While ad creep has yet to make an appearance in the 2010 election, Joe Pantalone’s pastel hued Smart car (Daimler AG) gets the nod as the most visible example to date of politically conscious corporate branding (product placement?).
The spiffy little vehicle is presumably meant to signal Pantalone’s environmental bona fides, and mesh with what his organizers promise will be a strategically upbeat, forward-looking campaign.
So what’s with the grim, backward-looking rhetoric in his stump speeches, such as the one he delivered to a sparse Board of Trade crowd on Friday morning?
Citing the decades of decline in three other Great Lakes cities — Cleveland, Detroit and Buffalo — Pantalone implied that a vote for his opponents could imperil our future. “There’s nothing written in the Bible, the Torah, the Koran or whatever else that Toronto will be a great city forever.”
Après Miller, le déluge? Oh, please.
Toronto — socially, economically, and culturally — has precious little in common with U.S. rust belt cities. Virtually all of our challenges involve growth, not exodus. Toronto doesn’t have the donut disease, and Pantalone, who’s been involved in downtown redevelopment decisions for three decades, should surely know that.
Anway, back to that conspicuous Smart car. My question for Pantalone is this: Why isn’t he tooling around town in a car-share vehicle? After all, if he wants to align himself with a dense, green urban future, that’s a really good way to get there.
Autoshare president Kevin McLaughlin says the number of car-share members in Toronto jumped to 20,000 from 2,000 since 2006 — a stunning growth rate linked directly to the increasing density in the core. With Zipcar hungry for market share, those numbers show no sign of slowing any time soon.
Industry studies, McLaughlin says, indicate that a single car-share vehicle [PDF] removes three to six privately-owned vehicles from the road, reduces cost of living and prevents the emission of 1.2 tonnes of carbon per member per year. About 15% of Autoshare members get rid of one car and 25% opt not to purchase a second.
Yet despite these layered benefits, none of the mayoral candidates, including a self-styled environmentalist like Pantalone, has said boo about a rapidly emerging low-carbon transportation alternative…and this in a race dominated by intense debate over congestion, bike lanes and transit expansion. Weird.
The city in recent years has taken baby steps to promote car-sharing. Condo developers now have an option to cut back on parking spots on the condition that they permit car share firms to locate vehicles in their garages. And a few municipal departments have started using car-share services instead of standard city-owned fleet vehicles.
But McLaughlin says the city’s purchasing and expensing procedures have prevented the municipality from making more use of car sharing. And the city has yet to follow Montreal and Vancouver’s lead in requiring high-rise developers to include parking spaces for car-share vehicles.
What’s more, antiquated rental rules prevent firms like Autoshare and Zipcar from making more in-roads in high rises. McLaughlin says Craig’s List Toronto is filled with ads for parking spaces in the Concord Adex highrises, but car-share firms aren’t allowed to rent them because they’re not tenants.
Three major car-share issues await the next council.
One involves the use of street-parking spaces for car-share vehicles. Toronto officials are plodding away with a pilot, even though cities like Vancouver, Montreal, Portland and San Francisco all allow dedicated on-street car-share spaces.
The second has to do with creating incentives for developers to outfit car-share spaces with electric vehicle infrastructure, so the car-share firms can go out and purchase EVs as part of their green marketing strategies.
The third focuses on the potential for developing transit smart cards that also allow users to access car share vehicles as well as the new bike sharing service to be launched shortly. Bundling will invariably help reduce private car useage. “It’s important for us to get in a room together and look to the future,” says McLaughlin.
Unless, of course, if you’re a candidate for mayor. Even the most broad-ranging transportation plan unveiled to date – George Smitherman’s – makes no mention of car-sharing, despite his oft-stated goal of creating integrated solutions.
As it happens, two car share networks in Ottawa and Quebec — Vrtucar and Communauto — this week announced a major initiative to knit together their services across the border, creating a 1,200 location car-sharing network extending from suburban Ottawa to Quebec City, Montreal and Sherbrooke. (Communauto this month also launched a joint marketing/discount program with Via Rail.)
The mayors of Ottawa and Gatineau both turned up at the official launch to laud the effort – a gesture, McLaughlin observes, that further validates the importance of car-sharing as an ultra-cheap means of fighting urban congestion.
Now that’s Smart.
photo by Gabi
15 comments
I love my zipcar membership! I would never own a car in this city as long as they’re around. The average cost of car ownership a year is about $7000. I spend around $2500 at the most. It makes so much sense!
and cents! haha, I couldn’t resist!
Toronto always plods behind other N. American cities of any quality, name an issue: car-share, bike-share, transit… WTH?
“Toronto doesn’t have the donut disease”. I thought there was a United Way study last year that showed there is a donut of poverty starting to circle the downtown.
As a comparison my car which is paid off costs me under 2500 a year. I had thought about car sharing but there is not one near me and it would cost the same. If there was a car sharing spot within a a block it might be enough to get me to sell the car.
@SCOTTD: eventually, your car will wear out to the point that you’ll have to buy a new one, or, granted, a used one. Either way though, it will be a large one-time expenditure, or a new payment of x dollars per month. So long term, car sharing ends up being more economical.
I had a car for a few years but sold it 2 years ago and I got a zip car membership. It’s incredibly useful, esp. with the cars a minute away. I live downtown, so I only spend 500-700 for the zip car.
SCOTTD: not to be too glib, but why not sell your car and rent your parking space to a car-sharing company?
I wish there was a car sharing facility in or south of Weston.
I wouldn’t expect Joe to adjust his behaviour to car-sharing as it might undermine our “need” to build roads like the local Front St. between Dufferin and Strachan at maybe what $60M? that even Green Gord seems to support as he owes Joe some for last election’s support.
Joe also likes the straightening up of Dufferin in the Exhibition and his true commitment to bikes has been seen with the years of trying to “complete the grid” for the 905 motorists, and gee, where are those bike lanes/routes in lower Pantalonia? (though Harbord did get extended to Osssington). Yet having a Mayor who gets the transport issues may make less of a difference given the 44 other votes from the rest of Caronto, so we likely need to work on ward votes too.
I agree with John on this one, and count myself a supporter, but not yet a user of carsharing.
As noted in some of the comments, its not just the City lagging, the carsharing companies here have been slow to expand beyond the core and the Yonge St. spine.
While tiny Grand River carshare is sticking cars all over Kitchener-Waterloo and Cambridge, the 2 biggies here can’t seem to get as far east as Victoria Park never mind actually into Scarborough. They don’t even have East York well covered north of Danforth, particularly as you go further east.
A little more ambition all around would be good!
MKM. No glibness taken. Its cheaper to keep the car (I cycle and use TTC most of the time) but I have street parking so I have no space to rent. Its a cool idea though.
Leo. Actually not.I always get small fuel efficient cars and if I got a “new” one it would be used. I have done the math and in my case car ownership actually is cheaper especially pro rated. You also have to factor in other costs, for example in a rush Sharing cars are not always available, and for heading out of town I don’t think they are a good value.FYI my car is over 10 years old, has 110,000 km on it and is in mint shape. It has 10 years left on it. I love car sharing but I will admit that having one sitting in front of my house is really nice when I need it.
Re: ScottD and United Way donut comment.
I’m believe the donut metaphor suggests a poor downtown (the hole) surrounded by a well off suburban ring (the donut). U.S. cites seem to struggle with the model. Toronto’s downtown is just fine.
I agree the United Way study pointed out the dangers of declining suburbs in Toronto but I think that would be an inverse donut or perhaps a bundt pan.
“Toronto — socially, economically, and culturally — has precious little in common with U.S. rust belt cities. Virtually all of our challenges involve growth, not exodus. Toronto doesn’t have the donut disease…”
Not so:
– Toronto has lost jobs over the last 10 years, where the 905 has packed on thousands of new jobs
– most of the growth in the GTA has been outside of Toronto, which fell far short of its population growth projections in the last census
– The region’s economy is heavily reliant on the “too big to fail” automakers and other manufacting sectors. Had they failed, we may have shared much more with the rust belt than we’d care to admit.
– the “three cities” mentioned by another commenter is indeed a troubling indication that while we may not have “donut disease,” we are certainly not immune from the polarizing effects of poverty and a lack of good, stable, local jobs that allow you to live in a Toronto neighbourhood – with or without a car.
allegory aside, I’m looking for a mayor who is realistic about the challenge of continuing to build a great city, rather than running negative campaigns against the ghost of David Miller and attacking an administration who has largely gotten it right. For me, that’s Joe Pantalone.
@Graham: When I started writing about development in Toronto in the late 1980s — ! — there were lots of people fussing about the exodus of downtown offices to the suburban periphery. And many politicians and planning experts talked about the hole in the donut effect and drew comparisons to Detroit, including the suggestion that Greater Toronto’s economy was overly dependent on the car industry.
But the exodus in Detroit has to do with all sorts of other factors — race being a very major one, and an economy that was genuinely, as opposed to allegedly, reliant on one set of employers. Toronto, by contrast, has major employment clusters in aerospace, financial services, media/arts, food processing and information technology. We are much more like Chicago.
Yes, businesses do decamp for the suburbs for economic reasons, and it will probably be ever thus. And yes, the city has an income polarization problem. But people who study global cities – Saskia Sassen, Richard Florida — have observed that social polarization is a clear feature of very large, very globally-connected cities, especially those with growing service sectors, such as Toronto.
My point was that candidates like Pantalone should be talking about Toronto as it is today, rather than dredging up old straw men arguments for political purposes.
We escaped becoming a doughnut only to become a Timbit.