I would willingly pay more taxes to enable a subway to every intersection in Toronto, would finance a network that carried us to empty farmer’s fields for picnics. But I’m like that. Lazy. I see subways as underground couches, would pay to build more of them in order not to have to stand up.
In fact, on last week’s wet windy Friday, distressed by everything, I rode the subway for an hour — the way you take crying babies for a drive at 4 a.m. — and found comfort in the vibrating silence, the etiquette, the feeling that I was seated and still getting somewhere.
What’s wrong with Ford? Pro-subway, the man actively fights his own cause, alienating supporters, shouting, threatening and pouting. This is what he does even with allies and voters present. I sometimes envision him alone in a room, and he’s still doing it.
We won’t get more subways on his watch, and he must know this, but he still cultivates an ill-considered resentment against lovely LRT cars. Think of them, Mayor Ford, as little necklaces rather than stonking great chains.
I’m gilding the subway lily, you say. Dupont Station a gem? It’s covered in chips and old hair. Main? Stark is the kindest word. Queen is less of a jewel, more of an armpit. Bessarion, I agree, is a symphony in loneliness. If you want solitude, go to this pointless station at noon mid-week after visiting Sheridan Nurseries and you couldn’t use it as a crime alibi.
“The TTC man might recall the shrubbery,” you tell the police. “A Kerria japonica, an indistinct plant but very hard to find.”
Extending the Sheppard line was a Mel Lastman project. What will Ford’s transit epitaph be? We Got Nowhere?
This mayor is why there won’t be a Sheppard extension or a true Eglinton subway. But there will — sooner or slightly less sooner — be an attractive LRT-technology not-quite-subway along Eglinton that Ford dismisses as mere “trolleys.” Trolleys, light-rail, loser cruisers, it all adds up to terrific transit.
Transit is a postcard. On vacation, I take the subway, writing down the stations and line changes on hotel notepaper like a little menu for visiting inadequates that you can shove at the locals when you get lost.
Later, you’ll recall cities by their subways. Paris wins, with beautiful Métro stations as distinctively dressed as its people, so much so that you’re unsettled when lost, but still appreciative. Lisbon’s modern stations are so artful that my vacation photos are all-tiled. Madrid’s are as small and shabby as Barcelona’s are confident.
The great Canadian journalist Taras Grescoe is transit-mad too. His wonderful new book, Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile, makes him transportation’s wine-taster. Shanghai’s ambrosial, he writes. New York is drinkable, Tokyo is a 1990 Meursault, Bogota is a boxed wine, Vancouver is a West Coast sparkler, and Toronto is mere . . . spillage.
Toronto’s transit is so bad you wouldn’t boil potatoes in it.
Grescoe writes more in desperation than in anger. How could we have fouled our nest this way? Your commute defines your quality of life.
Great transit is a wrinkle in time, the ends of a subway line-string brought together. Bad transit is packed with incident. In Toronto, the incidents are traffic rage, scarred bus stops, social resentment and a soul-destroying wait-time between a job you hate and a home you can’t afford.
It didn’t have to be this way.
We have to think ahead. And the first task is finding our next mayor. She or he needs political smarts, a certain charm, a willingness to compromise, an international understanding of what a city can be, an allegiance to every part of the GTA. Most of all, transit comes first.
Let’s discover that candidate now.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Heather Mallick
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