44 North
Senior Member
I was talking about RER actually. You could argue that it's primarily for the suburbs but it will also be a major expansion for the downtown area, the first since the 1960s. The Spadina and Queens Quay streetcars don’t count.
This seems to be a very Toronto trait - the idea that something that's routine in other cities would never work here. I don't know where that logic comes from. Regional transportation bodies don't just work in theory, they work in practice. There's nothing unique about Toronto that would prevent it from working here too.
Fair enough which is why I asked. And yes regional bodies can work well in regions where done organically over periods measured in decades or centuries. Some areas built their transit systems as a mega-region among (separate but still unified) municipalities, other areas consolidated public and private lines gradually and which eventually came under an umbrella agency's purview. Can't think of a "routine" instance where a city had its entire transit system and all assets taken.
The idea that establishing a regional body would amount to "ceding" local transit to some outside force is, frankly, baffling. This isn't a turf war. Transit in Mississauga and Markham is local transit. It's all, for all intents and purposes, one city. The sooner we stop reinforcing arbitrary boundaries for transit the better off we'll all be. Maybe a better way of looking at it is to recognize that the TTC is bigger than all the other transit agencies combined, which means that most of the staff of a new agency would be current TTC employees. Any merger would be more of a TTC takeover of the suburbs than the other way around.
Any argument against a potential Superlinx could also be made about the current system. It’s rife with biases and befoulment, as you put it. It’s subject to provincial and political meddling. There’s too much focus on the suburbs. And best practices from other cities are regarded with suspicion or hostility. If those are the biggest criticisms of a region-wide transit agency, then the worst case scenario is no worse than what we already have.
And why baffling? PC, previous Lib, and current BoT plan all involved ceding control, and more to the point ceding *asset ownership*. In Layman's terms we give (or they take) everything. This isn't just about overseeing, or responsibility, or merging. It's about taking and giving a new owner - which generally allows ultimate control. Any notion about arbitrary boundaries is a red herring that's only tangentially-related. And if you do want to bring up Sauga or Markham how bout giving the value of their assets vis a vis Toronto's.
If you read BoT's pamphlet there's very little to even make a valid best-worst practices criticism. Look at Metrolinx and the RL example I gave. A project in a city's TMP, accepted into a provincial RTP. Yet they singled it out and crapped on it. In the dozens of projects in their RTP not a single instance of anything remotely similar occurring. Simple logic would say that if we cede both control and ownership to a higher-level regional body, feelings such as this will be acted upon immediately and decisively rather than mused about. I mean if they own all of it, it's a reasonably likely outcome.
While I am not against the idea of a Metrolinx merger I do find it bizzare we would consider the creation of a super-regional organization without a super-regional body to answer to. Ideally any sort of "superlinx" would be part of a "Super Metro Government" similar to the Greater London Authority in London or the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in Tokyo. Obviously this would then beg the question what else gets uploaded to the Metro level. I mean it makes no sense to upload transit planning to Metrolinx if the regional planning to go along with it remains with the fiefdoms.
Agreed it is bizarre. Using their same reasons, wonder why no proposal for SuperCommunityHousingLinx, or SuperPoliceFireEMSLinx, or SuperSolidWasteLinx.