Quel surprise. The TTC’s “public meeting” on possible service cuts Monday night at Metro Hall had a public all right, but alas, no damn meeting.
Instead, it was a maps-on-boards sort of faux consultation featuring eager TTC service-reduction spinners wandering the floor with clipboards like salesmen at a trade show. Their job was supposedly to listen to complaints and expound on the “unproductivity” of the targeted routes, but their real function was to stay on message, the essence being, “cuts are an unfortunate thing but we have limited funds.”
And so we bid farewell to the David Miller principle that transit is a universal service, not one limited by geography and mortgage potential, and that all city residents, no matter where they live have a right to traverse the urban landscape with equal ease on a publicly-funded network.
Welcome, as well, to the new era where public hearings are reinvented as sell jobs. Sure, TTC chair Karen Stintz insisted to all who asked that politicians were listening to transit riders “there are general managers here and a comment box – there’s plenty of opportunity” for feed-in she said.
But, as councilor Janet Davis pointed out, “Not a single person came here to say ‘cut my bus.’ Indeed the 100 or so present respectfully studied the maps or listened to the looped slide-show and patiently explained to the clip-boarded ones how they worked shifts, feared walking an extra 15 minutes through dead zones, and counted on Sunday service.
Oh how clever of TTC politicos to have forced the multifold media present to nab transit-unhappy individuals for interviews, instead of filming a frustrated crowd en masse. “This is a way to dissipate dissent,” said Davis. And then she said what must have been rolling around many a head in room 309: “If we didn’t cut the vehicle registration tax, we wouldn’t have any of this.”
I got a special kick out of Monica Mitchell, co-founder of the Toronto Roller Derby and her crew of black-t-shirted sister derbiests who skillfully snagged passing reporters to argue on behalf of themselves and thousands of low-income kids using the hangar at lonely Downsview – on the to-be-cut 101 Downsview route.
I was talking to someone else when she made her pitch to the TTC spinmeisters and I’d love to know how they handled her argument that cuts to the Downsview bus would leave women and youngsters at night walking two kilometers across flat, barren, windswept terrain.
And what to make of those ridership numbers, anyway? TTC staff didn’t even have the stats available as hand-outs folks were left to scribble them down from the maps. What does it mean, for example, that on the 167 Pharmacy North, service will be limited to weekday morning and afternoon peak only, despite the fact that 340 riders currently board that bus on Saturdays. Or the 115 Silver Hills with a Saturday complement of 385 when weekday-only service is in the cards?
Transit guru Steve Munro, he of the long gray braid told me that he believed the process was moving too quickly and that number crunchers have “screwed up the math.”
For one thing, he said, the user stats on these lines don’t reflect the fact that there are bunched up busy periods and then times in between. Munro recently wrote in his blog that if “we start talking about increasing walks for riders in areas with low demand and infrequent service, we will see the network gradually disappear…That’s the problem with ‘efficiency’ it’s easy to point to a half-empty bus or streetcar and say ‘get rid of it’, but that’s the path to dismal service.”
It’s the same pathway that leads away from the unruly democracy of town hall meetings and any pretense that citizen opinion matters.
