How Toronto Got Addicted to Cars

this video was sponsored by nordvpn yeah I'm surprised too because I've seen a lot of nordvpn ads just like you have but I use it for something those other ads never discuss but anyway more about that later I've lived in a lot of cities around the world but the place I've lived in the longest in my adult life at least is Toronto or Toronto as it's called by people who don't live there Toronto is the best city in Canada Toronto is one of the top three best cities in Canada it's the capital of Ontario in the largest city in the country today Toronto is a bustling Metropolis with over 2.7 million people and an incredible Skyline including famous landmarks such as the CN Tower and the Sky Dome and it somehow has one of the best public transit systems in North America too but Jokes Aside the Toronto streetcar system does have the highest ridership of any light rail system on the continent Toronto is a decent City by North American Standards but it will never live up to its full potential because Toronto has a problem it's addicted to cars Toronto was founded as York in the late 1700s and was designed to be the capital of the new province of Upper Canada the city was later renamed to Toronto in 1834. why'd they change it I can't say people just liked it better that way the city evolved like pretty much every city at the time centered around industry on the water as rail technology improved the city was built out along streetcar lines with the first streetcar being built in 1861. many of these streetcar suburbs are still some of the best neighborhoods in the city and I made an earlier video about the one that we lived in called Riverdale the 1920s really were Peak urban planning for most of North America the first train station in Toronto opened in 1858 which eventually transitioned to the current Union Station in 1927. and it's been under construction ever since the point here is that this city was not built for cars that is until after the 1940s when Suburban development went crazy which is the story of pretty much every city in North America just like in the US the post-war period saw an explosion in car-dependent suburbs the construction of massive freeways that cost nothing to use and lots of other subsidies and incentives to get people into automobiles this is where the addiction started in order to make room for all those new cars the streetcars had to go Toronto has the largest historical streetcar network of any city in North America but there were still lots of streetcar lines that were torn out despite public backlash for example there used to be a streetcar along Parliament street that was torn out in 1966. and on Mount Pleasant a 1976 poll conducted by the local Business Association showed that 88 of their respondents wanted to keep the streetcar line so of course that had to go too the Toronto subway was also built shortly after the war but one of the key motivations for creating it was a way to remove the streetcars to make more space for motor traffic on the opening day of the young subway line in 1954 the guy who was in charge of the TTC the Toronto Transit Commission was quoted as saying the Queen Street Subway should be started at once eliminating 80 percent of the remaining streetcar operation in the downtown area and freeing many main streets for one-way traffic with friends like that Transit Riders didn't need enemies another Toronto Star article later that year read the main purpose of that underground will be to lessen congestion on the streets the subway can be justified as a Central City traffic relief project this makes it very clear that Rapid Transit in Toronto has never been for the convenience of the people who take transit it has always been for the benefit of drivers right from the start the regional GO train system was also built not as a project for people who live near Transit but as a train you had to drive to and I made a previous video about that already speaking of driving in the 1950s several neighborhoods were bulldozed to build the Gardner expressway an urban highway right through the center of the city for the other Urban freeway the Don Valley Parkway Traffic Engineers didn't need to bulldoze many neighborhoods but that's only because Hurricane Hazel took care of that for them in 1954. this reign of Destruction to make the city car friendly was really only stopped after significant public protest which included that of famous author Jane Jacobs who also fought Urban freeway projects in New York as well they successfully stopped the development of the Spadina Expressway a project that would have absolutely destroyed the urban fabric of the city Jacobs was quoted as saying Toronto will commit suicide if it plunges the Spadina Expressway into its heart our planners are 19th Century men with a naive faith and an obsolete technology in an age of software Metro planners treat people like Hardware they haven't the faintest interest in the value of neighborhoods or Community their failure to learn from the mistakes of American cities will be ours too and that was 100 absolutely correct in every way but while the destruction slowed a lot of the damage had already been done what was once a beautiful walkable City connected to streetcar suburbs had become a wasteland of Office Buildings and surface parking lots but hey it was easy to find parking right I'm old enough to remember the Toronto of the 1980s it was a place you drove to did what you needed to do and drove home and all of those post-war suburbs still exist today as a yellow belt of neighborhoods owned exclusively for single-family housing it kind of looks like a motive piss that is drowning downtown Toronto and it's why you so often see this ridiculous situation of single-family homes with giant condo Towers in the background and nothing else in between this terrible land use and a lack of investment in transit for Transit users has resulted in the vast majority of Toronto and its suburbs being completely dependent on cars and so the busiest Highway in North America isn't the Katy Freeway in Houston or any other place in the U.S it's the 401 through Toronto this is what it looks like at 2PM on a Tuesday in the middle of summer in other words this is the best case scenario but I'm sure one more Lane will fix it Canada was growing a lot in the post-war period due to an increase in Immigration and a lot of those new people ended up in the Toronto region in particular when there was uncertainty as a result of the Quebec sovereignty movement in the 1980s many major corporations moved their offices from Montreal to Toronto by the 1990s Toronto was the largest economic force in the country and was urbanizing quickly but this is when it gets political up until this time Toronto was a pretty small City it was just this part here which today is called Old Toronto since 1953 the city did share some administration of regional planning with other nearby cities through a government structure called Metro Toronto but otherwise these were all independent cities with their own governments this all changed when Ontario elected a progressive conservative government in 1995. the conservatives developed an amalgamation plan to combine Toronto with all its suburbs this plan which came to be known as the magacity I'm gonna pretend that's how it was pronounced was not popular referendums were held in all six municipalities and in every single case they voted overwhelmingly to remain as independent cities so in 1998 the conservative government ignored all that pesky democracy crap and did it anyway this was billed as a cost-cutting effort but it was determined that over 70 percent of the expenses of the Toronto region were already being handled by Metro Toronto so there was never much room for optimization though the plan did include taking a whole bunch of programs that were previously paid for by the province and downloading them to the city which created massive budget problems that are still being felt today but despite what was said publicly it was widely speculated at the time that this had less to do with finances and everything to do with politics as more jobs and influence moved to Toronto it became the most important financial center of the entire country but of course being a quickly urbanizing City it was mostly left-leaning politically the provincial Conservative government didn't like the idea of a left-wing region having so much Financial power and so they forced the amalgamation of Toronto with its car-dependent suburbs which were politically conservative in order to take control of the region and it worked the balance of city council became increasingly conservative but the worst outcome by far was the election of Rob Ford was most famous for being a nutcase and smoking crack cocaine yes I have some milk to crack cocaine but as wacky Antics hid the fact that he was a terrible terrible mayor he admitted to being drunk at work and very often had literally no idea what was going on because he didn't bother doing his job actually understand that it's grades separated that it doesn't rip out traffic links it does rip out traffic lands it does you know what counselor lrts go down the middle of a road they tear up your roads oh you just Mr Mayor do you know about this specific okay he tore up bike lanes and canceled Transit projects and he did a lot of this without the approval of City Council and every year we have dozens of people that get hit by cars or trucks well no wonder roads are built for buses cars and trucks not for people on bikes and you know I feel my heart bleeds for him when I hear someone gets killed but it's their own fault at the end of the day Rob Ford repeatedly said that he saved the city over a billion dollars which was a dubious claim to begin with but after he was gone the next mayor well we uncovered details of the decisions taken by prior administrations to rack up huge amounts of debt in an account called unfinanced capital in essence the city borrowed money without an identified means of repayment and accordingly those amounts of money were never added to the declared debt of the city when I learned of this account the total unfinanced Capital that means Undeclared debt had reached nearly one billion dollars this is what happens when you have someone incompetent running your city but look at the map of his election Victory this was the suburbs politically dominating the will of old Toronto and the results were almost exactly along pre-amalgamation borders of course this was likely the purpose of the magacity in the first place in the early 2000s Toronto was proposing widespread Transit projects such as Transit City a plan to crisscross the city with Light Rail lines and they were slowly building out a network of bike Lanes now I'm not going to pretend that they were on the verge of becoming an urbanist Utopia but I lived there at the time and the future was looking pretty good but when the suburbs took political control all of that disappeared now Toronto's future was being decided by the people who lived in 1960s era car dependent Suburbia the magacity set back the urbanization of Toronto by at least 20 years and its effects are still being felt today Rob Ford was an objectively terrible mayor and he was an objectively terrible city council member before that but because he advocated for more cars he had the support of Toronto's suburbs in other words he fed the addiction Rob Ford was forcibly removed as mayor and later died in 2016 but the Ford name has become a cult now Rob's brother is the premiere of Ontario and he's brought in several pieces of legislation that seem to only exist despite Toronto it has become very clear that a vote for a conservative government in Canada is a vote against cities it shouldn't be that way but it is bike Lanes trams city parks and really just dedicating any of the land between buildings to anything other than car movement and car storage have become political issues and by the way don't bother complaining that you just want the urban planning without the politics because urban planning is inherently political every decision from transportation to development to zoning goes through some kind of city council and these are all political decisions you literally cannot separate planning from politics so you really really really need to vote in your Municipal elections I cannot stress this enough most races go to the incumbent but sometimes a challenger is only a small number of votes behind which means that the makeup of your city council is being determined by a handful of cranky old people the topics I discuss on this channel aren't new to most urban planners they know most of this stuff already what's holding your city back is most likely the politicians not the planners though Traffic Engineers do a good job of things up too strong towns has shown us that there is a strong fiscal conservative argument for more mixed-use walkable cities that car infrastructure is fundamentally unsustainable and that it drives cities and suburbs to Financial insolvency but fiscal conservatism is dead anyway and replaced with populist culture War issues it's time to stop the war on cars great podcast by the way I was featured in episode 74 Link in the description Toronto has the potential to be a great City maybe even the best city on the continent but it's being held back by its addiction to cars and the politics that comes with it thankfully there are several new projects especially Transit projects on the verge of completion that may finally bring Toronto out of its outdated car Centric planning and into the 21st century but I'm going to save those topics for a future video about how Toronto is currently suffering under its addiction to cars and how it might get back on its feet and I hope it does because there's nothing worse than a city of wasted potential now I travel a lot and I get back to Canada at least once a year which is good for keeping up to date on what's happening in Toronto but when I'm traveling I always end up running into a bunch of ridiculous technical issues that really shouldn't exist what surprised me is that a bunch of these issues can be solved using nordvpn which lets me choose where I want my location to be using an incredibly simple interface one of the most frustrating things for me is how poorly many websites Implement their login security as soon as I load up my web browser while traveling I'm inevitably met with security prompts and two-factor authentication connecting through nordvpn as if I'm at home usually avoids all this I've also seen sites that default to the local language and currency with no way to change it why do they do this but when this happens I connect with nordvpn Pro tip if you want English and Euros choose Ireland which reminds me when I'm surfing from a connection in Europe there's a bunch of American sites that won't even let me in they don't want to implement proper data protection so they just cut off all of Europe so I quickly switch over to my connection to the US in nordvpn and problem solved that same trick usually works for video streaming sites too which I'm happy to do because region locking content is really obnoxious I legitimately do not want to travel without a VPN anymore which is why I'm happy to promote this deal with nordvpn if you think this might work for YouTube then you can sign up at nordvpn.com not just bikes and if you use the code not just bikes at checkout you can get a significant discount and if you try it and you're not as happy as I am well then there's a 30-day money-back guarantee so thanks to nordvpn for sponsoring this video I'd also like to thank my supporters on nebula and patreon who pay me to lament lost streetcar lines if you'd like to support the channel visit nebula.tv not just bikes or patreon.com not just bites

Channel: Not Just Bikes

Views: 952,694

Keywords: urban planning, toronto, megacity, toronto amagamation, rob ford, toronto sucks

Id: KkO-DttA9ew

Length: 16min 59sec (1019 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 03 2022