Canadian Cincinnatus

Yesterday Karen Stintz killed the City of Toronto

On October 25, 2010, I waited with bated breath to see who would become the next mayor of Toronto: Rob Ford or Miller-lite George Smitherman. When Ford won, everybody in the bar I and Cincinnatus contributor Mike Downtown were sitting in, spontaneously cheered. I said, “Yes, Transit City is dead.”

I felt enormous relief because I understood that the Transit City plan of clogging major arterial roads with oversize streetcars would make Toronto unlivable. The light rail transit lines will cause commuter chaos because they will take up at least three lanes of traffic on streets that are already beyond capacity at rush hour. Because these slow, low-capacity ‘trains’ will never move a significant volume of rush-hour commuters, the amount of passenger cars will not diminish. As Toronto Sun correspondent, Christina Blizzard said, “And that’s what Transit City was — a quick and cheaper fix instead of the real deal.”

As I said yesterday, this is not conjecture on my part. The experiment has already been done and the results can be seen on St Clair West (whose residents voted for Rob Ford in 2010).

Blizzard also points out: “Scarborough already has an LRT — from Kennedy to Scarborough Town Centre. It’s unreliable and freezes up any time there’s snow and ice.” She might have added that the only reason we got stuck with it - instead of seeing the subway extended from Kennedy all the way out to the Metro Zoo and to the Scarborough Town Center (both of which could have been done above ground all the way) - was because in the early 1980’s, the provincial crown corporation, The Urban Transportation Development Corporation, needed somebody to be their first customer. Vancouver was interested but balked at being the first buyer, so the province armtwisted the Borough of Scarborough into purchasing this light-duty albatross. What was found to be inadequate in Scarborough will now be found inadequate throughout the city.

About Toronto’s traffic woes, even a recent Toronto Star headline admitted, “Worse than L.A.” Well, thanks to Rob Ford’s two-faced supporter, Karen Stintz, it’s about to get a lot worse than LA.

 

Councillor Karen Stintz is dead wrong, Toronto needs subways...badly

One of the worst aspects of David Miller’s unfortunate tenure as the Mayor of Toronto was his misbegotten Transit City plan, whose cornerstone is the construction of a series of light rail transit lines on critical arterial routes across the city. The main problem with light rail is that it doesn’t add commuter capacity but merely exchanges road capacity for rail capacity (by eliminating traffic lanes). Since those roads are already clogged, this guarantees massive traffic jams on critical rush hour routes. And even though the whole idea is to prevent cars from driving on the light rail lines, the problem of left-turn lanes and intersections will make sure that streetcar traffic will not remain unaffected by the traffic chaos around it. With traffic jams at every intersection, the glorified streetcars will be no faster than the jammed-up car lanes they compete with. Dedicated light rail lines are a lose-lose proposition.

If you don’t believe me, just look at the St. Clair West streetcar disaster, the prototype for the Transit City boondoggle.

While it is true that the initial capital investment in subways is very high, it is a one-time cost. Once the tunnels are dug, a huge amount of commuter capacity will have been added to Toronto permanently without constricting a single road. A city the size of Toronto should be extending subway lines continuously every year, as far as it can afford to, given prudent budgeting. If we had been doing this all along, we really would now be the world-class city that David Miller bloviated we are. This is why Ron Ford’s plan to replace Transit City with a practical subway building program was such a welcome breath of fresh air.

Light rail is one of those boutique interests that the trendy Yorkville crowd gets excited about, like green energy. These enthusiasms are almost always misplaced because they are driven by snobby affectation or some knee-jerk aesthetic reaction, not reason or common sense. The bobos imagine streetcars and they see the San Francisco trolley; therefore streetcars are good. No matter that of all the public transit choices available - taxis, buses, electric trolley buses (which the streetcar crowd killed), streetcars and subways – streetcars are objectively the slowest and least flexible (if a streetcar konks out, the whole line is out of action). It doesn’t matter because buses are so down-scale (ick! poor people ride them – unlike the San Francisco streetcar which is populated exclusively by movie stars) and subways might actually work to reduce congestion (where would our war on cars be then?).

When David Miller was Mayor, I had the privilege to hear Karen Stintz speak at an anti-Miller event. I came away very impressed with her. This is why I am so disappointed with her recent comments. Nevertheless, if Karen Stintz has shown herself to be captive to this kind of thinking, it indicates that she is unqualified to head the Toronto Transit Commission. She needs to go.

Sooner rather than later.

 

One way to trim the Toronto Transit Commission budget without cutting service: automate the subway ticket booths

In 2005 I was in Washington DC for a conference and had occasion to take their Metro. What a contrast between Toronto’s filthy subway system: light-years cleaner and with features our subway would only receive much later (such as a display giving the ETA of the next train). What I also noticed was that every Metro station was unmanned. Every single one. No ticket takers in sight.

What each Metro station has instead is an automat that dispenses magnetic-stripe cards, with the amount of money you deposit into the machine electronically recorded on the card. When you go through the turnstile and swipe your card, the fare is subtracted from your total. If your card runs low, you stick it in the machine and top it up using cash or a credit card; if you want to minimize this ritual, you load up your card; if you lose your card, you buy another one. Dead simple and absolutely convenient.

In Toronto, in contrast, you have to buy a ticket or a token from the guy in the booth, you drop the ticket into a slot under his watchful eye. Needless to say, being a ticket taker for the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) is not a minimum wage job, not by a long shot (and that’s not counting their generous benefits). And to add insult to injury, even though the booth is manned by a person, I don’t think he can even take credit or debit cards! (At least I have never seen it done.)

When I saw the Washington setup, I thought: my God! our system hasn’t changed since I was a kid. I recalled taking the subway with my mother in the late 1960’s when the arrangement was exactly the same. Since that time, the only significant ‘improvement’ is that tokens these days are bimetallic, like the toonie. Back then they were a simple aluminium stamping, but that changed when it was discovered that they were being counterfeited en mass in China. With all the advances that have been made in recent decades in access control technology, there must be a thousand ways to improve and automate this antiquated process, the Washington DC solution being just one of the ‘better ways’.

Why doesn’t the TTC management suggest one to help deal with Mayor Rob Ford’s TTC cuts?

Answer: I think, because they can see with perfect clarity that it would work all too well in cutting costs and improving customer convenience. And we can’t have that now, can we?

 

How to cut the Toronto Transit Commission’s budget while improving public transit

Currently, controversy is swirling around Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s attempt to reign in city hall spending by cutting the Toronto Transit Commission’s (TTC) budget by 10%. Aside from the usual cause-of-the-month club crybabies, many transit users are upset that the cuts are to be funded by service cuts along many popular bus routes.

This is of course totally unnecessary. Does the TTC waste at least 10% of its budget? Of course it does. So could the TTC cut 10% of its budget and still maintain all present services? Of course it could – if it wanted to. But it, or more specifically its management, has no interest in doing so. For starters, it would mean admitting that they had not been doing a good job until now. Secondly, a significant part of the bloat comes from its top heavy management: i.e. them.

Instead, what they are doing is following the bureaucrat’s standard playbook for surviving budget cuts: they identify the most visible services that are the most politically painful to cut - and cut them. This has two effects: it inflicts pain on their tormentors (frugal politicians like Mayor Ford), and it puts pressure on City Hall to restore their budget as soon as possible.

So what could Rob Ford do instead?

Introduce transit competition. Competition is the mechanism by which private companies out-produce the government. Nobody wants to run a lean, mean, innovative outfit: neither bureaucrat nor corporate CEO. It’s simply too much hard work and its too risky. What differentiates the private sector from the government sector is that competition forces the former to compete but not the latter.

So how would you introduce competition to public transit?

By privatizing the TTC? Naw. A private monopoly would only be marginally more effective than a public monopoly, especially if the toxic transit worker’s union goes along for the ride, as would most likely be the case. 

A simple way to introduce competition is to remove the TTC’s monopoly on multiple fares. Allow upstart bus companies to compete with the TTC for passengers and you will see TTC executives morph into second-rate Steve Jobs’ before your eyes.

The standard objection is that the TTC needs a monopoly because the monopoly profits on good routes subsidize money-losing off-hour routes. In other words, without a monopoly, the reasoning goes, the city would not enjoy round-the-clock transit service. Private companies would eagerly run buses during the passenger-rich rush hour but would ignore the all-night routes.

The proper answer to this is that running buses all night is grossly inefficient and shouldn’t be done in the first place. Instead of operating huge buses on an inflexible and intermittent schedule along a small number of routes, smaller vehicles (say 7 passenger minivans) operating more flexibly could be employed to take multiple fares from places where late night travellers are likely to congregate (say, bars, nightclubs, hospital emergency rooms, etc.) to or near their homes. They would work kind of like taxis but be cheaper because the cost of the driver is split among six fares instead of one. And this is just one idea off the top of my head. Likely, transit entrepreneurs will come up with many other creative solutions, each one cheaper or more convenient than the last. The point is that the TTC’s one-bus-fits-all-sizes approach is stupid and increasingly unaffordable. We don’t have to keep living with 1950’s solutions!

And if this sounds a bit too radical, then sort-of copy York Region, which has two bus companies (one private, one public), each running selected routes. I would add one extra step: every year, the service and cost of each company’s routes should be publicly compared - with routes added and subtracted from each company according to last year’s performance. Even this limited amount of competition should motivate the removal of a huge amount of bloat.

 

The Left Strikes Back in Toronto

It didn't take long for the left to start striking back in Toronto against the popularly elected right wing mayor, Rob Ford.

First, the Toronto Public Library stated in a widely publicized press release that they'd have to close the city hall branch of the library if Ford forced them to accept a budget cut of 2%.  This is a typical bureaucratic response to cut backs.  Don't cut back on waste, unnecessary overtime or excess staff.  Cut back on something very public, the meaner the better, and blame the government.

The TTC struck next, hiring over forty new managers for everything from new customer service managers (yeah, like that's going to help) to "track walkers" for the subway to hunt out things to repair.  Yet, the TTC wanted a fare increase and wanted to cut back on bus schedules.  The Toronto Star was livid.  Mean old Ford.  And when Ford said no to the TTC, the Star slyly suggested it was all a plot by Ford, who must've tricked TTC officials into their fare hike and cut back announcement so that Ford could look good when he reversed it.  Funny, the Star spent most of the election portraying Ford as barely able to add.

The truth of course is that these bureaucrats and the Toronto Star are ruthlessly doing everything they can to sabotage Ford's agenda.  The bureaucrats are all Millerites who hate Ford and will need to be replaced if anything is to work.

Here's what I would do if I were Rob Ford: I'd say to the TTC fair enough.  If you feel it's not worth it to run a bus up and down Davenport Road after10 pm or on Sundays and holidays because there are rarely more than two passengers on the bus, then lets contract the route to a private company--the smaller the better.  In fact, why not just run a 15 passenger van up and down the street late at night?

Of course the unions will have a fit at the thought that even one TTC route goes out to competition, especially lean competition, maybe even run by just a guy with a van and a garage.

Ford won't even have to follow through on this threat.  TTC management and the Amalgamated Transit Workers Union will suddenly find all kinds of savings that will allow for a lower budget and maintenance of under-used routes--anything to prevent even the slightest crack in the TTC monopoly on public transit in Toronto.

As for the library: Aren't e-books all the rage these days?  Maybe it's time for the library to improve its pathetic and technically flawed attempts at e-book loans.  I'm not suggesting that we close branches and replace them with e-books.  I just want the unions to be uncomfortable, to worry about new technology, to feel like maybe it's better to make concessions than face major changes.

The public service unions proved to be intractable under Bob Rae's Ontario NDP, and Miller's Toronto, but those two men owed the unions and everybody on both sides knew it.  Ford owes the unions nothing and knows he will get zero support from them in the next election no matter what he does.  That's why they fear him.  That's why they'll deal.

Mike Downtown

The David Chen case shows why Mayor David Miller was powerless to stop crime in Toronto

When it comes to crime control, David Miller’s City Hall is like the hapless gang who can’t shoot straight. When Jamaican drugs gangs got caught up in a violent drug war a few years ago, David Miller targeted gun clubs, where peaceable citizens go to practice their law-abiding sport. While some of them may be guilty of paperwork crimes dreamed up by Alan Rock and Kim Campbell, they have absolutely nothing to do with the competitive activities of drug dealers. When Miller tried to explain away his perverted priorities by asserting that gangs get most of their guns by stealing them from law abiding gun owners, he not only further obfuscated the distinction between victims and criminals, he also contradicted an OPP study which concluded that most guns used in crime are imported from the US. End result: gun crime in Toronto unaffected during his tenure.

And now when a confrontation between a thief and a law-abiding merchant ensue, David Miller’s police force targets the merchant. Make no mistake about it, David Chen’s persecution is not accidental. It is a deliberate act of police policy. It is not an accident that police response time to shoplifting in Chinatown is measured in hours while their response time to law-abiding citizens defending themselves is measured in minutes. The police have their priorities; when they decide which call to go to first, they go down the priority list. Protecting criminals from ‘vigilantes’ (i.e. law abiding citizens) is high on that list. Theft from those same law abiding citizens is a bit lower down. Even then, the cops could have chosen to interpret Chen’s citizen arrest as having occurred while the crime was being committed instead of afterwards. Given that Chen arrested the man immediately after he had stolen something from him, this would have been a reasonable interpretation and there the matter would have rested. But they didn’t, thus precipitating the current controversy. This happened only because somebody higher up values the rights of criminals more than the rights of citizens. 

If Miller had concentrated on prosecuting criminals instead of persecuting citizens he might have gotten somewhere with Toronto’s crime rate but he didn’t. This is one reason why he is hated and most people will be glad that on Oct 26^th his unionized garbagemen will take him out with the rest of the trash.

 

Self-defence and the justice system in the age of David Chen

Us conservatives love law and order. As a result we naturally side with cops, prosecutors and hard-boiled judges. Normally I am no exception. On the flip side, we are also predisposed to personal responsibility and are inherently suspicious of big government as it accumulates more power. The trial surrounding David Chen citizen’s arrest case detailed yesterday’s post is what Barack Obama might call a ‘teachable moment’ for us. What it teaches conservatives is that the justice system is not immune to the flaws inherent in other Big Government departments so that we should never uncritically embrace the expansion of police power.

The truth of the matter is that the justice system behaves like every other government entity when their monopoly is being threatened. Normally cops and citizens are united in their hatred of bad guys, but the interests of the two groups diverge when it comes to self-defence. The average law abiding person loves it when his fellow citizen gets the better of a hooligan. But not the police, as evidenced by the ubiquitous police department spokesman who warns us on TV that people should not resist criminals: “It’s dangerous,” he intones, as if obeying psychopaths is safe. The existence of plenty of sociological studies, which conclude just the opposite (that resistance is at least marginally safer than obedience, and that the armed citizen is a better deterrent than even capital punishment), is neither here nor there to him. Public safety is not the main motivating factor in the police department’s disapproval. Rather, cops don’t like spontaneous citizen action because it infringes on their monopoly on force. They look at citizen arrests the way unionized city garbagemen view private contractors who haul away the trash for less money.

The David Chen incident also teaches us is that ordinary citizens can sometimes be far more effective than the government. David Chen caught the thief as soon as he attempted it. The Metro cops, who are paid 70+K a year to serve and protect him, were stumped for years. As Glenn Reynolds likes to point out, the self-organized citizenry is a pack not a herd. 

 

The David Chen trial and the enemies of the law abiding citizen

Reading the details of small businessman David Chen’s ongoing persecution by the Canadian justice system makes my blood boil, so much so that I have difficulty following it. But nevertheless I digested enough to compose the following synopsis:

David Chen is a grocer. He is the type of hard working entrepreneur that immigration advocates point to when they say Canada needs more immigrants. Mr. Chen runs a produce mart in Toronto’s Chinatown that was unfortunately plagued by shoplifting, a problem that the Toronto Police were lackadaisical (at best) in solving. When the thief who robbed him the most attempted to steal from his store for the second time in one day, Chen took matters into his own hands. He and his employees ran the thief down, apprehended him, tied him up and called the cops. The cops surprised Chen by showing up in 4 minutes instead of the customary 4 hours. They arrested Chen and his staff at gunpoint, charging him with assault, forcible confinement, kidnapping and carrying concealed weapons. The concealed weapons were box cutters. Eventually the latter charges were dropped when the even the dimwitted cops realized that grocers use box cutter mainly to cut boxes. Duhh.

Important background information: the Criminal Code of Canada states that a civilian’s powers of arrest are the same as that of a police officer while a crime is being committed - the principal difference being that a police officer can arrest criminals after the fact and a civilian can’t. In other words, I can arrest a bank robber if I happen to walk into a bank while it is being robbed but I can’t hunt the robber down to Montreal to bring him to justice. Fair enough. Unluckily for David Chen, the police and the prosecutors chose not to interpret Chen’s arrest as occurring while the actual crime was being committed – as most reasonable people would - but instead felt it occurred afterwards because of the small time lag between the time of the attempted robbery and when the actual arrest occurred. For this reason, they proceeded to interpret Chen’s actions as if none of the events that motivated Chen’s actions had ever occurred. The crowning outrage was that the Crown plea-bargained the career criminal’s sentence down in exchange for his cooperation in Chen’s kidnapping trial.

The only conclusion that can be reached from this sordid affair is that all of the police officers and crown attorneys involved in this case acted in a manner indistinguishable from dedicated enemies of law-abiding people. If any justice at all is to come in this case, they should all be fired, disbarred and thrown in jail – to serve beside the district attorney in the Duke rape hoax.

 

Why a Right Wing Mayor Mayoralty Candidate is Winning in a Left Wing City

Some would say voter frustration with Toronto's arrogant city unions is why Rob Ford is ahead of the Toronto Star's anointed for mayor, George Smitherman, but it goes far deeper than that.

Ford is ahead because he continues to frame the debate, despite all that Smitherman, Rossi, or Thompson can do.  Ford has been a one issue guy for ten years: cut city spending.  He wants to do it by contracting out garbage collection and anything else he can, and by cutting councillors' generous expense accounts, etc.  Ford's most important promise is to end the party councillors are having at city hall on the tax payers dime.

When this election began the left just laughed at Rob Ford, and someone in Torstar media, the parent company of the Toronto Star, went so far as to edit the wikipedia entry on Rob Ford to redirect people to a phony website designed to ridicule Ford, proving once again that news from the Toronto Star is neither fair nor balanced.

But then the polls came out placing Ford in the lead. Suddenly Smitherman and Rossi began talking about taking back city hall and cutting expenses.  Smitherman even promised a two year property tax freeze.

However Smitherman's sudden air of fiscal responsibility doesn't ring true from the man who cost Ontario tax payers a billion dollars on the e-heath scandal with nothing to show for it.  Even those who are only vaguely aware of the ridiculous sole-source contract he awarded to Samsung for wind power, which is set to substantially  increase electricity costs, have a sense that when it comes to spending, Smitherman is the opposite of Ford.  This is probably why people have taken to calling him Slitherman.

But just when the others thought they could out-talk Ford on spending, he jumped ahead, stating that it was time to end the war on the car, get rid of traffic-blocking street cars and build subways.  Once again, Ford is framing the debate.

The left is apoplectic.  The idea is the opposite of politically correct, where global warming is a sacrosanct concept and cars are the ultimate evil.  But Ford's position resonates with voters, who are sick of sitting in traffic beside empty bike lanes and empty street car right-of-ways.

Ford is winning because he isn't making even the tiniest attempt to cater to the mushy middle of the vote.  And Ford is winning despite everything the pundits from the MSM can throw at him.  Indeed, their anti-Ford rhetoric may be helping him, because the voters have also lost faith in the judgment of the MSM.

David Miller's Toronto is about to change.

Mike Downtown

BTW: I see a new poll came out this morning before I could even publish this that puts Ford at 45% of decided voters, far ahead of the pack.

Toronto to Repeat Social Housing Failure

Toronto Councillor Howard Moscoe openly admitted that the Lawrence Heights social housing project is a failed left wing experiment, and he received a standing ovation (and hugs) from Toronto's left wing city council.

Of course he didn't phrase it the way I just did because that would imply that left wing policies aren't the utopian solutions that the NDP claim.  Moscoe instead stated that, "The theories on which Lawrence Heights was based have turned out to be wrong — putting poor people into new houses in a park like setting does not solve their economic problems."

So why the standing ovation?  Because the other part of Moscoe's announcement is that Toronto intends to replace this failed social housing experiment with a new one with higher density and less "park like" setting.  I can't help wondering if the "theories" of this new high density plan will be deemed a failure by some future left wing councillor 40 years from now.

If Toronto truly wants competitive affordable housing I'd like to suggest a new theory.  Sell off Toronto's massive stock of crumbling, poorly maintained social housing to private companies.  Lobby the Ontario government to change the Landlord Tenant Act so that all the sections designed to punish landlords and coddle bad tenants are removed, like the section that allows scammers to live rent free from October to March (completely illegal to evict) and then skip out ahead of the eviction notice and the sheriff in the spring with all that rent unpaid and uncollectible.

If someone truly and desperately needs their rent subsidized, the city should pay the landlord directly.

This will solve three problems:

1) It will get rid of all the CUPE unionized employees who eat up huge chunks of the Toronto Community Housing Authority budget while not getting much done to maintain the buildings they are responsible for.  That's a lot of money that can go to rent subsidization.

2) It will eliminate the social housing ghettoes like Regent Park and Lawrence Heights because people will be able to live anywhere the government is willing to subsidize.  No one building need be all subsidized housing.  Every building can have just a few units.  No one area need be packed with the poor.  The new left wing theory is that if they let condo developers build a bunch of condos in Regent Park and Lawrence Heights mixed in with the government housing, no one will notice the neighborhood poverty.  I submit that a neighborhood with a disproportionate number of poor will be a bad neighborhood, no matter how many jogging yuppies with ipods you try to mix in with them.

3) Property Maintenance.  The city has utterly failed to properly invest in their social housing experiments like Regent Park (currently being ripped down after only 40 years) and Lawrence Heights. 

I used to live in a privately owned apartment building built in 1948, and my guests always marveled that the building was so beautifully maintained.  Even though he was crushed by rent control, the owner (whose grand daughter lived on the sixth floor) did everything he could to keep it clean and strong.  That building is still a going concern, and Mike Harris's vacancy decontrol interested new owners who purchased it after the original owner passed away.  They have since poured tens of thousands of dollars of renovations into the building to bring it up to 21st century code.

The city clearly cannot maintain buildings as well private industry, and they should recognize that it's not environmentally friendly to build social housing with great fanfare and leave it to rot until it has to be bulldozed, trucked to landfill and the whole process begun anew.

Finally, the most important thing that Toronto can do (and has direct control over) is to stop punishing renters with high property taxes.  That's right, renters of apartment space pay four times the property tax rate of condo owners in newer buildings with the same square footage.  That's because condos are taxed as residential properties and rental apartments are taxed as commercial properties.  Most renters just don't know this because the taxes are hidden in their bills.  Toronto is the only jurisdiction in Canada that continues to hurt the lowest income bracket of society with this unfair tax.

Of course the left wing city council refuses to lift it because they're concerned that the building owners will just keep their rental rates the same and not pass on the savings to renters, which is probably true.  What councillors ignore is that with this tax burden gone, businesses will start building rental units again, which will increase the supply until prices start to fall.  It's time to make being a landlord a profitable business.

The shortage of affordable housing in Toronto was totally caused by failed left wing experiments in rent control, landlord punishment and subsidized housing.  It's time for the government to get out of the way and let private industry provide housing.  They've done a great job with condos.  And they've also done a great job providing office space in Toronto, but that's because the city (other than David Miller's office building for Corus Entertainment on the lakefront) has kept out of the commercial office space market.  Otherwise there would be very few office towers on the Toronto skyline, and most of them would be in desperate need of repair.

Mike Downtown

Note: I do not own or have a share in any rental property.  I will not gain financially from any of the suggestions I have made in this article.  But if the changes are made, who knows?  Maybe I'll invest in housing.  That's the idea: to get more investors into housing.