I know, I know… I will be preaching to the non-converts in North America. And I know that for those of you who were born with a steering wheel in your hands or a car in your stomach (the latter following a Belgian expression “a brick in your stomach”, meaning a desire to own a house) it is impossible to accept a simple concept such as using public transportation for moving from point A to point B, even if it existed. And perhaps this is the reason it doesn’t exist. Which leads to a conversation about climate change and hypocrisy.
This post has been brewing for a very long time. I came here in the mid-nineties from Europe, where one can open the map, select 2 distant points on it and find affordable, timely and reliable transport for the journey. Every time I mention public transport in a conversation, I get push back. “Don’t look at Europe”, they’d say. “Canada is a new country”, some would say. But so are New Zealand and Australia. Others would say, “It is a vast country with extremes of weather making it hard to maintain the rail network”. But so is Russia, and the Trans-Siberian seems to run from Moscow to Vladivostok through all the snow of Siberia no problem. Or how about the Arctic Circle Express between Sweden and Norway?
Some background you can skip on why I think I have some competency to voice my views: In my previous life (before Canada), I used to belong to the scientific world and I worked in the environmental field.
Before I came here, I was working on climate change at Brussels University, Belgium. We then called it “Global warming”. This was in the early 90s, when few here had heard of it. As a matter of fact, when I met some of my environmentalist colleagues at the 29th annual congress of the CMOS (Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society) in Kelowna BC they told me’ “Don’t think of a job here in the environmental field… the government has severely cut funding for environmental research”. Fair enough, and I heard nothing and read nothing related to global warming for years and years after. I used to joke: when someone asked “Why did you come to Canada?”, my answer would be something like “Because I like it warm. I worked on global warming and one of my models predicted that Europe would freeze and Toronto would become a desert.” The subsequent question was “When?”. “In 100 years”, would be my reply…
In the late 80s and early 90s we talked a lot about free public transportation and car-free zones in cities. That was an idea that since has been trickling in to some enlightened places (check the next post). The idea was to create car-free zones in big cities, depending on the level of air pollution. A very simple idea: at the Research Institute of the Ministry of the Environment back in Sofia I was engaged in international projects related to transboundary air pollution (one can’t fence in the air, can one?). And I worked on big cities air pollution modelling. We created city zones, based on meteorological forecasts coupled with air pollution forecasts, red being highly polluted and green least polluted. The idea was to restrict car usage based on daily pollution forecasts: no cars allowed in red zones, some cars allowed in orange zones, etc. Sounds like Utopia, doesn’t it? And this was some 35 years ago.
This leads us to solid, efficient and environment-friendly transit system within the cities.
So let’s talk about it:
Imagine you live in a city covered with affordable, available (when you need it, from and to where you need it), accurate (timely and speedy), reliable transit network. Will you leave your car and use transit? (Please do comment and/or answer a few questions throughout these posts – your e-mail address is not visible or made public by the platform I am using, but is required with your first comment only in order to avoid spam).
Cars produce a significant amount of the CO2 emissions worldwide. But if I don’t want to use a car (and I don’t!) what is my alternative? We live in Markham, a suburb of the GTA (Greater Toronto Area). Aside from Toronto, Alex or I used to work in Burlington and Mississauga, Oshawa, or Newmarket – all within 60km of downtown Toronto, and even Kawartha Lakes, about 130km from Toronto downtown. I used to be on the road for over an hour or two hours each way to and from work. This was 3 to 4 hours of my day, lost in traffic and frustration. Wouldn’t it have been nice to hop on a train or subway car and use my time in a meaningful and more relaxing way? Forget about the GTA. Try to get from Scarborough to Etobicoke (the easterly and westerly districts of Metro Toronto) in a reasonable time using transit. There are well-documented stories of low income commuters spending 3-4 hours daily each way to make that trip.
Now retired, we have the time and try to use public transportation anywhere such exists. We take the GO bus to the airport, which is over 30 km from our home. Eh, still have to get to the GO station, but we have good neighbours who drive us 6 km to the bus terminal. We only fly when no other options are available (cruises are excluded because of my severe motion sickness), time is short or there are travel advisories by our government to avoid certain routes as it was for parts of Thailand that we had planned to traverse by rail.
During our 3 months spring travel through New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, we took plenty of public transportation. We crossed New Zealand from North to South using their trains and wonderful bus system (all booked online). In Australia too, we usually transited on trains or buses.
We envied the intercity bus/train network in Malaysia and parts of Thailand we visited. And we have definitely appreciated every single big city in the world that we’ve been to (outside North America) for their transit systems. And hold tight here.
Many cities we’ve visited have some kind of free transit in their city centres. We mentioned last year the free buses in Manchester centre and the ease of using intercity buses and trains in England. There was a free bus in Adelaide Australia, there was a free bus in Kuala Lumpur city centre, there was the free tram zone in the centre of Melbourne, to name but a few.
For those of you arguing that Canada is a new world, so are New Zealand and Australia. And based on our experience their transit is better.
As a matter of fact, I’d like to put Sydney back on the map, although we do have a Sydney post. I should be able to compare this big city with Toronto, shouldn’t I?
We commuted daily some 25 km each way between Hornsby and Sydney centre using our credit cards (tap in and tap out as in London). Their transit system covers a huge area of the city and suburbs of the Greater Sydney Area. The stress here is on their rapid transit. Because they too have mass transit where buses are dealing with road congestion. However, there are over 800 km of tracks with over 170 stops that cover the urban area of 1,687 km² (651 mi²), and extends to the Greater Sydney area of 12,367 km² (4,775 mi²). And they keep building it. Population in 2016 was 5,029,711 (city of Sydney).
I first took Alex to ex-communist Bulgaria in 2004. There was one metro line in Sofia, with about 10 stops.
In 2015 the entire city was covered by a metro network. We took a metro train from the airport to the city center. It took 20 min and cost us 50 Euro cents each. 50 cents Canada!
From the airport to everywhere in the city. Built in less than 17 years, it covers the 5,723 km² (2,210 mi²) of urban area, has 75 кm with 69 metro stations according to the Metropolian.
Sofia population is around 1,2 million.
Back to Toronto. The Yonge-University line was opened in 1954. This was 65 years ago, wasn’t it! As of 2017 we have 76.9km of line and 75 stations on four lines.
Except the 2 new stops in the northwest suburb of Vaughan that were opened in 2017, the subway is constrained to City of Toronto only. And even then, it covers an extremely small area of the city. The City of Toronto spans 630 km² (243 mi²) with 2,956,024 living in the City (2018 as per City of Toronto website) What’s left for the urban area of 5,903 km² (2,279 mi²) of the GTA and its population of 6,341,935 is a fractured combination of buses and GO commuter trains running on unacceptable schedules often running only once or twice an hour. There are only a few points where some of the GO-trains connect with the subway, and only Union Station, near the lake, connects all the GO railways. They all branch from there. The rest is a mass transit of buses sitting on congested roads slowly moving frustrated passengers, plus a few overcrowded tram lines that too compete for the same road as cars. The entire transit system is fractured as opposed to the integrated systems in big cities all over the world. I talk about the GTA because I know it better, but it is the same, or worse in other Canadian cities.
I searched long and hard for a map that combines the rail systems of Toronto subways with the regional GO trains. Below, you can see that most of the areas are not covered by rapid transit or commuter train (which are far from rapid in schedules and speed). The entire system is spokes from the single hub at Union Station. Given the grid plan of the city, why is rapid transit not a grid? So, my question above was how does one get from Scarborough to Etobicoke in a reasonable time using transit? There are inner suburbs within the boundaries of Toronto city, known as “transit deserts”. Further into the GTA, how do I get from Newmarket in the north to western Burlington in a reasonable time? There is no way but by using a car, like it or not.
Unless politicians from all levels of government and all political stripes sit together and start working on a long-term plan for affordable or even free rapid transit for the cities, they are not serious about climate change actions. What are my alternatives to using a car? (On electric cars, see next post.) Someone has to start by shifting public opinion (the electorate) from demanding more roads to demanding more rails. Someone has to do the public education. Someone has to see beyond their 4-year electoral mandate. Where is the vision? Where is the visionary? Where is the action?
(Kudos to the Toronto mayor John Tory for regularly using public transit and to former city councillor Adam Vaughan who was known for riding his bike in all weathers to the office. But shouldn’t all transit decision makers get out of their cars in order to experience and understand the problems the public is facing?)
More in our next post.
Agreed…we are years and miles behind 9n public transit.