Keeping Track
How public transit made me an activist
[ Continued from Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 ] The one common thread of my life has been my love of trains. I was obsessed with trains, ships, and planes as a child. As a grown-up, I took photos of trains, met other railfans, started my own website to share my rail-related adventures, and incorporated technology into the hobby. It even directly resulted in me learning to fly. It also gave me a direct path to the cause-based activism that eventually got me to run for office.
In January of 2003, I joined a small charitable non-profit called the Guelph Historical Railway Association and on February 1st — the day etched in my memory as it began with the space shuttle Columbia burning up in the atmosphere over the southern US — I borrowed one friend’s digital camera and followed another new friend to the train tracks to go see and photograph trains, seeing 14 of them that first day. Having always enjoyed watching trains, making it a formal hobby had never really occurred to me prior to that.
In 2004, I ran an antenna from my back porch, peaking just under 30 feet off the ground, to a wideband receiver in my room which was plugged into my desktop, which also served as my server for railfan.ca, by both data and audio cables. The scanner was set up to monitor rail traffic through much of southern Ontario and stream it to the Internet, and incorporated some code I wrote to send me text messages when it detected anomalies that could be unexpected trains that might be worth seeing.
Over the next years, trainspotting became a defining feature of my life as I grew to learn and understand the rail network and rail operations. In 2005, I began flying lessons and started exploring the regional network from the air every chance I could get. Increasingly, what I saw was missed opportunities in the public infrastructure space.
In June of 2006, my passions for rail and politics collided for the first time since watching trains cross the St Lawrence River on the Victoria Bridge while listening to CPAC as a teenager from my grandparents’ Nun’s Island condo. I read a simple notice in the local paper in Guelph, the city I had been living at the time, noting that North America’s busiest highway, the 401, would be expanded from 6 to 10 lanes for the short stretch between Cambridge and Kitchener, Ontario over the subsequent five years.
For me, in the context of a technology journalist and a train nerd, it seemed odd and short-sighted. Why would we invest tens of millions of dollars to expand a highway, and at that for only five kilometres, when there were not one, but three sets of train tracks in the area, all of which were under-utilised?
2006 was a municipal election year in Ontario and Stephen Host, the new friend who’d taken me trackside for the first time in 2003, launched a website called GO K-W in time for the campaign to get the issue of transit expansion on the radar. I wrote extensively about transit issues throughout the year and the election candidates paid a lot of lip service to transit, but it would not become clear for several more years that our work had actually paid off, when GO trains returned to Guelph in 2011 – shortly after I left the city for Ottawa.
I joined the Guelph Mercury Community Editorial Board in 2008 and began writing more formally about these issues. In January of that year, my then-wife told me I needed to go to the next level in my activism, and not just write quietly hoping someone would hear. On January 29th, 2008, 6 days before Guelph City Council was to formally discuss the city’s official plan, she phoned the city clerk and requested time for me to make a presentation — and then told me to go prepare one.
This was the first time I had ever used PowerPoint, and was my first attempt at public speaking since graduating from high school nearly a decade earlier. My instinct was that PowerPoint should not be used to bombard the audience with the text of what I will say, but to tell a parallel story while keeping the audience focused.
The reaction to the presentation was very positive, and for the first time Guelph residents and journalists clearly identified me with the transit issue. She had been right: writing into the abyss would not be sufficient.
In the midst of my intense period of advocacy and writing, the Guelph Mercury announced a search for their first Top 40 Under 40 list, and on June 27, 2008, I was named as one of Guelph’s top 40 under 40 specifically for my work on transit advocacy.
I spent that summer working on Guelph Liberal candidate Frank Valeriote’s federal by-election campaign and was greeted near the end by the announcement that only two years after we had created GO K-W and started our advocacy, GO was announcing its planned return to Guelph by 2011.
The fights and discussions that got us there are not new; in the summer of 2009, I was sent the text of a speech given by TTC Chairman William C. McBrien on March 30th, 1954, at the inauguration of Toronto’s first subway:
Honourable Sirs and Distinguished Guests, on behalf of the Toronto Transit Commission I welcome you here today and wish to thank each of you for coming and helping us make this, the official opening of Canada's First Subway, a success.
We would not be human if we did not admit that we are a very proud organisation today. This tremendous task is completed.
The dream of 1944 becomes a reality of 1954. This project was designed and built in the ten most chaotic years in the history of our country - war, shortage of steel and building supplies, shortage of skilled and unskilled labour and a general increase in labour and materials of nearly 100 per cent.
True, it cost more than our original estimate of ten years ago, but if started today, at present prices, it would cost at least 15 million dollars more or 30 percent above the actual cost.
We are more than satisfied with the design, construction, finish, and equipment, and today we publicly express our sincere thanks to the engineers, architects, contractors, suppliers, and workmen for a grand job.
In admitting that we are a proud organisation today we must also admit that we are also a humble one. For we know that the completion of this subway is not the final solution of Toronto's traffic problems. It is only the start of combatting this monster. Many other lines will have to be built in the future.
But the right-of-way and construction of all future rapid transit lines will have to be financed out of general taxation. If public transportation is to be the medium of relieving traffic congestion in our cities, and we believe it is, its success will depend upon getting more people to use it rather than on increasing fares to make it pay. We must not price ourselves out of our own field. We know that moving the masses, in the future, will be a tremendous task.
But if planners will give us the same consideration as the automobile in providing rights-of-way for new rapid transit lines; if government bodies, federal, provincial, and civic, will start making capital expenditures for the benefit of public transportation, we will accept the challenge.
Our major problem in Toronto is traffic congestion. If our small downtown business area supplies one third of our taxation we cannot allow it to be strangled to death by traffic congestion.
Surely we now realise that our patient medicine prescription of street widenings is not the cure. For it has only lured unmanageable numbers of automobiles into our downtown streets that were already overcrowded. We suggest:
Eliminate parking on all major streets in the downtown area.
Parking meters belong to the horse and buggy days and have no place in a large modern city.
Develop fringe parking lots to be serviced to this subway and the downtown area by bus transportation.
Downtown business will have to establish a system of staggered hours for their employees. All of these improvements can be put into effect with little or no capital cost.
The proposed mile of Queen Street subway should be started at once, eliminating 80% of the street car operation in the downtown area, and freeing many streets for one-way traffic.
Do not sell public transportation short. We are not a dying industry, but one that can and will meet the competition of the automobile. For we know that the egotism is gone from driving a motor car and that, today, tens of thousands of automobile owners do not want to bring their cars into the downtown area.
We also know that what the great majority of our people want is good public transportation with more speed, greater comfort, and improved service at a reasonable fare. Our ambition is to give such service.
In conclusion, I wish to say that the Toronto Transit Commission does not want or expect any praise or glory for the completion of this gigantic task. It was our job and we did it. Our reward is in the fact that we, ourselves, know - it was a job well done.
Thank you.
McBrien was clearly a visionary who understood the future, and saw that we were not going in the right direction. From this speech, he would likely be heartbroken to learn that few of his lessons have been heeded.
I spent my last years in Guelph arguing against the expansion of the highways around Guelph in favour of better transit, very much in the way McBrien envisioned. In 2010, I moved to Ottawa to work on the Hill because the public policy space was where I felt I needed to be, and transit was far from the only issue that needed attention.