Even a broken clock ...

Where I reflect.

People are complex, nuanced beings. I cut my transit advocacy teeth in Metro Vancouver in my teens — circa 2012, advocating for light rail in Surrey and Langley. I had spent a lot of time in Portland, the light rail in Portland was snazzy, and the idea of having this in my hometown was really a dream.

Eventually though, I came around. Honestly, I liked transit, and any new rail system got me excited (the additional mileage of light rail was particularly attractive to me, and that it felt more like a real train than SkyTrain — fallacies I still see all the time), and once enough people had pointed out that the light rail would cost a lot and only be a minute faster than the bus on Fraser Highway (sound familiar?) I relented and got on the Surrey SkyTrain bandwagon — and now the mostly rural town I grew up in, where I could only get an hourly bus by walking half an hour is going to get a metro. How things change!

The madness of the last month in Toronto has perhaps surprised me most in that fewer people seem to be saying I’m a rampant light rail “hater” than did a year or two ago, despite all of the blog posts written on what a disappointment Finch West is. Perhaps this is because after all that time I turned out to be right about several things. What’s funny to me though is that for years I made video after video arguing both sides of basically all the big transit debates, and yet people still said this.

While I certainly did talk more about light rail being problematic in its implementation in North America, I find the “this guy hates transit and is trying to undermine it!” takes so exhausting. Yeah … I hate transit, that’s why I went and made hundreds of videos about it and spent years of my life on this, that’s why I worked weekends and stayed up overnight at damp British train stations!

That this goes much deeper is something I don’t think a lot of people realize. As it turns out, way back, there was a city councillor quite passionate about cancelling Finch West, and even though the whole “light rail is barely faster than buses” thing was fresh in my mind, I was well aware of what people keep insisting on reminding me — it’s not only about speed. So little ol’ baby Reece was rallying people to try to save … the Finch West LRT.

For some reason, people are just so often incapable of seeing other people as … people, who can have complex multifaceted feelings about complex multifaceted issues, and who may criticize things sometimes … because they just care about making them better.

I guess I was incensed into writing this blog post because I saw Spacing released a post (nothing against Spacing, Spacing is great) that called my recent piece in the Star “provocativ[e]”.

The article went on to say:

Unfortunately, neither of these transit takes address some of the major mobility issues in the Greater Toronto Area, nor do they offer solutions for affordable, quick, and effective transportation that can move people efficiently and comfortably across the city and the region. This includes making better use of our existing infrastructure and fixing LRTs and streetcars to match speeds elsewhere in North America and in Europe. It also means investing in buses, which have helped to make the TTC a success story in years past.

I find this pretty annoying!

That the take “build more subways” does not “address some of the major mobility issues in the Greater Toronto Area” feels ... completely false. Again, the most important transit project in the region, remains a subway the Ontario line, which will move several times more people on opening day than the Eglinton Crosstown and Finch West LRT combined. While the article laments the loss of Transit City — its main architect has been calling for cancelling one of the most important chunks of this Ontario line for years!

The article does give some credit to me for some of the arguments I made. But then again, it says:

But then Martin goes on to tout subway construction, quoting Rob Ford’s mantra. Mayor Ford, along with his brother, Doug, was obsessed with the idea of a “war on the car.” During his short term in office, Mayor Ford moved to rip out cycling infrastructure in Downtown Toronto and on two Scarborough roads, raised TTC fares, reduced bus service, and even ordered TTC buses pulled from regular service to pick up the high school football team he was coaching in 2012. At Queen’s Park, Doug Ford has continued fighting the “war on the car” by restricting the installation of new cycling infrastructure, removing speed enforcement cameras, and focusing on the construction of new and expanded highways.

My crime is ... “touting subway construction”?! Like yes, I understand that saying “subways subways subways” is going to rile people up, but at some point people have to recognize that just as I am a complex, nuanced human being — so was Rob Ford, and all kinds of other people who most people reading this (myself included!) were not and are not fond of! This quote mentions Rob Ford wanting subways, and then some of the less crazy, bad things Rob Ford did, and acts as if my endorsement of subways is somehow an endorsement of Rob Ford writ large. Subways subways subways is just a catchy slogan (maybe if Transit City had one it wouldn’t be mostly confined to the dustbin … I jest ... mostly)! People often talk about how transit is political in Toronto, but literally talking about subways — including the most-used transit lines in the region — like they are bad because they had a questionable political advocate is making it political! It often feels like people who are supposed to care about transit, dislike Rob Ford more than they like transit — because I can see no other reason someone would take such an issue with “touting subway construction”.

This is because — to be clear — Toronto is not Seoul.

It’s not like people are pushing for subways in a city loaded with so many subways. This talk literally feels like the “Toronto is really a small town pretending to be a big city” stereotype embodied.

Berlin is a city who nobody would really call subway-obsessed (and it’s pretty auto centric by European standards), and its regional population is substantially smaller than Toronto’s — this is its subway (and S-Bahn, which Berliners I know will argue hard is a subway).

This is Madrid, which is a little bigger than Berlin …

And this one doesn’t include the fast — frequent suburban trains!

This is a map of all the transit in Toronto.

All that red? That’s local street-based transit (as is the grey Finch West line in the top left).

And again the subway.

The idea that Toronto is hell-bent on building this outrageously overkill subway network is laughable. Even much smaller European cities like Vienna and Oslo (which is Ottawa-sized) have more impressive networks. Toronto has a way higher population, and a way higher GDP. My argument is simply one that indeed “tout[s] subway construction”, we have a lot of local transit, and we need more rapid transit! Local transit is excellent for the last several miles, but it can’t get people across our huge region in reasonable spans of time, surrendering the larger number of trips that do that (as evidenced by mode share) to the car!

The article later mentions Finch:

The Finch West LRT, which opened just a month ago, was never intended to provide the same speeds as a rapid transit subway, nor should it. The prior bus route, the 36, was one of the busiest surface routes in the TTC’s network, yet it mostly served local needs; the LRT was intended to provide more capacity along with a higher-quality ride, with modest – yet real – improvements in travel times. The slow speed on Finch is not just a matter of having too many stops or not introducing aggressive transit signal priority (though it would help), but also reducing station dwell times, speeding up service through intersections, and eliminating unnecessary schedule padding.

And this is where I say —I know! I don’t think any reasonable person has asked the Finch West LRT to be as fast as a subway. No media coverage has said “Finch West LRT is not as fast as a subway!” ... instead, people are mad that the Finch West LRT is not as fast as a guy on his own two legs!

When people say things like this, it reminds me of a recent comment on my post about Waterloo moving its main hospital to a much worse location, where someone said “they will offer a shuttle bus”.

It’s this ignoring the main issue — the issue people are actually upset about and saying “well, have you considered this (thing which does nothing to make up for the issues)”.

The article ends on this note:

What we can do, right now, is speed up buses with measures such as all-door boarding, transit priority, dedicated lanes, and queue-jumps at intersections. In New York, social democratic mayor Zohran Mamdani was elected with a platform to improve the city’s buses. In Toronto, Mayor Olivia Chow is also leading plans to speed up buses on priority routes.

Speeding up buses and fixing our LRTs can provide the solutions commuters across the city are looking for quickly and at reasonable cost, while connecting neighbourhoods together, rather than just to downtown. Toronto already has a network of 900-series express buses that can be prioritized.

We simply cannot rely on a single solution to our transit woes.

Now, why am I annoyed that this post goes for the jugular (ok, thanks to the nice comments, I think my metaphor should refer to a more minor part of the circulatory system), but then goes and says “we simply cannot rely on a single solution”?

Well, because I never suggested relying on a single solution! And I have been spending so much time and energy arguing for exactly the type of measures the author mentions as being needed. In my article I don’t say transit sucks, I say I can get home on it, and guess what — I use transit and do go home on it, but that it’s far too slow. My argument isn’t some weird “we only need subways”, but that we also need subways! Time and again I’ve argued that Toronto has frequent local transit — in fact thats a bit part of my argument against Transit City — I live in Scarborough, and while I often hear politicians defending Transit City saying that Scarborough needs transit, this has an elitist tone, because Scarborough has loads of transit, it’s just buses — which as the authors note are often too slow!

The whole point of the article though, is not to argue that these improvements are unnecessary which the response article seems to frame it as, but that you cannot rely on faster buses and trams to replace rapid transit. When I was heading home that night (referenced in my article) and the journey was super long, the issue was not my bus getting stuck in traffic or not having priority, it was moving at a good clip, it was that buses — and light rail, are fundamentally limited in their speed by being on streets.

This is extra frustrating because I’ve spent months, and the several Star pieces before this one, talking about how improved priority and speed on local transit, the streetcars and light rail in particular is critical. Literally arguing for the exact things the author sort of suggests “we really need”.

Making transit go fast in Toronto is not my day job. And yet I’ve spent a lot of time fighting to fix transit projects which I warned would be like this, all while I was criticized for not being universally positive on them, and all despite the fact that when it became clear almost a decade ago that this project might get cancelled — I defended it.

Saying that the Mayor is already leading plans to speed up transit is frustrating, because until that Star article I coauthored with Jonathan English and Narayan Donaldson came out, I didn’t hear anyone on council, much less the Mayor seriously talking about this very big issue! And then saying that we cannot rely on a single solution, while I’ve been pushing an all-of-the-above approach for years also feels like a real kick in the teeth.

And so then I’m left reflecting on Rob Ford. He was wrong about a lot of stuff — most stuff even, but he was clearly not wrong that a city the size of Toronto should have more rapid transit, and seeing people argue that point — seemingly just because they dislike Rob Ford feels relatable. Because I feel people so often attack me, for only wanting X, when I repeatedly say I want X, Y, and Z. I’m reminded sometimes the issue isn’t what you’re saying, but that it’s you saying it.