St
Clair right-of-way is off the rails
Cesar Palacio
Toronto Star - March 8, 2005
As Toronto Transit Commissioners and city councillors try frantically
to find millions of dollars in savings and cuts to prevent a
city-wide 10-cent, $20 million TTC fare increase, many members
of the St Clair community have proposed a solution - cancel
the proposed St Clair Avenue West exclusive right-of-way.
The $65 million plan calls for the two centre lanes of St Clair
to be exclusively reserved for streetcars, similar to Spadina
or Queen's Quay, and was strongly opposed by three of four local
city councillors, and the vast majority of the local community.
Although we believe strongly in the principles of making public
transit more reliable, accessible and efficient, lifelong transit
advocates like myself, former Mayor John Sewell, and thousands
of local residents did not support the proposal because we do
not believe that this project accomplishes those goals.
In short, the minuscule few seconds per average rider that will
be saved cannot make up for almost 15 consecutive years of TTC
service cuts on St Clair, and to look at the street as simply
"a transportation corridor", where nothing else other than streetcars
and cars are important, is narrow-minded and regressive. St
Clair is an avenue for pedestrians, cyclists, trees, cafes and
shoppers, all of which lose out under a 24/7 exclusive right-of-way
plan.
The proposed massive sidewalk cuts, left turn restrictions,
substantial reduction of on-street parking, loss of many trees
and sidewalk cafes, and the potential traffic congestion and
infiltration into our local neighbourhoods will significantly
impact the St Clair community and make the 24/7 approach simply
unsupportable.
The right-of-way was sold to city council on the premise that
it would increase ridership, in theory by making service more
consistent by reducing the gaps between streetcars, and on the
premise that we could afford it. This now seems to be far from
the case. A 10-cent TTC fare increase would net only approximately
$20 million in new revenue for the TTC (compared with $65 million
for St Clair), and there is a mountain of evidence, particularly
in the form of ridership statistics during the early 1990s,
that show increasing fares to have a massive, virtually instant
negative effect on ridership. It's as if one hand doesn't know
what the other is doing.
Taking the TTC is already prohibitively expensive for many of
Toronto's least fortunate, and the vast majority of riders lost
as a result of any fare increase will be those who count pennies
each day to take the TTC, and not those who can afford the increase
but simply prefer not to pay. Any ridership growth realized
as a result of the installation of an exclusive TTC right-of-way,
or other expensive efforts aimed at increasing ridership, would
be completely undermined or wiped out by a regressive system-wide
fare increase that would impact the least fortunate the most.
To expensively tweak efficiency through fare increases is to
create a system that is slightly more convenient for those who
can afford the rising fares, and to make it quickly inaccessible
for those who can't.
Cesar Palacio is councillor for Ward 17-Davenport, and former
executive-assistant to the chair of the Toronto Transit Commission.
