This evening I went to a party organized by the I Heart Public Transit lobby group, which is working to pressure all levels of government to provide more money to fund the public transit systems in Toronto. MP Olivia Chow and MPP Rosario Marchese gave speeches, and somebody gave awards for the group's busiest activists.
Public transit has concerned me for years. IMHO Rob Ford made a big mistake throwing out the TransitCity plans: the planners got it right for once. His hate for streetcars is knee-jerk. Actually, a dedicated streetcar route takes so many drivers off the road that the remaining drivers aren't seriously worse off. It's true that the construction of the dedicated St. Clair line took far longer than it should have, partly because of unforeseeable factors (the plan being fought in court, upgrading other infrastructure at the same time). But now it's finished, and as someone who lives in the neighborhood I can say that it's a great benefit.
A few years ago I did some canvassing of my own in defence of TransitCity. I solicited petition signatures among TTC users in the St. Clair West station, and went door to door in the area just north of Eglinton West on what seemed to be the snowiest day of the year. Half of the locals seemed to be in Florida, but we did meet an Italian-Canadian woman who was baking stuff, and ended up giving us a couple of warm little roles. You can't buy an experience like that!
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