Photo by Points North

Driving in Toronto is a nightmare. There’s really no such thing as rush hour, no matter what the experts say. You sit in traffic going into the city at all hours practically, especially on the 401. You sit in traffic leaving the city. And as you sit, you get to look at rusting medians, potholes, and brown weeds, never mind belching trucks trying to mow you down. You stand on the subway during “off” hours and wade through litter at the main stations. You wait forever for a bus, then have nowhere to sit and the drivers won’t call out the stops and you can’t see out the windows to see where you are, that is if you know the area anyway.

So I want to talk about transit and where the parties stand. I wanted to go straight to the sources, and not through the media filter. It should have been a simple matter of clicking to the Ontario party pages, seeing a link to their campaign promises and then some sort of link about transit or infrastructure or roads, right? Wrong!

First I went to the Ontario Liberal party page. Found the campaign promises sheet, then looked down the list…schools…health care…jobs…environment…better families…uh, where’s transit? Nowhere to be found, not even hiding under the Environment, at least I couldn’t find it, and I spent a good 5 minutes or more looking (I don’t have much patience, and it shouldn’t take more than a minute anyway). So googled “ontario liberals transit” and in the end, I had to load the cached page, not the straight link, in order to see their transit announcement, and even then had to find the blog entry, and this people is the sum total of the Liberals’ transit policy — according to THEIR website:

“Dalton kick-started MoveOntario 2020 in Mississauga today, with a $100 million investment to fight gridlock.

And the buses were ready to move!!!”

Well, we’re really on the move now. $100 million, wow, when the TTC alone is short hundreds of millions, and what the heck is MoveOntario 2020? Another catchy Liberal slogan meaning nothing, just like the last election?

So that’s the Liberals, and I’m exhausted just from the convoluted hunt to see what they had to say on this very important subject. I don’t recall any more specifics than that on the TV news anyway.

On to the others.

Hallelujah, the Conservatives have an infrastructure link. Took me a few clicks to find it and their campaign promises page, mind you. The link on that page takes you to the correct page in their PDF policy handbook (which means they can make their links work too), and it’s long. Don’t they know we’re the sound byte generation and only want to read for 3 seconds?

So in a nutshell, the Conservatives under John Tory will make the roads more efficient by:

“…creating new high-occupancy lanes and synchronized signaling measures that allow traffic to move more smoothly, building on the successful Markham model of traffic management.”

And they will build “roads that are missing from our existing network - like completing the 407.”

For transit, the Conservatives will work with the almost dead-in-the-water Greater Toronto Transit Authority to spend the next 5 years moving gasoline and fuel taxes from the general coffers to putting them solely towards roads, bridges, highways, and public transit; to expand the GO rail network to communities that need it; to improve intercity bus service; to plan a new east-west interregional transit line (too bad that wasn’t new east-west Toronto subway line!); to support TTC plans for high-volume routes (is that a hint for building a Queen subway? Nah. Oh well.); to make it easier to move from system to system and for bike riders and car drivers to park and ride; and to build public transit outside the GTA. They talk about other kinds of infrastructure too, but that’s not the topic of this article.

Well, that’s a heck of a lot more detailed and ambitious than the Liberals moving Mississauga buses out of the terminal on September 25th, while carrolling we’re going to spend $100 million!

Now for the NDP. They have commitments, not one of which is about transit or infrastructure. So I looked under Environment. As part of their fight against global warming, Howard Hampton and his NDP party will quickly invest money in, and only in, “public transit projects that make the most difference for people and cut greenhouse gas emissions the quickest.” I can see a few fights brewing between the TTC and an NDP government over what that means, assuming the TTC is included in that. The NDP will also invest in “light rail and GO Transit, as well as [returning] the province [to] covering 50 per cent of transit authorities operating expenses.” Fantastic! The TTC will at last, at last get significant provincial support, and it will have to reduce fares. OK, I’m dreaming in technicolour for that last. The TTC believes in achieving the goal of being the most expensive public transit on the planet, and by God, they’re going to bankrupt us all in the process if they have to. I told the one candidate that showed up at my door that the TTC is too expensive. I suggest you do the same. It’s the only way our elected representatives are going to get the message that they not only have to support the TTC, but also ensure its affordable and to fight City Hall on that if they have to. Of course, if we had the MMP electoral system, they would truly have to listen to us because if they did not it would be much easier for us to vote them out in the next election, like New Zealanders did when a party there broke their promises and didn’t do what the voters wanted. But we have first-past-the-post, and the best we can do is hurt their ears. Vote YES on that referendum ballot if you want the politicians to hear and obey you on this topic!

The two main topics that I write on that gets the biggest response are the TTC and garbage. The TTC directly affects how congested our roads are because if the TTC is too expensive and too crowded and takes too long, then people will find ways to get in cars and drive to their destinations. It may be their own cars, it may be car pooling, it may be hitching a ride with whomever they can, but every time a person makes that decision, our roads get more overburdened and our air more polluted. Only the NDP tie public transit directly to global warming. But at least the Conservatives understand the dire need and have come up with pragmatic solutions to road congestion, crumbling bridges, and crappy public transit. Meanwhile the Liberals grin at us out of a Mississauga bus window.

Related posts:

1. Tory Rant
2. A Minority is NOT a Mandate
3. Who to Vote For?
4. Election Day!
5. PM Motivational Speech