In the early part of Tuesday’s city council meeting, a sharp debate featured opponents from opposite worlds, yet, and this is what’s noteworthy, the motion in question passed almost unanimously. Council’s real chasm is on display when there is so much surface disagreement even without any real corresponding divergence of opinion. The motion was the synchronizing of city traffic lights in order to ease road congestion, requiring the purchase of newer hardware and software. Nobody really opposed it, yet there was a battle. Bridging this gap is only possible after understanding the underlying attitudes of each.
Gordon Perks took up the progressive line that tinkering with the traffic lights isn’t a bad idea in and of itself, and he stressed that he doesn’t oppose it, but it isn’t any kind of comprehensive solution, and he cautioned against it opening up what he called a false pathway. We are in the middle of becoming a big city, and it’s crucial during this stage to consider how we plan neighbourhoods. The thing to do is have more mixed purpose units and mixed neighbourhoods so people don’t need to shuttle kilometres across the city in cars because schools, shopping, and recreation are already near where they live. This is a more fundamentally sound principle than finding out how best to manage an ever-increasing number of cars in ever-worsening gridlock. There’s no immediate way to enact Perks’ concept, and he never suggested there was. It’s big-scale planning to be gradually and continuously phased in. It was an intelligent speech riffing off of the basic tenets of urban planning. But his opponents heard him say, “congestion is good” and their mind was made up, if it wasn’t already from the start.
“I think this is going to come back to haunt you,” Mammoliti said, referencing the above phrase. “Based on you and Adam Vaughan’s comments in the past, I think all you want to do is frustrate people.” Mammoliti, a gifted self-satirist, then proposed to council a motion where everything south of Davenport reverts back to horse and buggy, people wear pioneer-period costumes and all asphalt is removed. Literally, this was his formal proposal. In his mind, a community without cars is a relic of a bygone age, and since so many people currently depend on cars the solution to gridlock must be car-centric.
To repeat, Perks didn’t oppose synchronizing traffic lights. He and the likeminded don’t just simply want to stick it to drivers because they hate cars and those who drive them. But it has been proven time and again that though people enjoy a stress free commute, best is when they don’t have to commute much at all. A reasonable TTC trip or a walk is best. Of course this isn’t always possible. But in general, when people live around where they work, go to school, shop, and relax, not only do they claim to have a higher quality of life but traffic congestion is reduced. This isn’t a horse and buggy way of thinking, this is urban planning 101 in 2013.
Doug Ford encouraged Perks and Vaughan to visit the suburbs to see that people don’t live the way they do downtown. They drive, he said. This is true, but nobody said it was otherwise, and it’s such a flagrantly obvious point that no serious politician can believe he’s bringing new light to this fact. So why does he persist in this line? This is key.
Councillors who bullishly pursue automobile reliance (who even if they advocate for TTC improvement it’s only so subways mitigate car traffic) hear talk of car-free communities and are immediately stricken by all the encompassing paranoid fear the word “communism” once provoked. This isn’t just a flippant comparison: I think they really fear that artists, urban planners, and others form a vicious cabal, and any of their ideas, however sound or reasonable, must be rejected out of hand rather than considered as it’s simply part of a larger conspiracy to undue the fabric of society. A walking shoe and an LRT carriage have replaced the hammer and sickle.
This accounts for Mammoliti’s hysterical, out of proportion response to what was a very measured and innocuous speech. He reads things between the lines that aren’t there because his lack of basic urban planning knowledge precludes him from understanding the direction which cities around the world are moving in, and what is standard fare in countless conversations around Toronto. Remember, for all the apparent disagreement, Perks and Vaughan voted with the Fords.
To be fair, there’s congestion and there’s congestion. Toronto has a huge traffic problem. While Perks said he doesn’t want to live in a ghost town like Detroit where it’s easy to drive through because it’s empty, we’re not at risk of that. But he was responding to Councillor Luby’s recollection of being in Florida, how when an event downtown ended the city used scheduling foreknowledge to expedite cars’ efficient exit. When several events take place at once, sometimes cars don’t move for twenty minutes. So Perks responded by saying many businesses depend on this traffic, potential consumers near their shops, who might drink a coffee or eat or buy something from innumerable merchants in the half hour or so after the game. This is the congestion he favoured. Looked at another way, congestion is nothing more than people in the same place at the same time. It’s only bad if everyone is trying to leave at once because the event is up and the area offers nothing else. The point isn’t to ceaselessly aspire for more congestion, but to recognize that not only is some inevitable, but desirable.
There’s nothing about residing in the suburbs that precludes one from learning how cities work, but I expect Ford and Co. will begin reading Jane Jacobs only after they’ve put down Karl Marx. Their fundamental view that citizens are only taxpayers makes these authors’, who are otherwise nothing alike, a relevant comparison. Ford and Co. have a built in aversion to anything that in their mind resembles or can be associated with these writers. This is to the detriment of Toronto.
But the gap can be bridged. I propose a tiny group from each faction take part in an arranged sleepover in each other’s wards, where each day they follow a planned itinerary to see what life is like for The Other.
The Fords and Mammoliti can find accommodation in ward 20 where they take in some theatre and, if they’d like, a sporting event, as well as dinner and drinks in a restaurant of their choosing. But they must walk, bike or take TTC everywhere. The whole thing will be privately funded, as it’ll be all too easy to find a gamesome company from the private sector willing to broadcast the entire thing. The audience will be large and eager. And after all, when Mammoliti and Ford engage in such self-parody like in Tuesday’s meeting, I know when as a satirist to back off and let the pros do their work.
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Jeff Halperin is a Toronto-based writer. You can follow him on Twitter @JDhalperin.
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