Toronto’s future far from assured
As much as Toronto’s leaders prefer the past, the future looms ominously. Climate change has seen to that. What the city will look like and how well it will function in five years, let alone 10, 20 or 50, is anyone’s guess. But one thing is already certain: getting there won’t be easy.
Doing nothing is hardly an option, but even a quick survey of the cities that embrace change makes it clear that the dream of a better tomorrow comes with a high price, a price Toronto has so far been unwilling to pay.
It’s not hard to understand why: French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent imposition of fuel surcharge led to violent demonstrations that nearly tore his country apart.
The new tax was quickly dropped, but the genie is out of the bottle. Cities in Spain, Belgium, Scandinavia as well as France have taken dramatic steps to prepare themselves for a post-globalwarming future. Cars will be banned from the downtown core of dozens of Spanish towns and cities. In Paris, Mayor Anne Hidalgo hopes to eliminate diesel cars by 2024 and gas-powered cars by 2030.
It’s what former Toronto mayor, Rob Ford, would have called a “War on the Car” — but taken to a whole new level. And Toronto, a city willing to tolerate the deaths of dozens of pedestrians and cyclists every year rather than crack
down on drivers, couldn’t be further behind.
And if cyclists weren’t irritating enough, global cities across the U.S. and Europe, including the French capital, are now awash in e-scooters, not the kind kids use but electrified minivehicles that compete with cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles and bicycles for space on the roads and sidewalks.
E-scooter rental programs are so popular they have left cities in the dust. Yet again, technology has left civic officials scrambling to keep up. The knee-jerk response, of course, is simply to ban them. Obviously, though, the advent of e-scooters is another example of why cities — Toronto included — need a comprehensive transit strategy focused on mobility, not how to preserve auto-domination.
Meanwhile, the failure of Toronto’s Vision Zero road safety program has become a much more contentious issue than Toronto Mayor John Tory and his allies ever expected. It is a reminder that urban populations are ahead of local politicians in many respects and that civic leadership is a balancing act. Hidalgo’s popularity has fallen lately primarily because of her efforts to cut car usage. On the other hand, almost two-thirds of Spaniards approve of the country’s plan to reduce cars in the downtown core of 138 towns and cities by 2025.
No one would expect Tory to argue, as did Oslo’s vice-mayor of urban development, Hanna Marcussen: “A couple of decades ago, it was perfectly normal to smoke inside. Today, very few would do that. I think it’s the same with cars in the city centre. One day, we will look back and ask ourselves why we ever thought that was a good idea.”
Her argument is simple: “Half of Oslo’s transport emissions come from private cars,” Marcussen explains. “So, to reduce these emissions, we need to encourage private households to buy electric cars. We need to improve our public transport system and have to make it easier to ride a bike in the city.”
Toronto, which maintains a Trumpian silence on climate change, is going in the opposite direction. The mayor’s priority is not to get people out of their cars, but to make getting around by car faster and more convenient. No surprise the city managed to add fewer than 10 kilometres of bike lanes last year. As a result, Toronto’s future looks less assured than ever. If it isn’t enough that we starve public transit, we’ve decided to spend more than a billion dollars to rebuild the east end of the Gardiner Expressway, against the advice of city staff. This sort of thinking doesn’t bode well for Toronto’s ability to cope with the changes that lie ahead. Hundredyear storms happen every few years now, and each time the city closes down.
Equally troubling is Toronto’s failure to ensure a sense of social and environmental responsibility in the development it permits. We build the way we drive — quickly and thoughtlessly. This lack of vision means projects are approved in a vacuum. No wonder Tory refused to debate environmental issues during the mayoral campaign. He had little to win and much to lose.