A year ago, Globe columnist Margaret Wente wrote a column glorifying her SUV and dismissing public transit as something you only take when you have to. She received a lot of well-deserved criticism.
To her credit, she took the criticism on board and decided to take only the TTC for a week and write about. Her diary (“Carless in Toronto”) appears in today’s Toronto section (unfortunately only accessible online to subscribers).
It’s typical Wente — breezy and superficial — but it’s also valuable because it reveals the impediments and attitudes that keep many people from taking the TTC on a regular basis in Toronto. It is people with these attitudes who need to be converted to transit in the long run if Toronto is to become a sustainable city.
And, I have to be honest, some of her observations made me realize the things I do to live carless in Toronto. She notes, for example, that most of her friends live a long distance away from her and from subway lines — “Geographically Undesirable” in her phrase — which makes me realize that my Toronto is very much circumscribed to areas accessible by subway or streetcar, and I simply don’t usually include places outside these areas as destinations I can reasonably expect to get to (unless I hitch a ride). She likewise points out how where her mom lives in Scarborough feels inaccessible because it is across a “transit divide” (subway/LRT/bus) — “by TTC” she writes “[my mom] might as well be on the other side of the Grand Canyon.” While Wente is indulging in typical exagerration, she’s not completely wrong if I look at my own travel assumptions. I think this psychological issue is one of the strongest arguments for continuing to build subways, despite the economics — they make more places feel easily and rapidly accessible by transit in a way that even dedicated-lane surface transit doesn’t.
Wente finds other incoveniences too — greatly extended travel times even when transit is direct, can’t do bulk shopping, need to wear sensible shoes for walking, more planning required — and a few benefits, like saving money, time to read, and developing a sense of community. She cleverly leaves the most obnoxious anti-transit argument to her exercise instructor, who says “Okay, I admit it’s a class thing. All those smelly people breathing on you. What if they cough and their spit lands on you?”
It’s easy to mock such attitudes, but they need to be dealt with if transit is to expand its customer base in Toronto. In many European cities, most people take transit as a matter of course. How do we puncture these attitudes and get these Torontonians to take transit?
photo by Sam Javanrouh
12 comments
My sense from reading the Wente column was that driving had left her quite divorced from her city and her home neighbourhood.
She mentioned living in the Beaches but needing a car to run all over to get what she needed to host a dinner. I would think she could get everything she needed along Queen St.
Get this woman a bike I say.
As a confirmed car driver I can say that it definitely does have an effect on my connection to the city. For instance, rather than explore my own area to find local shops, I can just hop in the car and go to familiar places, even if they’re halfway across the city.
At the same time I feel the sting of living in a somewhat TTC-inconvenient spot (Pape and Gerrard) and how my carless friends are rarely willing to make the commitment required to get to my place.
I wish the TTC were better, I might actually use it more. As it stands, it is simply too much of a hardship as it stands to use it on any regular basis as long as I have the means of supporting my own transportation. End of story.
I know why we do it (the connections created and developed over time), but this past summer I was thinking it’s a bit silly the amount of effort we put into socializing with friends — travelling halfway across the world to hangout with someone in particular. I started to think that it was even a bit odd that I’d bother to take the TTC to be with someone when there’s a whole bunch of people within walking distance of me that I likely have something in common with. I used this idea (and many others) as motivation, to organize several neighbourhood potlucks. Also, I’m able to access the Wente article this way: http://news.google.ca/news?hl=en&ned=ca&q=%22carless+in+toronto%22&btnG=Search+News
On shopping. I recently bought one of those “old lady” fold-up shopping carts and its really bad. I wonder if anybody has recommendations for something that works.
Don’t be a lazy friend Sean. People who don’t move around the city to see people end up falling off people’s radar’s. It’s not that far, and often getting there is nice. New York has real problems, that it takes forever to see friends in different parts of the city — Toronto is not so bad. Plus, analyzing why we have friends or socialize is probably not a good idea — I suspect you could come to the conclusion it is silly, which might be technically correct but very sad.
That said, people who decide to sequester themselves in far-off places like Parkdale or The Beach cannot complain when people don’t visit. It should be everybody’s ambition to live as close to Yonge as possible.
I found most of Wente’s arguments self-serving and rather irrelevant, but most people I know who take the TTC do share her experiences of it. It’s too often crowded and slow, and given the choice, too many Torontonians like Wente (and Jeremy, above) wouldn’t (or don’t) use it at all. I’m one of them, only my alternative is not a car (which I personally find far LESS efficient than the TTC) but my bike. I always grieve a little when forced down into a subway tunnel by bad weather. I’ll grant an exception for the streetcars, which I find slow but majestic; great behemoths gliding across the city. That’s not transportation but performance art.
I like Sean’s reminder to remember the local first. If we foraged for necessities such as groceries locally, then perhaps then we’d have more time to travel across the city to see friends.
No one should be obligated to take the TTC, it should be your own personal choice based on your own financial position, values, and taste. But, understand that we all cannot drive our own personal vehicles into the future. In a dynamic and growing city like Toronto, the car is going to have to give way to transit, there is no other choice without fooling ourselves.
I have no problem with people like Wente, they can live their lives any way they wish, I just don’t want to hear them bitching and moaning about the traffic, gas prices, the cost of parking, etc.
My only wish is that the pro-car lobby would understand that its not the number of cars that is the problem, its the number of trips generated by the land-use pattern. Its a proven fact in the transporation planning discipline that if you increase capacity, you increase the number of trips based on the perception of easier motoring. This increases congestion and removes any gains you attempted to achieve. The only solution is to reduce the number of trips by demanding compact mixed-use built-form, promoting walking, biking, and transit, and maintaing or reducing auto capacity despite increases in congestion.
This will take leadership and vision, lets hope our new Council has what it takes.
Two words: car sharing.
It fills the gap between car ownership and transit.
Quite simply, it’s (almost) perfect.
m.
There’s a lot that could be done to improve transit in this city. Many areas in the inner suburbs, for example, have unreliable, infrequent service.
Still, I think far too few of us realize how good we’ve got it. Growing up, I had no choice but to drive to get to where I wanted to go. This was my parent’s fault. They lived in the boonies. When I moved to Guelph for university, buses came every half an hour. If I didn’t time my trips to the bus stops, I’d be late for class or work or stuck in the cold.
After university, I lived in a suburb of Quebec city for eight months. It took me close to an hour to walk to a grocery store, and an hour to an hour and a half to travel downtown by bus, and by the end of the ride I’d feel like I was going to puke. The bus only came by once every hour, and I’d have to leave by midnight if I wanted to get home before bus service closed for the night.
Moving to Toronto was heaven. Now, I don’t bother checking the time when I want to take a bus; I just walk out to the bus stop. Streetcars run all night and the Subway is fast. Perhaps it’s all what you’re used to.
It’s good to think about how to entice people who are used to driving to use the TTC, but at some point, there’s not much the TTC is going to be able to do to win them over. No matter how great transit is, it will always be different than driving. There will always be something to complain about. At some point, many of the people who complain about it  especially able-bodied people who live downtown like myself  have to stop blaming the service and start blaming themselves.
Jeremy, I think your friends are being incredibly lazy. Pape and Gerrard is an intersection served by a streetcar line as well as a bus that comes directly from the subway every seven to eight minutes. The problem ought to stem from where they live — perhaps not near any convenient transit point — not where you do.
Amy (Amy Lavender?) … I love your description of streetcars. My boyfriend was recently back in Toronto for the weekend from Montreal and was waxing poetic about the lovely grace of streetcars himself.
> people who decide to sequester themselves in far-off places like Parkdale or The Beach
Man, consider yourself lucky you don’t have friends in really inconvenient places, like Agincourt or Rexdale. Or Brampton (*shudder*). It’s amazing how much of “Toronto” is inaccessibly far-flung.
Focus on subways. Most people of every class will use a subway, while very few of us will use the bus or streetcar. Buses do well for connections for the poor, while people with means will cab or find some other means.
Streetcars are far too expensive from a capital spending POV, disruptive on a day to day and long term perspective, and exceptionally uncomfortable. The best thing Toronto could do would be to deport James Bow and his crew of streetcar fetishists and rip up every streetcar track in the city. They don’t come frequently enough and aren’t fast enough to use as reliable transport. I say this as someone who uses the subway to commute on a daily basis (I live on top of a subway station).
Toronto also needs to sell the roads to private companies to enable road pricing (and good maintenance), so that the TTC can charge sufficient amounts to fund the system solely off of fares. Pricing on the TTC is idiotic, since it is very hard for me, a person who lives on top of the subway and can run their life solely off of transit, to justify a metro pass. Actually it never makes sense for me to buy a Metropass, so I don’t. Instead I buy tokens for weekday commuting (business travel, meetings, or late nights mean that I take about 30 commuting trips a month instead of 40) and use cabs or my car for other travel for less than it costs to use the TTC!
The comments above are hilarious, solely because they are stereotypically lefty, angrily denouncing people for how they live their lives and showing how they should live, rather than trying to deal with how they do live or with what their preferences or concerns are. Since people like these are involved in “community” planning and transit decisions, no wonder the TTC et al are so screwed up!