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tronto's broken transit system

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Getting down to St. Catharines, a city ~120km from Toronto's city centre, is such a hassle on the weekend that I borrowed a car.

It's sad. How it got this way is as a North American phenomenon is an interesting tale of its own, and what they're planning on doing about it both regionally and in the city is equally worth a look. But I have little confidence in any of it coming to pass. Quite frankly, and at the risk of sounding like some discredited "free market" rightist, I think it's time to take the problem from the hands of the government and license some private firm(s) to get it right. The various governments involved have accomplished nothing in the past twenty-five years. It's well past time to get some competition into the mix.

All it would take, I suspect, is to pull together a room full of prespective investors and show them the profits to be had in building a system like Tokyo's JR. As a retailer, that (private) firm has obscene profits, by far the highest in the country. They do it by using their transit infrastructure as an input to the stations, and then turning the stations into shopping and entertainment centres. It's simple, it's attractive, and makes a lot of money.

Hell, in Toronto they could start with the area around Bay and Dundas. It's ludricrously under-developed given its location. Make that the site of a centre-piece station and build out radially. With an underground rail system making beelines to the burbs in all directions, it would be a monstrous magnet of commuters who'd learn to stick around and shop.