[TheTigerMaster]

We're not a one-party state (despite the Liberals being in power a while....). You don't have to "convince party leadership".

Umm... under majority governments you surely do.

If your MPP doesn't deliver the goods, you vote him/her out. If his/her party shut down a subway line, they'd probably get booted. It's bizarre to argue that somehow there's huge difference in how democracy works at the provincial level.

Don't believe me? Have the Liberals propose suspension of GO service two stops past the 416 and watch what happens to MPPs in those ridings outside.

Successfully voting MPPs out takes a tremendous amount of effort. More effort than small modifications to a local bus route should ever require in an effective democracy. And even then, that doesn't mean party leadership will change their position.

 

[TheTigerMaster]

The mayor and council could do the exact same thing tomorrow. The only difference is that we don't have political party labels on councillors.

Key word: The mayor AND COUNCIL

The mayor needs to convince 44 independent Councillors to get anything done. If the majority of council agrees with it, the thing gets implemented. That is democracy. I don't see any issue with that.

At the provincial level. The first minister and their hand picked cabinet wields absolute power, in majority government situations. If what a constituent proposes isn't congruent with the party policy, there's minimal chances of getting anything changed (compared to the municipal level, where there is no overarching party policy).

 

[kEiThZ]

That's nonsense. Unlike at the provincial and federal level, municipal councillors aren't under an implicit obligation to vote with their "party" or the mayor. If a Councillor disagrees with something, they can present a motion and debate it among their 44 council colleagues. If you ever watched City Council, you'd know that "breaking rank" with the mayor happens all the time.

In reality they all form cliques that are effectively regional parties (like the Bloc Quebecois). How many Scarborough councillors are going to vote against the Scarborough Subway extension?

Just because they don't have party labels, that doesn't mean they don't form political cliques. That's a rather naive notion.

And the TTC holds zero power over city council. I don't know where you got that idea from.

Nor does one individual city councillor. You completely missed my point. You are arguing that having transit under city council allows the citizen more say because the councillor can advocate for services on their behalf. In reality though, that city councillor has to convince her fellow councillors to provide for her ward. There's no gurantee they'll agree with her. Or they may even want political tradeoffs for their own wards. The politics of this is no different than what would happen provincially. Parties can only impose so much discipline. If you think the issue is going to cost you your seat, you're not going to vote party lines.

And again, can you explain why the model of agency management of transit is a failure citing international examples? I see no issues in all those other cities I've been to. I've never once heard in my travels abroad, "I wish my local councillor had more say on my bus route."

 

[TJ O'Pootertoot]

People get so hung up on our current system that it seems they lose their minds when it comes to things like uploading and fare integration. These aren't things we're inventing on the fly, as much as we might like to think so. Plenty of "World Class" jurisdictions have had these things forever.

There's no question Metrolinx could not, as currently constituted, assume authority for regional transit. They'd have to be properly cut-off from cabinet and have local officials of some kind on the board so there is proper democratic representation.

But then people worry about, "How can the PROVINCE be in charge of our local buses?!" or "TTC is awesome - we can't let the province tell us what to do!" and all these teeny details and paranoid assumptions. As KeithZ pointed out, they have no trouble figuring out in London. I've been to London but am more familiar with New York City where there is similarly a single transit authority for the entire region and it has multiple divisions, no different than the way Metrolinx has divisions for Presto, GO and - um - UPX.

From Wikipedia:

• MTA Long Island Rail Road (LIRR)
  MTA Metro-North Railroad (MNR)
  MTA Staten Island Railway (SIR) [all 3 basically equivalent to RER Go,for those who don't know]
  MTA Bridges and Tunnels (MTA B&T)
  MTA Capital Construction (MTACC)
  MTA Regional Bus Operations
  • MTA New York City Bus
  • MTA New York City Transit (NYCT)

Makes sense to me, looking at it simplistically.
There are myriad ways to organize - you could make all the divisions same as the current transit bodies or do more east-west-central etc. It doesn't really matter. It's not too hard to evaluate best practices or find some experts on regional governance to devise something reasonable - the way the province once created Metro to achieve much the same aim.

What does matter is that we stop acting like it's so hard and we're reinventing the wheel, just because we've done things a certain way forever. Bigger, smarter cities have been doing it the other way forever and I don't think London or New York is going to look at us and say, "Gee, it really makes more sense to have a whole bunch of teeny transit services surrounding one big one and then a government-controlled agency that controls the bits and pieces left over," and change their system.

I've probably said it before but if you just looked at a satellite map of the region and the infrastructure in place today - with no sense of the local context and governance - you would NEVER design the system we have with its absurd rules, arbitrary boundaries, multiple fare strategies and political interference. As much as I respect Steve Munro's technical knowledge, for example, I'm sure he is incapable of doing this mental exercise. Every move by Metrolinx is percived as an encroachment on TTC's rightful territory and every change - fare integration being a prime example -seen as some move to undermine the Greater Good, as it now seems to exist.

Everyone's going to keep protecting their little fiefdoms until they're forcefully taken away and it's the riders who lose out.

 

[TheTigerMaster]

Provincial and federal governments are extremely effective at addressing broad policy and affects all, or a very significant proportion, of the constituents in their jurisdiction. They're utterly ineffective at addressing local issues, that might only affect a few thousand, or even a few dozen people. This is why local councils need to have jurisdiction over transit, and is the reason why we even have the municipal level.

 

[TheTigerMaster]

Nor does one individual city councillor. You completely missed my point. You are arguing that having transit under city council allows the citizen more say because the councillor can advocate for services on their behalf. In reality though, that city councillor has to convince her fellow councillors to provide for her ward. There's no gurantee they'll agree with her. Or they may even want political tradeoffs for their own wards. The politics of this is no different than what would happen provincially. Parties can only impose so much discipline. If you think the issue is going to cost you your seat, you're not going to vote party lines.

Convincing 44 Councillors is much easer than convincing party leadership, who has to closely adhere to party policy. The province isn't anywhere near as nimble as municipal governments.

 

[TJ O'Pootertoot]

Provincial and federal governments are extremely effective at addressing broad policy and affects all, or a very significant proportion, of the constituents in their jurisdiction. They're utterly ineffective at addressing local issues, that might only affect a few thousand, or even a few dozen people. This is why local councils need to have jurisdiction over transit, and is the reason why we even have the municipal level.
....If Canada were formed today, we'd have regional governments enshrined in the constitution, and the Province of Ontario never would have existed.

That's right, the latter point. And there's something absurd about PEI having way more power than Toronto but we have a Constitution enshrining it and we operate on that basis, the same way we let our provinces have a lot of power over cities. The status quo is preserved, by law.

We DON'T have one enshrining this transit stuff, so it's easy to change tomorrow if the will is there.

And no one (I don't think) is suggesting putting the PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENT in charge of addressing local transit. We're talking about a regional agency that operates under the umbrella of the province (which it pretty much has to, due to that Constitution, again). The government of the day - majority, minority, PC, NDP, whatever - should have ZERO influence on bus routes and what hours the subway operates.

Again, "local councils" don't control these things in London and New York (or Chicago or many other cities) and they're not staying up at night worrying that things are falling apart and they really need to make their system more like ours. OUR system is the anomaly and you only think local councils need to have jurisdiction because it's what you're used to.

How could anyone watch the past 5 years of Toronto council and come away thinking, "No matter what, we CAN NOT allow control of local transit to be taken away from these people!"

 

[TheTigerMaster]

Nor does one individual city councillor. You completely missed my point. You are arguing that having transit under city council allows the citizen more say because the councillor can advocate for services on their behalf. In reality though, that city councillor has to convince her fellow councillors to provide for her ward. There's no gurantee they'll agree with her. Or they may even want political tradeoffs for their own wards. The politics of this is no different than what would happen provincially. Parties can only impose so much discipline. If you think the issue is going to cost you your seat, you're not going to vote party lines.

Having dealt with MPPs and MPs before regarding local issues, I can tell you that it's not at all unusual for them to be hesitant to even meet with certain constituents because the issue they're advocating for isn't in line with their party, even when that particular MP personally supports their cause. And those MPs certainly would not take up the cause on their behalf. Advocating for specific service levels on a specific bus route would be a mighty challenge to do in that case.

 

[kEiThZ]

TJ. Absolutely right. You won't find anybody else in the world saying "I love how they do it in Toronto. Their councillors get votes on local bus routes!" That's insane. You don't manage transit and transportation for a region of 5 million residents like that.

We're discussing transit. But it's not just transit. The GTA has no common roads authority despite having the densest road network in the province. Nor do we have a common taxi licensing authority despite the fact that cabs cross local boundaries everyday. This is why I like the TfL or MTA model. Mobility is their business. In all its forms. TfL doesn't just manage transit. They've got taxi licensing, roads, paratransit, rail, subways, cycling, transit policing, etc. all under their purview. And I've never once heard a Londoner say that they'd rather have our system over theirs because somehow TfL is undemocratic.

Regional management agencies just work. I've never heard of the kind fractitious transit debates we have in Toronto, anywhere else in the world. Mostly because the local politicians know they can't make hay of it. The agencies make their long term service and investment plans. And they stick to it. Doesn't matter if governments change.

 

[TheTigerMaster]

Regional management agencies just work. I've never heard of the kind fractitious transit debates we have in Toronto, anywhere else in the world. Mostly because the local politicians know they can't make hay of it. The agencies make their long term service and investment plans. And they stick to it. Doesn't matter if governments change.

Those agencies need to be sufficiently protected from political interference for that to work. Do you have a proposal to make that possible?

 

[TheTigerMaster]

Regional management agencies just work. I've never heard of the kind fractitious transit debates we have in Toronto, anywhere else in the world. Mostly because the local politicians know they can't make hay of it. The agencies make their long term service and investment plans. And they stick to it. Doesn't matter if governments change.

I'd love to have a regional agency managing transit, but it shouldn't be at the provincial level. It would be far more effective, and more transparent, to have a regional agency managing transit that's under the direct control of those municipalities. Similar to how the TTC operated not that long ago.

 

[kEiThZ]

Those agencies need to be sufficiently protected from political interference for that to work. Do you have a proposal to make that possible?

Make them arms length agencies just like everywhere else. And have them report to a provincial parliamentary committee just like everywhere else. They could publish long term forecasts and quaterly reports. You can grill your local MPP on them if you have issues. Or if local control is really that much of an issue, create a regional council to oversee Metrolinx and either appoint politicians or elect them to that body.

Again. None of this is new. Understand that our backwards system is the anomaly. And not in a good way....

Personally, I am not the least bit worried that Metrolinx would cut Finch West by 50%. I'd be more worried that Metrolinx would tell Scarborough to shove it and build an LRT anyway.... But if it were Metrolinx doing that, I might be inclined to accept that they actually have a long term regional vision and aren't building one off lines (Sheppard) based on the mayor's whims....

 

[TheTigerMaster]

We're talking about a regional agency that operates under the umbrella of the province (which it pretty much has to, due to that Constitution, again). The government of the day - majority, minority, PC, NDP, whatever - should have ZERO influence on bus routes and what hours the subway operates.

Any regional agency operating under the "umbrella" of the province is directly controlled by the province. That should be abundantly obvious to anybody who has observed how Metrolinx operates, and the enormous influence the Liberals wield in their operation.

How exactly do you propose structuring a regional agency, operating under the "umbrella" of the province, that has ZERO influence over day to day operations?

My proposal would be to have said agency operating under the umbrella of a collective of municipal governments, similar to how the TTC used to work. That is not what Tim Hudak proposed (which is what this debate is about).

 

[kEiThZ]

I'd love to have a regional agency managing transit, but it shouldn't be at the provincial level. It would be far more effective, and more transparent, to have a regional agency managing transit that's under the direct control of those municipalities. Similar to how the TTC operated not that long ago.

The TTC never operated under direct control of a group of municipalities. It operated under Metro Toronto. What I am proposing would actually be creating a new regional version of the old Metro government. We could have a regional political council or we could have the regional bureaucracy report to Queen's Park. I don't really care how that bit is managed. I just think its nuts that we don't have a regional body overseeing transit and transport in a region of 5 million.

Metrolinx is weak sauce. Forget regional management. It doesn't even prioritize projects really. Or at least I've never seen a prioritization plan and criteria from them.

 

[TheTigerMaster]

Make them arms length agencies just like everywhere else. And have them report to a provincial parliamentary committee just like everywhere else. They could publish long term forecasts and quaterly reports

Saying you'll make an "arms length" agency is nice, but in reality these agencies tend to be a mouthpiece for the provincial government. Remember, Metrolinx is also technically an "arms length" agency, but they're no more distant from the province than my ring and pinkie fingers are from each other.

Municipal governments are specifically designed to act as arms length governance for the province. We should take advantage of that for transit. Any regional transit agency should be a accountable to a collective of municipalities, not to the province. This would make addressing local issues, and broader issues such as raising funds, much easier to accomplish. Under this situation, the only way the province could interfere is with legislation; you wouldn't have provincial government officials being able to order anything behind closed doors.