This particular screed has so many inaccuracies that I hardly know where to begin. Let’s start with the obvious: Chicago has a downtown airport. Let me repeat that, just for those who didn’t get it the first time: Chicago has a downtown airport. Called Midway, it plays host to massive jet traffic, ten times the maximum volume that Toronto’s City Centre Airport could ever handle. The Chicago area still has sixteen airports, six of them substantial towered fields. Anyone who claims that Daley has created a clean green paradise in Chicago hasn’t checked their facts. While I lament the loss of Meigs Field (the coolest little airport on the planet), Chicago has at least fouteen reliever airports remaining for on-demand business, medical transport, and education. The Toronto area has at most five (including Toronto City Centre Airport). Even if Chicago got away with vandalising its seventeenth airport, that doesn’t mean Toronto would suffer no consequences from destroying its fifth.But for sheer wishful thinking, the statement “Courts would later rule it was completely within the law for Daley to destroy the airport in the night.” takes the cake. Daley’s act of midnight thuggery cost residents of Chicago over a million dollars in fines and restitution (after his little midnight raid, which endangered the life of every pilot and passenger in the upper midwest, the US government raised the fines for what he did to a level commensurate with the crime).I lament the catastrophic lack of perspective that has so many people willing to vandalise a runway, a place of magic and a gateway to the unimaginable beauty of the skies. But even more I regret the intellectual corruption that kisses the feet of a sorry, lawless thug, as long as he vandalises something we want vandalised. That a website set up specifically to celebrate and encourage local democracy ends up celebrating “…a city with nearly zero opposition, a result of the tightly controled Democratic municipal political machine.” strikes me as a terrible irony.In English, the last word of the above article, “shadow”, generally has only one ‘d’.

Comment by John Spragge
October 20, 2006 @ 5:20 am

One big difference here. The city of Chicago owned the airport and could do as it saw fit. The Toronto Port Authority (TPA) owns and operates the Toronto City Centre Airport, Marine Terminals 51 and 52, and the Outer Harbour Marina.

The Toronto Port Authority was established on June 8, 1999, under the Canada Marine Act, with a seven-member Board of Directors. The Canada Marine Act was intended to create Port Authorities to govern Canada’s important commercial ports. The act, as originally introduced, did not include a Port Authority for Toronto. However, during final reading of the bill a motion to create the TPA was introduced by Liberal MP Dennis Mills.

The TPA replaced the Toronto Harbour Commission, created by a federal act in 1911, to manage the port lands in Toronto.

Also Chicago, in fact has two commercial airports which includes Midway Airport located just to the west of the city centre.

If the current city council and mayor wishes to exert control over the Island airport, they should go to the people of Toronto with a plebescite on actually purchasing the airport from the TPA. If the citizens of Toronto agree to purchase the airport, then and only then should they be able to exert any control over the operations of the City Centre Airport. As long as the airport operates within the guidelines of federal aviation regulations there is nothing the city can do.

Comment by Ethan Clarke
October 20, 2006 @ 8:40 am

John,

The distance from the Loop to Midway is 8 miles. I don’t know how you consider that a “downtown” airport when it’s in an area of industrial fields and bungalows.

Those sixteen remaining airports you talk about are all fine small opperations, few if any commercial flights, other than Midway and O’Hare of course. All of them in the suburbs or outlying areas of the city.

You are right the city was fined, but the courts fined the city US$33,000 not US$1,000,000. The future $1 million was from the FAA funds that the city misspent to destroy the airport. That wasn’t Chicago city tax dollars, it was repaying the FAA’s money. None the less the act did cost the City of Chicago.

I also agree with you, what Daley did was completely undemocratic and thuggish. I meant in no way to say it was a good thing that Chicago’s municipal system is a joke…just that it helps to explain why Daley was able to keep such a tight lid on opposition.

Comment by Dave Scrivener
October 20, 2006 @ 11:32 am

Ethan,

By your logic, the feds should not have taken control of the port and airport with the TPA from the City-run Harbour Commission back in ‘99 without purchasing the airport from the citizens of Toronto.
Did they do this?

I’m not against having an airport on the island and disagree quite strongly with most of the above article, but that does not change the fact that the TPA is an abomination that should never have been. Control of the port lands by the actual interested parties is essential if we’re ever to get anywhere on waterfront redevelopment.

Comment by John Duncan
October 20, 2006 @ 12:54 pm

Ahem, Chicago Midway is NOT a downtown airport. It is on the southwest corner of Chicago city proper, at the end of the Orange subway line. If you’re going to attack a person’s posts as inaccurate, you should get your own facts straight.

Comment by James Bow
October 21, 2006 @ 10:21 am

Toronto City Centre Airport is not like Meig’s Field, except location-wise. If the TPA wanted to keep the island airport open for private aviation, medevac helicopters and a small amount of commercial traffic, Community AIR , David Miller and the rest wouldn’t say boo. But the airport loses money unless it brings in a whole lot of commercial flights–even then it’s a dicey prospect. The volume of flights the TPA needs to survive is the problem, not the existence of the airport as such.The TPA has no valid reason to exist, and should be shut down by the feds, but that’s nothing to do with anything related to Chicago and Meig’s Field.

Comment by Andrew Jeanes
October 21, 2006 @ 1:11 pm

Mr. Scrivener, Mr. Bow:

Chicago Midway sits right in Chicago, surrounded by urban development on all sides, (TCCA, surrounded on three sides by water, including the three sides the flight paths go over. Midway offers convenient access to the city by (as Mr. Bow notes) by both road and subway. If Mr. Scriviener intended to suggest that a city can support a thriving corporate downtown with no conveniently located airport, I suggest that using Chicago as an example does not work. As for the question of where a “downtown” begins and ends, Mr. Bow, if you located an airport eight miles from the centre of Toronto, you could put it at the Woodbine subway station, High Park, Lawrence West, or Lawrence and Yonge. I would argue that any of those locations fit into a reasonable definition of downtown Toronto. Even if you wanted to place a busy jetport at the ends of any of Toronto’s subway lines, I would say that (in terms of population density) those locations pretty much qualify as downtown. I certainly don’t consider any of them particularly suburban. Which of Toronto’s subway stops would you consider suitable for a major jetport? I stand by my statement: Chicago’s actual transport planning practices clearly put convenience for travellers ahead of pollution abatement or comfort for many residents. If you want an example of a green city, Chicago doesn’t cut it.

Mr. Duncan, Mr. Jeanes:
All Canadians, not just those who live in Toronto, have the same stake in a viable transportation system. Toronto City Centre Airport acts as an important link in the Canadian medical transportation system, handling over ten medical flights every day. Those of us who live near the great medical complexes of this city have a responsibility to see that Canadians elsewhere have access to them, and if our civic government can’t handle the task (Mayor Miller says he can’t even begin to do regional planning with the other municipalities), then someone has to do it for us. The same holds true for the lake port, which urban designers want to vandalise with a promenade, even as looming increases in the price of oil make the current practises of (highway) truck delivery look less and less viable. If we fail to plan, we plan to fail, and in practise, someone has to plan on our behalf.

Comment by John Spragge
October 21, 2006 @ 4:07 pm

Mr. Jeanes:
Your argument that Community AIR accepts the medical and educational roles of the airport contradicts their plain statements, such as: “We’ll only be happy when we see bulldozers ripping up the runway.” You may wish Community AIR would compromise; certainly Mayor Miller has reason to, but I see no evidence they plan to

Comment by John Spragge
October 21, 2006 @ 5:37 pm

My idea of a viable, sustainable transportation system for Canada does not include any kind of short-hop commercial aviation–a total disaster in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, safety and value-for-money.

I should have conjugated in the conditional: were the TPA to have proposed keeping the airport open for medevac and commercial aviation only, it is doubtful that Community AIR would even exist. Their rhetoric about tearing up runways is a logical response to the community-hostile position adopted by the TPA.

I have no problem with maintaining a VTOL port, or even the exisiting runways for private conventional aircraft at City Centre. I am dismayed by those who believe that eliminating commercial shipping from Toronto harbour is a good idea. How many trucks on the 401 will be needed to bring road salt, or other traffic currently carried to Toronto by ship?

Unfortunately, the TPA seems to have no interest in commercial shipping. How hard have they been working to attract more such traffic, in comparison with their efforts on the airport? The TPA has no real interest in VTOL or private aviation either, except where it helps them with their ambitions to bring more commercial aviation in. The medevac helicopter is a stalking horse–there is no question that the city would find a way to accomodate it.

The big problem with the TPA is that it doesn’t want to be a port authority, it wants to be an airport authority. Unfortunately for it, it was created under the wrong piece of legislation.

Comment by Andrew Jeanes
October 21, 2006 @ 8:32 pm

Mr Spragge, are you suggesting that Toronto’s success as a thriving corporate downtown has anything to do with the island airport? I find the notion laughable. Porter Airport could boom, or go bust, and either way the city will continue to do just as well as it did before.

Comment by Boo Radley
October 22, 2006 @ 2:00 am

1) Commercial aviation pollutes less than driving (Guardian, 2006), and has a fatal accident rate over thirty times lower than cars, and equivalent to rail (American Public Transportation Association, 2003). A Porter flight that gets 70 cars off the roads reduces pollution, and improves safety and a Porter flight that supplants a flight from Pearson reduces both local emissions of cancer-causing pollutants by 30% (versus the same plane departing from Pearson) and the human impact of noise pollution. High-speed rail might (and I mean might) make more sense in terms of pollution, but we have no high speed rail project yet, and I don’t think we should tell the kids at Malton they should endure jet overflights until we get one.

2)As for medical transportation, the 4000 medical flights each year involve far more than Bandage 1 (the helicopter medevac service), although that service does have considerable importance. Toronto City Centre Airport serves as a lifeline for patients from all over Canada, and it provides a lifeline for patients in Toronto, also, bringing in essential medical freight such as blood and organs for transplant. Before you ask, no, Pearson cannot reliably serve as a substitute for daytime fixed wing flights. So where do you propose those flights should go? Keep in mind that the GTAA predicts that Buttonville will succumb to development pressures by 2010 (Buttonville lacks a convenient body of water that the flight paths can go over). So tell us where you want these flights to go. You can’t put “somewhere other than CYTZ” on a flight plan.

Comment by John Spragge
October 22, 2006 @ 2:25 am

Mr. Spragge (all this Mr-ing feels like the Globe and mail): Those 70 cars that Porter takes off the road, please explain. Are these people flying into the Island Airport going to be hiking away from there on foot to whatever their final destination is? And are all these customers going to Lakeshore and Bathurst — some close place that doesn’t need a car? Aren’t those 70 cars just…moved around now. You need to explain how they’ll dissapear, or at least, help me envision those business travellers on bikes or something.

Mr Andrew> Has the TPA or somebody come out against commercial shipping in the harbour? That would be…weird.

Comment by Shawn Micallef
October 22, 2006 @ 3:01 am

Mr. Micallef:
If 70 people take a Porter turbo-prop to Ottawa, they will emit far less in the way of greenhouse gasses than they would if they had driven in cars, and they have a considerably better chance of arriving safely. If the same 70 people take a Porter turbo-prop from Toronto City Centre Airport instead of from Toronto Pearson, their flight will emit about 30% less local cancer-causing pollutants (based on data from a survey done for the US EPA, 1993). As a bonus, their flight goes over water, rather than near the schools, homes and businesses that surround Pearson.

Nobody, least of all the TPA, has come out against commercial shipping in the harbour. However, a good number of urban designers have published proposals for developing the port land which envision vandalising the harbour and the turning basin with a promenade, making it useless for commercial shipping.

Comment by John Spragge
October 22, 2006 @ 5:41 am

Mr. Spragge> “Vandalising” — you’re creative with the using of the words.

Ok, I understand what you meant now by those 70 cars — (it looked like you were talking about transportation from airport to city). So these 70 cars (which we can call “70 people”) will eithe drive from Ottawa and Toronto, or fly into the Island Airport? They won’t fly into Pearson? They’re currently out there on the 401, right now?

We need high speed intercity trains more than anything. Mr. Spragge, i’m sure there will be lots of people happy to let slip your dogs of war for that cause, once the Island Airport is cleared up (if getting those 70 cars off the 401 is indeed a thing).

Comment by Shawn Micallef
October 22, 2006 @ 11:40 am

Mr. Micallef:

On vandalism:
I suspect you might disagree with me when I refer to ripping up a runway as vandalism, but I find it strange that you would see anything “creative” about my use of the word vandalism to describe putting the lake port out of action. To me it seems like a simple literal description.

On the airport:
Let’s try this again. Right now, we have four means of getting to Ottawa:

1) Cars. Planes (from Pearson or City Centre Airport) emit fewer greenhouse gases than people driving their own cars. See my link to the Guardian above.
2) Planes from Pearson. Aircraft flying from Pearson will emit substantially less greenhouse gas than cars on the highway to Ottawa. However, because of the long runways, at Pearson, with the resulting longer taxi distances, I estimate that a plane leaving from Pearson will spend at least twice as much time taxiing as a plane leaving from Toronto City Centre Airport. During the taxi phase, a plane produces 70% of the total local emissions of the major carcinogenic pollutants associated with airports operations. Also, planes leaving from Pearson affect schools and homes: three years ago, the city estimated that 150,000 people lived in the high noise impact area for Pearson; today, the TPA estimates 190,000 people live (and go to school, etc.) in the high noise impact area.

3) Planes from Toronto City Centre Airport. The planes from Toronto City Centre Airport will emit substantially less greenhouse gas than cars on the highway to Ottawa. Shorter taxiways mean less toxic/carcinogenic pollution than from Pearson. Flight paths going over water means less noise impact.

4) Trains. Environmentally ideal, but currently slow. Building the infrastructure for long distance high speed rail entails a huge carbon commitment for construction. In Europe, with high-speed rail routes anchored by metroplexes such as Paris et banleiu, dividing the setup costs (in money and carbon) by the savings per traveller works out. In North America, with smaller cities and vaster distances, I’ve had economists tell me high-speed rail simply won’t work.
Destroying Toronto City Centre Airport wouldn’t make sense as long as sick or injured kids from Iqaluit and medical shipments (blood and organs) need to come into Toronto. Hey, if you want to “slip your[sic] dogs of war” for high-speed rail, go right ahead. But if you have four possible means of getting somewhere, it hardly makes sense to wreck (vandalize, since I consider an act which will lead to an increase in pollution vandalism) the second least polluting method before working to improve the best solution, does it?

Comment by John Spragge
October 22, 2006 @ 4:17 pm

Shawn (may I call you Shawn?),

Nobody at the TPA would be foolish enough to actively discourage merchant shipping business. The most recent reports I’ve seen showed reasonably strong increases in total tonnage in and out of the commercial port. It does seem like it’s misguided urban planners who are most apt to come up with schemes that would make the port unusable for commercial shipping and force all the traffic that comes into the port now to come instead by truck from Hamilton, or elsewhere.

The TPA never seems to argue forcefully for the need for a commercial port anytime these foolish east waterfront revitalization plans come out, and I’d argue that if commercial traffic is up in the port, it’s despite, rather than because of the TPA’s limp promotional effort. As I say, the TPA is too distracted by trying to become an airport authority. Mind you, the Community AIR types probably want more commercial shipping in the harbour even less than the TPA does.

John (may I call you John?), which economists precisely have told you high speed rail won’t work in Canada? How are Toronto and Ottawa–roughly 430 km apart by rail and with metro area populations of 5.3 million and 1.2 million–so much smaller and more vastly separated than Paris and Lyon, with respective metro area populations of 11.2 and 1.6 million and about 425 km between them by rail?

How would the carbon sunk into building a high-speed line between Ottawa and Toronto be more damaging over the long term than the carbon we’ll sink into highway construction instead? How much benefit could we accrue from an incremental approach to HSR that would forego major investment in new rights-of-way in favour of faster trains over existing infrastructure, as has been done in many parts of the world that are not France, Germany or Japan? How many Porter flights will it take to get a substantial amount of traffic off the 401, versus even just investing in expanding VIA’s capacity to operate trains at current speeds?

Comment by Andrew Jeanes
October 22, 2006 @ 7:54 pm

Mr. Jeanes:

Feel free to call me John. I refer to people formally because I have had the misfortune to encounter people who thought they could make a point by twisting my name.

On your question about economics: at least two people have expressed reservations about what the population density of Ontario and Canada means about the suitability of high-speed rail as a solution to our transportation problems. I support rail when it works; but in this debate, people have had a habit of waving generalities as a proof that one specific proposal will work.

I would support serious proposals or studies for improvements in Ontario’s rail networks. If those networks progress to a point where travellers no longer feel a need to use aviation to reach certain destinations, well and good. The planes can fly elsewhere, or else we’ll just not fly them. If that makes Toronto City Centre Airport unable to support operations through fees, then as long as it remains an essential medial and educational resource, we can find some other way to support it. And if someone develops a substitute for the medical flights and the flight schools, them maybe it should close. I have no problem with any of that.

I do have a problem with the notion that because cities with twice our population, in a continent about Canada’s size with a quarter billion people, make a go of high-speed rail, we don’t need to worry about the consequences of stopping Porter. If you stop Porter, then you will end up with more traffic out of Pearson, more pollution, and more human impact from that pollution. If that happens, it simply won’t do to say that in ten years, or five, we’ll have a better rail service and flights will decrease. The children of Malton live there now. They have to go to school and grow up right now. And nobody has ever made a train fast enough to give kids their childhood back.

Comment by John Spragge
October 22, 2006 @ 11:45 pm

Oh, won’t somebody think of the children! Maybe we should ask the children what they think themselves.

You complain, John, about HSR supporters waving generalities, but then refute my specific city-pair by making a comparison with the entire surface area and population of Europe. I cited Paris and Lyon because that was the first ever Ligne a Grande Vitesse, and because–the size of Paris notwithstanding–it makes a much better comparison with the population densities we’re talking about in the Quebec City-Windsor corridor than you allow. The differences are there, but they are far from being as different as you say. The Paris-Lyon line was even routed away from population centres between the two cities, so average population density may even work out to less than we’d be dealing with here in central Canada.

What about Stockholm (metro area pop. 1.7 million) and Goteborg (pop. about 490K) in Sweden? Spaced, oh say 470 km apart; the X2000 trains running between those cities run only 200 km/h, but make commercial aviation on that route uncompetitive. That’s over more-or-less unupgraded conventional railway lines, mind. We could have had X2000-like trains between Montreal-Ottawa and Toronto 20 years ago or more, had the political will been there.

Here is a generality I will wave: short-hop commercial aviation is completely unsustainable by any rational standard of comparison with even the existing passenger rail infrastructure we possess today. Not a penny of federal money should go towards supporting companies that would provide short-hop services in the Quebec-Windsor corridor. Spend it on providing more trains, at existing speeds, on existing routes and the benefit to the environment, economy and country as a whole will be better for it.

Meanwhile keep the east side of Toronto harbour open to commercial shipping and light industry and keep the boardwalks for the yuppies to the west waterfront. Get rid of the TPA, bring back the THC and make it accountable to the city again. Thank you.

Comment by Andrew Jeanes
October 23, 2006 @ 2:08 am

Mr. Jeanes:
You wrote: “Oh, won’t somebody think of the children!” I don’t know how much, if anything, you know about the effect of aircraft noise on children’s schooling. I don’t know how much, if anything, you know about the number of schools around Pearson well inside the high noise area (one school, named Our Lady of the Airways, sits right beside the flight paths). I did literacy tutoring for eight years, Mr. Jeanes; I know very well what happens to people who don’t learn to read and write in this society. I just ask that you get your high speed passenger railway service working before you move to shut down passenger traffic at City Centre, so the kids in Malton and Rexdale have a chance for a respite from the noise and pollution. If you succeed at making our train system into super-competitive high or medium speed rail as thoroughly and easily as you seem to expect, that shouldn’t pose a problem.

You wrote “…short-hop commercial aviation is completely unsustainable by any rational standard of comparison with even the existing passenger rail infrastructure we possess today.” If that holds true, you should have little or no difficulty getting VIA Rail service upgraded to the point where Porter Air has to make their money flying elsewhere. If you can do that, if downtown to downtown rail service improves to the point where nobody offers air service to Ottawa from Pearson or City Centre, I have already said I’ll join the celebration.

You then wrote: “Not a penny of federal money should go towards supporting companies that would provide short-hop services in the Quebec-Windsor corridor.” I assume you mean the $35 million the federal government paid to bail he city out for the liabilities they incurred for changing their minds about the bridge. Not having access to Porter’s books or the Port Authority’s, I can’t tell you whether the money all went into compensating for the bridge cancellation, or Porter eked out a hidden subsidy to support airline operations.

I can tell you the cost of not keeping Toronto City Centre Airport viable: $300 million dollars, the amount of money the Greater Toronto Airport Authority wants to spend to build Pickering Airport. This city needs at least one reliever airport to handle medical flights. If we don’t have City Centre, we will need Pickering. So keeping City Centre viable, even if it means allowing Porter to operate short-haul flights, ultimately leaves more money available for transportation alternatives (including high speed rail).

The city won’t do this kind of planning. Mayor Miller claimed to me, in a public meeting, that he couldn’t get the leaders of Durham to sit down with him over this issue. If the city won’t plan for air traffic, and few people stand up to the planners who insist on proposing that we replace a vital asset for non-polluting transportation with a “promenade”, how can you find it surprising that the Federal Government doesn’t trust Toronto with the responsibility for transportation assets, which affect all Canadians? They obviously think we need adult supervision, and I don’t blame them.

Comment by John Spragge
October 23, 2006 @ 4:25 am