Photo: Going Places

Fifty years ago, Mississauga was mostly farmland and in order to get from it to the other cities of the Greater Toronto Area, your choices were pretty much between your own set of wheels and an intercity bus line. Today, the Square One complex is the downtown of Mississauga - such as it is, considering the city's development mirrors the way I built cities in SimCity 4 to maximize residential tax revenue - and GO Transit helps connect the GTA. Then there are the Absolute World towers in the background; they don't spin. That'd be too cool for Mississauga.


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Sic Transit Gloria Transit

It was a good three years while it lasted. From 2007, when Queen's Park announced the MoveOntario 2020 project to jump-start mass transit initiatives across the province, until last week's "delaying" of Transit City funds and the removal of funding from the Ontario Bus Replacement Program in the latest Ontario budget, the dream was alive - the dream that the government, any government, would finally give transit the shake it deserves. Those days are over now. For many people, transit has never been sexy - and I think that's a big part of the problem. While the United States tends more to cut NASA's budget when it needs to dredge up money from somewhere, in Canada governments seem to prefer to use mass transit systems as their piggy banks.

It's unfair, that's what it is. It's an inequitable and short-sighted solution that will only diminish the province's prospects in years to come. Not only do I find it regrettable that automobile ownership has, over the last seventy years, become the "ground state" of transportation in our society - that is, a car is the unspoken default - it's another example of our modern willingness to coast on the accomplishments of previous generations while building little for ourselves. Recall, if you will, that the entirety of the Toronto subway system except for Downsview station and the Sheppard line were built while everyone lived under the clear and present danger of global thermonuclear war. If leaders could justify building for the future when "the future" might mean getting vaporized by a Soviet warhead the next day, how is it that governments are unwilling to marshall the same will today?

The government is still insisting, through typically governmental doubletalk, that things are still all right - that the gutting of Transit City is only a "delay," and that bus operators around the province can use revenue from gas taxes to pay for new buses. But that's just a dodge. Come 2011, we may well have Premier Who-Dat in Queen's Park, and you can still see where the Progressive Conservatives have taken transit in Ontario before by following the trail of blood.

We can't keep living like this. Transit needs to be one of the defining issues of Toronto's municipal election, and fortunately enough it's the drum I feel most comfortable beating. Sure, financing from higher governments is welcome, but the lessons of the last twenty years demonstrate that the province and the federal government cannot be relied upon for consistent funding. The creation of a Province of Toronto would be a great help in rebalancing the equation, and although secession from Ontario is tempting given the current situation, it's also not my first choice. It's more like my second.

Surprisingly enough, the answer might come from Los Angeles. That city, that car-sprawling city, had no transit system save buses twenty years ago. Now it has more rail than Toronto subway, and more is under construction. They can afford this because of Measure R, a half-cent sales tax in force throughout Los Angeles County, the proceeds of which are funnelled to transportation projects - be they transit expansion, road rehabilitation or construction, or otherwise. The Los Angeles Times has recently written on details of LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's latest plan to fast-track transit construction - by using Measure R funds as guarantees to secure federal construction loans. It appears to be something that Washington is warming to.

From my reading of the City of Toronto Act, I can't see anything that categorically prohibits something like this - but knowing the twisted skein that law can be, it's very possible that I'm missing something in it. If it is practicable, though, all that we would need is the guaranteed revenue stream. There's one possibility in Toronto already, that would only need minor tweaking - the plastic bag tax. Right now, no matter where you are in the city of Toronto, if you want to get a plastic bag with your purchase you need to cough up an extra $0.05. It's purely symbolic environmentalism, meant mostly to discourage people from using plastic bags - but it doesn't do anything. The retailer keeps the extra five cents.

I believe that the money collected from bag taxes in Toronto should instead be used as a revenue stream for the TTC. If the tax was started up out of environmental reasons, fine - let's use it for a true environmental alternative, and not some fuzzy feel-good thing. Still, transit is an issue that affects more people than just Torontonians. We need a wide solution. I've said this before, and it bears repeating - there needs to be a Measure R of provincial scope, a revenue stream devoted purely to transportation projects.

We need to get serious about this. The glories of yore are tarnishing fast, and we can't coast forever on what's been built and made for us. We have to start finding ways of doing it anew.

PDP #100: Unfriendly Street

Yesterday I wrote about the bicycle-unfriendliness of Bayly Street in Pickering. I took a few photos of it at the time, but with fifteen shots already in yesterday's post I couldn't find a good place to put it - so here it is on its own. This photograph is looking east, toward the Liverpool Street intersection and the site of Pickering GO Station.

Thanks, readers, for sticking around long enough that I've had call to post a hundred of these photos. It really is something to me.

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Tyrannies of Distance

There's an old anecdote that in the United States a hundred years is a long time, and in the United Kingdom a hundred miles is a long way. It seems to me that North American society has forgotten the truth of it. A lot of bad habits can become so ingrained to seem unimpeachable in far less than a hundred years, and the road and highway networks of Canada and the United States make distances seem artificially compressed.

I realized this in my bones yesterday, during the tail end of my crazy bicycle adventure. I'd taken the GO train to Oshawa GO Station, and intended to cycle back to my home near Exhibition GO Station - a distance of 53.7 kilometers by the rails. Nothing, right? I'd done forty-two kilometers before, and the only killer chunk of that was a long, steep hill on Wilson Avenue in Downsview.

It wasn't until I crossed from Pickering to Scarborough, found myself forced to switch from comfortable lakeside bicycle trails to Lawrence Avenue East - which, though an official bike route, doesn't have anything to actually make it so - that I found I was still only halfway home. Scarborough, if you're unaware, is big. Much of it was rural up until the postwar housing boom, and Scarborough is where you will find the sort of suburban developments that could just as easily be in Scottsdale.

Even before then, my ride through Pickering wasn't stress-free either, once the trail so thoughtfully dumped me onto Liverpool Street and then Bayly Street, which parallels Highway 401 and struck me as its younger sibling - wide lanes, wide grassy shoulders, few opportunities to enter or exit, and aside from a single sidewalk on the south side of the lanes, no consideration given to road users not driving cars.

The extent to which this philosophy of rambling suburbs connected by wide, howling highways and mini-expressways dominates North American development makes it even more disturbing to realize that it's only in the last sixty years that it became the law of the land. What's worse, in my opinion, is that it's actually harder to destroy than to create in this context. We would have a far more difficult time adapting our existing infrastructure to new modes of living than our predecessors had building that infrastructure in the first place.

The phrase "tyranny of distance" originates from the sprawling decentralization of Australian civilization, with metropolitan centers in the southeast, northeast, and west cut off from each other by thousands of kilometers of hostile terrain. Canada, by contrast, is centralized in its own peripheries, with the vast majority of the population brushing up against the American border because that's where the best lands that we have can be found - until, of course, they're plowed under for more developments that prize wide lanes and sparse settlement.

We think that the world is smaller than it is because of how easy we can get from place to place, either physically or by online proxy. That's nothing but an illusion. Driving for pleasure from Oshawa to Toronto might mean a relaxing bop around back roads, not to mention even more kilograms of carbon dioxide chilling in the atmosphere, but what have you accomplished? Nothing, except reinforcement of the perspective you already had - that if traffic's good, Toronto's half an hour or forty-five minutes away.

In the end, I didn't even make it that far. After five hours on the saddle I'd gone way beyond the limits of my endurance, and I diverted to Guildwood GO Station and took the train the rest of the way home.

If we want to learn the lessons that will be necessary to solve our pressing problems, if we want to exit the twenty-first century in a better state than when we entered into it, we can't keep falling back on old perspectives. There are some things that can only be meaningfully experienced with no filters. Taking a hundred miles, or even ten, on a bicycle demonstrates just how long those distances can be when they're paid for not with gasoline, but with dripping sweat and aching muscles.

They say that cars bring freedom. Personally, I prefer the freedom of the grocery store being close enough for me to walk.

PDP #66: Dark Clouds Over Milton

I couldn't have timed it better. The instant the GO train's doors groaned open at the Milton station platform, the sky opened and the rain came roaring down. In the time it took me to get from the platform to the station building, a hundred feet at most, I got well and thoroughly soaked. I took this picture once it settled down to a few drops.

Shortly after I took this picture, a GO Transit employee asked me to stop taking photographs for "security reasons." It's just as well she didn't ask me to delete the photos, because I would've had no choice but to politely refuse. When I checked later I couldn't find any no-photographs policy on the GO Transit website. Has anyone else ever run into this?


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