Raise the Hammer

It's important to balance the carrots and the sticks. It's tempting and popular but insidious to place too much weight on the notion that driving must be made less convenient and/or more costly in order to increase transit usage.

I live in Toronto. A few weeks ago, I dropped off my truck at the alignment shop and hopped on the bus to get to work. Took about the same amount of time as if I'd driven, and I got a nice 5-block walk in the beautiful sunny weather on Toronto's first Smog Alert day. While I walked, I did some mental maths:

The trip from home to work is about 4.6 km.

The truck takes, in round figures, 20 litres per hundred kilometres in slow stop-and-go traffic.

That means each trip to or from work takes about 1 litre of gasoline. One litre of gasoline cost $1.05 on that particular day.

I could walk 3 blocks from home to the subway stop, get on the subway, and wind up across the street from my office. That trip, in either direction, costs me $2.10 if I buy ten tokens or tickets at a time, $2.75 if I pay the fare in cash.

So, my truck would have to get half the lousy mileage it actually gets in order for it to cost as much as the least-costly transit ride. Yikes! Now, of course, this does not factor in the cost of owning the truck, just the cost of driving it. So that compares using the truck vs. not using it, rather than using the truck vs. not having it. So the answer is to jack up the cost of parking, insurance, registration, and other vehicle-ownership factors, and that'll get me to take transit instead, right?

Well...no! What I'm looking for, and what I suspect most people are looking for, is the most cost-effective way to get from A to B. That's not necessarily (nor usually) the same thing as the least-costly way.

Compared to systems like MUNI in San Francisco or the Washington DC Metro, the TTC is grossly inferior. They do a masterful job of making the grossly underfunded system work with what few resources they have—the system generally runs more or less on time, and the stations often don't smell too badly of piss and worse—but the rolling stock (buses, street cars, subway trains) are ancient and increasingly decrepit, the fare has to be unreasonably high because otherwise they couldn't run the system at all, and in general the system only just barely meets Toronto's needs, in only the most basic way. We're still running mostly GMC New Look buses, for heaven's sake, and the last one of those rolled off the assembly line twenty-five years ago! I don't object to old vehicles per se, for constructing new vehicles consumes vast amounts of resources and energy and generates massive waste, but it's a growing struggle for the TTC to keep these (and the even more elderly trains and streetcars) together and rolling every day. There's just no funding for replacements, as it seems.

And it's not just that the TTC's clunkers are repellingly unpleasant to ride, they're also a serious embarrassment in a city that likes to babble about how world-class it is. I was in Frankfurt recently, and was astonished to watch streetcars taking even tight-radius curves with none of the hair-raising squawk and squeal emitted by Toronto's street cars. I was shocked to discover these quiet cars were made by -- guess who? -- Bombardier, right here in Canada.

There's also no money (or perhaps just no will) to implement the kind of farecard system the Washington DC Metro has: Wanna go 2 stops off peak? Cost you 35¢. Wanna go the length of the system at rush hour? Cost you $3.75. Nor does there seem any interest in a timeframe limitless transfer system like TransLink in Vancouver has: Your fare gets you on however many of whichever trains and buses you want to ride within a 90-minute timeframe. After 90 minutes have elapsed, the next ride you want to take or connection you want to make, you pay another fare.

Either the DC-type or the Vancouver-type fare system would probably cause me to quit driving in town altogether; if either were combined with vehicles not hellish to sit in, I'd definitely quit driving in town. Conversely -- pay attention, this is the important part -- punitive measures aimed solely at pushing me out of my vehicle won't get the job done. Tax the roads or the parkades and put the money towards better transit? Yep, I'll go along with that. But tax the roads or the parkades just to punish me for driving? Sorry, that just won't work.

(And please, let's not have any scolding for the cruddy mileage my truck gets. I'm quite aware of it, and have a solution pending as soon as some custom-made engine components are ready. When, in the near future, my situation changes and a truck is no longer required, I will park it for good.)