Jennifer Smith

The following letter was submitted in response to a letter from Councillor Rick Malboeuf in the February 22nd issue of the Champion.

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To the Editor, Milton Champion -

I had honestly hoped that Councillor Malboeuf would have used the time since last month's budget meeting to educate himself on the economics of public transit, but apparently the efforts of staff and his fellow transit committee members to correct him have fallen on deaf ears.

To be clear, the numbers he quoted in his letter are the gross transit budget figures, as he well knows. After taking fares and the gas tax into account, the actual cost to taxpayers for our transit system is $1.5 million, not $2.5 million. And that number will continue to go down as ridership increases and our share of the gas tax goes up once the 2011 census figures are in.

The fact is, transit is one of those rare services that costs less the more people use it. Small increases in service levels - added routes, more frequent and more convenient service, etc. - result in ridership increases that far exceed the financial investment. The 50% increase in Milton Transit ridership that followed a 35% increase in service was not a fluke, nor was it purely seasonal. It was entirely typical of transit ridership patterns everywhere, and is showing every sign of continuing.

Conversely, small decreases in service and convenience generally result in drastic drops in ridership, making the whole system less efficient and more costly. If this is Mr. Malboeuf's intent, then he is definitely on the right track with his proposed quarter million dollar budget cut.

As far as other transit systems go, I agree that we should be comparing apples to apples. Of the examples he cited, Toronto is a huge metropolis; Georgetown is practically a village. Let's look at Peterborough instead, which has a comparable population to Milton at about 80,000 and a similar reliance on private cars for commuting.

Peterborough Transit has twelve bus routes (as compared to our six), runs seven days a week, and has an annual ridership of almost three million trips. That's nearly twenty times more riders than we have for about two and a half times the cost.

Of course, Peterborough has had a lot more time to develop their transit system. Comparatively speaking, Milton Transit is still in its infancy. Let's not strangle it in the cradle.
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UPDATE: The letter was published in the Champion on Tuesday, March 1st. Well, most of it anyway - they edited a bit of the snark out.

About a year ago I took a ride with my friend Zeeshan Hamid on the brand new Scott Express bus. We chatted about the differences and similarities between our respective wards, and I noted how much more sensible this route was than the one which meandered round my own neighbourhood.

The Scott route was the first in a series of changes to Milton Transit that culminated last fall in the implementation of new routes and the overhaul of existing ones to make them more direct and less of the Grand Tour variety.

Earlier this week I decided to check it out.

I caught the #2 Main Street bus at a stop a couple of blocks from my house. Note to the Town: the Commercial and Heslop stop is in a really bad spot - no sidewalk and it hasn't been shoveled, so you have to either stand in the street or in half a foot of snow. Once I boarded, however, it was a very direct and comfortable ride to the GO station, where it paused for a few minutes before continuing eastbound to the Wal-Mart and back again.

I can actually get from my door to the movie theatre in less than 20 minutes on a single bus now.

I've been hearing a lot of complaints about empty buses driving all over town, but that was certainly not my experience. Riding most of the length of the #2 route there were a total of fifteen people who rode with me on and off - and this was in the middle of the afternoon. Not exactly crowded, but that's about as busy as most suburban Toronto or Ottawa buses are during off-peak hours in my experience.

The only empty bus I rode was the #5 Yates route where only one other passenger got on. But of course that's all commuterville down there and the big commuter rush was still over an hour away at that point. I had a nice chat with the driver who informed me that not only does that bus get very busy after 6:00, but that he also drives the School Special routes to the two high schools, and those ones are completely packed. Standing room only.

I also had a long chat with the driver of the Scott Express, which was almost as busy as the #2 and had a couple of dozen people waiting to get on after I got off back at the station at about quarter to six.

Both drivers were very enthusiastic about the service, but frustrated and confused that they seemed to be getting a lot of push-back from Council. They have seen how quickly ridership has been growing since the new routes were implemented, and they know from their riders how much demand there is to have it expanded to weekends and evenings. So they don't understand why some council members are suddenly fighting to cut service.

Neither do I.

From what I heard at the budget meeting, it sounds like this is largely due to a lack of basic understanding of how public transit works. So for you, gentle readers, and for those Councillors who still don't get it, here are the facts:

• Transit is a service, not a money-maker. Fares help subsidize the service, but outside of very high density cities like Tokyo and Hong Kong, a significant percentage of the costs of operating a transit system is always covered by taxes.
  

• The 'fare recovery ratio' is the percent of costs covered by fares. Toronto's TTC has one of the highest ratios in North America at 66% (in fact, it used to break even before they stopped charging extra for riders crossing in from the suburbs back in the early 70s). Most other major cities like New York and Chicago are around 50-55% - smaller cities and suburbs closer to 20%. Austin, Texas has a fare recovery ratio of 9%. Milton's is about 17%, but we also get money from the gas tax so only 60% is actually paid for by property taxes.
  

• Conventional wisdom states that the higher the population density, the higher the fare recovery ratio and the more efficient the transit system. Compact cities have very efficient transit systems - sprawling suburban and town systems are less compact and therefore more expensive, just as it's more expensive to provide waste and snow removal and other services there. While all that is often true, it is actually an over-simplification. Density isn't the whole story, and transit can be made to work well in lower-density towns and cities.

• Small increases in service result in large increases in ridership. For example, Milton Transit increased service by 35% last year which resulted in a 50% increase in ridership. Conversely, small cuts to service often result in drastic declines in ridership - often colourfully referred to as a 'death spiral'. Nobody has ever made a transit system more cost effective by cutting routes or frequency.

The bottom line: If you really want our transit system to be more efficient and more cost-effective, keep it growing. If you want to kill it dead, by all means get out your axe.

Finally, for those who still believe that "nobody in Milton rides the bus" or "only poor people and seniors ride the bus", all I can suggest is that you do what I did and check it out (and yes, I'm looking at you, Rick Malboeuf). You will see what I saw - rich and poor, young and old, commuters, shoppers, students - a complete cross section of Milton all happily making good use of our transit system.

All aboard!

As a brief follow-up to my previous post, I wanted to quote in full from one of my favourite books: "The Shape of the Suburbs: Understanding Toronto's Sprawl" by former Toronto mayor John Sewell. It's a passage I've been thinking about a lot lately, especially after reading some of the comments on Hawthorne Villager.

After describing a commute by car and by transit, Sewell sums up these contrasting experiences:

"Transit promotes a sense of community: people are not competing with one another, but they are all on the same bus, sharing a common experience, reinforcing the idea of community. Transit promote tolerance - individuals experience people who are different ages, speak different languages, wear different clothes, and have different colours of skin, and know they are not a threat. One starts tolerating others because there is no choice, but quickly, toleration becomes a matter of standard behaviour. Transit promotes civility. One is expected to be civil to those around you , sometimes crowding very close, and most people are civil, respecting the space of others, sometimes even going out of their way to demonstrate respect. Teenagers do give up their seats to older people. The disabled do get priority. Riders do generally respect other riders.

"The private car promotes different values. It promotes a sense of individuality, as one must drive more against, than with, the rest of the world. Every day one proves how good one is. Driving promotes a sense of competition with other drivers for space on the road, and it is of the intense kind: each driver must pay very careful attention to what the other drivers are doing, and be prepared to react quickly if something is out of line. It's a bit of a jungle - one cannot relax for a minute. Driving in a sealed car also promotes a sense that everything is at a distance. The car is a bit of a cocoon with its personalized heat and sound system, and noise can't leak in too easily. The speed at which you move means the world passes by quickly.

"The private automobile promotes the values of individuality, competition, distancing. Transit promotes the values of community, tolerance, and civility. Obviously individuals can and do take actions that transcend these qualities. Some people on transit are really impolite and cause trouble. Some drivers are very considerate, and you notice it. For those in a bad relationship or a bad job, the drive to and from work can be the best part of the day. For some transit riders, the crowding is uncomfortable, and leaves them in a snit by the end of the ride. Sometimes transit breaks down and causes enormous inconvenience. But these cases are infrequent, and the more usual outcomes are the ones described."

Sewell is hardly unbiased when it comes to the suburbs, but I find this idea intriguing: that our values and attitudes are shaped by where we choose to live as much as they affect our choice. There certainly seems to be evidence of a fundamental shift in values and attitudes when one crosses the urban/suburban line; one need only look at a map of the results from any election in any city in Canada to see where that line is drawn.

How this might apply to Milton is another matter. We are not a suburb in the classic sense, and certainly no part of our town could be described as 'urban'. But I can tell you from experience that the sense of community I have felt living in downtown Milton is not all that different from the sense of living in any downtown Toronto neighbourhood. You get to know the local shop keepers and the parents of your kid's friends, you make at least nodding acquaintance with the rest of your neighbours, you participate in street events - you feel part of the life of the place. I've also lived in the Toronto suburbs, and it's not like that at all.

In our case, this has less to do with the use of transit and more to do with the availability of public space in general. Buses are one type of public space of course, but so are parks, sidewalks, libraries, coffee shops, restaurant patios, etc. Spaces like these all facilitate random interactions with many types of people of varying degrees of familiarity, allowing us to weave together what we think of as a 'community'.

However, none of these spaces can be accessed from inside a car.

I realize I might be coming off a little anti-car in these posts. Ok, more than a little, despite my earlier confessions about my car addiction. But honestly, I'm not trying to suggest that it's feasible or even desirable for most people to live entirely car-free in Milton.

Ultimately, it's about moderation in all things. It's about recognizing that there are multiple benefits in choosing not to drive sometimes in terms of our health, the environment, and the basic functioning of our community. Spending all of one's time cocooned in either a house, a car, or a cubicle is not only bad for us physically and psychologically - it disengages us from our fellow human beings in a way that, on a broader scale, may well be damaging our whole society.

But this is all terribly philosophical. I'll try to get more into the practicalities of transit in Milton in my next post.

  

I was pleased to see that the Champion finally got around to reporting on the transit debate that went on at last month's budget meetings. Although overshadowed by the hospital levy, Rick Malboeuf's motion to slash over a quarter million dollars from the Milton Transit budget was at least as surprising, and considerably more controversial.

As I reported at the time, the motion took everyone off guard and forced engineering staff and transit committee members to leap to the defense of our much maligned bus system. In the end, Malboeuf agreed to set aside his motion on the condition that Council and staff investigate the possibility of cuts over the coming year.

I had the impression that most councillors agreed just so they could move on.

The article has sparked a debate over at the Hawthorne Villager forum. I left a few comments, but I gave up after one person left a post about how someone would have to put a gun to his head to get him onto a bus full of the great unwashed, and how he failed to see any reason why he should choose suffer the grotesque inconvenience of waiting five minutes for a bus when he can jump in any one of his three (three!) cars any time he wants and pull up right to the door of his destination.

The overwhelming sense of entitlement and classism was making me a little queasy, so I decided to make a strategic withdrawal. If I had left a response, it likely would have been to question why someone happily spending thousands of dollars a year insuring, maintaining and fueling three cars - not to mention his tax dollars spent on new and existing roads - would find it so onerous to have to shell out $40 or $50 a year in taxes to provide transit for those who want or need it.

Alas, it would have gotten me nowhere.

I'm going to set aside the practical arguments for and against transit in Milton for a later post, because I want to address what I found most disturbing in all these discussions: the attitude that transit is only for students and tree-huggers or, worse, poor pathetic lowlifes who can't afford any better.

As an old Toronto girl, this attitude strikes me as particularly bizarre. I grew up in what were, at the time, the suburbs of Toronto, and the TTC was simply how everyone got around. My father was a fairly successful lawyer, so we weren't exactly short of money - and yet he took transit downtown to work just about every day of his career. So did all of his friends and colleagues. Even after my parents moved out to Bolton, he would drive to the King GO station and take transit to the office.

We had one car (nobody had two, of course) and my mother used it to run errands and drive me and my sister to skating or wherever. Certainly never to school, unless it was really raining cats and dogs. I walked to school until about grade 4 when I started taking the trolley bus. We moved to North York when I was in grade 6, but I continued to attend school at Avenue Road and Lawrence. I would take a bus, then the subway and then another bus to get there, often with my father part of the way if we happened to be leaving at the same time.


When I moved out of my parents house, I lived downtown and either took the TTC or rode my bike wherever I went. I didn't get my driver's license until I was 23 and living in Ottawa, but even then the car was never my primary mode of transport (my sister didn't learn to drive until she was 40).

Even after I married and we moved to Milton, I rarely drove. My husband would take the GO train downtown every day, so unless I felt like getting up very early to drive him to the station I was without a car most of the day. Which was fine since we still had a grocery store, banks, parks, the video store, and everything else I needed within blocks of my house. When my son was a little older and I got a part-time job up on Steeles, I just caught the bus at the stop right across the street from me.

It was only after we got the second car that I started relying on driving more and more. I was working from home so there was no need to commute by transit, the grocery store and several other amenities moved out of downtown, and it just became too easy to choose to drive.

My point is, I'm no angel. Like many people in Milton, I drive far more than I should. I do try to walk or bike as much as I can, but there's always an excuse - I'm in a hurry, it's too cold, it's too hot, I need to go to the Superstore anyway so I might as well drive. And it's taken its toll - I'm 35 pounds heavier now than when I moved here.

The difference is that I recognize all this as being a Bad Thing. Sure, as semi-affluent North Americans we're entitled to own two or three cars at a time and drive the block and a half to the mailbox and back instead of getting off our widening asses to walk. We're also entitled to throw out our clothes and dishes and buy new ones every week instead of washing the old ones if we have the money, but it's no less wasteful.

My father didn't ride the bus because it was cheaper, or faster, or better for the environment, or because he didn't have a choice. He took transit because it made sense, and because back then most people would have considered driving in your car by yourself to the office every day to be the height of wasteful self-indulgence.

I'm determined to get rid of that second car this year.

Monday was the last day for submitting comments to the Town about the Bruce Street Library. I submitted mine a few weeks ago, and several other people have been kind enough to CC me on their own contributions. They were all quite passionate and very well written, as have been all the letters to the Champion over the past year.

And then there's the 'Save the Library' petition, which was the subject of an article in the Champion last week and should be safely in the hands of Jennifer Reynolds by now. Last I heard there were well over 500 names, so a big tip of the hat to Carla, Joan, and Lillian for pulling that together.

UPDATE: Here's a great interview with Joan and Lillian from Milton Today TV.

The passion surrounding this issue in central Milton is obvious, but it's not necessarily shared by folks who live outside the area. For them, the main concern is the financial impact, and so I tried to address that in my submission. It's quite long (8 pages, with charts, graphs and maps), but I wanted to be very specific with what I was proposing.

Part of the problem is that while the numbers presented by the consultants for keeping a small branch at the site are a good starting point, they definitely err on the high side, and the public reporting of them has failed to take into account things like offset revenues from partial sale and leasing. Also, the staff figures (which I had to ask for details on) are grossly inflated compared to other branch libraries of similar size.

It's still not going to cost nothing, but I believe that we should be able to cut the estimated net capital costs from the feasibility study by about 2/5 and the net operating costs by nearly 2/3.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

I still don't know how all this is going to play out when it comes before council. There are a few councillors who have publicly stated that they will vote to keep a branch at Bruce Street, and a few more who are pretty much guaranteed to vote against. I've been working on the undecideds, often making a pest of myself online and after council meetings, but I honestly don't know which way they are leaning.

The best thing you can probably do at this point is contact all our councillors directly (not just the one in your ward) and let them know that this isn't just a Ward 2 issue. Downtown is for everyone, and keeping it vibrant by locating important services like this in the core benefits the whole town.

I'll try to keep you updated about future meetings.