Toronto: a crossroads gridlocked by Stintz & downtown councillors

Nearly $9 Billion has been earmarked by the province of Ontario for transit in Toronto. The new Mayor wisely asked that this be directed to create subways to add to the small network curerntly in place. Toronto is estimated to welcome approximately 1,000,000 new immigrants in the next 10-15 years. A small minded local councillor (stintz) who wishes to play political games for her own benefit has sided with a cabal of radical allegedly left wing downtown councillors to have these funds be used for gridlock creating, business destroying and crime engendering disasters that are streetcars/trams, rather than subways. This political game is not about making the future of Toronto a pleasant place, but based solely on a vicious vendetta to undermine a centre-right Mayor, who had the temerity to defeat a liberal insider (Smiterman) who had a history of wasting taxpayer money ($1Billion plus on ehealth, unknown $Billions on "green" handouts).

Back to traffic.

Before you ask, or dismiss this message as a car junkie rant, you ought to be aware that I walk, bike and use a subway every single day to get to work. Part of the last municipal election was about getting away from the idiocy of streetcars above ground, and to get away from the imposition of downtown councillor militant anti-car agendas on those living North of St. Clair Avenue in Toronto. A streetcar/tram imposition on St. Clair Avenue drove over 100 businesses into insolvency and has created gridlock all around it. The fiasco of placing streetcars/trams above ground was to be done away following the termination of the last Mayor's (Miller) administration, but Stintz has revived this debacle on the basis of short term thinking and political gain

Please let me tell you that I have seen the devastation to a city’s quality of life that streetcars/trams and bus lanes bring. I lived through the horror of it in Manchester, England from where I emigrated and if people think the St. Clair monstrosity was bad, they have no idea what is coming.

One should have concern for the local economy. I have seen and heard all the same arguments being put forward by council  before, and as noted, seen the destruction trams brought to quality of life in Manchester by creating gridlock, no-go crime ridden pedestrianized zones and devastation of real businesses (pawn shops, bookmakers and dollar store equivalents are now prevalent on remaining single lane roads into the centre of Manchester).

In Toronto, the same disruption as on St. Clair Avenue will ensue and many more families will also lose their livelihoods from along the new route. A double whammy for the province and city to have to pay compensation and lose taxpayers. It is better for the City of Toronto not to buy trams and remain as it is, rather than place these in the way of Toronto’s modern development and traffic flow.

As background, Manchester resurrected trams in the 1990’s for many of the same reasons that Toronto Council now seem to want to. They wanted to create gridlock to force people onto public transport and were short of the will to fund real forward thinking infrastructure. Like Toronto, Manchester also had limited funds due to huge labour costs of the city’s workforce, even as real services were cut (not the same peripheral entitlements that are being fought over by a relatively small number of vocal beneficiaries in Toronto). Manchester is a poorer city than Toronto, with significantly more amounts of street crime, which also meant that taking public transport was often dangerous. Nevertheless, the driven council of Manchester pushed forward and were given a huge boost when the IRA blew up the city centre in 1996. They had a clean slate to make the city in their mind’s image. Therefore, they removed road lanes for vehicles, putting in trams, bike and bus lanes. It has been a total disaster for the whole quality of life in the city because movement has ground to a virtual halt and there are large crime-ridden pockets targeting slow moving pedestrians exposed to the vagaries of a public transport system also caught up in the gridlock. Manchester has approximately 1 million people and yet this is what trams did to a smaller city.

I expect councillors have received input and delegations from the organized pressure groups led by people who were rejected by the voters at municipal level, but those people who work too hard to be able to spend time making representations to their councillors on every vote or attending council meetings are opposed to trams over subways. All but one of the people I have spoken to are tremendously irate about the possibility of streetcars/trams being funded at the cost of subways. Out of the myriad of people who have contacted me, only one solitary person, who lives beyond Toronto itself in Thornhill, has expressed any satisfaction about putting more trams on the streets of Toronto. This is solely because he hates Mayor Ford and this is an opportunity to attack him. Hardly a good or logical reason for promoting a strategy for Toronto’s future. Every single other person who actually lives in Toronto has been irate about the devastation that will be laid upon the city by this short sighted plan.

Cheap infrastructure that does not do the job now should not be adopted because it suits the political plans of particular councillors.

Simple question is, if subways are not put in now when there is a chance to do so, when will they ever be? As happened in the last edition, will the North York Post be publishing 82 year old pictures of the technological marvel of trams in 2094? The future of Toronto and its quality of life lies in whether the council sees fit to act as a whole on behalf of its residents, now and future, or whether it will promote a wasteful incompetent mechanism for their own personal goals.

Toronto can be great, but if the reports are accurate, then Toronto will now degrade into a second class mediocre humdrum workaday city if tram vision is allowed to proceed.