A Bit More Detail

After VIA Rail's service from Toronto to Niagara Falls, Ontario dropped us off in that border city's train station yesterday morning, I went inside the station to (among other things) take a look. I was interested to see the below map, depicting the GO Transit service network in southern Ontario. Niagara Falls is literally on the uttermost edge of the network, the southeasternmost extension of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area's regional commuting network.



I'll be sorting through the very enjoyable day trip to Niagara Falls for some time; sharing some of my photos is going to take up a fair amount of space, for instance. One thing that did impress me, as a Torontonian visiting from the city, was the extent to which Niagara Falls was physically removed from the heart of the Golden Horseshoe, could be substantially inaccessible even. The VIA Rail trip out in the morning was perfectly good, a comfortable ride two hours' long that was only five minutes late, but it was not matched by a corresponding train trip back--we had to book a return trip on GO Transit, an express bus to Burlington and then a commuter rail ride east to Toronto. Had it not been for the combination of VIA and GO Transit service, we wouldn't have been able to get there save by bus.

I live in the heart of a region that, by Canadian standards, is absurdly well-served by transit options. GO Transit does stretch far and wide, extending to Hamilton and Kitchener and Barrie and Oshawa, and bus routes do extend beyond these cities to smaller centres like Niagara Falls and Peterborough, but beyond that? Talk of developing a high-speed rail connection between Toronto and the southwest Ontario city of London have been dismissed by the new provincial government, with talk of perhaps increasing VIA Rail service, but I am unaware of this talk being solidified. There was a brief flurry of excitement this year when the mayor of Niagara Falls, New York, talked of extending commuter rail from Toronto to his city, and that does appeal to me; better yet, I think, also extend GO Transit just a bit further too, to connect to a Buffalo that while more distant from Toronto than Hamilton is also larger than Hamilton. The border, alas, is going to intervene. The Golden Horsehose will remain connected, but cities and destinations just tantalizingly out of reach will remain tantalizingly out of reach to people who do not own vehicles, to the deficit of these cities and to the Golden Horseshoe, too.

Beyond this, what do things look like for mass transit? There are, as best as I can tell, no transit links to such an eminently day-trippable community as Port Hope, just one hour's trip east of Toronto. The Québec City-Windsor Corridor as a whole remains connected by bus and rail routes, but only barely; I cannot help but think that the lack of affordable transit connections in the arguable core of Canada is a good thing. And beyond Central Canada, mass transit options are scarce. Prince Edward Island can barely sustain decent bus routes within and between its major cities, with even the North Shore remaining consigned to private shuttles, for instance, while Atlantic Canada as a whole is lacking. At least things are better than in Western Canada, where a Greyhound hit hard by long distances and high costs has shut down most of its routes, leaving small communities especially disconnected from the wider country and with successors apparently unclear as to how they can fill the gap.

I am lucky in that I only find Niagara Falls a bit complicated to reach, and London offputting. Others outside the Golden Horseshoe, and the well-serviced conurbations of the Québec City-Windosr corridor, face worse fates, trapped in their communities without access to the wider world and facing terrible risks as they try to get out. The so-called "Highway of Tears" in northern British Columbia, known as being a haunt for murderers of women, could only take on this role in the first place because of the need of women to hitchhike for want of any other way to leave.

I can easily make the argument that much more funding is required for mass transit in Canada, to make it much easier for Canadians to move from one community to another. A Canada arbitrarily parceled out into communities of various sizes, each disconnected from each other with the costs of individual travel making regular travel inaccessible to most people, is a Canada that is poorer in so many ways. Why public policy in Canada has not sought to remedy this, if not through direct investment in new transit infrastructure then at least through subsidies to private companies like Greyhound, is beyond me. I would have thought the gains obvious. Far-sighted politicians should seize on this, I'd think, as an issue they can at least try to deal with.