Toronto, where I have lived my whole life, certainly has high points. There is the financial district, which is the second largest financial centre in North America and home to several good coffee shops. Toronto also features some excellent cuisine. Tyler Cowen, who in 2011 was listed among Foreign Policy’s top 100 global thinkers and whose blog with Alex Tabarrok Time magazine ranked third-best financial blog, once concluded after a restaurant tour of Scarborough plus rolls from a Sri Lankan locale and lots of driving around, “Scarborough is the best ethnic food suburb I have seen in my life, ever, and by an order of magnitude.”
With all it has going for it, Toronto really should be a world-class city. But I fear if it continues on its current path, it will instead become an honorary third-world city — certainly with respect to the unreliability of its public transit system, its inept municipal management, its descent into lawlessness and social dysfunction, and its NHL team’s dismal playoff performance. On this last point, explanations and proposed solutions vary; for the first three the causes are quite clear. If Milton Friedman’s classic 1993 essay Why Government is the Problem were being written today, Toronto could feature prominently in it.
The unreliability of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) has recently become intolerable. Last Wednesday during evening rush hour the TTC shut down a significant stretch of its Line 1 subway for two and a quarter hours. Just before 5:30 p.m., service was suspended from Lawrence to St. Clair due to a track-level injury at Eglinton (three stations spanning five kilometres of track). Also around that time, northbound passengers at a major interchange, Bloor-Yonge, were kicked off their train, causing significant overflow that took some time to clear. Later the initial service suspension was extended south to include Bloor-Yonge — making seven stops in all. Service was not restored until around 7:45 p.m. This was the second serious subway outage in less than a week: the previous Thursday, a significant part of the other major line was shut down for much of the day due to an oil leakage from a subway work car.
Mass public transit chaos has become almost commonplace since last winter. In mid-December, the TTC experienced lengthy shutdowns during the morning rush hour on no less than three days, with varying causes, including a trespasser on the tracks, multiple signal issues and a lost raccoon wandering the rails.
Then in February, extensive TTC delays were blamed on snow and ice. In a further demonstration of the City of Toronto’s inability to provide basic municipal services, snow piled up everywhere, with some sidewalks taking three weeks to clear. It was later reported that of the city’s 59 pieces of winter sidewalk-clearing equipment, nearly half were out of commission on average during the three days of heaviest snowfall.
