When telling the story of the Holocaust, one effective way to overcome our sheer inability to comprehend the scope and scale of such atrocities is to zoom in on one or two stories: share one particular experience, in all its brutal specificity, and we have at least a small way into the event—the small details illuminate the larger whole.

One theatre company from the Netherlands, Hotel Modern, takes a related approach in KAMP (CAMP). The production depicts a typical day at the Auschwitz concentration camp, but instead of zooming in into a closeup, it shrinks everything down, literally, into miniature. It’s the accumulation of thousands of small details that has the impact in this case.

Eleanor McMahon thinks it’s time to change the conversation around cycling in Ontario.

McMahon is the founder of the Share the Road Cycling Coalition, who will be hosting the fifth annual Ontario Bike Summit this week in Toronto. She says that we need to stop talking about things like bike lanes and other bicycle infrastructure as a zero sum game between cars and bikes.

“We do polling, and our polling tells us that 89 per cent of Ontarians are both drivers and cyclists,” she says. “The notion that it’s cars versus bikes is overblown, and it’s really not working anymore. Deciding to change the conversation means going out of our way to poke holes in that idea and say from the get go ‘We don’t buy into that philosophy, and just because you say it, doesn’t make it true.’ ”

A rendering of what Pape Station will look like, once construction there is finished. Image courtesy of the TTC.

The TTC announced earlier today that Pape Station will be closed for about two weeks, starting on June 15 and ending on the 26th. The amazing thing about this is that it’s happening, in a sense, by popular demand. The TTC used an online poll to determine the the public’s preferred schedule of closures while workers put the finishing touches on a long-delayed, four-year effort to modernize the station. This, the option that will arguably create the most short-term pain for riders, was the winner.

Throughout the closure, trains won’t stop at Pape, and buses that normally stop there will be diverted to nearby stations.

The TTC has said that closing the station for 12 straight days will allow it to finish most of the renovations by September, whereas not closing the station would have caused the construction to continue until December. The online poll also gave riders the option of having the station closed on six consecutive weekends.

The TTC has more details about the closure in its press release.

“Our budgeting and estimating has to get exponentially better if we are to change our reputation… It’s not all about new equipment and flashy new lines. Our processes and systems are archaic, and our procedures impede progress in customer service. A major part of our plan will address people performance and cultural transformation. Decades’ old practices need to be swept away.”

—TTC CEO Andy Byford, in a lunchtime speech to the Empire Club today. Byford was there to lay out his five-year strategy for reforming the transit commission. The first year of his tenure, he said, was about “challenging mediocrity”; the next four years will see the implementation of a series of key objectives including a new safety management plan; a “customer-focused station business model”; a review of training programs “to ensure customer service and customer thinking runs throughout”; and perhaps most ambitiously, a program of “proactive service management…procedures that are customer-led rather than production led.” Byford said that he “will not accept that bunching of vehicles is inevitable, that the short-turning of vehicles is inevitable.” His goal, he went on, is that by the end of the five years people will say “we didn’t believe it would happen but the TTC has definitely changed.”

The full text of his speech follows…

Cartoon, the Telegram, August 21, 1958.

As we’ve witnessed this week, city councillors have no qualms about promoting public transit schemes in their wards regardless of whatever makes sense across the entire city. Elected representatives from Etobicoke and Scarborough who back contentious new subway lines fit within a long tradition of suburban politicians thinking within their fiefdoms. Back in the 1950s, their predecessors in Metropolitan Toronto were among the loudest opponents of the construction of the Bloor-Danforth and University subway lines out of belief that their constituents would be slammed with tax bills for infrastructure they would never use.

While leaders in inner suburbs like East York, Leaside, and Swansea embraced a new east-west subway to relieve congestion, their western counterparts were less enthusiastic when the TTC posted signs in March 1957 promising a future line along Bloor Street. Objections were mainly financial, with fears that the costs associated with building a new transit line would force cuts to other public works projects. Some officials, like reeves H.O. Waffle of Etobicoke and Chris Tonks of York, felt Metro needed to finish ongoing infrastructure projects before proceeding with a subway. In the small lakeshore communities of Long Branch, Mimico, and New Toronto, officials resented the extra cash commuters paid to travel downtown thanks to the TTC’s fare zone system. “I will never support a Bloor subway until the TTC institutes a single-fare system,” declared Mimico Mayor Gus Edwards. “The outer zones are paying double fares for the present [Yonge] subway and they never use it.”

A group shot of the 1962 Metropolitan Toronto Council, featuring several players in this week’s story. Back row, left to right: Kenneth M. Ostrander, David Rotenberg, Alex Hodgins, Walter Saunders, Laurie T. Simonsky, Charlie H. Hiscott, William C. Davidson, William Dennison, Donald R. Russell, Harold Menzies, Frederick J. Beavis, George W. Bull, W. Frank Clifton, True Davidson. Front row, left to right: H. O. Waffle, Marie Curtis, Donald D. Summerville, Dorothy Wagner, Nathan Phillips, William R. Allen, Norman C. Goodhead, Albert M. Campbell, William L. Archer, Margaret Campbell, Hugh M. Griggs. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 4999.

Funding a subway was challenging, as the federal government refused to offer any money and the province gave little hint of subsidies. Metro Council settled on a formula to split the cost between taxpayers and the TTC, the percentages of which caused months of rancorous debate before settling on 55 per cent Metro, 45 per cent TTC. When Metro council voted to request the necessary permissions from the provincial government, especially from the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB), to proceed with the new subway lines in February 1958, the local councils in Long Branch and New Toronto unanimously passed resolutions to lobby Queen’s Park to ignore Metro’s requests. Long Branch Reeve Marie Curtis felt residents would be hurt by a tax increase of roughly $7 per year. “I fear we are being bamboozled,” Curtis observed. “I am afraid these taxes will tie people up so tightly it will make them move out of here, the same as some of us moved from the city.” Over in Mimico, councillors declared that the new lines would be “of doubtful benefit to our municipality.”

Over the next few months, other suburban leaders doubted the wisdom of financing a subway. Some were riled when Metro Council rejected a monorail system study championed by Tonks and Waffle. During a marathon 13-and-a-half-hour meeting on July 3, 1958, Metro Chairman Frederick Gardiner urged his colleagues to “show vision and courage,” citing the Fathers of Confederation and the signatories of the Declaration of Independence for displaying the foresight to support large projects which benefitted all. Toronto Mayor Nathan Phillips felt the “pulse of the people” favoured a subway. Metro Council voted 16 to 8 in favour of commencing work on the subway, with all of the dissenting votes coming from the suburbs. Among the extreme responses was Tonks’ belief that his children and grandchildren would curse him for the debt legacy a subway might impose on York. “Don’t be misled by visionaries who would lead you to believe they see things the rest of us don’t,” he noted.

Metro councillors attempting to catch a few winks during a 13-and-a-half hour meeting. Left picture: H.O. Waffle (in shades) and Donald Summerville (head resting). Middle picture: Chris Tonks. Right picture: Albert Campbell. The Toronto Star, July 4, 1958.

One by one, six opposing suburbs announced they would oppose the subway during the OMB hearing in August 1958. Despite having discussed subway plans for three years, lawyers representing the suburbs requested a two-month delay to prepare their case. OMB Chairman Lorne Cumming refused. The hearings devolved into shouting matches between the suburban lawyers and a belligerent Gardiner. Beyond taxation issues, subway opponents argued that the project was the first since the formation of Metro in 1954 which didn’t offer “equality of service” to all of its municipalities.

The suburban case suffered a setback on day two when lawyers representing Etobicoke, New Toronto, and Scarborough withdrew, citing lack of time to digest lengthy reports. York’s lawyer went on vacation, leaving only Long Branch and Mimico to carry on. The two tiny municipalities dragged the hearings on for as long as they could, employing filibusters and stalling tactics like subpoenaing TTC officials. Newspaper editorials criticized the suburbs for their obstinacy. Mimico lawyer George Gauld admitted he had “a hopeless task,” but insisted the little guys had to fight on. Within the opposing suburbs, councils voted to ask the OMB to force a Metro-wide public vote on the subway, a power the OMB lacked. Frustrations among subway proponents grew to the point that Toronto alderman Philip Givens sponsored a Metro Council motion to force the amalgamation of the three lakeshore communities into Etobicoke to eliminate their opposition, a move which would happen in 1967.

Source: the Telegram, August 19, 1958.

On September 5, 1958, the OMB ruled in favour of the subway, giving permission for Metro to spend $102.2 million and the TTC $98.6 million to fund the project. They had no qualms with Metro’s plan for a two mill property tax increase over the next 10 years. Metro wanted shovels in the ground by year’s end. While newspaper editorials urged officials to get on with it, opponents fumed. Doomsday scenarios about the state of public works and threats of local plebiscites abounded. Edwards believed Toronto taxpayers weren’t as enthusiastic about a subway as generally depicted—“There is only a small percentage of the people who are inconvenienced at the intersection of Bloor and Yonge.”

The lakeshore communities, along with Etobicoke and Scarborough, went to the Ontario Court of Appeals to reverse the OMB’s decision. When their attempt was turned down in November 1958, they attacked the local media for politicking in favour of the subway. Scarborough Reeve Albert Campbell felt that past Toronto mayors didn’t act on major issues until they consulted with supportive papers. “This kind of ‘government by the press’ may suit Toronto,” he told the Star. “It is of no interest to us in Scarborough.” Curtis believed the media was out to destroy Long Branch and other small municipalities who opposed the subway.

In municipal elections that December, all of the opposing suburban leaders were re-elected. While Campbell soon switched sides on the subway debate when he saw no further alternatives, Curtis, Edwards, and New Toronto Mayor Donald Russell pressed on. They threatened to go to the Supreme Court of Canada if a flat transit fare wasn’t enacted. The TTC laughed. Councillors in the lakeshore communities continued to resist paying for the line, insisting that their residents had nothing to gain and that full funding should come from the fare box. Lawyers who suggested they should raise the white flag were ignored.

Marie Curtis gets the boot, while the new Metro Executive Committee smiles for a group shot. The Telegram, January 14, 1959.

On January 7, 1959, Long Branch, Mimico, and New Toronto filed a Supreme Court appeal against Metro Council, the OMB, and the TTC to halt the subway. Curtis felt assured of victory. A week later, she left a Metro Council meeting in tears after she was voted off the executive committee, on which she had served for three years. Pro-subway suburban councillors, including Campbell, were voted in. Applying the 1950s equivalent of Godwin’s Law, Curtis bitterly observed that “Hitler also tried to stamp out people for what they believed, but he didn’t succeed.” Edwards dubbed her “Saint Marie, the Martyr.”

When the Supreme Court assembled to hear the subway case on February 9, 1959, it considered both the suburban appeal and a Metro motion to quash it. The lakeshore communities, by now admitting the project was all but inevitable, pressed for the project to be financed by 30-year debentures, a move Metro claimed would add $90 million in costs. Suburban lawyers claimed the OMB’s decision to allow a special 10-year tax levy was illegal, that Metro could not force future councils to levy taxes unless they paid off debentures. They charged that Metro could become an “evil godfather.”

The court gave its verdict on February 11, 1959, ruling 3 to 2 in favour of Metro on both actions. There was one slight window of opportunity for further action from the suburbs, as Metro and the TTC had not yet signed an official contract, which could be contested once signatures were applied. Edwards and Russell vowed to fight on, promising to meet with the other lakeshore communities for their next move, including further Supreme Court cases. The TTC used the ruling to give utilities the go-ahead to begin relocating their lines underneath University Avenue.

Headline: the Telegram, February 11, 1959.

When Metro Council voted on one of the last obstacles to construction, a new expropriation bylaw, in April 1959, only the lakeshore communities voted against it. Curtis still seethed that Metro won the Supreme Court case on technicalities involving monetary amounts, while Edwards continued to warn the $200 million cost was an illusion. Edwards also opposed early discussions about the Spadina line, sticking to his line that suburbanites were subsidizing subway passengers.

The three lakeshore leaders proved sore losers when they refused to show up for the groundbreaking ceremony for the new subway lines on November 16, 1959. Edwards boycotted the ceremony because “when the people in my municipality are paying two mills a year and a double fare to subsidize subway riders, I don’t feel like celebrating.”

While the transit file didn’t go Marie Curtis’s way in 1959, she left a positive enduring legacy that year. On June 5, Marie Curtis Park was officially opened, on former residential land which had been destroyed during Hurricane Hazel. At the ceremony, she noted that the park showed that “we can go a long way if we pull together. Long Branch couldn’t have done this alone. We needed Metro.” She had also proven the lakeshore communities could pull together, even if they fought a losing cause.

In the end, the provincial government offered a $60 million loan to build the Bloor-Danforth and University lines, which shortened the 10-year construction window. The University line opened in 1963, the first phase of the Bloor-Danforth in 1966, and a Bloor extension into Etobicoke in 1968. The fare zone system was scrapped on New Year’s Day 1973.

We’ll give the last word to Toronto resident Alfred Carswell, whose letter to the Star in September 1958 on the craziness surrounding the subway issue may reverberate with those frustrated with our current city council.

When election time comes around, voters in the suburbs which oppose the subway project should remember the farce their representatives are now putting up in opposition to progress. They state they know they are fighting a losing battle but they will go on with it. It has been obvious for some years that the main transit routes were inadequately serviced, especially Bloor-Danforth and almost to similar degree Queen. One wonders if any of Curtis, Edwards, and Co. have had the experience of literally being pushed into a streetcar with the doors trying to close behind your back. Not once, but most mornings and evenings of the week this jostling, pushing and trampling on people’s feet has been going on for a long time.

Additional material from the June 18, 1958, September 6, 1958, February 10, 1959, and April 22, 1959 editions of the Globe and Mail; the March 5, 1957, February 27, 1958, July 4, 1958, August 21, 1958, September 2, 1958, September 6, 1958, November 11, 1958, November 13, 1958, December 10, 1958, January 14, 1959, February 11, 1959, February 12, 1959, June 5, 1959, September 23, 1959, and November 16, 1959 editions of the Toronto Star; and the July 4, 1958, August 19, 1958, August 20, 1958, August 22, 1958, August 25, 1958, January 14, 1959, February 9, 1959, February 10, 1959, February 11, 1959 editions of the Telegram.

Every Saturday, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today.

CORRECTION: May 12, 2013, 3:45 PM The article originally said that Long Branch Reeve Marie Curtis believed residents would be hurt by a tax increase of roughly $70 per year, when the actual amount was $7 per year, as this story now reflects.

The TTC has really been on a roll with these things lately.

On Saturday, once again, a portion of the Yonge-University-Spadina subway line will be closed while the TTC does some work on its signal systems. This time, the affected part of the line is the bit between Bloor-Yonge and Union stations. Subways will turn back at both those stations. Frequent shuttle buses will be running as far north as Rosedale.

But of course, if you still want to take a subway downtown, you can always just walk over to the other side of the horseshoe. Trains will still be running between Spadina and Union stations.

Left to right: councillor James Pasternak; Metrolinx CEO Bruce McCuaig; TTC CEO Andy Byford; councillors Paula Fletcher, Joe Mihevc, Mary-Margaret McMahon, and Josh Colle; TTC Chair Karen Stintz; councillor Maria Augimeri; then-Transportation Minister Bob Chiarelli; MP Peter Van Loan; and councillor Mike Del Grande at the preview for the TTC’s new streetcars last fall.

Toronto City Council was supposed to debate the issue of transit “revenue tools” on Wednesday, so that it could advise Queen’s Park which are acceptable in Toronto’s eyes—or at least which are the least unacceptable, given that nobody likes new taxes.

The debate, which continues today, descended into complete chaos of “let’s make a deal” transit planning of the worst kind seen in decades.

The whole affair started simply enough, with a move to wrest control of the City Manager’s report on revenue tools from Mayor Rob Ford’s executive committee, which voted recently to defer the debate—they’d resume discussions, the committee decided, the day after Metrolinx (the regional agency in charge of transit planning) issued their recommendations, rendering municipal input into that process useless. This first step was accomplished with a procedural vote—one which needed a strong consensus of a two-thirds majority of councillors present.

That was on Tuesday. Late Wednesday morning, the item came up for debate.

The entire scheme started to unravel with a move by Scarborough councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker (Ward 38, Scarborough Centre) to make any approval of new funding tools conditional on changing the signed agreement to build a Scarborough light rail line, instead calling for a full subway line. The arguments for this change are tenuous and include flat out misrepresentations of several aspects of the two options, notably their relative costs. Contrary to political talking points yesterday, a subway will be one billion dollars more expensive than LRT, not “just” the $500 million some councillors cited. (This was confirmed by TTC CEO Andy Byford during the meeting.)

Not content to stop at one subway, other members of council then started to chime in with their pet projects, including a Bloor West subway; not one but two Sheppard extensions (one dubbed the “Pasternak Relief Line” by some, after the councillor who moved it); a subway on Finch; and a resurrected Jane LRT. The combined additions to the network cost are astronomical, but that’s not really what councillors care about.

Photo by tapesonthefloor from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Some, like De Baeremaeker, are fighting for their political hides, worried about being portrayed as less than supportive of their supposedly downtrodden suburban communities.

Some are fighting political battles by proxy for the provincial parties. The Tories bang the drum on the “no new taxes” front while failing to explain how high-cost transit proposals will be funded. The NDP trots out their hobby-horse of corporate taxes, arguing that council should not support increases in regressive, user-based fees, such as sales or fuel taxes. Even some Liberals are up to mischief, attempting to create an embarrassing situation whereby Premier Kathleen Wynne would be forced into a Hobson’s choice of changing her position on the existing round of planned transit expansions (a set of projects collectively called The Big Move), or of overriding council’s desire for new subway lines. The Liberals in question are still fighting the lost leadership battle.

None of this serves the debate about funding and building a major expansion of the GTA’s transit network.

What is overwhelmingly evident is the leadership vacuum at City Hall. Throughout the debate, Mayor Ford wandered in and out of the chamber wearing his Toronto Maple Leafs jersey, and seemingly more interested in how the hockey game might play out than a vital debate. (At one point the debate paused momentarily to the sound of whooping—it was the mayor, behind the scenes, responding to the Leafs’ first goal.) But he didn’t even have much to do with De Baeremaeker making a complete fool of himself, and compromising both truth and any sense of responsible transit planning (though he certainly is glad to trumpet subways any time anyone mentions them).

For her part, TTC Chair Karen Stintz (Ward 16, Eglinton-Lawrence), having launched the whole process by backing De Baeremaeker’s pipe dreams, sat silently while the debate drifted further and further from any coherence and, by extension, possible support for any “plan” including her own ill-fated One City scheme from a few months ago. Rather than controlling the genie she let out of the bottle and getting three well-chosen wishes for her transit efforts, Stintz is revealed as a sorcerer’s apprentice who cannot control the blind forces she has unleashed.

Procedurally, there is one hope: any formal change to last fall’s LRT-based agreement between Toronto and Metrolinx would require a two-thirds majority of council to be reopened. This may block some of the more outrageous schemes for a time, but won’t undo the damage of a divisive, if-I-don’t-get-a-subway-I-won’t-play attitude on council, and on the residents across Toronto who are watching them spin out of control.

At Queen’s Park, the Tories must be rubbing their hands with delight at yet another chance to embarrass the Wynne government. Meanwhile, the NDP, utterly incapable of actually making a decision without weeks of polling and “conversation,” shows no coherent leadership, and the Liberals have to deal with a fifth column of anti-Wynne Scarborough MPPs.

We must not leave out the transit agencies here. Metrolinx has been notoriously unwilling to actually defend its plan by fleshing out details, providing accurate information about what it will build, how long this will take, and how much it will cost. The TTC, meanwhile, produced a report in January, 2013 comparing the subway and LRT options for Scarborough that we now know overstate the cost of light rail by $500 million. Is this incompetence or an underhanded attempt to make the subway option look better than it really is?

Amusingly, some councillors, such as speaker Frances Nunziata (Ward 11, York South-Weston), are happy to attack the TTC for being incapable of doing anything right, notably citing the “St. Clair disaster,” which also figured in the debate yesterday. Those same councillors, however, are more than happy to cite a bogus comparison of technologies coming from the TTC when it suits them.

As I have written before, there may be an argument for some subway expansion provided that this is based on trustworthy projections of costs and benefits, not on rose-tinted dreams of development and transit demand in every corner of the city. None of the debates we’re currently having rest on such a foundation, and “planning” right now consists of issuing boxes of crayons to a kindergarten class of politicians.

Toronto deserves so much better, but we are unlikely to see it, and a chance to actually build the transit we need may be lost for at least a decade.

A version of this post originally appeared on stevemunro.ca.

Image courtesy of the TTC.

We’ve known since last summer that the TTC is getting ready to introduce a fleet of 153 articulated buses to routes all around the city. Now we’ve got a picture of one of the new, 60-foot-long vehicles all done up in TTC livery and out on the pavement.

Granted, this isn’t Toronto pavement. TTC spokesperson Brad Ross tells us that there are no new articulated buses in town at the moment. The picture above, which he provided, was taken at a plant in Quebec where Nova Bus, a bus manufacturer, is still in the process of making the new vehicles. (Another picture of a TTC articulated bus that surfaced on Reddit Toronto earlier today was likely taken in the same place.) Nova’s name for this type of bus is “Artic.” The same model is used in a number of other cities, including New York.

The TTC hopes to pack these new, bendier buses with about 77 people at a time during peak periods, which is 45 per cent more than the non-bendy versions are supposed to be able to handle. The plan is to use the articulated buses to reduce the total number of vehicles serving some of the city’s busiest routes, without sacrificing rider capacity. Not everybody thinks this is a great idea, because it will mean longer waits.

The TTC used to use articulated buses made by Orion, another bus manufacturer, but retired the last of them about a decade ago, reportedly because of problems with corrosion.

All other considerations aside, though, it’s always neat when we get new transit toys. The articulated buses are expected to enter service in 2014.

Remember all those weekends when the University subway line was completely shut down between St. George and Union stations while the TTC did some work on its signalling system? Well, that’s happening again.

The TTC says the closure will be happening all day on Saturday, May 4. There will be frequent shuttle buses running between St. George and King stations, and of course you can always just take the Yonge subway line if you really must get downtown without setting eyes upon a single ray of sunshine.

Photo by sniderscion from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

The outcome of the debate was clear from the moment the report appeared.

Mayor Rob Ford is absolutely, positively, undeniably opposed to any new taxes to pay for transit (or anything else, for that matter). He sees fiscal salvation in vague promises of government efficiency, the magic of private sector finance, and the siren lure of a megacasino. Taxpayers are fed up, says the mayor, and new taxes just won’t happen on his watch.

To that end, this week Ford and five of his closest allies decided to shelve a major report on long-term transit funding for the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. They decided to derail that conversation—a chance to give Metrolinx, the regional agency in charge of transit, their advice and recommendations about how to proceed—for just long enough to make themselves entirely irrelevant to the process. Metrolinx will unveil their strategy for tackling that funding question on May 27; the executive committee deferred their debate on the issue until May 28.

Mayor Ford is entitled to his opinion, as are the executive members who passed that 6 to 4 vote to take no action. But there are 45 members of Toronto city council who represent the voters of the city, who now won’t get to sit down together and debate this report. The executive committee simply does not care to let them have their say, exercise their democratic right to discuss one of the most important issues facing the city. The mayor and his minions have spoken.

This cannot stand.

The congestion on our transit and road systems currently dominates the agendas of municipal and provincial governments, community groups, and business associations. They are all asking how we can undo the damage cause by decades of underinvestment in transportation, while the region sprawled and travel demand grew beyond the network’s capacity. All of them, that is, except for the leadership at Toronto City Hall.

How We Got Here

Five years ago, the Ontario government tried to wrestle with this problem through Metrolinx, with a plan called The Big Move. Fighting congestion was never going to be easy or cheap; the task requires a regional view both of transportation requirements and of funding options. The plan was—is—imperfect and undersized, but it was a starting point.

The Big Move arrived just as the world economy began to unravel. Just when momentum, a sense of beginning and accomplishment, was needed, Queen’s Park put the brakes on transit spending thanks to budget pressures, throwing the whole project into question. But the conversation didn’t stop. Congestion did not conveniently evaporate just because provincial revenues fell, and though implementation was delayed, people began considering how the $50 billion set of projects could be funded.

Our collective conversation about these issues changed fundamentally when the business community recognized that the “do nothing” option would not bring the savings a “no new taxes” policy might promise. Congestion affects the region’s economic vitality, and the value of lost time and of falling competitiveness is greater than the cost of improving the network’s speed and capacity. With that recognition, better transit stopped being a “left-right” issue, a question of social good versus hard-nosed business, and became a common problem.

Metrolinx’s pending report on “revenue tools”—a euphemism for the suite of taxes, tolls, and fees we’ll need to introduce to raise all that money—goes back almost as far as The Big Move itself. The menu of options was always there in plain sight, although many were reluctant to discuss the issue lest a tax-and-spend brand be stamped on their foreheads. But we are, finally, talking about it.

Kathleen Wynne Takes on the Future of Toronto Transit (Sort Of)

For the past year, the debate over transit funding has been hard to escape. Metrolinx has had its round of consultations. The Toronto Region Board of Trade stepped up with support. CivicAction’s What Would You Do With 32? campaign, backed by a variety of business and social leaders, stressed the personal loss that worsening congestion will bring in added commute times. The debate hasn’t stopped at the 416/905 boundary, and recognition that inaction is unacceptable pervades the region. Will new revenue streams be an easy sell? No, but at least politicians are engaging us on it now.

The Toronto Problem

Photo by allanparke from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Now we come to Toronto, centrepiece of the region, with half its population and by far the largest and best-used transit network. Metrolinx asked all municipalities to comment on possible funding tools, and Toronto passed this task on to its professional staff. The response, a long report [PDF], is the one that came before the executive committee on April 23. It’s the one that committee decided to defer until after Metrolinx had issued its recommendations.

Council’s rules of procedure are designed to give extra power to the mayor and executive, in part, to prevent a pesky minority from advancing business that a “majority government” of the mayor and council don’t support. (We use the quotation marks because, without political parties at City Hall, the terms technically don’t quite fit. They capture the dynamics accurately, however.) Toronto effectively has a “minority government” with the mayor and his shrinking band of loyal allies cornered by opposition on council. The rules require a super-majority, a two-thirds vote, to seize the agenda from the mayor’s control. If the mayor can exploit division among his opposition, building minority coalitions just big enough, he can thwart votes to undo his policies.

A little over a year ago, that tactic failed, and council held a special meeting to reinstate a long-standing plan to build several new light rail lines in the city. Control of the transit agenda passed to Karen Stintz and a coalition for whom Ford’s subways-subways-subways mantra was an empty promise obstructing real progress on transit expansion.

The question of revenue tools should come before council so that the entire assembly, the representatives of all voters, can decide which options they support, and more generally how transportation planning and spending should proceed.

Six members of the executive committee think they know better. Some of them hope for a new political dawn with a Tory government installed at Queen’s Park. A mayor who cares so much for his taxpayers and his city places his faith in a change of the guard at the Pink Palace. Everyone else can step aside.

That’s not how government is supposed to work in Toronto. The arrogant meddling of the mayor and a few of his puffed-up lieutenants should not prevent us from having a proper, complete debate on this vital issue. If Toronto really does not want Queen’s Park to levy new taxes or pay for expanded transit, then let council say so.

The process has been used before and it is quite simple: if 30 councillors, two-thirds of council, work together, they can run the table, control not just votes but the process of conducting city business. Nobody likes the idea of paying more for anything, but that train has left the station. If we want more transportation, if we want to support the regional economy, if we want to reduce the paralysis on roads and transit, we must pay. The questions now are how much we need, and which revenue sources we will tap.

City council deserves a chance to debate these questions and to participate in unlocking decades of inaction, of political gridlock. We deserve a government that is willing to have that debate.

Rob Ford has sabotaged Toronto’s transit planning, and much more, for too long. Where are the 30 who will put this wretched mayor in his place?

A rendering of what Pape Station will look like, once construction there is finished. Image courtesy of the TTC.

A couple weeks ago, we told you about the TTC’s attempt to have riders decide whether Pape Station should be closed in order to facilitate renovations. Well, the online poll results are in, and it seems as though the majority of those who participated support the rip-off-the-band-aid approach.

According to a report that went before the TTC’s board earlier today, 52.3 per cent of almost 3,000 responses favoured closing the station for 12 straight days in order to speed up construction by about three months. The TTC estimates that it can have the bulk of the work done by September this way.

The online survey, which closed on April 17, presented respondents with two other options. One was to leave the station open throughout construction—a course of action the TTC estimates would have drawn out renovations until December. The final option was to close the station on six consecutive weekends, which would have allowed work to finish in September, but would also have spread the no-subway-service pain over a month and a half. The station has already been under construction for quite some time. The project started in 2009 and was originally supposed to be finished by spring 2012.

In the end, riders opted to get all the unpleasantness over in one go. TTC spokespeople have said the commission will honour the results of the survey. Exact scheduling details for the closure should be released within the next few weeks.

Image of the SR.N2 Hovercraft from Flight International (March 9, 1962).

Imagine skimming along Lake Ontario at 120 kilometres per hour, reading the newspaper on the way to work in the city. Inching along the congested (and increasingly dangerous) Queen Elizabeth Way or the Gardiner Expressway might’ve taken you up to an hour, but instead your commute aboard a massive passenger hovercraft makes the same journey in all weather in mere minutes—and with none of the stress traffic creates. Twenty-five minutes to get downtown from Hamilton, or 11 minutes from Oakville, and just four to travel from Mimico.

The spacious passenger cabin, where you’re strapped into your seats for safety (in case the vessel needs to skid through a turn at a high speed), is comfortable and protected from the spray and blasting wind of the propellers. Seconds after arriving downtown, the amphibious craft gliding up a concrete ramp at the ferry docks, you emerge through a side door and head to the office. Passengers bound for the suburbs board and, in minutes, the hovercraft is off again, blasting across Lake Ontario.

This might’ve been your commute, and the future of regional transportation in Metro Toronto, if Mimico Mayor Hugh McGregor Griggs had had his way in the early 1960s.

Metropolitan Toronto Council, 1962, with Hugh M. Griggs at bottom right. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 5000.

Mimico had been a Toronto bedroom community since the first streetcar line was laid in the late 19th century. After the Second World War, as servicemen returned home to purchase homes and start families, it steadily grew, from 8,785 in 1945 to 10,410 in 1951. The booming growth was typical of Toronto’s suburbs at the time; along with Toronto proper they formed the Metropolitan Toronto regional government in 1954, to coordinate in areas of common concern.

Grey-haired and bespectacled, Griggs was elected in 1960, after campaigning on a promise “to give the town a sane, dignified administration” during this period of region-wide growth, as the Globe and Mail (November 28, 1962) put it. He would remain mayor until 1967 when, along with New Toronto and Long Branch, Mimico was absorbed into the Borough of Etobicoke. In office, Griggs played a key role in establishing Mimico’s Planning Board, and developing an official plan that altered the local landscape. The town of predominantly single-family homes saw large numbers of apartment high rises constructed along the waterfront at the behest of the local council. By 1962, the population had ballooned to 17,707—all crowded into an area one square mile in size. “It is now,” Harvey Currell stated in The Mimico Story (Town of Mimico and Library Board, 1967), “part-way through the 1960s, one of the most densely populated apartment areas on the continent.”

A former schoolteacher and editor of the Canadian School Journal before entering municipal politics, the new mayor became intrigued by an emerging technology making waves in the United Kingdom: the hovercraft, a vessel capable of travelling over sea or land on a cushion of high-pressure air. Although the technology had only progressed to the prototype stage, Griggs thought it had potential as a means of relieving his constituents’ daily commute to the city core.

Image of the SR.N2 (left) and SR.N1 (right) Hovercrafts from Flight International (March 9, 1962).

The modern hovercraft emerged from the backyard experiments of Sir Christopher Cockerell, who built several working models in the 1950s. When the British military showed no interest in the technology, Cockerell’s designs were declassified by the British government for development by the National Research Development Corporation (NRDC), the body tasked with turning promising inventions into viable commercial enterprises.

In October 1958, under contract to the NRDC, the Saunders-Roe Division of Westland Aircraft Ltd. began work on a full-scale hovercraft prototype. The SR.N1, as the small vessel was called, first flew in early June 1959, and just over a month later made a successful crossing of the English Channel. That well-publicized event, and a subsequent test piloted by Prince Philip, caught the public’s imagination, and further hovercraft developments were widely reported in the world press.

By 1961 it was no longer a question of whether the hovercraft’s ground effect principle worked. The challenge was now whether the companies could prove the hovercraft was more than a novelty—that it had the potential to carry large numbers of people or cargo at great speed over long distances, and at a reasonable operating cost. So when Saunders-Roe received correspondence from a small-town Canadian mayor, the company took the inquiry seriously, mailing him studies and research information. “On the face of it, it seems Air Cushion Vehicles could play an important part in the over-all transportation pattern in the Toronto area,” F.R. Drew of Saunders-Roe later told a Toronto reporter.

(Above right: Portrait of Hugh M. Griggs from Harvey Currell’s The Mimico Story; Town of Mimico and Library Board, 1967.)

Armed with this material and the company’s encouragement, Griggs made a presentation at a meeting of the Metro Roads and Traffic Committee in November 1961. “Let’s set up a committee,” he explained, “to take a serious look at this British Hovercraft—I think it could be the answer to all our problems.” Metro officials laughed, thinking his futuristic, “flying saucer” proposal to be nonsense.

Griggs refused to be discouraged. “I don’t mind that the Committee laughed at me,” he said after. “Bigger and more important people have laughed at me before for suggesting something different or unusual.”

Griggs found an ally in aviation reporter Kerry Gibbens. “[T]he major design problems have now been licked,” Gibbens argued in a profile of Griggs’ hovercraft scheme in Canadian Magazine (July 1962), “and within two years it could become the logical answer to commuter transport problems in Toronto—and in every other major Canadian city with urban areas spread along accessible waterfronts.” He suggested Vancouver, Montreal, and other cities with significant waterfronts might follow Toronto as early adopters of the hovercraft.

Griggs envisioned regular, year-round hovercraft commuter service along Greater Toronto’s lakeshore, carrying hundreds of commuters downtown and back to the suburbs several times daily—as well as to the islands. “It is easy to operate, runs forward, backwards, sideways, turns on a dime,” Gibbens noted enthusiastically. “It can hover like a helicopter, move forward at near-aircraft speeds. And if its motors fail, it will float like a boat—in fact, in extremely bad weather when it cannot skim over the waves, it can ride through them like a regular ferry.”

Because the hovercraft could land on any beach or strip of concrete protruding into the lake and didn’t require specially-constructed terminals, the capital cost to establish this service was expected to be a fraction of that for any other emerging commuter option like a subway, monorail, or even helicopter. If operating at full passenger capacity, Griggs and Gibbens estimated the hovercraft’s operating costs to be about eight cents per passenger mile (or 40 cents per trip). “In two years,” Gibbens echoed the view of Saunders-Roe officials, “it will be able to handle all of Toronto’s rush hour lakeshore traffic at a price little more than the present car fare.”

(Above: Toronto Star; May 7, 1963.)

Griggs and Gibbens were confident there’d be sufficient demand for a hovercraft service. “Toronto west-enders,” the reporter stressed, “would undoubtedly plump for ANY means of transport that could beat the nerve-wracking 60 minute crawl to and from work each day—let alone one that can do it for the price of car fare.”

At the time Griggs pitched the Metro Roads and Traffic Committee, Saunders-Roe’s prototype for a larger, faster hovercraft capable of carrying 50 or more passengers (the SR.N2) had not yet been tested at sea. But subsequent successful tests of the SR.N2 confirmed its commercial promise. Hovercraft companies also began solving the problems they’d faced in early designs. Flexible skirts to contain the compressed air and improve lift and stability over obstacles or rough waves, for instance, made passenger service more practical. Finally, in July 1962, the first hovercraft operating as a passenger ferry—the Vickers VA-3—entered regular service, carrying up to 25 passengers across a 27-kilometre route between Merseyside and Wales on the River Dee.

Suddenly, Griggs’ futuristic idea didn’t seem so far-fetched.

Toronto Star (April 30, 1963).

In late April 1963, the SR.N2 Mark 2 was unloaded in Montreal for two weeks of live demonstrations, the first held outside of the United Kingdom. Griggs and other Metro Toronto officials were among those in attendance at the trials on Lake St. Louis and along the St. Lawrence River—a crowd of 600 that included representatives of commercial firms and armed forces from across the Western Hemisphere, as well as from governments from as far away as Japan.

Toronto Star reporter George Bryant took a test run. “As one of the first in Canada to ride in one,” he said. “I can guarantee they’re as comfortable as they are speedy.” He described the passenger compartment, sealed to protect from the wind and spray, as spacious. The control room, he said, resembled an airplane’s cockpit.

“The first real surprise comes when the craft lifts,” Bryant wrote. “The sensation resembles that experienced when a helicopter goes up, or one that might be experienced by sitting on a large truck tube while it was suddenly inflated.” He added: “The feeling of speed only occurs when the driver makes a 75-mile-an-hour sliding turn and lets the skirt dig in the water.”

Others who travelled by hovercraft in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, however, would question whether the mode of transportation lived up to its billing, commenting on the loud engines and the need to be strapped into one’s seat.

Clarence Downey and H.E. Pettett, chairman and secretary of the TTC respectively, also had the opportunity to take a test flight. Their presence indicates how seriously Metro Toronto was contemplating acquiring one of the crafts, which came with a $1,351,000 price tag but could carry 150 passengers at a cruising speed of 130 kilometres per hour. Saunders-Roe, newspapers noted, could deliver an operational hovercraft in no more than a year.

But no hovercraft was ever ordered.

Toronto Star (May 4, 1963).

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, hovercrafts became a regular feature of the transportation landscape. More and more of them entered regular passenger service, crossing The Solent to the Isle of Wight, connecting Weston-super-Mare and Penarth on opposite banks of the River Severn, and spanning the English Channel to France, among other routes. Ambitious designers introduced ever larger and more powerful designs throughout the 1960s, leading Cockerell to speculate that his invention might eventually take shape as a 10,000-ton ocean liner, zipping across the Atlantic in 30 hours. Late in the decade, Cockerell was at work on a “hovertrain,” a concept that aimed to apply the same air-cushion principles to the railway, but which petered out by the 1970s.

In Toronto, Griggs continued stumping for hovercrafts for years. In 1963, when construction of a subway line beneath Queen Street was being debated, Griggs predicted that the purchase of a hovercraft would make subway expansion unnecessary. Speculating with gathered journalists on the benefits of regular hovercraft service, Griggs confidently asserted that 15 hovercrafts could be ordered for $20,000,000—the cost of 1.6 kilometres of subway.

When Parks Commissioner T.W. Thompson, speaking off the cuff, told a group of Metro officials that hydrofoils might be an option to replace standard ferry service between the mainland and Toronto Island, Griggs took the opportunity to again redirect public discussion to the topic of hovercrafts. As late as 1966, speaking at the Lakeshore Kiwanis Club, he urged Metro Toronto to divert some of the funds being spent on regional expressways to the procurement of a giant commuter hovercraft.

Photo of the SR.N4 Hovercraft, October 2000, by Andrew Berridge from WikiMedia Commons.

Although Griggs’s efforts came to naught in the 1960s, hovercraft passenger service was eventually initiated on Lake Ontario in July 1974 with the Toryoung I and Toryoung II. The service quickly proved popular, carrying 14,000 passengers between Toronto, Niagara-on-the-Lake, and Youngstown, New York, in August 1974 alone. But the service was discontinued shortly afterward when, in mid-September, the Toryoung II hit a buoy and nearly sank.

The circumstances of another accident in February 1987—when several policemen and firefighters responding to an ice-boat accident on Burlington Bay became trapped in freezing water and were rescued by a Toronto man demonstrating his recreational hovercraft nearby—prompted numerous Ontario police and fire departments, including the Metro Police, to investigate the use of small-scale hovercraft as rescue vehicles. This, whether by police and fire services or the Canadian Coast Guard, has remained the most common use of hovercrafts in Canada today.

But the idea of passenger hovercraft service on Lake Ontario has never disappeared entirely. In February 1991, with the backing of the provincial Ministry of Transportation and the Toronto Harbour Commission, a group of private consultants undertook a study of the feasibility of a rush-hour ferry service using hovercrafts, hydrofoils, or catamarans, running year-round between Toronto and the Niagara Peninsula. The same year, another company in Burlington, Transportation Alternatives, hoped to operate a commuter hovercraft service from Port Weller to Toronto.

More recently, brothers Dale and Ryan Wilson of Hover Transit Services first sought to purchase two retired hovercraft ferries from a British museum in 2004 in order to establish commuter routes on Lake Ontario to the east and west of Toronto. Then, in the spring of 2008, Hover Transit Services next proposed using a second-hand passenger hovercraft to revive the fast ferry service linking Toronto and Rochester that had previously failed in 2004 and 2006—with hopes the venture might eventually lead to commuter service for Toronto.

None of these proposals were ever implemented.

Sources consulted: Kerry Gibbens, “A Flying Saucer for Toronto?…Why Not!” Canadian Magazine (July 1962); Bill Gunston, “Stepping Stone to the Economical Hovercraft,” Flight International (March 9, 1962); and articles from the Canadian Press (July 9, 1991; and July 15, 2008); Globe and Mail (November 28 & 29, July 24, September 29, 1962; and April 9, 2008); National Post (September 7, 2002); Toronto Star (July 20, September 5 & 29, 1962; April 23 & 30, May 4, 5 & 7, June 11, 1963; January 28, April 2, September 8, October 19, 1966; May 24, 1987; May 27, 1988; January 22, September 17, November 8, 1990; February 23, 1991; January 17, 2004; and January 1, 2007).

Every Saturday, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today.