Shit.

It turns out that the TTC unions have turned down their deal and will strike as of midnight. Says the Star:

"Unionized transit workers were notified by electronic voice mail late Friday evening that they were not to report for their shifts effective at midnight."

That should make Monday morning interesting for me if something isn't done.

Dodging (Transit) Bullets

No TTC strike this morning. Lucky. Yesterday I put slick tires on my old mountain bike to make it a bit more ridable should I need it as a commuter. (An aside: Actually I should have done this some time ago as I just don't do a lot of trail riding. There's really no good reason not to use this bike around town.)

Should we make the TTC an essential service? On the plus side for commuters, it would mean no more strikes. That said, binding arbitration is usually more expensive. Yes this could be a good deal for the TTC's workers, but it may mean that we have less money to expand service et cetera. Moreover, I do not know that the TTC is an essential service per se. It's massively inconvenient not to have it, but teacher strikes, garbage worker strikes, and others are also massively inconvenient.

Why we need transit money

When your transit system resorts to duct tape as a signage tool, that means you're underfunded.

Keeping the TTC in Toronto's Hands

The Star has an editorial today that suggests that it may not be so bad to have the province (in the form of the Greater Toronto Transportation Authority) take over the TTC. They appear to praise local control and then turn around and say this:

"The TTC's celebrated "intimacy" with people making local demands might not always prove beneficial. Parochial pressures could well result in misguided transit decisions that benefit a loud and local few at the expense of many more transit riders. Such inefficiency only causes gridlock to worsen and service to others to be adversely affected."

Unfortunately parochial pressures could still apply to a region-wide system. I suspect that the term "parochial pressures" is probably a veiled reference to Mel Lastman's ability to force through a truncated Sheppard Subway. The problem with a regional board on which Toronto has a minority of votes is that the area over which some politician could place a pet project is ever expanded. Under regional control would the TTC have to compete for funds with ever local bus service in outlying areas of York Region or Peel or Durham? By placing all tranist under regional control we surely run the risk of simply encouraging sprawl by creating a transit system that is designed to serve such sprawl. I have no idea why a region-wide body would be less parochial.

There are however legitimate concerns raised in editorial such as connections between the various transit systems currently in operation. Buying multiple types of tickets and trying to go from transit system to another can be annoying. That said what the GTTA ought to do is create some sort of region-wide fare system as well as a package of incentives for those transit systems that participate. This would address the major concerns of many commuters while avoiding a drastic and unnecessary experiment in transit management.

The TTC as a provincial body?

According to this story in the Star this morning, there's talk about having the province take over the TTC. The thinking comes out of an extension of the idea of the Greater Toronto Transportation Authority:

"The Greater Toronto Transportation Authority already has the province's mandate to plan the entire transportation network for the Golden Horseshoe. Its report is expected in spring.

It's also poised to take over GO Transit, fuelling suggestions that it could be the vehicle the province needs to co-opt all or part of the TTC as part of a harmonized GTA transit system that would garner provincial resources, parcel out service fairly across what is now nine transit systems, and make it simpler for commuters to travel across city borders."

The idea of having GO Transit in the hands of a provincial body is sensible as the service runs all over the Golden Horseshoe. The same cannot be said for the TTC or any of the other municipal transit services. The reality is that things like smaller residential-area bus routes would be far more vulnerable to cuts if the system is provincially controlled. The GTTA does have a role to play, but outside of managing GO Transit, I think they are best suited to harmonizing fares and acting as a go-between for local services so that the whole system operates seamlessly.

Toronto's Subway Woes

First it seemed like Giambrone was going to close it down, but now it appears that there will be consultations and the like before anything substantive is done. In other words we are at least six months away from closing a subway line. There is some discussion as to whether this was some kind of bluff, Giambrone said not on CBC radio last night. Of course if it was a bluff, it would not profit the TTC to say so. My gut instinct on this though is that there will be a way found to save the subway line. The sort of blow to Toronto's collective psyche from losing a whole subway line as well as the optics of a Kyoto-embracing city closing public transportation will keep the line open.

In the meantime this is going to be something that plays to the coming provincial election. John Tory promises that he will rebalance provincial-municipal roles and responsibilities (and their financial burdens) so that Toronto might have a prayer of affording to run a city. Like fixing healthcare on the federal scene this sounds like the type of thing were a great deal of meeting and accord-writing can happen without anything substantive getting done. I'm not sure how the, uh, Harris rump still in Tory's Tories will take to this plan to renege on their legacy.

Meanwhile Jason Cherniak is putting the blame on the city itself. I'm not sure I get where Cherniak is going though with his post, I'm not aware of Toronto spending all kinds of money on "tearing down highways" or any such thing. It's as though he forgot about the downloading mess that we were stuck with ten years ago. Or perhaps we need to read into Cherniak's line about "a bunch of politicians far too easily reelected year after year [that] are unable to get their bloody acts together" a slightly veiled criticism of the NDP members of Toronto City Council.

A Big Idea for Toronto?

In the decade-plus that I've been driving (where did the time go?) traffic in Toronto has gotten significantly worse. While I can recall times when the DVP would be fast during off-peak hours, now there is no guarantee. The same can be said of certain stretches of the 401.

In that time period I have done my share of transit commuting and I can say with some certainty that there is nothing worse that the purgatory of TTC trips that go very far beyond the subway lines that are the backbones of its system. Buses don't come, or they come late, when they do come they're overcrowded. All that traffic build-up that I mentioned above, makes the bus trips seem interminable.

A couple of my friends live right on Queen St. and I guess if you live and work along a 24-hour streetcar line, this is all theoretical, but most of us don't (even if we really, really want to). Most of Toronto's residents are out in the vast tracts of housing beyond downtown. And out there, the TTC is often a wretched way to get around.

All this is a prelude to saying that something like this is really encouraging. Check out the website here.

Nerd Fight!

Torontoist points out that someone has gone and carved an apple shape out of Windows Vista ads at the King and Queen subway stations. (Incidentally, until I made this post, I had no idea that each Toronto subway station had a Wikipedia entry.)

I wonder if this is the work of an Apple partisan or just desperation on the part of someone fed up with the Vista marketing blitz hitting Toronto. Jam did you do this?