[PHOTO] Hungarian House, still on the block

Hungarian House, still on the block, a photo by randyfmcdonald on Flickr.

The Hungarian-Canadian community is still concentrated in the Greater Toronto Area, but the density of Hungarian-Canadians in the downtown that once supported the ethnic community centre known as Hungarian House has faded, even as real estate prices--and taxes--have risen near the House's location around St. Clair West and Dufferin Street. After opening its facilities up to non-Hungarians for income, the House's governing body finally decided to put the large building up for sale. No takers, it seems, so far.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomy reports on the continuing frustrating lack of certainty as to whether or not the Hubble space telescope's successor will survive budget cuts or not. (It should; overspending is all in the past, and cancelling it now would be pointless.)


• blogTO asks the inevitable question: What landmark should be renamed in memory of Jack Layton?


• blogTO also reports that the famed Green Room may, or may not, open up again (unless it doesn't).


• Centauri Dreams reports on a recent astronomical research project's discovery of super-Earths orbiting nearby Sol-like stars, including three orbiting the nearby 82 Eridani (the worlds are much too close to their primaries, sadly).


• Daniel Drezner ranks the winners and the losers from Libya.


• Mark Simpson is decidedly unimpressed with the techniques and technologies used by some scientists to identify the different strains of human sexuality. "All that has been proven is that measuring penile blood-flow in a laboratory is a highly reductive and highly abnormal measure of male sexuality."


• Gideon Rachman wonders if Libya will need peacekeepers and where this peacekeepers will come from: NATO, the Arab League?


• Spike Japan visits Fukushima and reports--with extensive pictures--on the extensive drift racing scene there.


• Towleroad emphasizes the importance of Jack Layton as a long-standing GLBT ally in its coverage.


• Understanding Society poses the interesting question of what life is like in the small cities of the United States (and elsewhere, too), the ones neither big-city urban nor suburban or exurban.

[URBAN NOTE] Four notes on the Torontonian commute

A new report from Statistics Canada--"Commuting to work: Results of the 2010 General Social Survey", by Martin Turcotte--created a fair amount of press reaction.

The first striking element of this reaction relate to the proportion of commuters who drove.

The Statistics Canada study found about 82 per cent of commuters travelled to work by car in 2010, while 12 per cent took public transit and six per cent walked or cycled.

[. . .]

“Of the 10.6 million workers who commuted by car, about 9 million reported that they had never used public transit for their commute,” says the 2010 General Social Survey.

“About 7.4 million of these people thought public transit would be somewhat or very inconvenient.”

About 1.6 million car commuters, or 15 per cent, said they had tried using public transit to get to work; 53 per cent of them considered it inconvenient.

The second striking element?

“Commuters who used public transit took considerably longer to get to work than those who lived an equivalent distance from their place of work and went by car,” says the study.

Nationally, users of public transit spent 44 minutes travelling to work, compared with 24 minutes for those who went by car.

Commuting times are door-to-door, StatsCan notes. Times for public transit are generally longer because its use can involve walking to a transit stop and waiting for a bus, it says.

In the six largest cities, the average commuting time was 44 minutes for public transit users and 27 minutes by car. The gap in average commuting time was slightly larger in mid-sized metropolitan areas — 46 minutes on public transit and 23 minutes by car.

“The gap was not a result of distance travelled,” the agency says.

“Among workers in (cities) with at least 250,000 residents who travelled less than 5 kilometres to work, car users had an average commute of 10 minutes, compared with 26 minutes for public transit users. The same held true for longer commutes.”

In Toronto and Vancouver, it took public transit users about 20 minutes longer than car users to get to work. In Montreal, the difference was much smaller, about 10 minutes.

While satisfaction with commuting times was generally high (85 per cent said they were satisfied or very satisfied), big-city residents were more than twice as likely to be frustrated with their commuting times than those in smaller centres.

“Public transit users were more likely than car commuters to be dissatisfied with their commuting times (23 per cent versus 18 per cent),” says the study.

“This was primarily because it takes them longer on average to get to work.”

This has been noted before as a very serious issue for Toronto.

In late March, the Toronto Board of Trade warned the current gridlock crisis will only worsen, which is hard to fathom since the GTA already ranks dead last in its ranking of 21 North American cities for average commute time. The board used data gathered in the 2006 census.

The board reported the 80-minute roundtrip commute costs the GTA $6 billion a year. The commute time included drivers, transit users, cyclists and walkers. Montreal, and its crumbling roads and bridges, ranked next at 76 minutes. Los Angeles, often assumed to be the epicentre of driving hell, has a more modest commute of 55.9 minutes.

And the board predicts a “carmageddon” in 20 years when another 1 million cars will be on GTA roads, which will raise the average commute to nearly two hours. It doesn’t help that most Torontonians ride to work in four wheels: more than 70 per cent of commuters drove to their job in 2006, the most recent data available.

The board’s analysis revealed 28.8 per cent of Toronto’s commuters walk, bike or take public transit to work, which ranks 11th out of 22 cities worldwide. Montreal was slightly ahead with 29.5 per cent, while Vancouver sits at 25.3 per cent.

New York City is North America’s gold standard with 40.3 per cent avoiding the car on their commute. That’s nothing compared to other cities around the world such as Hong Kong, where nine out of 10 workers walk, bike or use transit.

The board recently suggested examining anything that could curb gridlock, including road tolls, parking levies and tax tools among a litany of other ideas. Otherwise, the board said, Toronto isn’t as attractive to potential workers due to the city’s egregious commuting time.

My contribution to this discussion? A reiteration of the truism that the Toronto city policies traditionally favouring mass transit and biking are popular in the old city, the pre-amalgamation city, where the biking culture exists and there's a suitably compact and bikable geography and topography, but that these policies may not work so well in the rest of the post-amalgamation city of Toronto, in places where mass transit is more sparse and bking much less possible. (Do you want to bike for two hours to get to work?)

One of these maps--5 January 2010's "Map of the Week: Commuter cycling by census tract"--shows which neighbourhoods of Toronto are home to people who commute regularly via bicycle and which are not, and, in so doing, shows why biking isn't big across Toronto and why there are so many disputes within Toronto as to the use of biking. The areas coloured dark blue in the area of the Cain's map of Toronto bike commuting are all but one of the areas where 10-12% of the resident population commutes via bicycle, and are themselves surrounded by most of the other bicycle-happy districts of the city.

Much more investment in mass transit is needed, and yes, encouraging more of a biking culture is a good idea. Convergence of outer Toronto on the biking norms of downtown Toronto remains unrealistic, unless you're going to use singularities to engage in controlled reversable implosions of space or something. Toronto, by virtue of its physical size, is going to be a car city with bike neighbourhoods and a mass transit skeleton. It can't be anything else

[URBAN NOTE] "The Missing Link: Why downtown Buffalo needs a new rail station"

Here at A Bit More Detail I post every so often about Buffalo, that city in New York State not two hours' drive from Toronto that directly adjoins Ontario and is one corner of the Toronto sprawl. Today's justification for Toronto linkage? In one of its periodic links roundup posts, Spacing Toronto linked to an article in Buffalo's ArtVoice discussing a renewed push for improved passenger rail facilities in Buffalo to plug that city into--among other regional metropoles--Toronto.

Ten years ago, everyone thought the wait was over. There was a game-changing plan to re-establish downtown Buffalo as the transit center of Western New York. A part of the empty Aud and the area around it would have been transformed into a regional transportation hub, bringing together passenger rail, light rail, and buses. Local politicians even secured money and drew up detailed plans for the building’s repurposing. The Buffalo News quoted then-mayor Anthony Masiello as saying: “This sends a very strong signal we’re no longer talking about concepts…We’re going to start delivering on what we’re talking about for the Buffalo Inner Harbor.”

It never materialized, the Aud was demolished, and the entire idea of such a downtown project vanished with the building. Buffalo was left with a hole in the ground and its meager Amtrak station hidden under the I-190.

Now, Buffalo faces what some suggest may be a new key to energizing the region: high-speed rail.

Groups involved in the planning, including CSX and the New York State Department of Transportation, have discussed faster trains, higher trip frequency, and more reliable service. All this would be within the Empire State Corridor, a two-track line that stretches from Niagara Falls to New York City, with emphasis on the stretch between Albany and the Falls.

Planning is still in early stages, says Hal Morse, executive director of the Greater Buffalo-Niagara Regional Transportation Council. A corridor-wide environmental impact statement on the effects and feasibility of high-speed rail, he says, is expected in the summer of 2012. Localized studies will follow, and after those, construction.

[. . .]

In the beginning, higher-speed trains would still share tracks with regular passenger and freight trains. The finished product, Morse says, would be a third track to be used exclusively for high-speed trains. A small part of that third track has already been built outside Rochester.

“When you’re bringing the external transportation to the region—for example the high-speed rail project—one of the things that we do is try and coordinate how will we achieve the vision for this region,” Morse says. “We’re also working closely with the Canadians. We’ve been building this mega-region concept that incorporates the greater Toronto area and Upstate New York. And when you combine that population base it’s really significant and substantially growing.”

The problem with this plan? It may not make economic sense.

“Who knows how much service would actually increase with high-speed rail,” says Dr. Daniel Hess, associate professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at UB. Hess, like Foster, recognizes high-speed rail’s potential. “It would have to be really terrific service, really priced right, in order to greatly increase the number of people coming to Buffalo by rail.”

He says that if it does materialize, Buffalo can handle the increase in visitors that Morse and the NYSDOT predict. “Can NFTA handle the number of people that would be coming on rail? Right now I think absolutely,” he says.

Hess teaches classes on transportation planning, and has experience in researching travel behavior, or people’s choices about where, when, and how they travel. He, too, warns that any decisions on high-speed rail, at both the city and state level, must be approached cautiously. Often, Hess says, American travelers in Western Europe will experience the region’s efficient high-speed trains and demand that the same system be built back home.

“Where rail works best is at its arrival and departure points you have a lot of activity happening. You travel from the center of London to the center of Paris on high-speed rail, and when you arrive in the center of Paris there’s an enormous density of activity,” Hess says. The closest example of such a system stateside is the Boston-New York City-Washington, DC corridor, which is different in more than one way from the Empire Corridor. “The problem with cities like Buffalo is the central city, the central core, has really lost its bang as the nerve center of the region,” Hess says. “If you were to arrive in downtown Buffalo on the rail, there isn’t necessarily so much there for you.”

As at least one commenter notes, Buffalo's more natural partner may well be Toronto not New York City, but the decided non-transparency of the Canadian-American border isn't exactly the sort of phenomenon that encourages the growth of transnational regions. Is making massive investments in high-speed rail networks in a fairly speculative effort at renewing the economy of upstate New York a good idea? I leave this to my readers to discuss.