcars would make it easier, at the least, to disseminate news of subway shutdowns _before_ people get to the platforms.

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What I Have to Say About the Day

Yesterday, as you may or may not be aware, was International Women's Day. On Twitter, fellow Toronto mayoral candidate Sarah Thomson - who, incidentally, has a pretty kickin' logo on her Twitter page - put forward the question of how readers would recognize the day. It didn't take me all that long to figure out how I would. The most appropriate way for me, I think, is a recognition of everything my mother did for me; she's certainly the most influential woman in my life, and most likely the reason I tend to favor strong female protagonists in my writing and reading. Female Shepard is just the latest in a long list.

Andrew Barton, rockin' it in 1983

Take a look at that kid. What do you see? Aside from all the obvious aspects, what I see is potential - a life still at the starting line, capable of going in any direction, opportunity without limits. Depending on how things turned out and how events had shaped him, that kid could have been dead by now, or a millionaire, or in jail, or a man on the front lines - or even a rabid Montreal Expos fan until 2004, at which point he may have become a dispirited Nationals fan or just switched to the Blue Jays. That he ended up becoming a candidate for municipal office was likely one of the lower-probability results, but like I said, to me that photo represents opportunity without limits. But it's one's parents that can wield a disproportionate influence in the development of their children's outlook, and given the nature of my family life, my mother's influence was especially significant.

It's a difficult and stressful period in anyone's life. My parents were both younger than I am now when I was born - I have no idea how they managed it, and I doubt I would have been up to the same task at the equivalent point in my own life. My mother managed, and while I've always agreed that she raised me well, it wasn't until very recently that I figured out how to articulate the whys of it. Now I do.

Over this past weekend, I came across and read The Authoritarians by Robert Altemeyer, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. The Authoritarians, freely accessible online, is a study of the nature of the right-wing authoritarian personality; a personality characterized by the combination of a submission to established authorities, a willingness to aggress against groups that are considered "enemies" of the established authorities, and a highly conventional outlook of society and social norms - this generally manifests in a desire to force everyone to conform with the same conventionalist viewpoint. Repent Amarillo, the "Texas Taliban" you may have heard about in the news recently, represents this well, and in fact is how I heard about The Authoritarians in the first place.

One of the aspects Altemeyer discusses is a theory of why people develop strongly right-wing authoritarian personalities in the first place. Not surprisingly, the manner in which parents raise their children figures prominently into the theory - particularly considering that, as Altemeyer tells us, "we do know that [high-scoring right-wing authoritarians] were raised by their parents to be afraid of others, because both the parents and their children tell us so... authoritarians' parents taught fear of homosexuals, radicals, atheists, and pornographers... about kidnappers, reckless drivers, bullies and drunks."

People who have these kind of personalities, according to the research that's been done so far, tend to have far deeper and nevertheless-overflowing reservoirs of fear in them than people like, say, me, who scored very low on the scale. "Anger... fear... aggression. The dark side of the Force are they," Yoda said, and he's right. Fear can make people commit desperate and negative acts, and someone raised in a climate of fear would understandably be more willing to commit acts of aggression in the service of the authorities that keep the objects of fear at bay. I can understand it intellectually. Nevertheless, when it really comes down to it that kind of upbringing is foreign to me... completely outside my experience, and thankfully so.

So, in the spirit of this International Women's Day, I want to thank my mother for raising me right, however she did it. For not looping a leash around my neck and yanking it back whenever I went off to explore or wonder. For not presenting a situation where the world consisted of a few good people ("Us") and a great, seething mass of others ("Them"). For letting me be with both eyes open, for letting me ask my questions and find my own solutions.

For letting me grow up, no matter how hard it must have been under the long shadows of fifty thousand nuclear weapons, in a world without monsters.

PDP #187: Tall Tower, Bright Sun

Scotia Plaza, housing the corporate headquarters of the Bank of Nova Scotia, tends to stand out from the rest of Toronto's skyline. Whereas First Canadian Place, the Bay-Adelaide Centre, and the towers of the Toronto-Dominion Centre follow similar architectural playbooks, Scotia Plaza goes in a different direction to the extent that there aren't very many buildings out there that resemble it. Not all skyscrapers are created equally. Along with New City Hall, I think this is one of those buildings that would be well at home in the City of the Future.

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Phototour: Climbing Mount Pleasant

Spring began to make its presence known in Toronto yesterday, step by tentative step. It was the first time in months I've been able to go outside wearing a light jacket and be comfortable, and the cloudless sky made conditions ideal for photography and wandering. Days like that, when everything seems clear and free, are ideal for exploration.

Depending on where you live, Toronto's Mount Pleasant Road is one of those streets that can easily fall off your mental map if you're not careful. For much of its length it's the first major road east of Yonge Street, and between Bloor Street in the south and its northern extent in Hoggs Hollow it runs through some of the most established and affluent neighborhoods in the city. It runs through places that are calm, quiet, and comforting. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of this, it is subtly out of the way. While it's not far removed from Toronto's rapid transit network, there are no stations in the system that serve Mount Pleasant Road directly. In my estimation it is, like downtown's Esplanade, easy to forget about. That's one of the reasons why I went there.

The other reason is that I wanted to retrace the route of the Mount Pleasant streetcar, which stopped running in 1976 after a brief sixteen months of service and was the last actual streetcar line to be removed from the system - while the 507 Long Branch route was removed in 1995, the local tracks still exist and 501 Queen cars still provide service there. From St. Clair station on the Yonge subway, it ran east along St. Clair Avenue East and north along Mount Pleasant Road to Eglinton, and that's the route I followed for this phototour. You can thank the Metro Roads Department for the line no longer existing; it overruled the Toronto Transit Commission's desire to continue running the route, according to Transit Toronto, "in response to complaints from car drivers about streetcars 'obstructing' their progress." I could make a comment here that similar complaints from drivers played a significant role in the abandonment of streetcar systems in other North American cities, as a 1952 TTC report made available by Steve Munro lucidly argues - that such actions mean that "[transit agencies] have tailored their service in accordance with the demands of their bitter competitors rather than in accordance with the needs of their patrons."

Still - it was a good journey regardless. If you're interested, follow along!

At Ferndale Avenue, where the streetcar tracks loop back out of St. Clair station for the journey west to Keele, you're not far from a shift in the cityscape. A 1920s bridge, its guardrails low and made of stone, carries St. Clair East over David A. Balfour Park, filling one of the city's many ravines. As I crossed the bridge, I felt almost as if I was walking back in time - while office towers, apartment building, and modern-looking condo complexes rise on the west side, the east is mostly hidden beneath tree cover.

Like I've said before, it's quiet and residential, comprised substantially of what seems to be late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century housing stock. Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, at the corner of St. Clair and Clifton, is the most architecturally imposing part of the neighborhood that I saw, and likely the only part that would be visible above the trees in summer. It's a brief walk from St. Clair station, only nine hundred meters, but by the time you arrive the city's been left behind. There's not much evidence suggesting that streetcars ever ran here, but for a slight seam between the inner and outer lanes of the roadway that implies the two inner lanes, where the streetcar tracks were, had been resurfaced more recently.

Forty years ago you would have found Moore Park Loop at the northeast corner of St. Clair East and Mount Pleasant, which was the sole short-turn loop on the entire route. Today it's Loring-Wyle Parkette - commemorating Frances Loring and Florence Wyle, American-born sculptors who have left their artistic heritage throughout Toronto and Ontario - the Queen Elizabeth Way Monument, which I wrote about last year, may be one of their most outstanding works. Exhibited in the parkette are busts Loring and Wyle sculpted of each other in 1914, Loring by Wyle and Wyle by Loring, as well as Wyle's 1938 Young Girl sculpture - Wikipedia refers to a fourth, Harvester, which I was apparently too oblivious to notice. With only four pieces I wouldn't exactly call it an outdoor art museum, but the parkette is obviously well cared for - aside, that is, from the old-style payphone with its handset and keys slathered in red and an anarchy symbol slapdashed on the glass - and I think it's one of the better uses an abandoned streetcar loop could be put to.

North of St. Clair, Mount Pleasant resembles an affluent suburb, which I suppose the area was when it first came to prominence. There are a handful of the old metal poles still along it which formerly supported the overhead electrical infrastructure, which are frequently the only remaining indications that streetcars ever ran along a particular street. It doesn't last for long, though - four hundred meters north of Loring-Wyle Parkette and 1.3 kilometers from St. Clair station, the tenor of the community changes again upon entering the grounds of Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

Mount Pleasant Cemetery dates back to 1876, opened as a place where the bones of all Torontonians could rest without regard to religious affiliation, and today is one of the more well-known burial grounds in central Toronto. Among the more than 168,000 people buried there are two Victoria Cross recipients, six mayors of Toronto, and William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada's longest-serving Prime Minister and grandson of William Lyon Mackenzie, who was interred in Cabbagetown's Necropolis until he returned to throw his hat into the 2010 Toronto municipal election. Mount Pleasant Road actually cuts the cemetery in half, and is the only option for through traffic in the area between Yonge Street to the west and Bayview Avenue to the east. Things are even more calm and stilled here, except for the ubiquitous traffic. Particularly considering the way the cemetery interrupts the street grid, it's no surprise that so much traffic ends up being funnelled onto Mount Pleasant Road.

North of the cemetery, a second, smaller bridge carries the road over Mud Creek, one of the Don River's many tributaries. At this point, I realized I'd entered familiar ground - this was part of the route my father and I covered by car, from downtown Toronto to Allen Road. What I recall as having been vaguely industrial buildings fifteen years ago are now new and shining retirement residences. The office building at Mount Pleasant and Davisville still exists, but the UNICEF logo is no longer there, and the train hobby shop that used to occupy the first storefront north of June Rowlands Park is now a hair studio.

This is the point where the character of Mount Pleasant changes for a third time. At Millwood Road, a kilometer north of Mount Pleasant Cemetery's southern fringe and 2.2 kilometers out from St. Clair station, the "affluent suburb" vibe disappears and is replaced by one of the "main streets" that are commonplace throughout the city, in places like Queen Street West, Roncesvalles, King Street East, St. Clair West, Harbord Street, and Rogers Road - places that at one time had, or continued to have, streetcar service.

It's places like these, in my opinion, that really make Toronto - that cement the idea that this is "a city of neighbourhoods." Aside from a handful of outliers north of the cemetery, this was the first time I'd encountered commercial properties along the route since before I'd crossed the bridge on St. Clair. I passed two independent bookstores here, two old-style theatres - the Regent and, further north, the Mount Pleasant, the latter retaining a sign that looks as if it's seen many days - and saw the re-emergence of pedestrian culture that didn't seem to exist through the residential section of my route. It was only when I approached Eglinton that the architecture really began to diverge from the early twentieth-century style that predominated further south - the Mount Pleasant branch of the Toronto Public Library, even though built in 1991, is architecturally well-integrated with its surroundings.

This "Main Street Mount Pleasant" lasts for another seven hundred meters until it reaches Eglinton, historically one of the major dividing lines between the city of Toronto and "the suburbs," three kilometers out from St. Clair station.

That green-roofed structure is St. Peter's Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church of Toronto, and as churches in Toronto go it's got a rather distinct architectural design going for it. It was relevant to me because it marked out the end of the route - I've seen it in photos from the 1970s that depicted the end of the Mount Pleasant line. Here, just north of Eglinton, the streetcars turned around for their southbound runs at Eglinton Loop. It still exists today, though the Moore Place development has risen around and above it, as the northern terminus of the 74 Mt Pleasant bus route. Aside from one minor diversion, this bus route exactly parallels the route of the old streetcar.

I've never been on Mount Pleasant Road north of Eglinton Loop. I'm not sure what sort of neighborhoods may or may not thrive there - whether there's another "Main Street" along its length, or if it returns to the same sort of residential tranquility that predominated in Moore Park.

Still, though, it left me wondering: why's it called Mount Pleasant? Hell if I know. It seemed perfectly level to me.

PDP #186: Long Shadows on King West

It's been a long time since I've been part of rush hour. My schedule has me enter the downtown core while most everyone else is still plugging away in their offices, and leave it when most of them have already gone to sleep. So in a way, I wasn't entirely prepared for the tumult I found out there around quarter past five. On King Street West the sidewalks were full, the streetcars were full, and it seemed like everyone was trying to beat the sun to the horizon.

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To Mend and Defend

For the past year I've been striving to deliver something fresh and wothwhile every day. For those that read this, I'm going to have to make an exception today - sorry! My main computer has been laid low by an untimely and STUBBORN infection bt the Vista 2010 Antivirus spyware virus, which has thus far survived all my efforts to remove it. At this point I think I'm going to have to go the System Restore route and be extremely thankful that I bought that external hard drive.

Honestly, though, it is one of the cannier viruses I've run across. There were barely any misspellings and it aped legitimate Vista appearances and it's probably voiced by Tony Jay. I, unfortunately, am failing pretty spectacularly at mending and defending.

Nevertheless, so this isn't entirely wasted - scientific perspective on just how stupid some aspects of stupid movies really are.

PDP #185: A Stillness on Queen West

There were opportunities to be had during the recent anti-prorogation rally and march in Toronto. Aside from the wealth of photos of People Doing Stuff that I brought back from it, once it actually got going it gave me a chance to get perspectives on the city that would be flatly impossible at any other time. Take, for example, Queen Street West. As it cuts straight through downtown and runs for kilometers in both directions, and is host to the city's single longest streetcar line, it's a pretty well-trafficked road.

For a little while during the rally, it was free and clear and had reverted back to the pedestrian domain. I had to take this picture, because really - how many chances are there to stand in the middle of a downtown street during the day, with no traffic, without an apocalypse?

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Stepping Back from the Marks

Now that the Biggest Hangover in British Columbia's History is well into its first week, and will be around in the background until the 2010 Winter Olympics are finally paid off - probably sometime in the 2040s, considering the depth of the economic straits we're currently submerged in - thoughts are naturally turning to the future. Torontoist's Stephen Johns, who was covering the Olympics from Vancouver, thinks that future should include an Olympic Games in Toronto. I can remember a time when I would have wholeheartedly agreed with him. I remember gnashing my teeth in 2001 after the announcement that Beijing had won the 2008 Summer Games over Toronto. I remember standing in Chicago's Daley Plaza last October, wearing one of those bright orange "CHICAGO 2016" shirts they were handing out for free, and seeing the crowd switch from anticipatory to angry in an instant when the Windy City was defeated in the first round of the voting that Rio de Janiero eventually won.

Now, though... I've had ample opportunity to re-evaluate my priorities. Hosting an Olympics in Toronto would, I think, be a mistake - an appeal to a too-temporary euphoria that puts itself above the day-to-day necessities of a vital city, even more so now than before. Max Fawcett at You Shall Know My Veracity fulminated about this yesterday, and I tend to agree with him. Vancouver's truly important projects, such as the SkyTrain's Canada Line linking downtown Vancouver to Richmond and Vancouver International Airport, is a sensible addition to that city's transit network and would have been built regardless of whether the Olympics were landing in town. What we should be thinking about is what Vancouver won't be able to build because the Olympics came to town.

I can think of one possibility - the Evergreen Line, a new SkyTrain extension. While BC Finance Minister Colin Hansen pretty much said that it was "full speed ahead" for the six-station line, intended to start construction next year, there is still $400-million that has yet to be accounted for. I can imagine it'd be slightly easier to find that money if Vancouver wasn't on the hook for a six billion dollar party.

Toronto has its own necessities waiting in the pipeline. The Downtown Relief Line, for one, which will only become more vital with each passing year, particularly once Transit City lines start transporting new passengers into the existing subway system. We have problems with insufficient community housing budgets and daycare program budgets and basic social infrastructure budgets. To prioritize what are literally called "games" over vital patches of our urban fabric is, in my opinion, totally wrong. These are serious times we're living in.

Honestly, times are frequently serious in Toronto, as the extremely limited powers it was granted in the City of Toronto Act tend to leave it in a difficult position. The current brouhaha regarding billboard taxes has arisen in part because billboards are one of the few things that the provincial government will allow Toronto to tax. Other cities have wide revenue streams - Toronto's is based on property taxes to an unhealthy extreme. If you think things are bad now, just wait until Toronto homeowners have to pay even more and more and more to make up for the cost of an Olympic Village or new purpose-built venues that would have to flounder for some post-Olympic role - because, after all, if there was a need for them, they wouldn't need to wait for the Olympics in order to be built.

Vancouver paying for their Olympics until the 2040s may be an exaggeration. It may not be. I would rather not take the chance. Ultimately I'd rather have Toronto's money go to something that gives us concrete benefits, something more valuable than simple egoboo and two weeks of warm fuzzies.

PDP #184: Old Timey Trolley

I mentioned yesterday in the course of my fulmination that streetcars ("trams" if you're European, "trolleys" if you're American, from what I understand) were common across North America and Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While a number of the European tram systems did survive, or have since been rebuilt with more up-to-date technology, most of the survivors in North America were "heritage" lines run for nostalgic purposes and to catch tourists' eyes. One such trolley runs today in Los Angeles, a privately-operated line that glides between the Farmers Market at 3rd and Fairfax and the adjacent retail development at the Grove.

I'll admit, it does have a way of catching the eye, but even back in the glory days of streetcars or trolleys or whatever you want to call them, they never did look quite like this. For one, they tended to be powered by overhead wires. That's why they're called "trolleys."

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Too Important To Be Left To Profit

In the past couple of decades, one particular concept has been steadily gaining currency among some parts of the political spectrum - the idea that anything governments can do, corporations can do better. The purer forms of libertarianism are based on this, and tend to postulate anemic governments that oversee little more than national defense. Everything else in society, from education to roads to electricity, would be provided by for-profit agencies at direct cost to the consumer.

To some people, this sounds good in theory. Libertarianism seems to be especially popular in the United States, which I think owes a lot to the nature of American colonization and the natural bounty of that country, and as a result the United States' culture and politics have been influenced by the "rugged individualism" meme for centuries. As far as I see it, though, the fact of the matter is that the utility and capability of action for a purely libertarian society decreases as that society's complexity increases. That kind of extremely loose "government" is easily plausible in a frontier setting composed of homesteads and small crossroads towns, but as cities rise and populations swell they tend to lose some of their lustre. Why?

Because despite what some more devoted libertarians might tell you, governments are not uniformly tyrannical and evil. Governments are an expression of the team-building spirit, a confirmation that many people in organized groups can - in the proper spheres of activity - accomplish far more than individuals working alone. Ultimately, the way I see it, there are some things that governments should manage - some things that are too important to be hitched to the profit motive.

Perhaps the most contentious example of this today is the ongoing health care situation in the United States. The US is pretty much unique among wealthy Western nations in that it lacks a universal health care system - and this leaves people a great deal more precariously balanced. While my health care and that of other Ontarians is underwritten by OHIP and paid for by provincial tax revenue and federal transfer payments, Americans must rely on purely private medical insurance - mostly as a perk of employment, but sometimes privately purchased.

The problem that this system runs into is a result of the intersection of two different priorities. While the overriding goal of health care should be to ensure that as many people as possible are as healthy as possible, the overriding goal of a for-profit corporation is to earn as much profit as possible. Health care costs tend to skew to the expensive side, particularly when it comes to unusual or life-threatening issues. While a for-profit corporation theoretically could make good on that social responsibility and pay out its claims in good faith, the cold equations of the business frequently result in companies trying to pay out as little as possible to bulk up their bottom line. This account from Denver's Westword News is only the most spectacular example I've seen of it.

Transit can fall into a similar hole. Recently, ever since the Toronto Transit Commission's $0.25 fare increase and lingering anti-union sentiments have brought popular indignation against the TTC to a boiling point, I've heard more and more people suggesting that the TTC be privatized. Supposedly this would make everything better - I don't think so. Again, this falls into the intersection of two different priorities. The overriding goal of transit is to move people as efficiently as possible. This ran in parallel with the profit motive in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when it seemed as if every city in North America had a privately-run streetcar system, because at that point there was no recourse to private transportation. Cars were still a toy for the wealthy, interurban expressways were a thing of the future, and so if the average person wanted to get anywhere, the only real option was a nickel for the conductor.

Toronto has experienced this directly. Streetcars have run in Toronto since September 11, 1861 - what an unfortunate date for a sesquicentennial, incidentally - and for the first sixty years the streetcar system was operated by private companies under license from the city. Things weren't all that bad to begin with, but as the end of the Toronto Railway Company's thirty-year license approach, it began to turtle. Losses in other railway ventures by the TRC's owner left limited funds to invest in the system, which may have played a significant role in that company's refusal to serve newly-annexed communities beyond the 1894 borders of the City of Toronto, despite the city government's order. This led to the formation of the Toronto Transportation Commission in 1921, which assumed responsibility for all the disparate streetcar systems within Toronto and began the work of extending the network to new communities and knitting it into a cohesive whole.

It's likely for the best that this happened when it did, as it insulated Toronto's transit system from postwar shocks. In the late 1940s and through the 1950s, private ownership of cars became mainstream, and more and more of the riders that transit operators had relied on deserted their systems. The result on behalf of these operators was, unsurprisingly, a slashing of service in an attempt to stem the fare hemorrhage. Ultimately, this widening income gap played a significant role in the diminution of public transportation in the mid-20th century, as private companies could no longer make a profit from it while cities were as yet unwilling or unable to pick up the tab for the service themselves. Most were reduced to purely bus operations, as they were seen as less expensive to run - of North America's vast network of streetcar systems, only those in Toronto and New Orleans survived in their original forms, and even in New Orleans a once-vast system was pared down to a single line.

In the end, what I think is that the profit motive is an exceptional force when it's aimed in the right direction. When it comes to agencies that have as their goal the public good, the quest for profit tends to work against itself. For the most part, health care and public transit are not intrinsically profitable - and, in my opinion, nor should they be. If people only took actions that were assured to leave them richer than they were before, on the whole the world would be much poorer.