Tag: transit

Growing up, budgeting, and other stuff

After I got out of my holiday depressive slump I managed to get off my ass and accomplish a few things. I resolved to be more conciliatory and politic, and even made it a few days before ranting about white-centric feminism or something. I cancelled my Rogers internet so I can switch to the cheaper ISP TekSavvy. I cleared my inbox. I made a doctor’s appointment. And—biggest of all—I applied for a credit card!

The thing about being broke, you see, is that you make terrible financial decisions. I could barely afford to buy things with my debit card, so why would I take on debt I certainly couldn’t pay off?

But a credit card opens the door to so many other things. I can buy stuff cheaper online. I could get a drawing tablet, for instance, that would let me do illustrations on commission and earn money on the side. I can buy cheap glasses. I can replace my ailing netbook. I can get a smartphone!—The smartphone was really what convinced me. Because right now I’m on a prepaid plan, and you can only get a good deal on a smartphone if you are on pay-after, which requires a credit check. And you can’t have credit, good or bad, if you don’t have a credit card.

I won’t be able to pay off the entire balance at once, but I can definitely do minimum monthly payments. And that’s an acceptable cost to take on, because I need to maintain a level of healthy debt in order to live like a Real Adult.

And yes, this is a metaphor for the budget and why we shouldn’t be afraid to borrow money, because this city could be so much more awesome if we were willing to invest in big things, rather than tightening our belts and scrimping and saving and settling for the cheap bread at No Frills. Have you ever had that bread? It’s dry and flavourless and unsatisfying and only $1.97. You can only go so many years on that bread before you put your foot down and say I want more. I deserve more. I’m going to get out of this miserable pit, somehow.—wait, where was I? Oh yeah. So I was talking about the budget, but also about my current situation. Increasingly I feel disconnected from the #TOpoli crowd. It’s hard to express how viscerally worried I am. I wish I could talk intellectually about debt ceilings and GTA property tax rates, but I’m afraid…

No, of course it’s not the end of the world. That’s the problem. These things aren’t often drastic or dramatic. We’ll just accept a little more anxiety, a few more aggravations. “The people want change“—for those at the bottom, the currents pass us by, there’s no change at all. When things are precarious you can’t afford to take chances. There’s less margin for error. Every resource you have—a spot on the waitlist, med samples from the doctor, someone who can stay home to watch your kid, an all-night bus route—you’re counting on, and if one doesn’t come through, it throws everything into disarray. And it occupies your thoughts constantly and you just want to explain to people what it’s like and we can’t wait another moment for housing/daycare/transit…

But, in reality, you need to be able to do both at once. You still have to talk politics the way the men, the journalists, talk politics. Be smart the way they want you to be smart, and witty, but not at their expense, and they’ll listen to you, and take your advice on those things you know about. It’s cynical, but you can’t afford to insist on having the conversation on your own terms. You can’t pour your heart out so you let it drip a little all the time into everything you do. That’s the idea, anyway.

Diary of a councilspotter: In which the politicians take over City Hall

Monday, March 5, City Council meeting 19

The Story So Far:

  • January 17, 2012: In an unprecedented victory, left-wing and centrist councillors get together and vote to reverse most of Ford’s proposed budget cuts. Getting cocky, they think about bringing back Transit City, the previous mayor’s transit plan that Ford strongly opposes.

  • February 8, 2012: At a special council meeting, TTC chair and (up till now) Ford loyalist Karen Stintz spearheads a motion to basically reinstate Transit City, which passes with a decent majority. Team Ford would fire Stintz if they could, but the rules say they can’t.

  • February 21, 2012: Five Ford-friendly members of the TTC board call a special meeting and fire the TTC general manager Gary Webster instead. This is a bad move, and the other four councillors on the board are pissed.

  • March 5, 2012: Council votes to dissolve the TTC board and put together a new one, which happens to include the minority of TTC board members who voted not to fire Webster (this includes Stintz), plus some centrist and left-wing councillors. Council then votes Stintz back in as TTC chair.

For those keeping track at home, this is the third failed attempt by Team Ford to get back at Stintz for Transit City. But there’s more: there’s another special council meeting on the 21st where they’ll be making decisions about transit on Sheppard. (The mayor and others want subways; the plan calls for light rail.)

The title of the post refers to what Cllr Giorgio Mammoliti actually said at some point yesterday. Yes, that apparently came out of his mouth with no irony. It’s only a slightly more fucking ridiculous version of what Cllr Denzil Minnan-Wong and Cllr Michael Thompson have said at various points in the past few months: they believe transit should be depoliticized. Which, I mean, I live and die by “the personal is political”, so you can guess how I feel about that. It’s horrible because everything is fucking political, and “depoliticize” basically just means “pretend it’s not political” or “our politics don’t count as politics”, which is bullshit—

—and if it’s not that, it’s some kind of libertarian shit, like, the government shouldn’t be in this business, which is also bullshit. Doug Ford said as much during last Sunday’s radio show when he was spouting off about how “taxes are evil” (yes, another thing that actually crawled out of someone’s mouth)—he said the government should be providing services, not creating jobs (damn the economy!). But apparently those services don’t even include transit. These people’s ideal government is basically a glorified utility company. No wonder they lack long-term vision.

And I realize the entire point of this enterprise is to get inside government and tear it down but I can’t help remembering another feminist soundbite: “Don’t like abortions? Don’t have one.”

Don’t like politics?

DON’T. FUCKING. BECOME. A. POLITICIAN.

Re: Gary Webster

Dear Councillors:

I’m writing to encourage you not to fire Gary Webster. It would mean paying out an enormous severance package (about $500,000) just to intimidate City workers and to further politicize the civil service. Webster is bound by professional honesty to serve the Mayor by advising him on the facts as they are and not how we would like them to be. Further, his duty is not only to the Mayor, but to all of us—so he must act in the public interest whether or not that aligns with Ford’s mandate.

Firing people because they can’t honestly agree with you is irresponsible from both a financial and an ethical perspective. Please do the right thing.

Yours,

Neville Park

Diary of a councilspotter: They can’t all be golden

Monday, February 13, Executive Committee meeting 16

That controversial TCHC item got punted to a special meeting on Friday, so today’s agenda isn’t very interesting aside from the presentation of the Chong report. It’s hard to work up much excitement for development charges by-laws. Luckily many of the Scoobies are here too, including new guy @oytamarind, and we’re occupying ourselves by surreptitiously passing out City Hall-themed valentines to various councillors, journos, and staffers.

(We’re in the caf when we spot Doug Holyday eating his lunch on the other side of the room and start double-dog-daring each other to go up and give him a couple of valentines. I finally take one for the team, because I broke down in tears in front of the guy at my last deputation and I figure it’s all uphill from there. Adorably, he assumes the Janet Davis one is actually from Janet Davis, because she later says he thanked her for it.

I offer Mary “Best Hair On Council” Fragedakis a Denzil Minnan-Wong valentine and she shoots me down. Ice cold, lady. Ice cold.)

The Chong report is—pardon the term—irrelevant after last week’s transit vote, but I figure the presentation and question period have got to be entertaining, and they are. I’ll say this for Chong, he did the job he was hired to do, and he’s a lively speaker. The report itself is a masterful exercise in dressing up bullshit to fool the uninformed; it reminds me of creationist literature that attempts to prove that the earth is six thousand years old. Gord Perks compares it to promises of pigs flying. At any rate you can only make it look reasonable with a delicate balance of sloppy and outdated data, selective statistics, out-of-context numbers, and pure mendacity. Notably, the report doesn’t offer any actual recommendations, because 1) who wants to sign their name to that shit? and 2) it has to support whatever Team Ford wants it to. It drives Gord Perks and especially Adam Vaughan up a wall—I swear if we weren’t there to make sarcastic asides to, he’d seriously lose it.

(A little digression on Why We Can’t Have Nice Things Subways:

  1. They’re really fucking expensive to build and nobody can pay for them
  2. They want to put them in areas that basically will not be dense enough to run profitably in our lifetimes.

And the niceness of subways cannot override those facts. Shut up and get on the LRT.)

In the end ExComm votes to establish a panel to look into subways, which—you might recall—council already voted to do. Does this mean they’re supporting the status quo? LOL NO, they voted for an entirely redundant second subways panel, which will totally never get past council, so really we could have all gone home and jerked off for four hours and we’d have the same result. It’s just a last noisy crying jag in the extended tantrum Team Ford have been throwing as their grip on power erodes.

There’s still some items to go, but I’m at that point of tiredness and boredom where I’m entertaining myself by Google image searching Mike Del Grande and laughing inwardly (Edit: apparently not so inwardly) how he looks like a hungover owl in like every single photo. Which is a pretty pathetic point to be at, even for a council creeper, so I pack up my computer and head home.

Someone is wrong on the Internet, TTC edition

So here I am having gotten work out of the way, done laundry, cooked dinner, looking forward to a pleasant evening of photoshopping city councillors and watching horror movies, when someone on Twitter linked Matt Gurney’s analysis of the whole transit thing that just went down and I had to read it and I don’t normally do the fisking thing but it’s so profoundly out of touch with reality I just need to sit down and bang out a post on how wrong he is about nearly everything here, paragraph by paragraph.

tl:dr; LOL WUT STFU NOOB

The Ford Plan, as it’s been dubbed, involved building a light-rail line entirely underground [blah blah]…It’s a plan with a lot of merit, but was hotly contested by a faction of council that preferred building a greater number of light-rail lines into more Toronto neighbourhoods.

Reality: This light rail plan, Transit City, was introduced under Miller and was about to get going when Ford got elected and unilaterally decided to cancel it in favour of his own plan. The problem is that the province had already agreed to pay for Transit City, whereas Ford’s plan was a little more…ephemeral. Fast forward to now, when the guys doing the Eglinton crosstown line, Metrolinx, are like, “We’re super confused about what we’re supposed to be doing, can City Council clear this up?” [PDF] So the TTC chair, Councillor Karen Stintz, called a special meeting and put forward a motion that was basically “Okay, guys, let’s do Transit City.”

LRTs aren’t as good as subways

Subways are faster and bigger, yes, but they’re also hella expensive, so they’re only worth building in much denser areas. So in this case, for the densities we’re talking about (and that includes projected future growth), light rail would actually be better. For the numbers and a good explanation of the differences between the transit modes, see the Pembina report.

Mayor Ford, a sworn enemy of any transit plan that removes lanes from roads

Um yeah, so that funding already included the costs of widening roads so they wouldn’t lose lanes. Was that good enough for Ford? HELL NO, he doesn’t even want to see the LRVs.

[Ford’s plan was] expensive, but Ford won a victory when he was able to convince the government of Ontario to pick up the entire tab — better than eight-billion bucks.

Well, no. He basically pinky-swore with the Premier. Their agreement was non-binding, which means Council had to approve it first [PDF].

It’s entirely possible that Ontario might agree to allow Toronto to take that $8-billion and use some of it — the portion saved by not burying part of the Eglinton line — on other transit projects

This was the point where I was like, “He doesn’t even go here!”

What actually happened:

Dalton McGuinty: I’ll give you guys $8 billion for this Transit City you planned.
Rob Ford: DISREGARD THAT, SUBWAYS SUBWAYS SUBWAYS
Dalton McGuinty: Um, if Council’s cool with that, I guess.
Council: Nah, the Mayor’s plan blows, let’s do Transit City.
Dalton McGuinty: Sure, whatever. It’s a deal.

Gordon Chong, a former city councillor that Ford hired to prepare a plan showing how the Mayor’s plan was fiscally feasible, spent a year doing exactly that, and determined that it was, indeed, a workable plan. But some new parking fees and road tolls were going to be necessary.

In reality Chong’s report was an “unabashedly political” piece of work that relied on suspiciously low estimates, optimistic projections, and funding sources more wishful than concrete. Subways are not really “workable” in this case because subways are fucking expensive. They’re so expensive that even with (really unpopular) parking fees and road tolls and whatnot the Sheppard subway would still be a billion dollars short.

Ford’s transit plan is arguably superior to the version endorsed by his opponents in council.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAno.

Ford’s plan 1) served like a tenth of the people Transit City would, 2) was horrifically inefficient (for one, LRTs are basically wasted underground), and 3) was prohibitively expensive. In fact, “plan” is kind of a strong word, considering that Ford’s creatively named “Transportation City” was basically just (misconceived) ideas with no means of funding them.

I am genuinely curious as to where Matt Gurney has been getting his information, because I suspect it’s that parallel universe where the St. Clair right-of-way is a dystopian warzone and Bombardier takes payment in Canadian Tire money.

Fuck the Post, I’m going to take a bubble bath.

What the flying fuck happened yesterday?

Let’s do this TUMBLR STYLE.

  • So they kicked off the Extra Special Surprise Transit Meeting by presenting a shit-ton of petitions from all over the city, mostly for Stintz’s plan.
  • Mammoliti banged the drum for a subway on Finch, which no one had even been considering until today and which no one can pay for.
  • His argument was that the people up there are real nice and they deserve subways.
  • Like the transit version of the Nice Guy™.
  • The spectre of the St. Clair Right-of-Way Disaster was constantly raised, causing innumerable PTSD flashbacks.
  • Gary Webster pretty much earned his whole year’s salary patiently answering councillors’ wrong-headed questions about LRTs.
  • Denzil Minnan-Wong and others brought up an ’86 vote on subways, because that was the last time subways were actually a good idea. I was not even crawling by then, if that gives you any perspective.
  • Possibly the funniest moment: Nunziata flipping out having just realized that the Stintz “don’t call it the Stintz” plan was basically Transit City. OH SHIT GUYS, SHE’S ON TO US.
  • Nobody knows the fucking difference between LRTs and streetcars.
  • Someone had a button maker and was turning out “I ♥ Gary Webster” and “Karen Stintz Fan Club” pins, seen on the lapels of many centre/left councillors.
  • Rob Ford moved to defer the vote for a month for no damn good reason.
  • Karen Stintz extended an entire goddamn olive tree to the man and he apparently refused any compromise, even though it would make him look good. WAT.
  • Perruzza got all fiery and shit.
  • Doug Ford and Norm Kelly demonstrated their extraordinarily shaky grasp of Canadian history. No, the 2010 mayoral election was not “the largest referendum in Canadian history”, and Toronto is not actually the capital of Canada.
  • Berardinetti shared an impassioned plea to “depoliticize transiAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA I can’t even type that with a straight face.
  • The audience died of hunger and dehydration while every goddamn councillor had to stand up and have their say instead of just having the fucking vote.
  • They had to vote THREE TIMES.
  • Ford et al. (that makes them sound so much classier) threw a fit by opposing all the subsequent motions, even the routine one to end the meeting, WAT.
  • We won!!!

The takeaway: The same people who lectured us since last summer about “nice-to-haves” and fiscal responsibility turned around and argued for throwing away billions of dollars from the province and pouring billions more into the exorbitantly expensive and unnecessary transit option (subways) just because they can’t abide seeing public transit vehicles sharing space with CAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRSSSSSSSSS. And when they don’t get their way they’re extraordinarily petty and mean-spirited about it.

The good news: they’re no longer a majority on Council. The best-case scenario a lot of lefties were hoping for when Ford got elected seems to have come to pass — he’s staked out a position extreme enough that most of Council won’t stand with him. He’s unwilling to compromise or build consensus, and that’s finally coming back to bite him in the ass. People are pissed-off, mobilized, and — for the first goddamn time in years — paying attention.

I don’t think it’s too early to declare Rob Ford the best shitty mayor this town’s ever had.