The signage of the Apollo 11 Restaurant at 1093 Bathurst Street just south of Dupont Street dates this restaurant as surely as anything else I could imagine. At one point the name must have seen up-to-date and futuristic. Now it isn't even retro-futuristic; it's just kitsch.
[I]f you want to look at this extension from the angle of "running a business" — a phrase we've heard the mayor trot out at every possible opportunity — the data clearly supports there is no business case to be made. The ridership numbers at non-connecting stations on the Sheppard line — Bayview, Bessarion, and Leslie — all fall within the 10 most under-performing stations in the TTC (Bayview is 10th at 8,196 riders a day; Leslie is 6th at 5,614; Bessarion is the second worst station at 2,588 riders day). The best business option was building the affordable Transit City, but that idea is moot for the time being.
So, with a funding model that seems dead in the water and a business case that is next to non-existent, is there anyway that the mayor could convince me that building a Sheppard extension is a good idea? Maybe. But it wouldn't be the extension that the mayor has envisioned.
If Ford is hell-bent on using money to build a Sheppard subway it should be to go west, not east: connect the Yonge-Sheppard station to Downsview station. This stretch of 4.5km would connect the University line to the Yonge line, as well as the new University-Spadina extension that is currently being built up into Vaughan.
This kind of connection provides the TTC with all kinds of options. When southbound trains leave from the Vaughan Centre and reach Downsview, trains could alternate between going south or going east along the Sheppard line. This would transform the Sheppard line from being a 5.5km stubway into an integrated 20km east-west line. And it would finally give the Sheppard line a reason for its own existence.
The residents along Sheppard East were sold a bag of bad goods by Ford in the last election. Sadly, their votes were attached to a promise that cannot be delivered by the City, TTC, or the private sector, nor is there any real business or density justification for investing billions of dollars in this corridor.
If Mayor Ford had some respect for Toronto taxpayers as he so often claims, we would work on proposals to improve the balance sheet on Toronto’s operating budget. Ford’s Council is already on record asking that Queen’s Park return to funding half of the operating deficit, but this issue was not even on the table.
“Predictable funding” has been the rallying cry of transit advocates, politicians and management for decades. It is impossible to make long range plans about service quality, major system maintenance works and expansion without knowing that money will be available, and that funding programs will meet the challenge of a robust, growing transit system.
On the Operating Budget, Ontario dropped out of that game under the Harris Tories, and came back, fitfully, under the Liberals with various one-time bailouts. Gas tax revenues earmarked for Toronto are split between capital and operating with about $90-million going to operations, and the rest to capital. To put this in context, the TTC’s total operating subsidy is over $400-million, and the provincial contribution is nowhere near half.
[. . .]
Like Toronto, Queen’s Park faces the conundrum that actually supporting transit costs money because almost all new riders represent additional net costs. Going “green”, giving riders better options for travel without the need for multi-car families, isn’t free. Supporting the growth of employment in downtown Toronto through better regional transit isn’t free. Attacking congestion on roads in the 905 with good, attractive local transit certainly won’t be free because the transit habit falls off north of Bloor Street, never mind the 401 or Steeles Avenue.
[. . .]
Politicians who fear to state the obvious may play to their base, to the something-for-nothing crowd for whom “gravy trains” are the simplistic answer to all our problems. That’s not leadership, but pandering, and without even a modicum of real business sense about how city and regional finance work.
Rebel fighters have claimed complete control of a sprawling oil refinery in this coastal town, seizing one of Muammar Gaddafi's most important assets after just three days of fighting and delivering the latest in a string of small victories that have suddenly put the rebels at Tripoli's door.
Despite what rebel leaders described as fierce fighting, many of them expressed surprise that the Gaddafi loyalists were routed with relative ease. Some people even wondered whether the chaotic exit by about 50 of the Gaddafi fighters - who fled by boat before they were bombed by NATO warplanes, according to several fighters - was a ruse.
''We hope this is it,'' said Ajali Deeb, a petrochemical engineer at the seized refinery. ''These are indications that the system has started to collapse.''
The six-month history of the Libyan conflict is filled with similar predictions. Even so, the rebels have taken a substantial swathe of territory in western Libya over the past few weeks, and Gaddafi's forces have not mounted a forceful counterattack.
There were other signs of a conflict that had reached a critical moment, if not its final stage. For days, the vital highway from Tunisia to Tripoli has remained closed, controlled by the rebels in a harsh blow to the Gaddafi government, which relies on the road for supplies of food and fuel.
Thousands of refugees are also fleeing daily from Tripoli, some to escape the city's mounting hardships but others expecting that they would be safer in rebel-held areas.
Suddenly things seem to be moving very fast. It’s possible that Qaddafi could still launch a counterstrike, of course. But he won’t easily be able to undo the results of the past few days; for instance, even if he retakes the coastal towns, the rebels can still destroy highway bridges and overpasses, keeping the capital’s main supply route cut for days or weeks.
One peculiarity of this whole thing is that the eastern front — where the main concentration of government forces faces the main rebel army — has been almost static. The rebels have spent the last few weeks very slowly fighting their way into the town of Brega. Brega sits at the edge of a massive concentration of Libya’s oil infrastructure — pipelines, refineries, an export terminal. So it’s possible that the rebels have been deliberately going slow in order to minimize the risk of damaging large amounts of complex and expensive equipment, hoping that it will fall into their hands intact. Whether this will work out or not remains to be seen.
Another interesting point: the rebel offensive seems to have been remarkably well coordinated, with major offensives in three widely separated fronts. As far as can be told (this is not certain) NATO forces seem to have been working quite effectively with the rebels, providing air cover and helping bring down Loyalist strongpoints. Someone fairly competent is running this show, it seems. It would be nice to know more.
Mayor Rob Ford was incorrect when he told the premier that the city needed $650 million from the province for the Sheppard subway to access $333 million from Ottawa, a federal spokesperson said Thursday.
The Harper government already intends to give the city the $333 million, said Vanessa Schneider, spokesperson for Transport, Infrastructure and Communities Minister Denis Lebel. The province would need to be a “partner” in any funding deal, she said, but would not necessarily need to contribute $650 million.
The $650 million in provincial money and the $333 million in federal money were tied together only under the former Transit City agreement to build light-rail transit (LRT) on Sheppard, Schneider said. Ford abandoned that agreement in favour of his subway plan.
“Basically, the conditions of the LRT agreement no longer exist,” Schneider said in an interview.
Under Transit City, the province was to pay two-thirds of the $1 billion cost, the federal government one-third. Ford policy director Mark Towhey told reporters Wednesday, as Ford apparently told Premier Dalton McGuinty, that this precise arrangement was generally required by the Building Canada federal infrastructure fund.
That is not true, Schneider said.
While she said other levels of government must contribute to all projects paid for with fund money, she said the specific amount of provincial assistance needed for Sheppard was up for discussion.
“Each project is worked through on a case-by-case basis,” she said.
A senior Ford official acknowledged he was “not an expert on the Building Canada fund,” but he rejected any suggestion that Ford had misled McGuinty.
Even after he was informed of Schneider’s comments, he said he still believed the existing fund “requirement” demands that the province provide $650 million. He said he now understands that, “in exceptional circumstances,” fund money can be activated with as little as a simple “match” by the province — in this case, $333 million.
Even that concession, however, may not be accurate. Fund rules say only that the federal government cannot provide more than 50 per cent of a project’s cost. The rules do not say Ottawa’s contribution to a project can never exceed Queen’s Park’s.
Brian Porter and Carrie Low thought they’d hatched the perfect plan to avoid the eight-lane gridlock they faced every week on their drive to the family cottage in the Kawarthas. Porter, a soft-spoken 41-year-old Toronto firefighter, would arrange his work schedule to be home on Friday. He’d pack the car at noon and pick up his daughters, Lily and Amelia, from daycare shortly after lunch. Then, rather than head from their home in the Beach to pick up Low downtown, he’d drive to a strategic pit stop in Oshawa. Low, a slim 41-year-old redhead, works as a lawyer with RBC in the financial district, her days and nights packed, respectively, with meetings and paperwork. Her role in the escape plan was to get off work early and catch the GO train to Oshawa Station. Often, she’d end up working a pressure-packed day until 5 p.m. anyway, leaving Porter and the girls waiting at the station for hours. In the end they never gained that much time—it could still be a challenge to get to the cottage before nightfall. But at least they’d avoided the worst hours on the DVP and the 401.
Porter and Low’s weekend escape strategy was symptomatic of their over-engineered city lives. To juggle all their needs and obligations—two careers, mortgage payments, bills, kid drop-offs and pickups, groceries, meals—they had built a life that resembled a Rube Goldberg machine, and any misstep threatened to collapse the entire contraption. Grandparents were often called in to shuttle the kids to lessons and play dates and birthday parties. “My mother-in-law would phone me at work and ask, ‘Where is Amelia’s dance outfit?’ and my stress level would go through the roof, ” recalls Low. “I’d say, ‘Why are you calling me at work for this? It’s in the house somewhere. Don’t ask me, ask Brian.’”
The problem, they decided, was not each other or their careers or their kids, but the city itself—a surprising diagnosis given that they had both grown up in Toronto, happily, in the Beach. They bought their 1,600-square-foot detached home on Benlamond because they wanted to raise their family there, too. But living in the city required too many contortions. They decided to divorce it.
Long before I became a magazine writer, and certainly well before I spent a decade as Toronto Life’s politics columnist, I used to work part-time for Book City, in the Annex. The remainder tables always used to be piled high with copies of a paperback called “The Death and Life of the Great American Cities,” about which I knew nothing.
Fairly regularly, a tall but stooped older woman, always wearing a shapeless brown wrap, would come in to browse. Eventually, one of my co-workers told me she was the author of said remainder. Jane Jacobs.
Only later did I become aware of her accomplishments — here and elsewhere — and her truly remarkable celebrity among urban thinkers. But when I think of Jane Jacobs, I often imagine her in person, among the stacks at Book City.
When Jacobs was writing in the early 1960s, she was responding to the centrifugal conditions created by post-war suburban sprawl and automobile dependency (not to mention white flight). Municipal planners thought that the best way to connect the new subdivisions to the existing urban commercial cores was with highways that, as it happened, would cut through working class neighbourhoods whose residents didn’t really count.
Fulford somehow manages to blame Jacobs for Toronto’s congestion problems, because, as she argues, Jacobs gave us a legacy of opposing “big plans.” This is a woefully simplistic argument, of course, and one that overlooks a lot of intervening history, but has the virtue of fitting well with a sensational headline.
I am not denying that Toronto has nasty traffic congestion – worse in the 905, by the way, than in the core, where transit is a viable alternative – and certainly Jane Jacobs wasn’t right about everything. But the city’s most wicked problems are a legacy of a long-standing cheapness that runs deep in our politics, and is currently expressing itself, so to speak, as a complete unwillingness on the part of the region’s residents to pay for the sorts of things a big city needs.
The new twist here is that Preville is discussing people who think of themselves as city types moving to towns and cities on the edge of the GTA rather than to suburbs, to essentially urban places. Downtown Cobourg, Uxbridge, Dundas, Creemore—as Preville says, “19th-century towns built of brick and stone, with elegant and durable housing stock shaded by giant leafy canopies, picturesque old city halls and quaint, lively downtown commercial avenues. They look nothing at all like the cookie-cutter, aluminum-clad, cul-de-sacky Mississaugaish, soulless wasteland of the downtown imagination.” He even acknowledges that most people would not define these areas as suburban, saying, “You could argue that some of these places are small towns, not suburbs. But the march of sprawl swallowed Port Credit and Oakville, and it will swallow East Gwillimbury, too.”
I think this is an issue that is not so easily dismissed. Preville’s saying that if people move to an area outside the city “while still making a living off the big-city economy,” then they’re effectively making wherever they go a suburb. I understand the point—that many satellite cities function as bedroom communities to the city. But Preville’s project is in part an attempt to dispel some of the cultural snobbery urbanists feel towards the suburbs and those who move to them. And that’s why the bait and switch is kind of pivotal, because I do not think downtown residents feel any snobbery at all towards the kinds of places he is discussing. Quite the opposite, actually.
[O]f those 95,700 people between 25 and 44 who left Toronto between 2001 and 2006, I’d wager the vast bulk of them moved not to the “new suburbs” but to actual suburbs, places like Markham and Aurora and Pickering. And they had their reasons to move to cookie-cutter big-box cul-de-sac-land, reasons that go unexplored in this story about the supposed “exodus to the ‘burbs.” I know a lot of those people, and anecdotally I’d say that the primary reason people do so and tolerate a long, road-rage filled commute is simply that they get a bedroom for each kid and a big backyard for their money in those places. That’s why my parents and my family moved to an unsung suburban cul-de-sac in Scarborough in the late 1980s. These are the actual victims of cultural snobbery, whose lifestyle and motivations are impenetrable to the minds of downtowners.
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