[PRCo] Huffington Post

[Fred Schneider]

Dennis:

Regarding this item that you posted four days back:

> http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/11/19/public-transit-gif-toronto-streetcar-ttc_n_4304258.html


A variety of reactions:

1.  It is  fabulous portrayal of how many rush hour commuters will fit into one trolley (tram, streetcar) and how much street space they take up using cars.   Incredibly graphic.    I love it.  Great stuff.   I would love to see one of the TTC's new articulated cars in such a simulation.

2.  It looks like the Huffington Post's Canada cousin has come out against Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's suburbanite pro-automobile / anti-streetcar stance.  This sounds like a political piece at its absolute best.    I also think it shows what happens when we merge the suburbs with the city and the suburban view point might prevail.     

3.   Although in some ways I favor mergers of suburban areas with cities because all too often the suburbs are created simply as a means for the rich to escape helping those of lesser means,  at the same time I recognize that combining suburbs with cities also allow the suburbanites to tramp on the people living in the cities.   It all depends on which group has the voting advantage.  There are tremendous burdens placed on cities by the tax free real estate for government offices, libraries and hospitals which suburbanites use but too many of those wonderful people outside the cities feel no compulsion to support.  There are also the pension liabilities for many of the city staff which the people who moved out escaped from paying … yes it should have been wholly funded be we know it wasn't.   Often they moved out to escape people who look different too.   I do not buy into that either.   I personally would like to go back to the 1950s when every place I had to go (jobs, church, doctors, hospitals, stores, restaurants) were within a few thousand feet of each other downtown instead of spread out in a 50 mile diameter circle.   I couldn't use the bus today to reach a lot of my destinations today if life depended on it but I could and did all the time in the 1950s.   The last time I was able to spend a whole day without a car (and it was wonderful) was a day in New York … by train from here last year.   

4.   But if we try to extrapolate that fantastic comparison of how many people the streetcar holds versus the automobile to the United States, it just doesn't does not work.  Falls flat here because so many of our transit vehicles are empty.   In many of our cities you would be replacing that huge vehicle with no cars, or one car, or two cars.   But it works marvelously up there because Toronto is a heavily populated city that is railway dependent like ours used to be.    

I think it might have been Herb Brannon who pointed out that the Canadian cities annexed everything in sight.   Toronto today is basically six municipalities from the PCC era.  No, make that ten.   Etobicoke alone was created from four different municipalities which I think were combined in the 1960s or 1970s.        

If we take old Toronto, York and East York … the old built up area of the city … we have 985,501 people shoehorned into 18.05 square miles …. thats 18,046 people per square mile.   Only one city in the United States exceeds that … New York with over 26,000.
San Francisco is in the same ballpark with 17,246.   And if we take the current city of Toronto, which adds in the merged cities or towns of Scarborough, North York and Etobicoke, then the density drops to 10,750, which is still about twice that of Pittsburgh or Cleveland.  Remember that 10,000 number.

      Still, we have only six major cities in the United States with a density of over 10,000 per square mile … New York, San Francisco, Boston (13,321),  Chicago (11,868), Philadelphia (11,234) and Miami (10,161) and only the first five of them exceed Toronto in population density.  And none of them have annexed their suburbs in recent years.    To bring it back to the list, Cleveland and Pittsburgh have 5,107 and 5540 people per square mile.    We have a bunch of smaller cities with 10,000 or more in the USA, most are around New York … one is in Allegheny County which essential a village with a huge apartment building complex for an anchor.  

     Canada, by the way has four cities that exceed 10,000 population per square mile:  Toronto (10,750), Montreal (11701), Vancouver (13590) and Victoria (10,643).   

     So who hauls the most people?   Here are weekday averages for 1912.    

New York City MTA  11.050 million on a normal weekday.  (Long Island, Metro North, and NJ Transit haul another 1 million)

Toronto Transit Commission   2.764 million  (GO Transit is a separate agency with 174,000 daily riders.)

Chicago Transit Authority   1.724 million  (METRA and NICTD adds about 311,000)

Los Angeles County MTA   1.480 million  (commuter rail adds another 23,000 and there are numerous independent bus lines)

Montreal, Quebec 1.441 million   (Commuter trains … separate agency … 71,000 daily)

Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (DC)  1.312 million   (commuter rail - MdDOT and Va is over 50,000 more)

MBTA Boston   1.276 million (includes commuter rail)

Vancouver, BC 1.176 million (commuter rail is a separate agency)

SEPTA Philadelphia  1.164 million (includes commuter rail)

Did you observe that one-third of cities with more than a million daily transit riders are in Canada, a nation with one-tenth as many people as we have in the United States?   I think that might have to do with (1) the fact that they are more densely settled and (2) they have, for a long time, accepted driving as a privilege and not a right and paid higher gas taxes than we do.   They have gas taxes that are close to four times what ours are.    I just looked up their current gas prices … CDN$ 1.27577 in Toronto per liter … x 3.96 x .9492  
 = $4.79 a gallon in US dollars.   When you have $5.00 a gallon gas and $20 to $30 a day park downtown, you might have a greater temptation to drop $3.00 morning and afternoon into the TTC farebox .   I am not sure if it is still that way but Canada used to have a higher excise tax on new cars too … we paid a lot less for our new cars than they did … nice way of encouraging people to use transit.  

      http://toronto.bestparking.com/

And the outlier that surprised even me was Los Angeles with over a million riders and a population density of only a little over 8,000 people per square mile.   Even at today's current low rate of growth, it could be another 100 years before it gets up to 10,000.   But it is the 2nd largest city in the US and Canada … helps to account for why there are so many riders today.   Might be sooner if we change our immigration or import taxation policies.    

Fred



On Nov 20, 2013, at 7:14 AM, DF Cramer wrote:

> http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/11/19/public-transit-gif-toronto-streetcar-ttc_n_4304258.html
> Great visualization of the benefits of transit from our friends north of the border.
> 
> Dennis F. Cramer 
> http://home.windstream.net/dfc1/ 		 	   		  
>