Freedom to Move

Every weekday morning around 9 Pacific Time, the day's transportation headlines from the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Metro Library and Archive show up in my inbox. Over the past couple of months, ever since the midterm elections in the United States ended the Democratic Party's dominance in Congress, I've been seeing more and more stories about transit initiatives encountering heavier and heavier resistance in government committees that are now dominated, or led by, Republican Party lawmakers. Witness the case of planned intercity rail projects in Wisconsin and Ohio, where newly-elected Republican governors moved to cancel these programs.

Highways aren't getting the same rap - something that, to completely honest, comes as absolutely no surprise considering the strength of the Republicans' grip on the wheel. The open road has always carried connotations of freedom, the idea that people can just pack up their car and go where they want, when they want, how they want. While the truth is significantly more complicated, the simple meme of "roads mean freedom" is deeply entrenched in the United States' cognitive ecology.

The real barometer of freedom is choice. The infrastructural decisions of the past several decades, decisions which not only continue to echo but are echoed today, prioritized the development of highway networks over railway and urban transit expansion in both the United States and Canada. But we can't just blithely assume that what has held true for the past few decades will likewise continue uninterrupted into the future. We can't assume that people will always be able to pack up their car and go where they want, when they want, how they want. What if, for starters, they can't afford the gas?

A population's movements can be controlled by means far subtler than the internal passports demanded by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and which are still used in Russia today. We've already spent decades engineering our society around the idea of automotive mobility - it wouldn't take much now to use that dependence against us.

A China Eastern Airlines A340-600 taxis toward the runway at Vancouver International Airport

Imagine a future where the railways pull nothing but freight between cities... a future where oil shocks have come and gone, and the price of gas has reached such heights that the kind of intercity driving common today simply isn't economical anymore, or a future where the highways have been made limited-access only. It wouldn't be too hard to justify in the wake of, say, a national emergency. Sure, you could still go point-to-point by air; but air travel is the easiest method of transit for governments to control. I would not be surprised - but it would disturb me greatly - to live to see a future where air travel is far more regimented and controlled than it is now, where very few people fly anywhere other than government-approved sun destinations because the pre-ticketing background checks are just too much of a hassle. If you can't afford to drive, you can't get on a plane, and there aren't any trains you can take from one city to another - then how free are you, really?

There always need to be options in how people can get from point A to point B. In business, that competition is necessary to prevent consumer gouging. In government, it's just as necessary - to head off one potential mode of oppression and control.

In Defense of the Island Airport

In Which Andrew Will Somehow Mask His Irritation at VIA Rail Settling the Strike Nine Hours After He Cancels His Reservations With Them

Recently I've begun seeing flyers around Parkdale, flyers which feature an infant in a breathing mask and criticize the five four hundred "TOXIC diesel trains" that will be roaring through the neighborhood when the Blue22 rail link between Union Station and Toronto Pearson International Airport comes to fruition. Personally, I have always thought that Blue22 was ridiculous, the sort of project only a politician could support. For one, it steals valuable rail corridor space that could be put to much better use as a western extension of the Downtown Relief Line.

I think this conflict all stems from a misapprehension of the situation at hand. See, personally I don't think air travel, in its most common form, has staying power. Those big turbofan jetliners, the Boeings and the Airbuses and Ilyushins, are not the cheapest machines in the world to operate. There's an old joke: what's the easiest way to become a millionaire? Be a billionaire and buy an airline. The environmental cost is no less, even if it's not commonly thought of; a 2006 Guardian piece reported a "general consensus" that aviation was responsible for 4% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

Here in Toronto, I think the Island Airport - officially, Toronto City Centre Airport - provides a much-needed alternative. For the last three years, Porter Airlines has been the sole passenger airline operating from YTZ, flying Bombardier Q400 turboprop aircraft on short-haul routes in eastern Canada and the northeastern United States. When I was planning for my trip to Montreal next month for the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, Anticipation SF, I was only interested in VIA Rail or Porter Airlines because the two of them offered the lowest environmental impact.

Nevertheless, the Island Airport has historically had a fractious relationship with the city of Toronto, both old and new. The controversy goes back to the late 1970s, when the first whispers of passenger service out of YTZ reached City Hall, and reached a fever pitch in 2006 when Porter Airlines began its operations. Mayor David Miller, you see, doesn't like the idea of the Island Airport, and was elected on a platform that included a halt on the construction of a bridge across the narrow Western Gap to the airport - perhaps out of the hope that ferry-only access might choke Porter's profit margins like Hercules in the crib.

It hasn't really worked out that way, but Miller still opposes the idea of passenger aircraft flying from the Island. Personally, I think the city should encourage development and use of the Island Airport. No matter how much Pearson's management might want it to be otherwise, there is no reason to believe that the status quo will last forever. Short-haul flights on efficient aircraft like the Q400 are far more sustainable a mode of transportation than modern jetliners.

For a mayor who's staking so much, like the Jarvis bike lane project, on his environmentalist creds, Miller's continued opposition to the Island Airport seems quixotic and more than a bit shortsighted to me. For my part, I imagine what's possible - a pedestrian and transit bridge that flies across the Western Gap, and a platform where travellers can step straight on a streetcar and step off again at Union Station.

It'd be a hell of a lot cheaper, cleaner, and quieter than Blue22.