Here’s a great video by Streetfilms that shows the incredible transformation of New York’s public realm during the Bloomberg administration. I found it via The Urbanophile blog. It’s about 5 minutes long.

Video Description: “There’s nothing more dramatic than looking back five or ten years at Streetfilms footage to see how much the streets of New York City have changed. In this wonderful montage, check out the incredible changes at Times Square, Herald Square, the Brooklyn waterfront, and many other places that outgoing NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and her staff have intrepidly transformed.”

It just goes to show what can be accomplished with the right leader and political will. I wish we (Toronto) had a mayor who understood the value of beautiful public spaces and bike lanes. It’s unfortunate that these things often become attached to political orientation. This shouldn’t be the case. It’s just good city building.

I was cruising the twitter sphere yesterday when I came across the following chart, outlining the various transit vehicle capacities here in Toronto. It was created by Cameron MacLeod of #CodeRedTO, which is a grassroots group advocating for “a rational, affordable, and achievable rapid transit strategy for Toronto.”

On the left you have the vehicle type and then you have the capacity in terms of number of seats and standing room. The planned capacity is essentially the sum of those two numbers and the “unsafe crush load” is the number of people you could fit if you really put your back into it.

Articulated buses refer to the longer (1.5x) bendy ones and, similarly, ALRV streetcars are the longer, articulated version of our regular streetcars. The low-floor streetcar is similar to what Toronto will be getting. And SRT is the Scarborough Rapid Transit system.

The chart also compares between vehicle types: How many cars would you need to move the same number of people? How many buses? And so on. As one example, you would need 15.9 buses or 982 cars to move the same number of people as the Yonge subway line!

What’s missing from the above chart though is light rail transit (LRT), which is comparable to the linking of up to 3 low-floor streetcars. In the case of the under construction Eglinton Crosstown LRT line, the planned capacity is 750 people!

This is an hugely important takeaway because many people, including our own Mayor, do not properly distinguish between streetcar and light rail. The two are not one and the same. LRT has the potential to move a lot more people.

In fact, at 750 people, the Eglinton Crosstown could move more people than the Sheppard subway line, which is only operating on 4 cars (as compared to 6 on our other subway lines).

So while it’s all fine and dandy to bang our fists on the table and advocate for subways, they don’t make economic sense in all parts of our city. With the Sheppard line, we’ve been leaving capacity on the table and wasting taxpayer money.

Of course this chart is also useful for those outside of Toronto. What I like about it is that it clearly shows the tool chest available to cities when it comes to building transit. Every city and neighborhood is different. And I think it’s important to have intelligent conversations about what makes sense in each.

Thank you to Cameron and #CodeRedTO for allowing me to post their work.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a big supporter of road pricing. I think it’s an incredibly efficient way of reducing congestion, improving regional productivity, making us more sustainable, and funding other infrastructure, like transit.

But one of the arguments I often hear against road pricing is that it’s unfair to force a segment of the market out of their car if there’s no good alternative (ie. proper transit). And even if the revenue produced from road pricing goes towards transit, we all know that new infrastructure takes a very, long, time.

So we end up with a chicken and egg problem: Road pricing is a great way to fund transit, but it’s difficult to implement without the proper transit in place. So what should we do? What comes next?

I have two thoughts.

First, road pricing doesn’t necessarily mean that you can no longer drive without paying. Effective road pricing matches price with demand. Therefore if there’s nobody else on the road, you wouldn’t be paying (or at least wouldn’t be paying much). This is what makes it efficient—it adjusts. So for somebody without the willingness to pay for peak congestion pricing, they could still have the option of driving at another time. Go in early or go in later.

But what it does mean is that no matter what time you’re driving, the road could be priced so that it actually functions again. In Toronto today, many of our roads are completely failing. Demand greatly exceeds available supply (the amount of road we have) and so you can’t use them to get anywhere in an efficient way. So what we have is equal access to terrible non-functioning roads.

Second, there’s no such thing as a free lunch and nobody said it was going to be easy to build phenomenal infrastructure. We all complain and say we want it, but when push comes to shove, are you willing to open up your wallet and pay for it?

So I say forget pontificating about chickens and eggs and just do it. If we priced roads and setup other appropriate revenue tools, I’m sure there are some financial wizards in this city that could use tax increment financing or other mechanisms to ensure that we get shovels in the ground today for the new infrastructure that we so desperately need.

These are important discussions to be having no matter what city you live in. I would love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below or on twitter.