[LINK] Two links on Toronto's internal divisions

[rfmcdonald]

The two leading Toronto blogs, blogTO and Torontoist, have each come up with their own must-read posts exploring Toronto's internal divisions and their import

At blogTO, Derek Flack's "Will the mayoral race once again be defined by the "urban" vs. "suburban" split?" takes a look at that old division between downtown and suburbs. Yes, it looks like these divisions are real; yes, it looks like Toronto has its own two solitudes.

With Rob Ford's ascent to front-runner status in the 2010 mayoral race, much is once again being made of the oppositional voting preferences of those who reside in old (urban) Toronto and what were once the suburbs that sprouted up around the core of the city. I say "what were once the suburbs" because post-amalgamation it makes little sense to use this terminology to describe areas like Scarborough, North York and Etobicoke.

But, forgetting this terminological inaccuracy, there's compelling evidence -- at the very least from a political perspective -- to suggest that the old city and its former suburbs have never aligned ideologically.

[. . .]

[E]ven though Barbara Hall, [Mel] Lastman's competition in the mayoral race that year, was also against amalgamation, it's not really a surprise that the results of the election were split between north and south. Regardless of their stance against the province's decision to amalgamate, the deed had been done, and each candidate was affiliated with the municipality he/she formerly governed. Hall was the lefty from old Toronto, while Lastman's position on the right struck a chord with voters in other formerly suburban municipalities beyond just North York (e.g. Etobicoke and Scarborough).

None of this is really news. But it does at least partially explain Rob Ford's recent polling success. I can recall a number of occasions over the last few weeks in which I confidently proclaimed that Ford's popularity will be checked once the mayoral race kicks into high gear post-Labour Day. It wasn't a particularly sophisticated argument I was making. At bottom, I merely believed that Ford's views on a host of issues -- be it immigration, same-sex marriage, city spending or reducing the number of city councillors -- don't jive with the values of the average Torontonian.

But, alas, there's a basic fallacy that informs this stance, one that these maps and recent polls show rather well. It's not really possible to speak of average or typical citizens when it comes to Toronto politics (if it ever is). In the wake of amalgamation in particular, the nature of the issues at play in municipal politics tends to galvanize groups of people who share a common geography.

At Torontoist, Steve Kupferman's "Researchers Propose Buses to Ease Toronto's Class Divide" starts from an observation that the "Three Torontos"--the segmentation of Toronto, in concentric rings, from richer to poorer neighbourhoods--maps quite closely onto the subway coverage provided by the TTC. That means, some thing, that the TTC could be used to deal with these inequalities.

The researchers who compiled the data (graduate students working for MPI, and not Florida himself) were struck by how tightly clustered Toronto's creative jobs are, and by how closely those jobs hew, geographically, to subway lines. They say this indicates that Toronto's subway network doesn't benefit all types of workers equally.

"When you look at our map, and you look at who is best served by something like the subway system, it's the people in the creative occupations, which tend to make more [money]," said Patrick Adler, the report's lead researcher and a graduate student in geography at the University of Toronto. "If you're a creative class worker, you're probably more likely than any other kind of worker to drive to work, but if you choose to take the subway it really works out well for you." Service and working-class employees, meanwhile, are less likely to have easy access to speedy rail transit at their places of work, because their jobs are more evenly distributed across the city.

Addressing inequalities in transit access is a major policy goal for all of this year's mayoral contenders, each of whom advocates either light rail or subway expansion, or some combination of the two. Adler and his team, upon studying their data, have proposed a different solution: bus rapid transit, or BRT—which is when road infrastructure and bus scheduling are altered in any of a number of ways to give buses priority over car traffic. Usually, it entails giving certain bus routes their own separate, dedicated lanes.

"Our recommendation about rapid bus systems was a very pragmatic one. We understood that the planning horizon for even light rail is so long, and there are so many variables," said Adler, alluding to the political travails of Transit City.

BRT is currently scarce in Toronto. There's a dedicated busway between Downsview Station and York University. Another BRT route is under consideration for along Kingston Road and Danforth Avenue between Victoria Park Avenue and Eglinton Avenue East, in Scarborough. York Region, Mississauga, and Brampton are all in the process of implementing BRT systems.

"We were trying to think of something that could be implemented even with the City's current resources," said Adler.