[PHOTO] Entering Eglinton

Train entering Eglinton station, southbound platform.

[URBAN NOTE] "I am not Anti-Subway, I am Pro-Transit"

James Bow's post makes the point that in the particular circumstances of Toronto, a fetish for building subways to the exclusion of all other methods of mass transit--like, say, surface light rail--is, among other things, a classic example of the pure being the enemy of the good. Yes, subways might be nice, but--questions of financial viability aside--there's such a built-up need to catch up on transit infrastructure that spending money on a new subway line would be a poor use of scarce moneys.

To me, one of the greatest frustrations of Toronto’s rapid transit network is the Scarborough RT. As it stands, it’s a rather useless appendage of the Bloor-Danforth subway — a shuttle between Kennedy station and the Scarborough Town Centre that adds ten minutes of transfer time as most passengers head down four flights of stairs to board the subway. Why was it built as it was? Why wasn’t the Bloor-Danforth subway extended northeast instead?

But if the Scarborough RT had been built as the TTC originally intended it to be built, it wouldn’t just be a useless appendage shuttling people between the Scarborough Town Centre and the end of the Bloor-Danforth subway line. In the 1970s, the TTC, realizing that subway construction was becoming prohibitively expensive, sought a cheaper alternative to bring rapid transit to the lower density suburbs. To them, the solution was obvious: inexpensive streetcars operating on private rights-of-way. Based on the subway-surface model seen in Boston, the Scarborough RT would have been a high-level trunk route, still fully separated from competing traffic, that would have sent streetcars racing to get to the subway. At the Scarborough Town Centre, the streetcars would have continued north and east, branching out, running in the middle of streets, as they followed the tree-like network to its farthest appendages. People as far afield as the Toronto Zoo could have gotten a single seat ride by streetcar to the end of the Bloor-Danforth subway, and the final stretch of their journey would have been very fast indeed.

But it didn’t happen. The province of Ontario wanted the TTC to convert the Scarborough RT into a high-tech transit line using technology that was, at one point, supposed to offer magnetically levitated trains. The magnetic levitation never worked out, and the Scarborough RT vehicles run on wheels instead, but they are pulled by electro-magnets in the middle of the track. The design is elegant, but also complicated and, at the time, untested. The Scarborough RT opened a year late, over $100 million over budget, and had no possibility of being extended out in branches in the middle of major arterial roads.

Imagine what the City of Toronto would have looked like today if the TTC had stuck to its guns in the 1970s, or if the province hadn’t been so enamoured by high-tech that they left a perfectly workable, twentieth-century solution by the wayside. The core subway network in Toronto would be significantly smaller, but it could have been ringed by a network of high speed streetcars operating on grade separated private rights-of-way, as seen in Calgary or Edmonton. They could have stretched all across the suburbs. They were cheaper to build and effective at moving large numbers of people quickly. Unfortunately, that never happened.

How do you correct a thirty-seven year old mistake? Yes, transit expansion needs to happen, but if we hope to catch up on the lost decades of transit growth, the worst idea is to spend far more money than we need to on projects that are well beyond what is needed to serve Torontonians. The surface-subway LRT idea that Karen Stintz wants to see come to Eglinton Avenue has been a long time in coming. It’s time for Mayor Rob Ford to show some real common-sense fiscal conservatism, and let the Eglinton LRT come to the surface to breathe.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto council to debate transit future"

I learned at the Toronto livejournal community that Karen Stintz, the city councillor and chair of the Toronto Transit Commission whose alliance with Mayor Rob Ford has been buckling over disputes about Toronto's transit future, has openly broken with Ford and called for a special session of city council to settle the matter.

Mayor Rob Ford's plan to bury a large portion of the Eglinton Cross Town route has led TTC chair Karen Stintz to file a petition demanding the special meeting.

The petition asks council to renew its commitment to the 2009 Transit City plan of former mayor David Miller, which calls for light rail lines on Eglinton, Sheppard and Finch Avenues. It would also call for the Scarborough Rapid Transit line to be replace by an LRT.

Ford is on record saying he wants subways — including an extension of the Sheppard line.

[. . .]

Stintz said the mayor's plan is not doable. "There's no funded subway plan. An underground LRT is not a subway," she said.

The issue re-emerged in late January when Stintz proposed — with the knowledge of the mayor's office — a compromise plan for the Eglinton section of the line.

Instead of burying the entire line, Stintz proposed an underground section only in the portion that travels through the centre of the city. The section built east of Laird Drive would be above ground.

Stintz lost a vote at the last TTC board meeting, when other board members — who are also city councillors — voted down a proposal to study the option.

The Eglinton project and the extension of the Sheppard subway are expected to cost about $8.4 billion. Stintz estimated that her proposal would save about $2 billion — and suggested that money could be re-directed to the subway project.

[. . .]

"I must reiterate: there is no funded subway plan. An underground LRT is not a plan," said Stintz, who also admitted she will probably be replaced as TTC chair.

[URBAN NOTE] "Rebellion at City Hall: Everything You Need to Know About City Council’s Special Trans

Hamutal Dotan's Torontoist post goes into great, and much-appreciated, detail about the special session of Toronto city council called by Karen Stintz. What? How? Where? When? Why? It's all there.

What is a “special meeting” of council?

Council meetings are planned and scheduled on an annual basis; the rules state that council must meet at least 10 times each year, and that the schedule must respect religious holidays. Special meetings are ones that are called outside of this regular schedule.

There are three circumstances under which a special meeting can be called:

•At the request of the mayor, who can call for a special meeting at any time and for any reason; he or she must give 24 hours notice.
•In case of emergency, in which case the mayor can call a meeting without 24 hours notice, so long as all members of council are individually informed about the meeting and a majority of those councillors agree to it.
•At the direct request of councillors, by way of a petition signed by a majority of councillors. The petition must include “a clear statement of the meeting’s purpose” and the meeting must be held within 48 hours of filing the petition with the city clerk.
The special meeting that will be held on Wednesday is this last type of special meeting—called by councillors—and it is unprecedented: no special meeting of city council has been called by a petition of councillors since amalgamation. (Special meetings have been called by mayors to deal with time-sensitive matters, such as the meeting to decide on purchasing streetcars in 2009, or last year’s meeting regarding the constitution of the Toronto Community Housing Corporation board.)

What will be decided at the meeting?

There will be only one item on the special meeting’s agenda: Metrolinx’s transit projects in Toronto. More specifically, Karen Stintz has said that she will move a motion for council to recommit to the 2009 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) it signed with the province: the one that outlines a light rail–based transit plan, with lines for Sheppard, Finch, Eglinton, and Scarborough. None of the councillors who signed the petition used the words “Transit City” today—there is too much political baggage associated with the term—but in effect that is what’s on the table.

Other motions may also be introduced at the meeting, but they must all relate to transit planning—it’s not open season to try to pass anything at all.

At one point, it seemed possible that council would, in some meeting or other, consider a compromise motion that would restore the original plan for building Eglinton above-ground in less congested portions of the route, with the money saved going to Rob Ford’s Sheppard subway proposal. Stintz and other councillors were advocating this compromise as recently as last week, but the mayor has made it clear that he isn’t interested in it. Depending on how the next couple days go for the mayor, however, he might become more amenable, at which point the landscape of what gets debated may change.

It's a great post. Go, read.

[BRIEF NOTE] Chris Hedges on the black bloc

Gerry Canavan's link to Chris Hedges' "The Cancer of Occupy", a thorough critique of the anarchist Black Bloc tendency and its devotion to mass vandalism and the harm it inflicted on peaceful social movements, is titled with the quote "‘Their Thinking Is Not Only Nonstrategic, but Actively Opposed to Strategy’".

Hedges is entirely right: in Toronto, Black Bloc vandalism in downtown Toronto during the G20 summit back in 2010 may not only have given the Toronto police the political space necessary to make indiscriminate mass arrests, but it discredited by proximity peaceful anti-globalization activists. Yes, I disagree with anti-globalization activists on many issues, but they deserve to be heard and not be outshouted by stupid vandals or--worse yet--compromised by a tacit willingness to accept the Black Bloc's presence.

The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists—so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property—is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state. The Occupy encampments in various cities were shut down precisely because they were nonviolent. They were shut down because the state realized the potential of their broad appeal even to those within the systems of power. They were shut down because they articulated a truth about our economic and political system that cut across political and cultural lines. And they were shut down because they were places mothers and fathers with strollers felt safe.

Black Bloc adherents detest those of us on the organized left and seek, quite consciously, to take away our tools of empowerment. They confuse acts of petty vandalism and a repellent cynicism with revolution. The real enemies, they argue, are not the corporate capitalists, but their collaborators among the unions, workers’ movements, radical intellectuals, environmental activists and populist movements such as the Zapatistas. Any group that seeks to rebuild social structures, especially through nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, rather than physically destroy, becomes, in the eyes of Black Bloc anarchists, the enemy. Black Bloc anarchists spend most of their fury not on the architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or globalism, but on those, such as the Zapatistas, who respond to the problem. It is a grotesque inversion of value systems.

Because Black Bloc anarchists do not believe in organization, indeed oppose all organized movements, they ensure their own powerlessness. They can only be obstructionist. And they are primarily obstructionist to those who resist. John Zerzan, one of the principal ideologues of the Black Bloc movement in the United States, defended “Industrial Society and Its Future,” the rambling manifesto by Theodore Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, although he did not endorse Kaczynski’s bombings. Zerzan is a fierce critic of a long list of supposed sellouts starting with Noam Chomsky. Black Bloc anarchists are an example of what Theodore Roszak in “The Making of a Counter Culture” called the “progressive adolescentization” of the American left.

[. . .]

“The Black Bloc can say they are attacking cops, but what they are really doing is destroying the Occupy movement,” the writer and environmental activist Derrick Jensen told me when I reached him by phone in California. “If their real target actually was the cops and not the Occupy movement, the Black Bloc would make their actions completely separate from Occupy, instead of effectively using these others as a human shield. Their attacks on cops are simply a means to an end, which is to destroy a movement that doesn’t fit their ideological standard.”

“I don’t have a problem with escalating tactics to some sort of militant resistance if it is appropriate morally, strategically and tactically,” Jensen continued. “This is true if one is going to pick up a sign, a rock or a gun. But you need to have thought it through. The Black Bloc spends more time attempting to destroy movements than they do attacking those in power. They hate the left more than they hate capitalists.”

“Their thinking is not only nonstrategic, but actively opposed to strategy,” said Jensen, author of several books, including “The Culture of Make Believe.” “They are unwilling to think critically about whether one is acting appropriately in the moment. I have no problem with someone violating boundaries [when] that violation is the smart, appropriate thing to do. I have a huge problem with people violating boundaries for the sake of violating boundaries. It is a lot easier to pick up a rock and throw it through the nearest window than it is to organize, or at least figure out which window you should throw a rock through if you are going to throw a rock. A lot of it is laziness.”

Groups of Black Bloc protesters, for example, smashed the windows of a locally owned coffee shop in November in Oakland and looted it. It was not, as Jensen points out, a strategic, moral or tactical act. It was done for its own sake. Random acts of violence, looting and vandalism are justified, in the jargon of the movement, as components of “feral” or “spontaneous insurrection.” These acts, the movement argues, can never be organized. Organization, in the thinking of the movement, implies hierarchy, which must always be opposed. There can be no restraints on “feral” or “spontaneous” acts of insurrection. Whoever gets hurt gets hurt. Whatever gets destroyed gets destroyed.

Keep in mind that Derrick Jensen himself is fairly radical, a Deep Green environmentalist who thinks that industrial civilization is doomed and who--as noted by Hedges--is willing to consider engaging in terrorist activities if need be.

The Black Bloc's tactics, like so many things, are not only criminal but fundamentally mistaken.

Anyhow, go read Hedges' essay in full.