Planning and the Scarborough Subway

The idea of an extended Scarborough subway is sort of like the phoenix: it never dies. Alternatively, it's a hydra; every time the debate seems to settle and an agreement appears to be reached, it comes back and starts biting just when you've started to relax. First it was Hizzoner Rob Ford's refrain of subways subways subways during the last mayoral election and the first year or so of his term, when a build-out of the Sheppard line to Scarborough Centre was decreed to be Toronto's #1 transit priority. Last year saw the OneCity proposal by TTC chair Karen Stintz and Scarborough councillor Glenn De Baeremaker, which would have extended the Bloor-Danforth line east and north from its Kennedy terminus to a link-up with the planned Sheppard East LRT--which, I will remind you, was originally planned to have been completed last year--only for the plan to collapse in a council vote less than a month after being introduced.

Yet it seems that you can't keep a thing like the Scarborough subway down. It's come back in the news again in the past week or two, with Stintz pushing what appears to be pretty much the same thing she pushed with OneCity. The main point of contention is, as always, money: the planned replacement of the Scarborough RT with an LRT line already has committed funding from the province, while a subway extension has... maps with longer green lines on them.

I'm not really interested in going over the pros and cons of a Scarborough subway extension here. I've probably done so at some point in the past, and there are plenty of other places you can go for that kind of analysis. What I'm more concerned about is what got us into this situation in the first place--the planning in Scarborough, or rather, the lack of such. From my new digs in southern East York, I can see Scarborough from my balcony. When I go for a walk, it's still clearly evident where the old Bloor streetcar stopped running, even fifty years after it was replaced by the subway.

Pictured: Scarborough. Not pictured: allowances for the installation of rapid transit.

Until the postwar suburbanization boom, Scarborough was essentially farmland with isolated pockets of development here and there; I like to think that it resembled eastern Lulu Island or the undeveloped parts of Surrey's Agricultural Land Reserve today. With no constraints save those imposed politically, Scarborough's reeves and mayors oversaw the plowing under and paving over of more than a hundred square kilometers of land with new developments designed and built in accordance with the prevailing wisdom of the time: namely, that the car was king and everyone would be driving everywhere. What there wasn't any planning for--what there wasn't even any thought spared for, apparently--was how to integrate transit with the city once it reached the size to warrant it.

Even in the wake of the general streetcar abandonment of the 1950s and the rush to cars across much of the West, it's not as if cities didn't plan for the future. In Calgary, separated rights-of-way were reserved for transit usage decades before the city's C-Train system started rolling. In Los Angeles, Pacific Electric's rights-of-way were maintained even after the streetcars were removed, and today the modern Expo Line runs along one of them. In Coquitlam, where the in-progress Evergreen Line extension will finally bring SkyTrain service, development has been oriented around the expectation of rapid transit service since the 1990s. In Scarborough... in Scarborough, looking on Google Maps, the only empty corridors I can find are two hydro corridors, one paralleling McNicoll Avenue and another reaching from Victoria Park to Meadowvale.

To put it bluntly, Scarborough was not built for transit. Scarborough was built for the car, and we're now in the position of trying to find some way to haphazardly cram it in there. It's not an easy task; just as you can't unring a bell, you can't unbuild a city. We're stuck with the built forms bequested to us by past generations. It's up to us to find a way for them to keep working, despite it all.

Photo: To Dizzying Heights

After two years away, one thing I had to adjust to was that places I remembered as empty pits had become semi-complete skyscrapers. Such is the case with the L Tower, under construction across the street from Union Station at Yonge and Front, and it's being built with the single tallest crane in the country. You may have seen some of the photos that Robert MacFarlane, the crane's operator, has posted on his Twitter account. When you look at that same crane from the ground, you can develop a real appreciation for a vantage point like that.

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What Happens At Track Level...

One of the things that was new to me when I returned to Toronto was the way announcements are now done in the subway. When I left, it would always be someone from Transit Control coming over the microphone, more often than not sounding like one of Charlie Brown's teachers--and that was on the rare occasion when I was in the position to hear one of their announcements, as it's only since I came back that I've been relying on the subway for day-to-day travel.

If you use the subway even occasionally, though, you'll run into one eventually. In a city where the passenger assistance alarm is pressed at least three times a day, given enough days the odds are unity.

"ATTENTION SUBWAY CUSTOMERS ON THE YONGE-UNIVERSITY-SPADINA LINE... WE ARE CURRENTLY EXPERIENCING A DELAY BOTH WAYS AT UNION STATION DUE TO A PERSONAL INJURY AT TRACK LEVEL..."

It's not something that anyone likes to hear, is it? Plenty of us leave their schedules down to the wire as it is, and a few minutes here or there can break them. That emotionless, monotone synthetic voice comes over the speakers and your heart sinks--what's it going to be this time? Waiting in the tunnel for five minutes? Ten minutes? Half an hour? At least they even deigned to announce the delay at all; who hasn't been stuck on a train that's come to a stop in the tunnel, or just been loitering at the platform for five minutes with its doors open, with nary a word of explanation?

The problem is when people feed that sense of being inconvenienced too much. When it makes people lose perspective.

A few months ago, I was riding in to work as normal, aboard one of the sleek new Toronto Rocket trains. When it pulled into the Union platform, there was another train already there on the other side. Hardly unusual--what was unusual was that when my train stopped, it was more like it had been put on pause. None of the doors opened, and for a minute or so us passengers could only goggle out at the platform, wondering what the hold-up was this time. Eventually, a door opened: the one at the very front of the train, up where the operator sits. We started filing toward it, pushed on by a request to leave the train, as it had been taken out of service.

It was the same Union platform that I stepped onto then that it's been before and since, but the atmosphere was vastly different from anything I'd experienced. People were streaming up the stairways and escalators, but no one was coming down. Uniformed police officers were there, urging people to clear the area. There, crouched against one of the walls, was a woman in tears: a woman wearing the sort of frozen grimace that tells you everything you need to know.

Suicide is more common on the Toronto subway than we'd like to think. You won't see them reported on in the news, if only to keep from encouraging any potentials who might be wavering... but it happens, nonetheless. Those announcements of "a personal injury at track level" don't mean that someone slipped on the yellow dots. It means someone made a 218-ton subway the instrument by which they would catch a ride away from the world.

When I next checked up Twitter, what did I see in #TTC? Message after message of complaints. Of grousing. Of bitching. People moaning that they would be delayed in getting where they were going. People fulminating against the TTC for lousing things up again. People gnawing and whining that the wire had snapped.

Lost in it all, of course, was this simple fact: a person had died. Presumably, at least; I can only draw inferences about what I saw. But who cares about that? No, the truly important factor is how the fact that a person is dead impacts one's timetable. Don't consider, say, the operator of the subway--the person in control of those two hundred tons of steel, who got to watch while a person who'd reached the end dropped in front of the train, too close and too quick to do anything but let physics solve that harsh equation. Don't consider the people around--say, the commuter who watched someone step off the platform right next to them. Don't consider the people that the person left behind.

Because it's only your schedule that's really important. What's one life, more or less, if it means you're late to work today? Empathy is totally for suckers.

Photo: Neither Bird Nor Plane

In my latest photo, the Toronto skyline is UNDER ATTACK! ...by a fancifully-designed and angled kite, that is. There was no shortage of people taking advantage of yesterday's salubrious conditions down in the Beaches, and from the sand at the foot of Neville Park Boulevard it's a clear view to downtown's towers... more of them than I remember, it seems. Notice how the kite's strings are almost lost against the clouds back behind the buildings; this photo would only need elementary maniuplation, followed up by a lot of blurring, to be put forward as yet another UFO shot. Hell, as UFOs go, this kite would be more aerodynamic than most.

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Photo: It's the Amazing Bong-Man!

You're always ripe to encounter the unexpected along a city's main drag, at least until you've been there long enough to properly calibrate your definition of "unexpected." Back in Vancouver, walking along Granville Street and encountering the smell of marijuana in the air at noon on a Wednesday was brazenly odd until I got used to it. On my first jaunt up Yonge Street since returning to Toronto, I encountered something even more so--a micro-demonstration of a few people with cannabis flags and a dude shouting "free Marc Emery" through a megaphone, as well as some other stuff I couldn't quite parse. The centerpiece, though, was the person dressed up as a walking bong in superhero spandex.

Yonge Street never disappoints.

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Sides and Subjects

The thing about governments is this: they're supposed to look out for their people. That's one of the key differentiating factors in the whole public/private foofaraw, as the private side of the equation is supposed to extract as much wealth from the people as said privateers can get away with. Really, though, that's an idealistic view of government, and governments rarely live up to the ideals. Still, though, I'd appreciate it if they pretended to care.

But of course they won't.

Case in point: the upcoming Labrador by-election, which in nine days may well introduce a new splotch of red into the House of Commons. From the 2011 election until March it was represented by Conservative MP Peter Penashue, who resigned due to his campaign accepting more than twenty-five illegal campaign donations--and yet he's running for his old seat in the by-election, because why the hell not? Still, for my purposes that's a sideshow--and, considering the Pierre Poutine scandal, hardly unprecedented. No, what really drew my attention was one of the quotes in a Globe and Mail article about it.

"Labradorians have a choice, [Penashue] likes to say: a voice in government for the next two years or another loud but ineffectual opposition member." Or, in Penashue's own words: "I think [Labradorians] will decide that it is much better to be on the government side than to be on the opposition."

That really gets to the core of it, doesn't it? I know there's a long tradition in Canadian politics as viewing the Opposition as a collection of windbags who have nothing better to do than obstruct the government--I mean, it wasn't that long ago when the Bloc Quebecois was the Official Opposition; remember them? Whether Conservative or Liberal, once a party carves out a majority government, the last thing they want to do is give consideration to the other side of the House.

But it's bullshit.

What infuriates me is when politicians treat politics as a game. That's exactly what I'm getting from this: a sense of "us versus them," and if people go with them instead of us, the people will be punished, even if it's just being frozen out of the system. Which, in a democratic country like this one, is bullshit. I, as someone who voted for a non-Conservative party, do not get to freeze the government out of my life. If I didn't pay my taxes, they wouldn't just let it slide. This attitude is that of the people as a resource; a resource the government can tap whenever it wants to build billion-dollar gazebos in Muskoka or to send mailouts attacking Justin Trudeau, paid for with taxpayer dollars.

I can sum it up a different way in light of what I've observed. If you live in a Conservative riding, you're a strong, proud, citizen with a strong voice in government; otherwise, you're just a subject. Here's hoping you paid your taxes, fellow serfs and peons.

PS: it's been two years since the election that propelled the Conservatives to their majority. Only nine hundred and one days to go until we find out if they can manage to keep it.

Photo: This Certainly Inspires Confidence

Despite spending two years away, when I returned to Toronto I found that not all that much had changed in my absence. With the exception of the new Toronto Rocket trains, the TTC was essentially just as I remembered it, still struggling with all the problems faced by the operator of a sixty-year-old underground railway, problems that didn't exist in elevated, automated Vancouver. There are things here and there that I don't remember seeing, though--such as this rather stark gap in the ceiling of Osgoode Station above the southbound tracks. While I know those aren't load-bearing slats, at the same time I'm fairly confident that the original station design did not mean for the ceiling to be exposed in this manner.

Oh, TTC.

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Photo: Farewell to SkyTrains

As I said a couple of days ago, and as mentioned on the sidebar over there, after more than two years getting rained on in Metro Vancouver I'm back in Metro Toronto. I left the West on November 29th, and it was one hell of a day--you never appreciate just how much stuff is contained in an apartment until you have to pack it all away. Once it was all on the truck, though, I was left with as close to fifty pounds of luggage as I could get to; backpack, roller suitcase, and two duffel bags.

It was some kind of fun maneuvering that load down the Fourth Street hill to Columbia Station, I can tell you.

When I got off the train at Granville, I had to take a retrospective photograph; I've used that station hundreds of times, being so close to work, and last times are always strange when you recognize them for what they are. It was some kind of time in Vancouver, to be sure... but sometimes it just feels like a blur.

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Photo: Trafficking with Geese

It's a fact: animals have no regard for the laws of humankind. Without any shred of guilt animals will kill, animals will steal, and animals will ruthlessly hold up traffic on Steeles Avenue. That last one is what I captured in today's photograph, at any rate; a couple of Canada geese leisurely strolling on the Steeles blacktop while the cars built up behind them. In the end it didn't make much of a difference, since Steeles seems to be nothing if not a forest of idling cars. Truly the result of foresighted planning decisions, I can assure you.

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Not Quite Dead

It appears that it's been six months since I've posted anything. What an oversight. But I am, at the least, still alive.

The truth of the matter is that I've let some of the weblogging fire go as of late, as I said back in the beginning of October; my recent relocation had something to do with that. At the end of November I pulled up stakes again, decamped from the rainy Lower Mainland, and returned to Toronto just in time for six months of winter or winter-like weather to start. Six months is enough of a break, I think; personally, one of the big issues for me was that Google changed the Blogger posting format right around the time I paused regular updating for the first time, and even months later it still strikes me as irredeemably ugly and clunky.

So we'll see how things go from here. On those occasions when I post, I'll endeavor to provide material actually worth your time, and if it's something that isn't a fulminating reaction to something I saw in some newspaper, so much the better. New Tunnel Visions posts will be on the way in due time, hopefully--although, thanks to the chaos of my transcontinental move, I still have yet to figure out where I put the notebook in which I recorded my impressions of the Portland Streetcar and the Seattle Streetcar Network. If that means I just have to return to Cascadia one day to get that information fresh, well... I'll confront that when it comes. Besides, I seem to recall promising overviews of the systems in Buffalo and Cleveland, at least, and they're far easier to get to from Toronto than Vancouver.

In the meantime, have a photo of a fire hydrant wearing a kitty toque.

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