Preville on Politics

Why transit sucks

Posted on May 23, 2008 by Philip Preville

File under “heresies, urban”: in today’s Report on Business section in the Globe, columnist Neil Reynolds explains why transit—especially the light-rail kind that Toronto is about to spend millions developing—is the wrong solution for urban traffic congestion. The best way to end gridlock, says Reynolds, is to make the roadways more accommodating to cars. “Buying bulk people-movers is an old paradigm,” he says, words that will surely drive TTC-heads bananas. But Reynolds may have a point.

I have a sneaking suspicion that there is a sort of theoretical limit to transit, a ridership beyond which it cannot reach. I have no idea if anyone’s studied the concept, and I may be as full of hot air as Reynolds. But the truth is that mass transit involves compromises that are simply untenable for some segments of the population: people whose workdays involve travel between many locations, those who have to pick up the groceries and the kids on the way home, and so on. The greatest appeal of cars is that they are individualized transportation pods (let’s call them ITPs): they take you everywhere you need to go, door to door, with lots of room for passengers and freight. And we will never be rid of our dependence upon ITPs. They are too useful and too much fun to give up.

But there is another type of ITP: the bicycle. Properly outfitted, it can do almost everything a car can do. Outside my son’s daycare is a storage shed where parents can leave their strollers for the day while at work; one parent stores his bike’s kiddie trailer there every morning before riding off to work, then hitches it back up at pickup time. Granted, for some of those transit-impossible segments of the population, bikes will always be inadequate as well. But for many others they are a more workable solution than transit.

Which leads me to the following three public service announcements:

1. This week saw the launch of the Toronto Cyclists Union, a membership-driven organization that hopes to gather up all the city’s bicycle users—commuters, recreational riders, whomever—under a single umbrella. If you own a bike, you should join.
2. This Sunday will feature the second annual Bells on Bloor, a happy-go-lucky demonstration-cum-parade of cyclists along Bloor West, from High Park to Queen’s Park. Bikes, trikes, unicycles—anything on wheels that isn’t powered by an internal combustion engine—welcome.
3. My column about cycling in the June edition of Toronto Life is now available for free on the Web site. Happy reading.

Categories: General, Media, Transit
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Comments

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Mark Dowling May 23, 2008 at 12:59 p.m.

I think what we need to get away from is the tyranny of one mode for all. Transit stations need to become even more multi-modal than they already are but unified around a smartcard. It should be possible to emerge from Eglinton station and with the same smartcard pay for a reserved Zipcar or for a reserved bike. As for whether light rail can work - Dublin shows that it can, with ridership way ahead of expectations and massive demand for the system to be expanded. You just have to do it right.

I think the more positive article on Ottawa light rail is <a href="http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=f0e033aa-4010-4303-a738-849ddc508499">the one in the Citizen</a>, in which a councillor warns residents who would like a light rail line that intensification will precede it. It would have been nice if Lastman had been similarly honest with residents of Sheppard Avenue East who are shocked - SHOCKED - that they couldn't have a low rise neighbourhood adjoining a subway line with the rest of the city paying for its operating losses.

While I enjoyed your cycling article, one thing that bugs me about Toronto cyclists which I never seemed to notice when living in Ireland is that they like to have their cake and eat it.

They cycle across crosswalks (and sometimes <a href="http://www.mirror-guardian.com/news/News/Scarborough/article/30740">that kills kids</a> - not a week after that incident I saw kids riding across a Broadview crosswalk). They use pedestrian lights if the general traffic light isn't suiting them but traffic lights if the pedestrians don't suit them. They are as capable of hammering through a red light as any stockbroker in a Beemer but without a licence plate for the camera to catch. They mount footpaths - pedestrian "bikelanes" - when it suits them.

I have twice come close to being taken out by cyclists speeding through the lights between King and Queen on Bay (i.e. I felt the wind from their passage against my face close) - what's the catchy "door prize"-style name for that behaviour.

Roderick May 23, 2008 at 3:06 p.m.

"I have no idea if anyone’s studied the concept, and I may be as full of hot air as Reynolds."

Maybe you should do a quick check before writing about it then?

I like the fact that we have a local monthly like Toronto Life but in execution it is one of the most intellectually lazy publications I've ever read. You're one of the few contributors who sometimes rises above the malaise. Please try harder!

james May 24, 2008 at 3:10 a.m.

If transit is quick and frequent, with things like Metropasses, the disadvantage is minimal. At rush hour, a subway will get you to your destination faster. Transit has to be multi-modal. Also key is density and a compact urban structure. Transit doesn't work that well in the suburbs as in downtown. You need to spread downtown outwards, and have different people living downtown. There is no significant limit to the capabilities of properly planned transit. It's necessary to have healthy urban areas though. We need to live in areas where we can walk to stores for everyday items and walk the kids to school.

Kermit the Frog May 25, 2008 at 1:50 a.m.

I'm troubled by this columnist's credulous embrace of the Thoreau Institute and Randal O'Toole, who, in his previous column, he describes as "an Oregon economist with impeccable environmental credentials. Senior economist for a number of years with the Thoreau Institute (an environmental think tank in Portland)..." - before going on to laud him as the next Jane Jacobs.

I don't know much about Mr. O'Toole. But what I can tell you is that calling the Thoreau Institute is to transit studies what the Discovery Institute - the home of "intelligent design" - is to evolution research.

It's an anti-transit activist group with two researchers, Mr. O'Toole being one. It shows up on the fringes of the debate every time, and it always says the same thing.

That's because it's an ideologically-driven group, driven by a belief that transit equals government meddling in individual freedoms.

To quote their website: "Inspired both by Henry David Thoreau's love of the natural world and his dislike of big government, the Thoreau Institute seeks ways to protect the environment without regulation, bureaucracy, or central control."

As such, their conclusions are always foregone, to the tune of "four wheels good, eight wheels bad."

And bully for them, it's a free continent. But Thoreau shouldn't be passed off as an "environmental think-tank," and its conclusions - dictated not by facts, but by their mission statement - need to be taken with a giant silo of road salt.

Philip Preville May 25, 2008 at 10:51 p.m.

Kermit: just for the record, if the columnist you are referring to is me, I have never written a word about Randall O'Toole in my life.

Dylan Reid May 25, 2008 at 10:59 p.m.

If there is a theoretical limit to transit, it is MUCH higher than where transit currently stands in Toronto. In central London, England, something like 85% of trips are by transit (sorry I don't have the exact number). We have a long way to go before we have to start worrying about theoretical limits.

Kermit the Frog May 26, 2008 at 1:14 a.m.

Sorry for the ambiguity. I was referring to the Globe columnist, in the columns you link to here.

Philip Preville May 26, 2008 at 1:16 p.m.

Let's keep this discussion going. As James points out, the effectiveness of public transit is tied to urban form and density. In other words: the theoretical limit of transit is a moving target, tied to further intensification. Toronto is dense at its core, not so dense in its inner suburbs. When I get off at my Danforth-area subway stop, I can do everything on foot along a six-block walk home: groceries, drycleaning, flowers, prescriptions, even take-out. If my stop were Kennedy station that would likely be impossible. And just look at London: even with a laudable percentage of trips made on transit, the streets remain gridlocked. A successful city always faces an ITP congestion problem because it can never manage to shoehorn all activity within its transit system, and the more successful a city becomes, the greater the demand for both mass transit and personalized travel. It's inescapable.

And all I wish to point out is that, as ITPs go, bikes are a useful alternative to cars. To me, the most compelling reasons to promote cycling in the city have little to do with the environment. They have to do with pure utility: bikes are smaller, so they have the potential to move more people on existing roadways compared to cars, and cyclists give up little in terms of convenience. And Mr. Dowling is right: the more multimodal the subway stations are, the better.

Ivor May 27, 2008 at 12:06 a.m.

Heck with Monderman. I'm with Rob Ford.

The trick with bike transit, just like rapid transit, is that it has two discrete parts: local puttering (running errands and generally conducting life in and around one's lilypad) and inter-regional travel (commuting from point A to point B and back). The infrastructure required for these is different, and we need both.

On the interregional front, the suburbs, with their wide, alienating roads, might present an opportunity for arterial bikeways.

The problem with bike lanes is that whenever they skirt parking spaces, they persistently enter their users in the draw for a door prize, and as such are only of marginal use. Not only does biking in them remain risky, it stays stressful. If we're going to promote wider adoption of cycling as a lifestyle, we need to somehow ratchet down the ambient stress of the urban cycling experience. More relaxing riding; less girding for combat.

And that, I think, means getting out of traffic. We talk a lot about transit ROWs. They can be great for wide suburban roads - not just by improving traffic, but by breaking up dreadfully wide streets. Bike lanes need to be a part of the Transit City proposals, a la Queen's Quay approach.

But more to the point - will we get to the point where dedicated bicycle ROWs might become politically feasible? The costs would be huge. Local councillors would hate it. Suburbanites would march on City Hall with Hummers and pitchforks. Rob Ford would win the mayoralty on the issue. But he was the one who made, I think, one very good point in the first place: in the best of all worlds, bikes and cars would have their own roads.

So, how's about you fork over some of that road?

Philip Preville

Veteran freelance writer Philip Preville lived much of his life in Montreal and Edmonton before he was lured, like so many Torontonians before him, by the promise of more work and a better living. A National Magazine Award winner and former Canadian Journalism Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Massey College, Preville writes Toronto Life’s politics column. He lives with his wife and one-year-old son in Riverdale, just close enough to the Don Valley Parkway that he can hear it when he steps outside his house—but just far enough away that it doesn’t keep him awake at night. On his office wall hangs a 1938–39 press pass belonging to his grandfather, Elias Gannon, who wrote for the Montreal Star.

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