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.

 

How to resurrect America’s inner cities: create jobs poor people can do

Walter Russell Mead is a professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College. Recently, at the American Interest, he wrote an essay on what is wrong with America’s blighted inner cities and how to correct the problem. It is a must read. A few selections to wet the appetite are reproduced here:

“We need to stop thinking about our inner city problems so heavily in terms of race.”

 “The first and most important precondition for returning health to poor urban neighborhoods is the creation of large numbers of private sector jobs that relatively unskilled people can do.”

“So where will the jobs come from?

Answer: if they come at all they will come from small business and many of these jobs will not be particularly attractive.

Businesses that hire low skilled workers without much experience or with checkered work histories are often smelly and noxious.  They are unlikely to pay particularly well.  There will be lots of casual day labor involved with not many benefits — and perhaps little information sent to the IRS.  Casual construction work and small repair shops where people bang metal and use power tools all day long are the kinds of employers we need in the inner city.  Working conditions are not always great — and these industries do not always attract the most humanitarian and generous people on earth.  The factories that hired illiterate and unskilled urban workers 100 years ago were offensive from many points of view;  they did, however, actually hire those workers and put tens of millions of people on the thorny, difficult and uphill path toward middle class life.

Think of the path to successful middle class living as a ladder; the lower rungs on that ladder are not nice places to be, but if those rungs don’t exist, nobody can climb.  When politicians talk about creating jobs, they always talk about creating ‘good’ jobs.  That is all very well, but unless there are bad jobs and lots of them, people in the inner cities will have a hard time getting on the ladder at all, much less climbing into the middle class.”

“Many sensitive and idealistic people in our society work very hard to keep from connecting these dots and admitting to themselves that bad jobs are something we need.”

“To get these jobs, we have to change the way our cities work.  Essentially, we have created urban environments in which the kind of enterprises that often hire the poor — low margin, poorly capitalized, noisy, smelly, dirty, informally managed without a long paper trail — can’t exist.  The kind of metal bashing repair shops that fill the cities of the developing world are almost impossible to operate here.  Plumbers, carpenters, electricians, pushcart vendors and day care operators need licenses; construction work has to comply with elaborate guidelines and city bureaucracies disgorge the required permits slowly and reluctantly.”

“The bien-pensant gentry politics that dominates political discussion in respectable circles has lost touch with the realities of American life and no longer really comprehends the issues at stake.”

“’Progressive’ policy now increasingly means policy that benefits genteel upper middle class liberals and public sector government workers; the resulting mix of complex and poorly applied regulations, high costs and high taxes throttles the only kind of job creation that could offer most inner city residents a feasible step up.”

“Without rapid, small business led growth, there is no way that the residents of our inner cities can escape the cycle of poverty that has them in its grip.  And progressive blue politics as conventionally understood systematically squeeze and crush growth in our cities.  The bluer a city, the bluer a state, the fewer private sector jobs it tends to create.

Until our urban leaders grasp these truths, conditions in the inner city will continue to go downhill as more and more cities start to look more and more like Detroit.”

Though the essay is long, it is well worth reading the whole thing. There are many interesting points that I didn’t quote for reasons of brevity.

I have only one thing to add to Mead’s essay and it is in the form of a personal anecdote. I have a friend who owns an auto body shop within the City of Toronto. In his shop can be found a paint booth. He tells me that auto body paint booths are now illegal in the City of Toronto even though Toronto is home to over a million cars, which is why auto body shops line the streets of Vaughn, immediately to the north of Toronto. His booth exists only because it was grandfathered at the time of the ban. But if he were to sell his shop, the new owner would have a mere 48 hours to get the spray booth up and running again or he would lose its grandfathered status.

Mead is living proof that not all academics are one dimensional, second rate, left-wing propagandists. We need more professors like him.

 

Three cheers for Charlottetown!

According to the National Post yesterday:

After years of caving in to the pleas of residents asking for stop signs to stem the flow of speeding cars, Charlottetown is preparing to tear up more than a dozen residential stop signs that the city has deemed unnecessary, and even harmful.

“Signs that are placed in areas where they’re not needed and they don’t work are dangerous,” councillor David MacDonald told a recent city council meeting. “Stop signs that people do not stop at and go through are dangerous.”

The review was part of Mayor Clifford Lee’s re-election promise to take the politics out of Charlottetown’s road safety decisions by leaving them up to traffic engineers rather than residents and councillors.

For my part, this change can’t come soon enough. Four-way stop signs are a millstone around the neck of civilization and a persistent annoyance to all motorists, so its heartening that other cities across Canada - like Winnipeg and Nelson B.C. - are also considering the same thing.

I also like the Charlottetown Mayor’s idea of leaving the final decision to traffic engineers. In this matter, they are by far and away the most levelheaded people; they only recommend what has been proven to work. In contrast, the neighbours who demand stop signs are hysterical NIMBY’s who don’t care what the effect on overall traffic patterns is when their selfish policy is replicated across the city; urban planners usually have a hidden agenda behind their Big Idea; and elected city officials are either placating the NIMBY’s to bring home the bacon (in the suburbs) or anti-car zealots (downtown). Meanwhile the commuter (i.e. the hard working taxpayer) suffers.

If you want to see what a world without four-way stop signs looks like, go drive around in Europe. We usually think of Europe as a mass transit society and North America as a car society but, in fact, their traffic laws are often much more sensible than ours. For instance, roundabouts are common across the pond where they have been proven to be much more efficient than stop lights at moving traffic through major intersections. In contrast, we don’t have them here, or if we do, we add stop signs to them - negating their biggest advantage (avoiding the complete stop as much as possible). Also, many European countries have almost completely eliminated stop signs. If a small street ends at a bigger street, there is a yield sign. And if two roughly equivalent small streets cross, motorists use the right hand rule: the car to right has the right of way and everybody else yields. Works great. On reason why it works so well is because they use the right hand rule the way we use four-way stops - except that everybody sings from the same hymn book thanks to the fact that the commonplace and safe practice of going 10 km/h through a vacant intersection is legal.

Now that David Miller is gone, maybe Toronto can get some of these common sense reforms too.

 

Why is public transit run by the government anyway?

Now that the City of Toronto is facing a strike in the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) - a government owned monopoly – perhaps this is a good time to ask the above question.

The reason usually given by defenders of the public transit for the TTC monopoly is that if the city buses were not a monopoly then greedy private companies would operate only at rush hour, scooping all the passengers before TTC busses could do so and leave the unprofitable routes such as the night bus to the TTC. Public transit needs the profit it makes from rush hour routes to subsidize off-hour and out-of-the-way routes. Public transit provides a service that for-profit companies would refuse to do.

The first step is to note that even if this were true, this argument concedes that a majority of bus riders will experience better bus service as a result of free competition. Even if it were true that mediocre service for all is a better public policy choice than better service for most, it still has to be noted that the public monopoly argument begins with a huge concession: most people currently suffer poor service because the bus company faces no competition.

But is it true that private companies would not serve unprofitable routes that the TTC is currently required to serve? The usual argument is that no private company will run a bus along a route at 3 AM with 3 people on it. This is undoubtedly true however it begs the question, why do we want such an inefficient service in the first place?

To answer this question we have to first note that currently government regulations provide for only two forms of public transportation in Toronto, large vehicles (such as buses, streetcars and subways) run by the TTC, and taxicabs limited to single fares. The reason for this limitation is to protect two monopolies, the TTC monopoly and the taxicab monopoly.

For instance, why aren’t there 9 passenger minivans sitting in front of popular bars at closing time, ready to drive bar patrons home? Answer: because it is illegal for them to pick up multiple fares. If vehicles were allowed to take multiple fares, then the fare each patron pays the minibus could be much less than for an individual taxi ride - say $10 per person. Since taxis are not allowed to pick up more than one person, they have to charge a prohibitive rate to pay the driver and stay in business. One would think that with all the emphasis on drunk driving these days, this suggestion would be welcome, but one would be wrong.

Fortunately, to deregulate public transit is simplicity in itself. Only three sets of laws have to be abolished. First, eliminate the law prohibiting taxi cabs from taking multiple fares (i.e. break the TTC monopoly). Two, eliminate the preposterous and counterproductive rule limiting the number of taxis in the city to 10,000 (i.e. break the taxicab monopoly). Let the free market decide the optimum number of cabs. Three, allow the taxis to charge whatever fees they want (which we can safely do when they face unlimited competition). The only aspect of the taxi business the government has any business regulating is vehicle safety and driver competence. The rest is better left to the marketplace.

Why in the blue blazes is the number of taxis regulated anyway? Keeping the number of taxicabs fixed serves absolutely no social good. One can see that the number of taxis is kept artificially low by the fact that the cost of taxi license is roughly $100,000 on the open market (these things can be bought and sold).

Once can immediately see why these reforms have not been enacted. If one were to propose such heresy, two hornet’s nests would be aroused: the transit workers unions and the taxi license owners. While there is no getting around the fact that the transit workers will be in for tougher times when their monopoly is broken, the cab owners do have a legitimate beef that can be at least partially addressed.

Since they were forced to buy a taxi license because of a regulatory climate the government set up, it can be argued that the government has a moral duty to compensate them for their losses. After all, their deal was: you pay a 100 grand for a license, but in return you get access to a restricted market. To buy all these licenses back would cost a billion dollars – a number the government understandably chokes on. However, if you think about it, this may be money well spent, because where would it go? To small businesses that specialize in public transit, that’s where. Doubtlessly some might blow their new found fortune on coke and hookers, but I suspect that because all these people are entrepreneurs, they will invest it in the one business they know - public transit. They will buy things like the minibus parked outside the bar described above. And since they are small businesses, they will invest their money far more efficiently than a large bloated government bureaucracy like the TTC is capable of doing, whose first temptation is to hire more upper management and buy them all ergonometric chairs.

The most important positive result of these reforms would be that businesses will be allowed to experiment with creative public transit solutions. Minivans at bars; central minivan stops, where larger minibuses can ferry people on a longer journey to other minivan stops; and of course, as many buses as the market will bear at rush hour, competing with each other on fare or amenities. And these are just the things I came up with off the top of my head. However, as long as the monopoly remains, we are stuck with a system whose last new idea was the subway - implemented over 50 years ago.

Speaking of the subway: Because of its nature, this is an aspect of public transit where the public monopoly argument makes some sense. There really isn’t room for more than one subway system in a city (though Toronto is stuck with two, thanks to the wretched Scarborough Light Rail Transit System the province forced on the city in the 1980’s). However, if the TTC were divided in two, the buses in one company and the subway system in another, and the bus company were cut loose to compete as best it can with private firms, then public transit grants could be focused exclusively on the subway system. In this way, we could start a campaign of continuously building new subway stations, adding a new stop every year or two.

The last item on the agenda is the streetcar. This is a costly, obsolete technology that needlessly clogs our crowded streets. It is a costly indulgence for nostalgic streetcar cranks and misguided socialists. Public transit should be a state-of-the-art tool not a museum exhibit. The argument that streetcars pollutes less can be met by mandating hybrid and forthcoming electric technology on our new (and private) buses. If we must, we can bring back electric trolley buses as a compromise. The neighbourhood-killing (and street clogging) streetcar right-of-ways that the City of Toronto is hell bent on building only adds urgency to this issue. This is just one of the bad ideas that would have never seen the light of day if private industry were running the show instead of showboating politicians beholden to special interest groups. And by the way, the term ‘red rocket’ referred originally to the subway, not the streetcar.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for any of this. All of the foregoing is anathema to Toronto Mayor David Miller. It also goes against the instincts of Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty. The leader of the provincial opposition, John Tory could suggest it to good effect, but he won’t. He is too timid and too unimaginative.

And so we soldier on with a creaky 1950’s system that requires ever increasing amount of government money to keep it afloat.