John Barber had an amusing article in the Toronto section of the Globe and Mail today under the title “Dear worry warts: Stop fretting about our city” (see here, but it’s available online by subscription only) – for your pleasure here are excerpted from the article three things Toronto can stop worrying about that relate to urban planning and design:

“Urban living seems to promote a special susceptibility to profitless anxiety. So here are a few things not to worry about, no matter what they say.

“Parking. There is never enough of it and there never will be. But this is not a problem. Problems are things susceptible to solutions. Nobody complains about the ‘bread problem’ because bread isn’t free and some robbers charge $5 a loaf – parking is just another thing you have to pay for, subject to the usual laws of supply and demand. Not having enough of it is an existential urban condition. Ergo parking policy is pointless….

“Gridlock. No such thing has ever occurred in Toronto, a city in which travel of all kinds is still remarkably easy. With apologies to those commuters forced by bad luck, inadequate income or circumstance to travel expressways during rush hours – most commuters make the choice of where to live – there’s really not much to complain about. Indeed, there would be no traffic ‘problem’ at all if local expressways were priced like parking. Occasionally clogged but always free, they’re a bargain. GO Transit is also ludicrously cheap. And the TTC, the most businesslike of local transportation services, is extensive and brutally efficient. The only thing worse than chronic congestion is its absence, a condition known as ‘recession’.

“Advertising. I will never understand why it is considered wrong to stuff as much advertising as possible into the transit system. The ads are the most interesting things you can look at openly on the subway. You can’t see the ceilings of most Japanese subway cars for all the fluttering paper promoting racy tabloids. Streetcar ‘wraps’ are fantastic. The only thing wrong with the new televisions on subway platforms is that the screens are too small.”

I agree heartily with all three with the proviso that as I mentioned in an earlier post (A Little Request of the TTC) the television screens on subway platforms should display the time until the next train, and that I’m not sure if I would classify GO Transit as “ludicrously cheap” since it suffers terribly from having no reasonable integrated regional fare scheme.

Gridlock may in fact be an increasing issue in the 905 but whether or not it truly is a problem is an interesting question, since roads in the 905 will never be able to have the capacity to support the level of car dependency of the 905 in the long term. In that case, gridlock serves the purpose of driving home the point that transit is the only complete solution to mobility in a relatively dense urban area.

Certainly instead of spending so much time worrying about advertising on transit, we should be focussing all our energy towards making the best, most integrated transit system we can, amending the fare subsidy structure, procuring lasting and adequate commitments to transit funding and infrastructure improvements, improving routes and service levels, and experimenting with ways to address the real problems of providing transit in disparate, separated, car dependent suburban areas.

Faced with these concerns, you have to wonder what kind of people think too much advertising classifies as a transit problem in Toronto.

(with apologies to Matt Blackett, the TPSC, and Spacing – I keep picking on them and feel bad about it – they’re not such bad people, and I think Matt left a quite nice comment down on my A Little Request of the TTC post, so really I owe him one – we are all really interested in making the city a better place, we just don’t always agree on what’s wrong and how to fix it)