[URBAN NOTE] "Rio's Olympic Subway Boondoggle"

Nate Berg's article in The Atlantic about the Rio de Janeiro Metro's Line 4, engaging with issues of poverty and justice in mass transit, is more than a bit relevant for the wider world. (Scarborough subway extension, anyone?)

On July 30th, after nearly 20 years in the works and more than doubling its initial cost estimates, the Line 4 subway officially opened in Rio de Janeiro. The mayor, the governor, and the interim president, were all there to inaugurate the 10-mile subway line, and to claim some of the credit for finally getting it built. Also on hand was a figure arguably more responsible for the new subway line: Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee.

When it selected Rio to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games back in 2009, the IOC single handedly catalyzed a suite of city-changing projects like Line 4, as well as all the sports-related construction and development the Olympics require. “The city’s mobility has increased six-fold in as many years,” said Mayor Eduardo Paes during the subway’s inauguration. “It’s a fantastic transformation that only became possible thanks to the Olympic and Paralympic Games.”

Though it was barely completed in time for the opening ceremonies on August 5, the fact that Line 4 opened this year, let alone this decade, is undeniably because of the Olympics. The state government, which funded the $3.1-billion line, argues that the subway will vastly improve transportation options in the city. The state department of transportation said in an emailed statement that Line 4 will “provide locals and visitors a transportation alternative that’s fast, modern, efficient and sustainable.”

But many outside the government worry that Line 4 was built to primarily serve the Olympics and the upscale real estate developments that are planned in the event’s wake. Critics say Line 4 prioritizes access to the main event venues and wealthy neighborhoods, and disregards the transportation needs of the rest of the city. “This is to serve only the higher classes,” says Lucia Capanema Alvares, an urban planning professor at the Federal Fluminense University. “It’s not to serve the people.”

Line 4 runs westward from the iconic Ipanema beach near the center of the city to the wealthy western suburb of Barra da Tijuca, home to the main Olympic Park, the athletes’ village, and venues for many of the Olympic events. Line 4 travels between six stations (plus another that will open sometime in 2017) and connects in Ipanema with Line 1, one of the other two subway lines in the city’s relatively modest rail system, first opened in 1979.

[URBAN NOTE] "When a tree falls: A look at the daunting task of maintaining a city’s urban canopy"

Jill Mahoney AND Leyland Cecco's photo-heavy article in The Globe and Mail looks at the complexities of urban forestry in Toronto.

[There] are among at least 20 victims of falling tree limbs in Toronto in the past seven years, according to a Globe and Mail investigation that found the city has paid out more than $2-million in liability claims.

In addition, countless others have had close calls, saved by a few lucky moments that kept them out of harm’s way or by their ability to hear the cracking of a branch and sprint to safety.

The toll raises difficult questions about whether the city is doing enough to prevent such mishaps by adequately maintaining its 4.1 million trees – one-fifth of which are in fair, poor or even worse condition – and protecting people from the rare but sometimes catastrophic damage they can cause.

[. . .]

Toronto, which bills itself as “a city within a park,” is facing sweeping challenges in caring for its trees, with pressure from all sides. With a chronic budget crunch, the city admits it is not pruning public trees as often as its own experts recommend and acknowledges that it relies heavily on residents to report possibly dangerous trees.

At the same time, Toronto’s park, street and ravine trees have been hit hard by the destructive emerald ash borer, the 2013 ice storm and summer droughts, which can all weaken trees.

Despite this, officials are under pressure to increase the canopy and the significant benefits that trees provide to cities, including cleaning the air, cooling neighbourhoods, conserving energy and increasing property values. In addition, many residents have strong attachments to trees and vehemently oppose cutting them down.

[ISL] "This $11 Million Island Home Is Within Commuting Distance of NYC"

Bloomberg's James Tarmy describes some lucrative island real estate in the New York City area. This is nearly the inverse of the inexpensive Prince Edward Island real estate I have seen advertised around.

Island dwellers the world over have noted rising sea levels with increasing alarm, but for Barrie Zesiger and her husband, Al, the lone inhabitants of Connecticut’s three acre Tavern Island, climate change has resulted in an unexpected if temporary benefit: “Going across the sound at 2 a.m. in the winter isn’t a big deal,” Zesiger said. “It’s easy, because things don’t freeze over anymore.”

It also helps that the trip from island to shore takes about five minutes. Travel is easy enough that the Zesigers, who recently retired from the money management firm they founded, spent more than 35 years commuting to Manhattan. (The island is just off the town of Rowayton, which is a little more than an hour’s drive from the city with traffic. The couple also keeps an apartment in New York.) But after her husband fell in a horse riding accident—“we were going to get rid of the horse, but the horse got rid of us first,” she said—they decided to sell the island.

It first hit the market in 2012, a month before Hurricane Sandy; and though the island emerged almost completely unscathed from the storm, “coastal real estate in Connecticut totally disappeared for a year,” Zesiger explained. Four years later the Tudor Revival-style house, caretaker’s cottage, boathouse, teahouse, and a plot of land on the mainland with a three-car garage and a second boathouse are still waiting for a buyer willing to spend $10.995 million.

[URBAN NOTE] "TTC Lost Articles is Toronto's strangest lost and found"

Matt Switzer's brief post at blogTO caught my interest.

Every day at around 1 p.m., more than 200 lost and forgotten items from TTC vehicles and properties are delivered to the TTC Lost Articles Office located in the Bay subway station.

Wallets, cellphones, textbooks, booze, umbrellas, jackets, pants (how'd that happen?), towels, hats, jewellery, bikes, and even sex toys get recorded into a database, and then sorted and stored.

Part librarians, part investigators, the TTC Lost Articles team work tirelessly to reunite more than 4,000 items at any given time back to their owners.

"The job is rewarding," says Tara Mercorillo, Supervisor of the Lost Articles office.

"Just a few weeks ago we tracked down a lady who left her purse behind with $6,000 cash. She came in the next day, in tears, giving us all hugs. She was very grateful," Tara recounts.

[URBAN NOTE] "Why SlutWalk Toronto is as important as ever"

blogTO's Amy Grief wrote about the importance of SlutWalk, the Toronto-founded feminist street protest that occurred here yesterday.

Toronto's Heather Jarvis and Sonya Barnett started SlutWalk in 2011 after police officer Michael Sanguinetti told a group of York University Students, "'women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized."

Since then, cities around the world have organized their own SlutWalks. And the Toronto edition is happening tomorrow. But while it's still as relevant as ever, SlutWalk, at home and abroad, has changed since a group of about 1,000 people marched towards Queen's Park on April 3, 2011.

"There was a shift in the SlutWalk organizational team, starting in 2012, from this demand for police accountability to focusing more on how sexual violence affects the most marginalized people in our communities," the SlutWalk organizing committee tells me via email about the current direction of the Toronto movement.

"We are looking at opportunities to build and reinforce communities that experience sexual violence at higher rates, with emphasis on non-binary, trans, and queer folks, as well as Indigenous people and sex workers. We feel strongly about highlighting that not only women face sexual violence and that not only men are perpetrators."

Kaitlyn Mendes, a senior lecturer at the University of Leicester in the U.K., has seen this shift in other cities, such as Chicago, as well. "The SlutWalk movement has more of an intersectional understanding," she says.

[URBAN NOTE] "Rage and racism on the TTC"

Alok Mukherjee's essay, published last month in NOW Toronto, makes me worried. Degrading public services may well have an effect of ncouraging people to be more open about their issues with diversity.

Maybe it’s the the weather. Or maybe Donald Trump and Nigel Farage are to blame. Or it may be the sorry state of public transit.

I’ve been a daily user of the TTC for my entire adult life. Over the past few weeks, I’ve encountered a level of rage and hostility among passengers, related especially to race and immigration, that is inexplicable.

I do not recall ever observing this kind of aggressive and angry behaviour on TTC vehicles so frequently. I am not alone.

Recently, on a Toronto morning radio program, a woman described the horrendous behaviour of a middle-aged white man who loudly and in racist language harangued two women sitting behind him.

When a young Black man tried to reason with him, he pulled out a can of mace from his pocket and sprayed his face.

Mukherjee goes on to describe more like events.

[URBAN NOTE] "LRT will completely transform Mississauga"

San Grewal's Toronto Star article predicts good things for Mississauga, as mass transit leads to densification and unification.

Big skies, wide lanes, lowrise sprawl — that’s the post-’60s identity of Mississauga, burned into the GTA psyche.

But this month marked a historic step in the rapid evolution of this giant, sprawling suburb. A multibillion-dollar LRT transformation is about to begin, promising to do for Mississauga what the subway did for Toronto.

“This is truly transformational.” Adjectives are speeding out of Ed Sajecki’s mouth. The man in charge of planning and building Mississauga can’t contain his excitement, a day after council agreed on a “memorandum of understanding” with the province to build an almost 20-kilometre light rail corridor right up Hurontario St., the centre of what will soon be the country’s fifth-largest city.

“I mean, imagine what this could mean,” Sajecki says over the phone, the words flooding out of him in a stream of consciousness. “Imagine what Toronto was like without the Yonge subway and then the Bloor subway.”

For a builder like Sajecki, being handed the opportunity to transform Mississauga from that detached post-’60s identity into an interconnected city is akin to Michelangelo, commissioned to turn the Sistine Chapel’s blue ceiling into a magnificent series of frescoes.

Sajecki describes how, as a child, he began taking the subway to High Park, on his way to the lakeshore to fish and enjoy the city’s waterfront. “You didn’t need a car, you could leave it at home; the whole city became your neighbourhood.”

[URBAN NOTE] Two notes on the ill-thought campaign against the Toronto Metropass

Torontoist noted that a recent suggestion by councilor John Campbell that Metropasses are unfairly cheap and lead to underfunding is ill-founded.

In fact, compared to the largest North American, Canadian, and local transit system, TTC riders pay the largest percentage toward the fare box.

On a percentage basis, the TTC works with less subsidy than any other transit agency on the continent. This is in large part due to the Province getting out of funding the TTC’s operating budget. But the City didn’t pick up the slack—in large part because of councillors who are too afraid to raise property taxes or support other revenue tools to make up the difference.

And so here we are, with a councillor floating the trial balloon fare discounts like the Metropass is the TTC’s biggest problem, and that we can solve transit by making it more expensive. If that’s not indicative of larger problems, it’s hard to know what is.

Steve Munro goes into greater detail in the context of the budget cuts demanded. Removing the Metropass would save only 80 million dollars, and, notably, is not recommended by the TTC.

The relatively small saving through elimination of Metropass discounts gives a view into how riders actually use the system. Passholders account for over half of all adult “trips”, but one cannot simply assume that they would continue to make all of these journeys if they had to pay for each of them separately. The idea that all pass trips represent a huge subsidy (because the lower average fare one can achieve with very frequent use is “lost revenue”) simply does not hold up. Unfortunately, TTC management has encouraged this view ever since passes were introduced.

The total number of trips taken using any form of pass in 2015 was 292.983 million, or 55% of all ridership. With a projected saving of $80m, the average per pass trip is about 27 cents. However, eliminating pass-level pricing would represent a large fare increase and would affect ridership numbers, a counterproductive move when getting people onto transit is supposed to be one of the City’s priorities. Pass usage as a percentage of total ridership has grown from 25% in 1987 to 50% in 2008, and to 55% in 2015. This is now the primary way in which riders pay for travel, and the bean-counting politicians who agonize over TTC fares should stop thinking in terms of tokens, tickets and cash. Riders prefer to purchase their service in bulk at a fixed price, and this should be encouraged to simplify the fare system for as many riders as possible.

Mayor Tory’s financial schemes have been “running on the fumes” for two years, and the 2017 budget marks the point that his fantasies simply will not be tenable. Does Council have the will to tackle this problem, or will transit riders (not to mention users of many other City services) be forced to suffer through the effects of the tax cutters’ naïve belief that they can control costs through searches for “efficiency”? Will voters, especially those represented by Tory’s henchmen on Council, tell their representatives that cuts are unacceptable, or will those who languish awaiting suburban buses put their faith in myths about “waste” that prevents their having frequent, comfortable service?

If we want good things--and necessary things, as I would call the Metropass--we need to pay for them. This includes adequate levels of government funding.

[PHOTO] Eleven photos from Water Street, Summerside, early on a Monday evening

Summerside's Water Street seems to be the main commerical artery of the Island's second city, particularly the stretch between Central and Granville Streets downtown. In those three blocks are concentrated the banks, the older malls and shops, the brick buildings. It's a handsome stretch, but just by being there I was reminded that I was in a smalltown: All these photos, with sidewalks deserted of pedestrians and streets empty of most traffic, were taken just after 6 o'clock in the evening.

[PHOTO] Ten photos taken from the floor of the Don Valley via Rosedale Heights

While excavating the memory of an old tablet, I found some photos that I had taken last October. They were taken as part of an expedition with a friend to the grounds of the Rosedale Heights School of the Arts, located on the opposite side of Bloor Street East from the Castle Frank TTC station, the same expedition that saw me post these photos of the grounds. Once you venture further from the school, a staircase leading down the sharp inclines of the Don Valley to an oddly soggy baseball field on the valley's floor, and great view of the Bloor Viaduct from unanticipated angles.