So bang on! First of all, your last comment about Australia is very true. They build what we just talk about and I have personally ridden on Perth, Sydney and Melborne's systems. It's funny because Australia used to be a very provincial place but somewhere in the last 25 years or so it became a very dynamic and much bolder country and has prospered so much as a result. Canada has a golden opportunity in the midst of our crisis with the US to do the same. We must seize the moment. Build high speed rail, reorganize our passenger rail to actually serve passengers like they are served in Europe and Asia, have a fully realized and funded 25 year public transit infrastructure plan for all major Canadian cities so that we don't dicker and build piecemeal which is bad planning, expensive and inevitably creates inefficiencies.
Ha, ha, ha!:- Australia did not suddenly become bolder and more enterprising, etc and thereby became more prosperous. What really happened is that China got rich manufacturing cheap consumer goods for export to America and they let the Americans pay for it on credit and they imported a lot of their raw materials from good, old ever-plodding Australia which brought a lot of export-driven prosperity to "Oz" but the "Ozzies" started to become a little bit cocky and be "full of themselves" and got into the habit of thinking of themselves as being very, very clever. Now that old trading system is breaking down as Americans decide they need to repatriate a lot of manufacturing from abroad and the Chinese will become considerably more stingy in importing from Australia and "Ozzies" will start to become poorer and feel much less clever.
Btw, don't get carried away too much with high-speed rail in Canada:- for the last 60+ years every time the politicians want to create an illusion of impending progress they start proposing/farting high-speed rail-projects out of their fannies. There is simply not anywhere enough population-density anywhere in Canada to justify high-speed rail plus existing modes of inter-city transport are quite adequate so who needs high-speed rail? What we really need to do is to replace cheap consumer goods made in China with cheap consumer goods made in India so the Indian folks can earn some money to pay for all the imports they would like to buy from Canada, such as pulses and canola and pulp-and-paper, etc, while we relocate from the urban cesspit of Toronto to smaller regional cities to benefit from those new trade-patterns. It would also help if they built a much simpler two-track freight railway between Sudbury and Montreal so exports from western Canada to the Atlantic Basin do not need to go through Toronto.
Thanks Reece. I think that Toronto (and region) is still coming to grips with how big and spread out it is compared to even thirty years ago when the Jays were winning. One central Downtown station made more sense for a smaller, less polycentric region. Much has changed in and around Downtown and farther afield.
Hey, it could have been worse! 20+ years ago, during the era of David Miller and his "flying circus" of flakey, pink-lemonade socialists,the City briefly owned Union Station and Miller put Joe Pantalone in charge of redeveloping Union Station and he entertained all sorts of weird-and-wonderful proposals, such as a demand by Councillor Gloria Lindsay Luby that there should be a fish-store in Union Station which would sell smelly, drippy packages of over-ripe festering fish to commuters on their way home. Fortunately the Province removed Union Station from City control and put GO and Metrolinx in charge of redeveloping it:- sure it could perhaps be better but it's still much better than it used to be. Union Station was originally built for a city of 700,000 people in 1928 but the GTA has grown so hugely since then that it became very overloaded and it's just so hemmed in by other stuff that it's difficult to do anything much with it to improve it. Honestly, who cares about the limitations of Union Station?:- the Internet and broadband access are making it and the whole idea of commuting into downtown Toronto obsolete. Businesses have been emigrating out of downtown TO for years to the suburbs and even to other cities elsewhere and it's only a matter of time until the big banks do the same. They have already decentralized most of their administration to bank-branches so their head-office buildings are mostly occupied by non-bank tenants and they could easily decentralize what's left and move their greatly reduced executive offices to Ottawa. Native-born Canadians are leaving Toronto in droves for other cities and towns and basically Toronto and its downtown CBD has become an obsolete relic of the past as the Internet and broadband access and AI, etc, steadily decentralizes downtown business functions while new American tariffs radically change the economic geography of Canada. All those young foreigners who flooded in during the Trudeau era are now being pushed out by an anti-immigration drive and central Toronto will slowly collapse demographically but who cares? The Internet and the new "infobahns" give us huge new choices in how and where we live and work and if you don't like Union Station then you simply move elsewhere where it will suit you better and let Toronto crumble into oblivion.
Reece is interesting to read precisely because he does not issue a simple shopping-list of "to-do" stuff with an attitude of "I know best!" and prefers to discuss why certain kinds of things need to be done:-obviously all that thought-process is lost on some readers:-this is basically a discussion-group amongst renegade transit-junkies who wish to proclaim the Salvation of the World:-it's definitely an acquired taste! Who knows where these subversive and revolutionary conversations will lead:- bring it on!
Doesn't the pre-eminence of car culture help to explain or fully explain how rail-planning becomes a matter of 'human freight'?
The basic cultural-psychic-empathic frame-set given in the car culture is that of a driver, not a rail passenger. If you don't empathize with a rail passenger, if that's not in your imaginary as a vivid gestalt impression of "it could be me," then your sense of the difference between people and freight will necessarily be muted. You would never explicitly deny it, but the sense of empathic direction would be pre-given within the automotive frame. Rail passengers would be "those people over there", not me. This kind of judgment is underpinned by a tendency to imagine the default mode of travel as being within an automobile, and on that basis we might easily object to the very idea of building more rail stations anywhere in the city, let alone in proximity to Union. "How will that help the cars move faster?"
I think you have said, or agreed with others saying this point on many occasions in past posts and videos. I am trying to make sense of how such evidently well-thought out strategies as the ones you present don't have more traction in our institutions.
Over the long term, generationally, I wonder if the automotive bias is beginning to abate? That's my hope. Alot of people seem happy about the Eg. Crosstown, even Premier Ford.
Thanks as always for your insight into this matter that connects us all.
Oh dear, an actual transit philosopher! You sound almost like Jane Jacobs (and I actually am old enough to have met her and chatted with her). It's commenters like you who make this group worth reading! We need to get Steve Munro and Richard Soberman and all the other transit movers-and-shakers into this group:- who knows where it could lead?
So bang on! First of all, your last comment about Australia is very true. They build what we just talk about and I have personally ridden on Perth, Sydney and Melborne's systems. It's funny because Australia used to be a very provincial place but somewhere in the last 25 years or so it became a very dynamic and much bolder country and has prospered so much as a result. Canada has a golden opportunity in the midst of our crisis with the US to do the same. We must seize the moment. Build high speed rail, reorganize our passenger rail to actually serve passengers like they are served in Europe and Asia, have a fully realized and funded 25 year public transit infrastructure plan for all major Canadian cities so that we don't dicker and build piecemeal which is bad planning, expensive and inevitably creates inefficiencies.
Ha, ha, ha!:- Australia did not suddenly become bolder and more enterprising, etc and thereby became more prosperous. What really happened is that China got rich manufacturing cheap consumer goods for export to America and they let the Americans pay for it on credit and they imported a lot of their raw materials from good, old ever-plodding Australia which brought a lot of export-driven prosperity to "Oz" but the "Ozzies" started to become a little bit cocky and be "full of themselves" and got into the habit of thinking of themselves as being very, very clever. Now that old trading system is breaking down as Americans decide they need to repatriate a lot of manufacturing from abroad and the Chinese will become considerably more stingy in importing from Australia and "Ozzies" will start to become poorer and feel much less clever.
Btw, don't get carried away too much with high-speed rail in Canada:- for the last 60+ years every time the politicians want to create an illusion of impending progress they start proposing/farting high-speed rail-projects out of their fannies. There is simply not anywhere enough population-density anywhere in Canada to justify high-speed rail plus existing modes of inter-city transport are quite adequate so who needs high-speed rail? What we really need to do is to replace cheap consumer goods made in China with cheap consumer goods made in India so the Indian folks can earn some money to pay for all the imports they would like to buy from Canada, such as pulses and canola and pulp-and-paper, etc, while we relocate from the urban cesspit of Toronto to smaller regional cities to benefit from those new trade-patterns. It would also help if they built a much simpler two-track freight railway between Sudbury and Montreal so exports from western Canada to the Atlantic Basin do not need to go through Toronto.
Thanks Reece. I think that Toronto (and region) is still coming to grips with how big and spread out it is compared to even thirty years ago when the Jays were winning. One central Downtown station made more sense for a smaller, less polycentric region. Much has changed in and around Downtown and farther afield.
Hey, it could have been worse! 20+ years ago, during the era of David Miller and his "flying circus" of flakey, pink-lemonade socialists,the City briefly owned Union Station and Miller put Joe Pantalone in charge of redeveloping Union Station and he entertained all sorts of weird-and-wonderful proposals, such as a demand by Councillor Gloria Lindsay Luby that there should be a fish-store in Union Station which would sell smelly, drippy packages of over-ripe festering fish to commuters on their way home. Fortunately the Province removed Union Station from City control and put GO and Metrolinx in charge of redeveloping it:- sure it could perhaps be better but it's still much better than it used to be. Union Station was originally built for a city of 700,000 people in 1928 but the GTA has grown so hugely since then that it became very overloaded and it's just so hemmed in by other stuff that it's difficult to do anything much with it to improve it. Honestly, who cares about the limitations of Union Station?:- the Internet and broadband access are making it and the whole idea of commuting into downtown Toronto obsolete. Businesses have been emigrating out of downtown TO for years to the suburbs and even to other cities elsewhere and it's only a matter of time until the big banks do the same. They have already decentralized most of their administration to bank-branches so their head-office buildings are mostly occupied by non-bank tenants and they could easily decentralize what's left and move their greatly reduced executive offices to Ottawa. Native-born Canadians are leaving Toronto in droves for other cities and towns and basically Toronto and its downtown CBD has become an obsolete relic of the past as the Internet and broadband access and AI, etc, steadily decentralizes downtown business functions while new American tariffs radically change the economic geography of Canada. All those young foreigners who flooded in during the Trudeau era are now being pushed out by an anti-immigration drive and central Toronto will slowly collapse demographically but who cares? The Internet and the new "infobahns" give us huge new choices in how and where we live and work and if you don't like Union Station then you simply move elsewhere where it will suit you better and let Toronto crumble into oblivion.
So many things said all disappear in a foggy mist.
You should write a bullet point summary of things to do in priority:
#1- do this
#2- do that
#3- ...
Reece is interesting to read precisely because he does not issue a simple shopping-list of "to-do" stuff with an attitude of "I know best!" and prefers to discuss why certain kinds of things need to be done:-obviously all that thought-process is lost on some readers:-this is basically a discussion-group amongst renegade transit-junkies who wish to proclaim the Salvation of the World:-it's definitely an acquired taste! Who knows where these subversive and revolutionary conversations will lead:- bring it on!
Always fun when I read an article and see one of my old maps, especially credited!
Reece, you've written another great article.
I really want to highlight this point you made:
>...roughly one kilometre east and west of Union station — likely around Spadina Avenue and Sherbourne Street.
Having a station on Sherbourne Street is so important; it can bring many low-income residents close to high quality rapid transit.
The streetcars are good, but if you wish to travel to northern parts of the city, it is a slog.
It will truly help a historically impovished neighbourhood, and increase their quality of life.
I'm happy that someone understands the importance of Sherbourne.
How are you not working as a Transportation Planner? I mean it’s probably for the best as it’s thankless and soul-sucking work but still…
Doesn't the pre-eminence of car culture help to explain or fully explain how rail-planning becomes a matter of 'human freight'?
The basic cultural-psychic-empathic frame-set given in the car culture is that of a driver, not a rail passenger. If you don't empathize with a rail passenger, if that's not in your imaginary as a vivid gestalt impression of "it could be me," then your sense of the difference between people and freight will necessarily be muted. You would never explicitly deny it, but the sense of empathic direction would be pre-given within the automotive frame. Rail passengers would be "those people over there", not me. This kind of judgment is underpinned by a tendency to imagine the default mode of travel as being within an automobile, and on that basis we might easily object to the very idea of building more rail stations anywhere in the city, let alone in proximity to Union. "How will that help the cars move faster?"
I think you have said, or agreed with others saying this point on many occasions in past posts and videos. I am trying to make sense of how such evidently well-thought out strategies as the ones you present don't have more traction in our institutions.
Over the long term, generationally, I wonder if the automotive bias is beginning to abate? That's my hope. Alot of people seem happy about the Eg. Crosstown, even Premier Ford.
Thanks as always for your insight into this matter that connects us all.
Oh dear, an actual transit philosopher! You sound almost like Jane Jacobs (and I actually am old enough to have met her and chatted with her). It's commenters like you who make this group worth reading! We need to get Steve Munro and Richard Soberman and all the other transit movers-and-shakers into this group:- who knows where it could lead?