LRT was actually a neo-liberal Trojan horse

Public transit should bring a city together, not further entrench divisions

LRT has been cancelled, and it seems everyone is reckoning with what comes next. I am not #NoLRT; nothing has convinced me the anti-LRT people had any interest other than protecting the Main Street “green wave.” I was never #YesLRT, either; I could never drink the Kool-Aid and believe this project would change everything for a more progressive Hamilton.

I am a bus operator and a bus rider. I know more than a thing or two about the frustration of overcrowded, late buses. I understand why the LRT was attractive as an option. But the project before us was a Trojan horse of neoliberal austerity and we should be glad to be rid of it.

There are many arguments for LRT that sound good on paper: building density, reducing transit commute times, encouraging investment to increase the city’s tax base, and creating green infrastructure to help fight climate change. All good, sensible arguments. They are undermined, however, by the previous provincial Liberal government, which used this project to entrench neo-liberal austerity.

The interests of Hamiltonians were secondary to the Liberals’ desire for increasing the connectivity between cities. It was about ensuring people being pushed out of Toronto could find cheaper housing elsewhere and yet still make it to work easily.

This was infrastructure that sought to make the movement of capital seamless. Rather than fixing structural issues of affordability in Toronto, LRT works to raise housing prices in nearby cities.

The #YesLRT campaign chose to largely overlook this, just as they overlooked the fact that the service was being contracted out to a multinational corporation entrenching the profit motive in a system of public transit.

LRT is often described as the backbone of a future transit system. But this future has no concrete plans and instead is foreclosing on truly progressive possibilities.

A curious level of #YesLRT outrage has been directed at Doug Ford for using the cost of operations and maintenance in his calculation without also factoring in the amount of revenue brought in. This certainly inflated his numbers. However, using the argument that users should and will pay fares, and that this is how we justify public spending, creates a system where service users finance their own public service.

Fares hit the working poor the hardest and LRT would have increased fares across the entire transit system, while also pushing many out of housing along the transit corridor.

The social good of transit, which should be free and accessible as much as health care, is lost in the equation when people cave to 40 years of neoliberalism and assume it is only through individuals paying that we can justify public services.

This neo-liberal backbone is made harder and more calcified using the lines of attracting economic growth to the city. We are facing a climate emergency and universally accessible public transit has to play a big part in reducing emissions and rethinking how we live. However placing hopes on LRT increasing economic growth is a good example of the subtle contradiction of austerity and growth hidden within “green” solutions.

Perhaps I am too influenced by Greta Thunberg, but there is no way in which we can seek unlimited economic growth and at the same time substantially reduce carbon levels.

Banking on economic growth that the LRT will bring that will pay for LRT itself and needed infrastructure upgrades is backing a horse that will certainly collapse midrace. We don’t need the unlimited economic growth when two families in Canada have as much wealth as the bottom 11 million. The money is there to fix our cities in a way that will promote sustainable life without buying into unlimited growth.

Transit brings with it the liberatory potential to claim the right to the city and the right to movement. Real public transit is about fighting to ensure that we are all able to move to wherever we need to find our own humanity. LRT was not about this, but about further alienation from each other and creating a deeply unequal city.

I am not naive to think that Ford has any interest in public transit as I’ve mentioned. But we must build our movements to create this for a liberatory city for all rather than just a neoliberal city for a few.

Fares hit the working poor the hardest and LRT would have increased fares across the entire transit system, while pushing many out of housing along the corridor