City Hall
March 10th, 2010
A photo I took when we went through this ritual in mid-2008.
Context!
June 13, 2008. A Friday. I was covering City Hall for Eye Weekly at the time.
At 2:24 in the afternoon, the City put out a press release. Seventeen minutes later, my editor forwarded it to me, asking if I had any idea what it was about:
Media Advisory: Mayor David Miller to make important announcement
Media are advised that Mayor David Miller will make an important announcement today.
Date: TODAY - Friday, June 13
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: Mayor’s Protocol Lounge, 2nd Floor, City Hall, 100 Queen St. W.
Reasoning that it was either really good/important news (something so urgent they were announcing it late on a Friday afternoon) or really bad/embarrassing news (something so unfortunate they were announcing it late on a Friday afternoon), I decided that it was worth my time to schlep down to City Hall. So did the rest of the media, who — along with a whole whack of curious councillors and political staffers — enthusiastically stuffed into Miller’s office much as they did today, to hear what course-altering proclamation the mayor had in store.
March 9th, 2010
At a packed Board of Trade speech last week, Rocco Rossi vowed that as mayor, he would “put everything on the table” in negotiations with the province over the future of the TTC (and, by implication, its murky relationship to Metrolinx).
Everything?
Rossi seems to be implying that the TTC’s very status as a city agency may be in play if he wins. Rival George Smitherman doesn’t appear to disagree. In an interview with The Star, Smitherman (who’s found religion on the topic of contracting out) mused about outsourcing bus routes to private operators, as is done in London. He’s been vague about the rest of his TTC plans (the precondition to all changes, he said in an email, is the city getting its “house in order”), although he praised Metrolinx and called for more seamless transit within the region in a speech to the Board of Trade last December.
Time to call these guys out. If elected, are they planning to have council ask the province to upload all, or part, of the TTC to Metrolinx? And if so, what are the arguments? And what would drive the province to agree?
Spacing contributors John Lorinc and Steve Munro bring the debate out of the rhetorical shadows.
The Case For Uploading
In the past sixty years, the TTC has served Toronto well, concentrating growth within the former Metro boundaries and driving intensification closer to the core. In the 905, by contrast, municipalities and the province failed to invest comparably in transit, leading to today’s gridlock, productivity losses, and sprawl.
The region’s transportation crisis, however, cuts across municipal borders.
March 2nd, 2010
Spacing Radio 017 is on the air.
It’s budget-time in Toronto and while City Hall is busy at work approving the final numbers, host David Michael Lamb sits down with Spacing …
February 11th, 2010
The Toronto Environmental Alliance (TEA) has published a list of key policy priorities it hopes Toronto’s mayoral candidates will endorse. Noting that Rocco Rossi’s denouncement of Transit City and bike lanes on arterials has been the only discussion on environmental issues to date, TEA executive director, Dr Franz Hartmann called on candidates to put a focus on the environment.
The group listed six priorities as essential to continuing the push towards a cleaner and healthier city. Those priorities are:
- Build Transit City and fund it
- Achieve 70% waste diversion by 2012
- Buy and support locally produced green products
- Build transportation infrastructure everyone can use
- Implement the city’s sustainable energy strategy
- Provide tool to prevent pollution
The emphasis of the priorities is to build on past initiatives and to ensure continuity of what the group calls “ten years of environmental success”. Beyond the importance of these priorities to personal and communal well-being, TEA contends that the issues are also essential to continuing Toronto’s leadership role on the environment. The city’s pesticide bylaw, which helped lead to the province wide ban, and its pollution disclosure bylaws regarding the presence of toxic substances, were cited as examples of progressive action now being studied elsewhere. “Because Toronto is the biggest city in Canada, what happens here has a big impact on the rest of the county” said Theresa McClenaghan, Executive Director of the Candian Environmental Law Association. “That’s why so many prominent environmental groups endorsed these priorities. We want to send a clear signal to all Mayoralty candidates that these priorities matter and that the next Mayor must adopt them.”
February 11th, 2010
If Mayor David Miller was a premier or prime minister contending with a cabinet minister in political freefall, he’d have only one option: fire the person, fast.
Indeed, leaders like Dalton McGuinty and Jean Chretien have swung the ax for lesser transgressions than Adam Giambrone’s. Stephen Harper waited a bit, but demoted Lisa Raitt for her arrogance and mishandling of the isotope crisis.
So Miller — who’s been in Ottawa and wasn’t commenting on yesterday’s events — should make an appointment with the City Hall press corps before the end of the week and openly declare that he is replacing Adam Giambrone with a steady hand — someone who can dial down the volume on the runaway public relations disaster that is the Toronto Transit Commission. He’s got to be a tough guy, for once.
I’ve never understood Miller’s patronage of Giambrone, which has endured despite the councillor’s ham-fisted approach to ward business, his bizarre television show, his lack of enthusiasm for council work, and his nakedly opportunistic attempts to address the TTC’s customer service woes.
All that’s over. Only by replacing Giambrone can Miller now assure Torontonians that he is taking charge of the transit file for the remainder of his tenure.
February 8th, 2010
It couldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the city’s swinging right in this election year, and not without reason, given the increasingly perilous state of Toronto’s finances (the gory details of which will be getting a lot of airplay over the next week). But there’s something bizarre about the breast-beating over the alleged dearth of red-meat conservatives in the mayoral race.
Exhibit A: Marcus Gee’s plea in Saturday’s Globe and Mail for Rob Ford to jump into this “lefty” campaign. As a journalist, I whole-heartedly agree with him that the spectacle of a Ford candidacy would be enormously entertaining to cover.
But surely there’s more to this business of holding elections than simply the prospect of nine months of zingers. In our yearning for some blue blood, have we lost sight of that little matter of competence?
At the risk of inviting days of attack on the comment string, I’d argue that three current and former council conservatives certainly have the skills to run the city: Doug Holyday, Karen Stintz, and David Soknacki, former budget chief and currently chair of Parc Downsview Park. You may not agree with them on many points, but they all have functioning brains and understand the issues.
In lieu of these figures, we have Rocco Rossi, whose pronouncements to date make him look more and more like a conservative in Liberal clothing.
February 1st, 2010
Say this for Adam Giambrone’s long-shot run for mayor (which he launches tonight at Revival): As TTC chair, his very presence in the race all but guarantees that we will have a roiling, gloves-off debate about the future of transit in Toronto.
Coming off last week’s mea culpa and the launch of the external customer service review, Giambrone says his top priority for the TTC is completing all of Transit City. Rocco Rossi, by contrast, has pledged to put the multi-billion dollar project “on hold,” pending a financial review. George Smitherman wants to press ahead, but blames the city’s “leadership” for the $40 million cost over-run on the St. Clair right-of-way.
During council last week, Spacing asked all city councillors (except chair Sandra Bussin) to identify their top priority for improving the TTC.
Here are the replies, grouped by theme:
CUSTOMER SERVICE:
Brian Ashton: Paradigm shift to customer service culture.
Bill Saundercook: Expect every operator to be an ambassador for the ridership.
Paula Fletcher: Enhance customer service by permitting riders to buy tokens with credit and debit cards, and allowing convenience stores to sell Metropasses.
Peter Milczyn: Change the culture so everything the TTC does is viewed through a customer service lens.
Joe Mihevc: Institute a service culture from top to bottom.
Anthony Perruzza: Re-focus the TTC’s business delivery model from a transit system into a service provider.
Gloria Lindsay Luby: Improve driver safety while providing more customer service training for operators.
February 1st, 2010
As we have seen, allowing politicians to adjudicate on new billboard applications can be, well, problematic. That’s why City Council is setting up a new citizen-led Sign Variance Committee to make sound decisions based on planning principles rather than personal preferences (or lobbying, or campaign contributions, or any of the other complicating factors of politics).
On Thursday night, City staff held a voluntary information session for potential applicants, helpfully clarifying a lot of the details that aren’t fully explained online. Two dozen people came out (including me), which would have been more encouraging if all but one hadn’t been men (including me).
Applications are due at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 11, so there’s still time to get your name in. Committee members will get $250 per meeting attended, and it’s expected that the committee will meet monthly, so if you’re an urban policy wonk (and, for goodness sake, why are you reading this if you’re not?), it should sound like a pretty sweet gig. Read on for details.
January 27th, 2010
Adam Giambrone took some time this afternoon to address the fast escalating criticism of customer service on the TTC. His message was one of commitment to a new focus at the commission. Acknowledging the ‘perfect storm’ of bad press that started with the botched fare hike and culminated last week with a slew of pictures of sleeping employees; the Chair stated that this is was an opportunity the commission could seize upon to refocus itself on the issue of customer service.
“Focus” was indeed the word of day, with little new to announce in terms of initiatives, other than a new customer charter, Giambrone stated that the TTC would accelerate items already in the capital budget and work to put customer service forefront in the minds of its employees. Included in the list of quick fixes was the online trip planner, which Giambrone said would be released in beta some time next week and would be complemented by the release of necessary data to Google Transit (a mobile version of the trip planner is to come out this summer). Also included is a program to put SMS numbers on all streetcar stops that will allow for instant next car information to be sent to your phone; Giambrone is confident this service will be implemented by July. This service was promised for bus stops by 2011.
January 27th, 2010
Last week, as pedestrian deaths in the GTA mounted, several media outlets asked me how I felt about this seeming epidemic. I generally replied that I was horrified.
I also tried to look for an explanation. After the tenth death in just over a week, I wrote a post last week wondering if perhaps a week of poor visibility was a factor. I hoped that a change in the weather would bring an end to these fatal accidents. I also wrote an op-ed in the Star pointing out that most of these collisions took place in the suburbs, where the infrastructure is often dangerous for pedestrians.
In the following 5 days, 3 more pedestrians were killed by motor vehicles, all within the boundaries of the old City of Toronto. It’s obviously more than just overcast weather and suburban infrastructure, hazardous as they are. There have now been 7 pedestrians killed in one month in Toronto, possibly the most ever in a single month since amalgamation. Another 7 have been killed in the GTA.
By this point, my feeling is shell-shock. I have no idea how to explain what is happening. It’s as if all possible causes of pedestrian deaths have come together at the same time: bad visibility; inattentive and aggressive drivers; heavy vehicles (5 or more of the 14 deaths); distracted pedestrians (for goodness’ sake, do not cross the street while talking on a cellphone); terrible infrastructure (the intersection of Danforth and Broadview, where a man was killed on Friday, is particularly bad for pedestrians - sweeping corners that allow vehicles to turn at speed).
There was no official response from the city to this tide of death until yesterday, when the Mayor answered questions about the deaths in a media scrum. The tragedy is that the City could have been putting pedestrian safety programs in place for several months now, and could have had the resources to respond immediately to the rising tide of tragedies.
