tax land owners whos [property goes up to pay for transit simple

Hume: Evidence is clear — we need better transit Published On Sun Oct 09 2011 Email Print (84) Rss Article Comments (84) Image By Christopher Hume Urban Issues, Architecture So far, the two most important stories of the month have had nothing to do with the provincial election. The first came when the TTC announced that on Sept. 15 it had set a record, with 1.71 million rides that day. The second story, which appeared the same day, reported that more highrise buildings are under construction in Toronto — 132 projects between 12 and 40 storeys tall — than any other city in North America. The next on the list, Mexico City, has 88 such structures in the works. If anyone wants to know where Canada’s largest city is headed, there was the answer. Toronto will become what it already is — a city of towers and transit — only more so. Therein lies the future. This isn’t because of public policy or the intelligence of decision-makers. They’re usually in the way. Indeed, these are trends that fly in the face of everything Mayor Rob Ford stands for, and which go against the grain of every NIMBY association in the city. The mayor famously wants streetcars off the roads; ratepayers want highrises out of their backyards. Even if these positions were defensible as emotional responses, neither passes the reality test. The truth is that more than ever, Torontonians are choosing TTC and towers — depending on them, in fact. The figures make that clear. But still the transit commission struggles with chronic underfunding and lack of political commitment. In the current budget, the TTC will lose a further $46 million. And so we have a transit system that creaks along, 25 years behind the times and hard-pressed to cope with demand. Meanwhile, the towers now popping up in Toronto at an unprecedented rate will bring thousands of people to the city, many of them, whether by choice or necessity, dependent on public transit. The Toronto Board of Trade claims congestion already costs the GTA $6 billion annually. That will only get worse. The highway grid operates at full capacity but adding lanes and new roads simply doesn’t help. Still, we balk at the cost of building and operating new transit. What about the cost of not building new transit? This tradition of parsimony goes back at least to 1910, when Toronto killed a plan for the city’s first subway. And despite evidence from around the world — London, New York and Berlin — Queen’s Park and city hall continue to argue that public transit should pay its own way. Interesting that we do not demand the same of our highways. Though a truncated version will be constructed of an approved scheme that would have expanded transit throughout much of postwar Toronto, and the subway will be extended to Vaughan, public transit in Toronto remains rudimentary and woefully inadequate. Ultimately, of course, the issue is money. At a talk given last week at the University of Toronto, former Toronto city manager Shirley Hoy and municipal finance expert Enid Slack both made it clear Toronto cannot pay its own way. And given its limited financial resources, they argued, it never will. Their answer: Give cities more than property tax. “Property tax is a good tax for local government,” Slack said. “But property tax doesn’t grow with the economy. Toronto needs a mix of taxes. We should have some share of income tax.” Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi has launched a campaign to get 1 per cent of the sales tax for his city. Former mayor David Miller proposed the same thing in 2007. Hoy also blamed Toronto’s “structural deficit” on amalgamation, provincial downloading and Mel Lastman’s three-year tax freeze, which, she said, was “super-ridiculous.” Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca