Taras Grescoe is a straphanger: a rider of subways, buses and trains, and a flag-bearer for the urbanism movement. His new book Straphanger (HarperCollins) – the title comes from an old term for commuters in New York and London – is a manifesto in the shape of a travelogue aimed at “saving our cities and ourselves from the automobile.” In an effort to illuminate the follies of a century of auto-centric planning policies, Grescoe crosses the globe to take a tour of the world’s best and worst transit cities to see what works and what doesn’t.
I sat down with the Toronto-born author to talk about the global forces driving transportation behaviours, the culture war that has enveloped transit in North America and what lessons this city can learn from his journey abroad.
In your travels, what was one of the most surprising success stories that you encountered?
Bogotá surprised me because it’s in Colombia, a country in the developing world, and they set up this system very quickly that works like a subway on the street with fast loading buses that arrive sometimes three or four at a time on the same platform. It’s a very effective bus rapid transit system. I usually don’t find the experience of riding on buses all that pleasant. You feel like the slowest thing in traffic, you feel like you’re blocking everyone’s way. You stop every block or two. It was interesting to see a rapid transit system that worked that well that was based around buses. It’s a really good solution for a city like Bogotá. Now there are 84 systems like that around the world, mostly in Asia and Latin America.
A city that surprised me in general was Los Angeles, which everyone associates with sprawl and freeways, but in fact they’re investing a huge amount in public transportation expanding their existing subway, trying to expand their subway out to Santa Monica, and building a lot of new light rail. So they’re really trying to balance things and really get away from the domination of cars.
In Toronto recently, people have been evoking Los Angeles as a model in regards to what they did in 2008 to introduce a half-cent sales tax to fund transit expansion. Is Los Angeles a good role model for Toronto to be looking at right now?
Because there’s such a high approval rating in the surveys I’ve seen, that might be one way to go. I would say as much funding as you can get from as many different places as possible, whether it’s a congestion charge which is earmarked for public transportation or a sales tax, in some cases. The ideal, this is something that should have happened a long time ago, is that the federal government guarantees an annual revenue stream for urban transit. Canada spent, I think, $720 million on transit federally, and that was a good year, in the latest year in which figures are available. Germany spent $8 billion. They say that Brazil is going to spend $500 billion on infrastructure, much of that will include high-speed rail. Some countries take this kind of thing really seriously. Because we’re so invested in automobiles and the oil patch, we haven’t been taking it that seriously and we’re paying the price already in terms of congestion in the GTA, which has an impact on exports and also local mobility.
You talk about Toronto being in the grips of a culture war. On the one hand you have Rob Ford ripping out bike lanes and ranting about “damn streetcars” and on the other you have a booming condo construction industry driven by the demand of people wanting to live downtown. Who’s winning? Which way do you see this culture war going?
I think there’s a real revolt going against Rob Ford’s vision right now. Someone made quips that having Rob Ford as mayor was like waking up from a frat party with obscenities tattooed across your forehead. I kind of feel like Toronto’s feeling that on a metropolitan level right now. It’s like “How did this guy become the head of the largest city in Canada, a metropolitan area of 5.5 million people?” There’s a real revolt going on against his vision amongst councilors. Karen Stintz the chair of the TTC stood up to him. And I think this might be a little speed bump or detour that Toronto has encountered on it’s way to a more sensible future. I hope. Knock wood.
I don’t know if you saw today, Metrolinx announced that they are going back to basically the Transit City plan that council has approved. Is that good news for Toronto?
Of course it is. It was a fantastic plan developed under David Miller. It was a plan that would have served really poor neighbourhoods as well as well-off neighbourhoods. It was a system that was developed with really good scholarship and advice, using the best things that we know about urban transit, and it got killed because basically Rob Ford didn’t want light rail or streetcars in his way and there were enough people in the GTA that agreed with him. I think we’re seeing the results of, you know, congestion was so horrible in the area, it costs the region $6 billion a year in Hamilton Toronto. Transit City was definitely an amazing plan. I loved the way it used light rail and I get the feeling it might be happening again. There’s enough will from the people. There should be light rail on Eglinton it doesn’t have to be underground the whole way there should be light rail.
In Toronto, the transit debate and urbanism as a bigger debate, kind of tends to divide left and right. Is that unique here? Have you seen instances of that happening other places?
It’s unique in North America. In Europe and Asia, there’s no debate about transit. Everybody on the left and the right, even the far right, know that urban regions need good transit in order to function. Cities are that dense and that big that it’s elementary logic. Our cities are maturing in North America and we’re hitting that wall now. I think there is an ideology tied up in these things. I go out of my way that Dictatorships have built metro systems, under the soviets, but also the Germans built the autobahns. Transportation should be independent of ideology. We have to look at what works in cities. And I find a lot of people are ultimately aiming at the same thing. The conservative discourse which is often about community is often about public space. There’s a nostalgia for the time of trains and town squares, coherent communities. In the end we all kind of want that.
What’s emerged however is the car has kind of divided people we’re all rushing past each other at 55 mph, 100 km/h, or, if you’re on the 401, 2 km/h. We’re divided and we ended up in gated communities, subdivisions and malls, privatized space that should be public. We’ve been divided by our technology and the myth of freedom that comes with car ownership has a lot to do with that. I think we’ll find that we all have a lot more common ground than we think. Oddly enough it can start with getting on a streetcar, a lot of people are really resistant to that idea. I think there’s a fear of society, there’s a fear of the public. People that say they don’t like public transit, it’s not just germaphobia, it’s actually like, “I don’t know if I can take the implications of all of us together. I need to control my circumstances. Let’s go to the mall kids.”
How do you avoid preaching to the converted, people who already sing the praises of urbanism?
Yeah, it’s a risk. What I did was I turned my book into a travelogue. I admitted right from the start that I’m a person that mostly gets around on subways and buses and I ride a bike and I walk and this is my journey through the world. See if whether you know there’s a future for this, whether I can expect to keep on doing this. So I’ve turned it into what I hope is a really engaging travel story. Going from city to city, checking out ghost stations in Paris and New York, abandoned platforms and things like that. And meeting people along the way, people that believe in freeways and the future of the suburbs, testing my ideas that way.
So I don’t think I was just doing a green screed, diatribe against the car. I drive; I have my driver’s license. I always renew it. I live in the real world in North America where we have to drive at certain times. I think the kind of driving we’re going to do and the kind of driving I expect to do will be changing. We might be using public transit more and more for our day-to-day activities and saving the cars for weekends, for trips for pleasure, which is the way they were originally conceived. Cities don’t really work that well, especially mature cities, if you presuppose that automobiles are going to be the de facto mode of public transportation. Cars have their place for sure; it’s just that we’ve hit a wall in a lot of cities in North America in terms of congestion and a lot of lost time for the economy.
Is the bigger challenge editing that American Dream? As this idea of every family with their car spreads around the world, what is it going to take to put a cap on this concept that is so ingrained in our culture?
I started off by asking people to imagine the horror story of 2 — 3 billion cars on the planet by mid century. There’s about 600 million now. I don’t think it’s going to happen for a number of reasons. I think that there is that aspiration, China is motorizing as its middle class expands. But there is a countervailing force and that force is the price of gas, which whatever you think is happening with oil, one thing is certain, demand is rising and we’re not finding new supplies at the rate that we used to, the stuff that we’re getting is harder to get out of the ground. And I think that’s going to be the real force that limits the spread of the American Dream around the world. And also convinces people that hey, maybe it’s time to get on a bus or a subway instead of being stuck in traffic. So I think it’s going to be a natural process. I also see it happening all the time. People who would never would have ridden the bus or the subway before, you see them now.
There’s a whole generational thing too. For the boomers it was you hop in the Mustang and the freedom of the road, man. That whole romantic dream. But the Millenials are like, “Well no, I’d actually rather have a smart phone, meet my friends and get on the subway. And I actually feel a little bit freer, I don’t have to spend so much time making the down payment.”
We live in North America, we have to drive sometimes, but it’s more a question of not getting on the high horse and pointing a finger at people who drive, it’s just like, well reduce trips, if you can. That’s always been my attitude. Too many people get too dogmatic about these kinds of things. I was trying to make it, trying to bring both sides.
One of the things that you wrote that really interested me was that Toronto used to be a transit leader and well regarded, but now we’ve sort of lost that lead and fallen behind. Are we alone in that? Are we bucking the trend when other cities are picking up the slack? Or are there other places that are still struggling?
There are a lot of other places that are still struggling. Philadelphia was one that I visited with a similar sort of age and structure as Toronto. They’ve got a really old transit system that’s kind of suffering. They’ve got trains from the ‘50s signals from the 1930s. The transit goes everywhere, you can get around, it’s just they don’t have the money because so many people have opted out to the outer suburbs where the taxes don’t go back to the transit system in downtown Philadelphia. But even there people are starting to move back downtown.
But you don’t want to be compared to Philadelphia. You want to be compared to Paris or London. It’s the biggest city in Canada, one of the strongest economies on the planet right now, I mean Toronto should be comparing itself to the great cities of the world and aspiring to that. And in a lot of ways it does: in its architecture, in its innovation, in its arts. But for some reason it’s fallen behind on its infrastructure and its transportation.
What are two things Toronto can do to improve its transit system. First, something it could do immediately, and second, something it should be planning as a long-term project?
Something the TTC could do right away is to hire a good PR firm. I mean, I love the Rocket stuff and all that, that’s great. But they should turn themselves into the underdogs, the heroes of Toronto. Because everyone has a horror story about the TTC, the guy asleep at the token counter, that kind of thing. But the other thing is they’re keeping the city running. The cities like Los Angeles have done a really good job saying “Getting on the subway or the bus is great for the environment,” and, “Look how much money you’re saving.” The TTC does a little of that, but… Montreal has these great TV ads.
Big picture, you need a regional level planning association for transit. Metrolinx exists but its new, they’re not really doing their job. They’re not contributing enough money or expertise. They should be working at the level of a TransLink in Vancouver, which does true regional transit planning, or a TriMet in Portland which are two good examples of where they’re really thinking regionally. The TTC is basically a local network that has been called upon to do the job of a regional transit and transportation planning agency and Metrolinx needs to step up.
This interview has been edited.
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Michael Kolberg is a writer who writes for Toronto Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @mikeykolberg
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