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News and Articles>
ST. CLAIR RIGHT-OF-WAY IS OFF THE RAILS
Toronto Star --
Feb 8, 2005 --
CESAR PALACIO
As Toronto Transit Commissioners and city councillors try frantically to find millions of dollars in savings and cuts to prevent a city-wide 10-cent, $20 million TTC fare increase, many members of the St. Clair West community have proposed a solution -- cancel the proposed St. Clair Avenue West exclusive right-of-way.
The $65 million plan calls for the centre two lanes of St. Clair to be exclusively reserved for streetcars, similar to Spadina or Queen's Quay, and was strongly opposed by three of four local city councillors, and the vast majority of the local community.
Although we believe strongly in the principles of making public transit more reliable, accessible and efficient, lifelong transit advocates like myself, former Mayor John Sewell, and thousands of local residents did not support the proposal because we do not believe that this project accomplishes those goals.
In short, the minuscule few seconds per average rider that will be saved cannot make up for almost 15 consecutive years of TTC service cuts on St. Clair, and to look at the street as simply "a transportation corridor", where nothing else other than streetcars and cars are important, is narrow-minded and regressive. St. Clair is an avenue for pedestrians, cyclists, trees, cafés and shoppers, all of which lose out under a 24/7 exclusive right-of-way plan.
The proposed massive sidewalk cuts, left turn restrictions, substantial reduction of on-street parking, loss of many trees and sidewalk cafés, and the potential traffic congestion and infiltration into our local neighbourhoods will significantly impact the St. Clair community and make the 24/7 approach simply unsupportable.
The right-of-way was sold to city council on the premise that it would increase ridership, in theory by making service more consistent by reducing the gaps between streetcars, and on the premise that we could afford it. This now seems to be far from the case. A 10-cent TTC fare increase would net only approximately $20 million in new revenue for the TTC (compared with $65 million for St. Clair), and there is a mountain of evidence, particularly in the form of ridership statistics during the early 1990s, that show increasing fares to have a massive, virtually instant negative effect on ridership. It's as if one hand doesn't know what the other is doing.
Taking the TTC is already prohibitively expensive for many of Toronto's least fortunate, and the vast majority of riders lost as a result of any fare increase will be those who count pennies each day to take the TTC, and not those who can afford the increase but simply prefer not to pay. Any ridership growth realized as a result of the installation of an exclusive TTC right-of-way, or other expensive efforts aimed at increasing ridership, would be completely undermined or wiped out by a regressive system-wide fare increase that would impact the least fortunate the most.
To expensively tweak efficiency through fare increases is to create a system that is slightly more convenient for those who can afford the rising fares, and to make it quickly inaccessible for those who can't.
Cesar Palacio is councillor for Ward 17-Davenport, and former executive-assistant to the chair of the Toronto Transit Commission.
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