I had hoped this wouldn't happen, but given the way governments have acted over the last thirty years, it's absolutely no surprise at all. Due to the province of Ontario's massive debt load, itself a result of the recent economic crash and a spate of stimulus spending to keep the lid on things, the deferment of Transit City has begun in force. At this point, it's plausible that the plan Mayor Miller envisioned in 2007 - and for which the province promised support, giving us another lesson in the value of the province's promises - will never be built to its original design.
What we will have instead is an abbreviated system that will not be completed until 2022, and even then will not be "completed" the way it should have been. The airport will still be without fixed transit service, many of the originally planned lines won't be built at all, and the prospects for a Downtown Relief Line look dimmer and dimmer. Once again, Toronto transit is getting the shaft, presumably with the unspoken assumption that transit is a "nice to have" and not a "need to have."
Even this foreshortened plan is becoming the target of critics and candidates alike. Rocco Rossi, who has described Transit City as "Streetcar City," recently unveiled a "Transit City Plus" plan focused around new subway construction. Sarah Thomson's idea of tolls on the Don Valley Parkway and Gardiner Expressway would go toward financing subway construction. It seems like you can't throw a plastic bottle in Toronto without hitting a proponent of subway construction.
There's only one problem - subways are expensive, yet I keep seeing them being championed over light rail solutions like Transit City. In a tweet two days ago, Jennifer Hassum put it into perspective - "why do conservatives favor expensive subways and the left affordable light-rail?"
A light rail train on the Los Angeles Metro Blue Line, in operation since 1990, connecting Long Beach with downtown
The truth of the matter is that somehow, LRT has acquired a bad reputation in Toronto. I just wish that I knew how, because it would make dealing with it so much easier. Part of it, I think, stems not only from the basic unfamiliarity with the modern expression of light rail - the Scarborough RT is the closest thing Toronto has to a modern light rail line, and even then I wouldn't call it an adequate comparison to LRT as it's practiced in other cities - but because, unlike other cities, we have streetcars to reckon with. LRT is descended from the streetcar, but in the vast majority of cities LRT was only installed significantly after the streetcar systems had been removed. Here, we don't have that psychological remove, and it may be that it's easier to think of LRT as "streetcars plus." If former mayor Mel Lastman really said that "real cities don't use streetcars" - I can find quotes across the Internet, but no source - that may be one explanation.
I suppose one reason could be that subways are perceived as being fast and direct, and LRT meandering and slow. This is a mischaracterization based on equating LRT with streetcars. I have ridden on an LRT system - the Los Angeles County Metro Rail is primarily LRT, with only the downtown spine of the system served with subways - and aside from its separated rights-of-way, there's nothing in Toronto that compares to it. My experience with it was of a mode of transit that was fast and effective (though Angelenos who use it on a regular basis may have some words about what may be a rosy view).
The whole point of LRT is that it acts more like a subway than a streetcar - stations rather than stops, and widely-separated stations at that - but because of its surface-running and more limited infrastructure, is cheaper than a subway. This is the paradigm that Transit City should be built upon.In the end - across North America, more than twenty cities are building or planning light rail systems, whereas only New York is planning new subways. There's a lesson there, I'm sure of it.
Ultimately, though? Much of the vitriol against light rail transit may well stem from two simple sources - first, a general unfamiliarity with LRT in Toronto allows it to be mischaracterized in arguments, and second, Mayor Miller has taken the idea of LRT and made it his. Attacking the man's plan may be, for many people, an appropriate substitute for attacking the man himself.
It's no surprise that highways captured the public imagination, even nonwithstanding one of history's greatest memetic engineering campaigns. Beyond the sheer attraction of a wide, straight roadway with no traffic lights to slow you down, even the architecture can evoke a grand, sweeping, elevating aesthetic. After all, half of car culture is selling the dream of freedom, and convincing people that once they become drivers they're "above it all." That's the feeling I got from what's photographed below, Highway 403 looking north from King Street West in Hamilton.
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The Toronto Sun is, for better or for worse, one of those things that's hard to ignore. Its design department sees to that. Yesterday a Sun box grabbed my attention rather forcefully with the headline "BUS BUST," which in true Sun style combines criticism of the TTC and sex appeal in just seven letters. Pictured were two buses on the 84 Sheppard East route, accompanied by a bullet list about how no one's using the bicycle racks on the buses and that they're a waste of money and are stupid and have a stupid face. (My comment: few people using bicycle racks on a North York bus route? Shock! Horror! Maybe if there were some more bike lanes up there...)
Appropriately enough for the Sun, the story's real headline - "Bus fleet's bike racks rarely used" - is rather bloodless, since if you're in a position to be reading it they've got your money. The crux of the Sun's argument is this - that the $2-million it cost to outfit the TTC's modern bus fleet with folding bicycle racks "wasn't worth it," and that it demonstrates "how the transit authority is out of touch with reality."
Presumably, in the Sun's world, the bike racks on this Hamilton Street Railway bus were not a waste of money - because only the TTC is capable of wasting money.
I'll admit that the bike racks aren't used as much as they could be. I've noticed a tendency in Toronto, particularly in recent months, for bicycle riders to dispense with the TTC altogether. But that does not mean they are a waste. The truth is that cities across North America are in the process of, or already have, installed bike racks on their bus fleet. Beyond that, the mere presence of the option is valuable in and of itself. If the TTC had stood fast against bike racks, as the Sun appears to be lamenting, in that parallel universe would it now be criticizing the TTC for being less responsive to its riders than Guelph Transit? This isn't about the possibilities of a choice that people haven't rushed to make - this is more of a flimsy excuse for the Sun to, once again, bash the TTC. Given its own politics, the implication is clear, and disturbing - transit is a "left-wing" concern and conservative-minded folk shouldn't spare two thoughts for it.
In my mind, the real issue with this article is a lack of scientific thinking. If the Sun really wanted to see whether bike rack use in Toronto is behind the curve, there's a simple way to find out - go to the TTC's neighbor agencies and compare usage there. Or, considering it's a GTAH-based paper, shouldn't it also be criticizing the installation of bike racks by GO Transit, Durham Region Transit, Mississauga Transit, the Hamilton Street Railway, even Milton Transit? York Region Transit and Barrie Transit are the only operators from Oshawa to St. Catharines that do not have bike racks on their buses.
That would at least have resulted in a story with more than the vaguest whiff of journalistic value. On the other hand, though, it meant they would have had to find another avenue with which to criticize the TTC yesterday. Not that it's surprising. In my mind, to the Sun, anything that tries to establish a transportation alternative seems to be part of the "War On Cars" and therefore evil.
Streetcars have rolled in Toronto for almost one hundred and fifty years - the first horsecars entered service in 1861, the system was electrified thirty years later, and it has continued on ever since despite all attempts to shut it down. It's one of only a handful of North American streetcar systems that survived the dark years of the mid-20th century, and aside from New Orleans it's the only one that retains the standard 19th century operating practices - and New Orleans' system was pared down to a single line before it could rebuild again.
Over the last two years, I've been photographing streetcars with the ultimate intention of taking a picture of every single one the TTC operates. This slideshow video incorporates some of them. I hope you find it interesting. The audio track is a piano arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon in D, and it can be downloaded from the Internet Archive.
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It's important to establish limitations for oneself. If everything is valid, the scope of potential choices can become dizzying, and you can easily find yourself making no progress at all. That's why, when I'm writing and establishing my setting, I so far have two rules that I stick by.
No magic artificial gravity; and
NO TIME TRAVEL.
The second of those two is, in my mind, the most important. Whereas magic artificial gravity (that is, gravity produced by anything other than mass, acceleration, or rotation) merely gives the laws of physics a few swirlies, time travel can - and, in fictional depictions, frequently does - shake the foundations of all reality. The most disturbing example of this is the predestination paradox: to put it simply, this is a form of time travel where the act of intervening in history changes nothing about the present, for the simple reason that the intervention had always been part of history. I've mentioned my dislike of predestination paradoxes earlier.
The reason I don't like the idea is a very straightforward one - when first examined, it completely negates the concept of free will. Though this question does crop up for the time travellers involved directly in "making history," I'm thinking more in the grand scheme. While the time travellers may question whether or not they're just the instruments of history, a predestination paradox effectively reduces everyone else to deterministic automatons.
This aspect may not be immediately obvious - it took me years to realize the implications, but the implications do nonetheless exist. The people other than the time travellers, from the moment they arrive in the past to the instant they depart the future, must not have any free will - because, otherwise, the time travellers might never have the opportunity to travel through time in the first place. Choices deep in history resonate chaotically, and an innocuous decision made in the past could prevent the time travellers from ever being born. Entire lifetimes could easily be spent within the "locked-down zone" between future and past, billions of people following a script they can never see, to ensure that history unfolds as it needs to, and no one would really be responsible for their actions - after all, they didn't have a choice.
I find it rather disturbing, personally. I don't plan right now to do any time travel-related work, but if I did, I would do what I could to get around the question of predestination. The idea of the observer effect has a particular appeal to me - rather than get all caught up in the issues of the absence of free will, I'd rather explore the implications of time, from a non-linear and non-subjective viewpoint, actually unfolding in anachronic order. Time travellers from 2050 going back to 1750 wouldn't, in this case, worry about creating three hundred years of determination, because technically speaking 1750 hadn't happened yet.
It's just an idea that comes with plenty of headaches - so well fitted, I think, for something to do with time travel.
It's been a long time since I've been to New York City. Considering that it operates the king of subway systems in North America, recently I've been thinking of heading that way again after an eleven-year absence. I took a few pictures the last time I was there, such as this one from the ferry en route to (or returning from; I can't remember anymore) Liberty Island, in June of 1999. Just one more photo that can never be taken again.
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The problem, I think, is the nature of cursive writing. It's a relic of an earlier age, when never taking the pen off the paper was necessary to avoid unsightly ink splotches or smudges, and while it's true that it can be faster, it's that much harder for other people to read. The general impression I get today is that, for better or for worse, it's on the way out - not only is it not a priority for schools anymore, handwriting as a whole is being nibbled at by electronic alternatives. Five years ago, I made all my university course notes on paper, but even then there were people here and there tapping them into laptops instead - and that was before ubiquitous smartphones or iPads.
The implication, then, is clear: cursive writing is just the canary in the coal mine, and sooner or later the practice of writing in general will decline, as electronic and voice-recognition transcription systems make it possible for people to record their thoughts and ideas without ever having to resort to paper and pen. Clarity would improve - from millions of different hands, subtly shaped by the way each writer learned from the examples hanging over the blackboard and the way they held their pen, we would go to a relative handful of fonts designed for legibility. One prime reason that I never put an effort into learning cursive was that it would be counterproductive for me for exactly that reason. I've never come across anyone who could not read my printed handwriting, whereas if you go by my cursive chickenscratch, you would think my name was something like "Aw Batv."
On the other hand, the replacement of traditional writing methods with electronic ones wouldn't do much in terms of saving paper - if anything, it would encourage more use. There will still be a need for physical copies of documents, and running something off on a printer is a matter of pushing a few buttons; no exertion at all. Writing or no, the occasional dream of a "paperless society" is still a long way in the future, and until we develop methods of perfect information security and ubiquitous hardening of storage media against electromagnetic pulses, it's better for it to remain a dream.
Will writing become a lost art? I don't think so. There's a great many stages between ubiquity and irrelevance, and handwriting is just too valuable to lose completely. What might happen is that the frequent use of handwriting may end up becoming a signifier of affluence, effectively allowing a person to say "I am so well off I can afford for this task to take several times longer than would otherwise be the case." Though I don't think the idea of writing would become unheard of, I think it's likely that outside certain specific situations, people might come to think of handwriting as being a bit odd and old-fashioned.
Still, it's the most significant invention in the history of humanity. The future of writing will greatly influence the shape of years to come.
Yonge Street may be Toronto's main street, but Bay Street is arguably the pivot around which downtown moves - not only because of the sheer presence of the skyscrapers that line it south of Queen, but because Union Station abuts it. Every day, once the clock approaches 5, tens of thousands of people file out of their offices on their way to the trains that keep the entire region moving. The people crossing King at Bay are only a small part of the movement.
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This is the fact at hand: four days ago, a 79-year-old man was robbed on the Toronto subway, his wallet stolen by two attackers - and this on a car that was hardly empty, and like all Toronto subway cars equipped with a passenger assistance alarm. Yusuf Hizel couldn't press it, though he tried, because he was a bit busy being mugged at the time. Neither did anyone else in the car, though - and that's the rub. Suburbanites have picked up the story as yet another bludgeon to bring down on Toronto's head, while Torontonians wring their hands about whether this means the end of Good Samaritanism and lolbertarians in newspaper comment threads rail about how it's all because Canadians aren't allowed to carry concealed weapons. Everyone, it seems, has an angle in this story.
What everyone seems to agree on is that the other passengers' inaction was shameful. Personally, I'm not sure what went down - though I've heard that the car surveillance footage will be released today, the reports I've seen suggest that it was fast - but I can understand it. It's something that has roots deep within the human psyche. The bystander effect, in particular, is particularly vicious and tends to crop up in situations like this: perversely, the more people who are in a position to help, the less likely it is that any of them actually will. Whether it's because people subconsciously assume someone else better suited to help will do so, or because they don't want to stand out from the crowd, or so on--
It's difficult to overcome this - even more so if you're unfamiliar with it. In that respect, the news coverage of this incident is a good thing. If people are aware of this issue, if they ever find themselves in the proper situation they may be able to do the right thing. Still, I can understand why those in a position to act, don't - hesitation, fear, an unwillingness to get involved. That doesn't mean I excuse it. For me, the TTC has always been a kind of sanctuary. It's supposed to be safe.
Maybe that's why, when someone assaulted the operator of a streetcar I was on, I at least tried to act. I was too angry to be afraid at first - but as I stood staring at him from across half the length of the streetcar, I buckled. Confrontation can be a frightening thing. I mean, what if he had a knife - or something worse? In the end, all I can really hope for is that since I had him staring and growling right at me for what seemed like forever but was most likely a few seconds, the streetcar surveillance cameras got good video of his face. So I can understand why people might not act.
Nevertheless, if we want the TTC and our city as a whole to continue to be safe, we have to be willing to act, to step forward when necessary. The bystander effect only holds true if no one takes action. One someone, anyone steps up, the spell is broken and people can justify getting involved. We can't allow ourselves to be intimidated.
Safety is in numbers, but it always starts with one.
Up on Queen Street West, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health is in the midst of a monumental renewal. This meant the demolition of the structures that were already on site so that new ones could rise in their place - a philosophy that is par for the course in Toronto. This shot was taken in March from a passing Queen streetcar, and shows what was once the main building on the Queen West site in the process of coming down, with ragged edges.
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A light rail train on the Los Angeles Metro Blue Line, in operation since 1990, connecting Long Beach with downtown
