Sanctimonious wank — er, post — about reaffirming the intrinsic value of the public sphere and rededicating oneself to the idea of The Public Good will appear shortly. Renew. Re-confirm. Re-energize. Raw material and uncoordinated ideas have been sloshing around in the brain sludge for a couple of days, will rise to the surface and be placed in what I hope passes for coherent order as soon as I can get the proper synapses firing. You Have Been Warned.
Love, strength, and purpose in the new year to all — friends, colleagues, comrades, and fellow travellers — in the meantime.
Really, people, it’s a no-brainer. We shouldn’t even have to ask. It’s part of living in the city and being a good neighbour.
I touched on this a few weeks ago in a post about my attempt to get part of a local green space declared an off-leash area. The upshot of that was that it’s not going to happen any time soon, but in terms of on-the-ground realities, local residents and users of the space — parents, kids, students, dogs and dog people — have established an informal modus vivendi whereby everyone lives and lets live. We look the other way, we keep our dogs under control, we pick up the empty booze bottles, and we try to keep it cool. It’s that old spirit of generosity and accommodation. To the extent that the no-dogs rules are enforced, it’s on a haphazard and occasional basis, and it’s complaint-driven.
So it stands to reason, then, that it’s in all of our interests not to generate reasons for complaints. Which brings me to the prosaic and yucky trigger for this little rant: people who don’t pick up after their dogs.
Seriously, people? Seriously? No, really. Seriously? Do I have to walk you through this?
If you leave dog shit where kids are playing, sooner or later someone’s going to get it on them. Angry parents complain, as they have every right to do, and before you know it the neighbourhood is up in arms and the by-law officers are handing out tickets and a nice neighbourly vibe is poisoned. All because some asshole couldn’t be bothered to assume the most basic responsibility of dog ownership / dog stewardship.
Come on, folks. A lot of life’s little aggravations can be avoided if you just follow one simple rule. Remember the old truism about how it only takes one asshole to ruin things for everyone? Don’t be that asshole.
Privileged bourgeois arriviste makes a career out of pissing all over us, whines and holds his breath in pursuit of a manufactured peerage, flips us the bird as he flounces out in a snit, commits fraud, does time, slinks back into our country in disgrace whining about what a victim he is, and yet we still think he’s worth listening to. Of course, this could never happen in real life.
(Doesn’t mean I agree with everything he’s ever said or written, but h/t Stephen Marche.)
Water main let go just around the corner from my house. My kid’s school bus was late getting here to pick her up, and couldn’t drop her off in the afternoon; I had to go meet the bus a couple of blocks away.
Yeah, yeah, I know. First world problems. I’m not trolling for sympathy (well, maybe not exclusively — ed.), but I’m raising it in the context of a certain claim going ’round about saving taxpayers a billion dollars.
I’m not an accountant, but yeah, I suppose if you don’t spend money on maintenance, upkeep, or, you know, TAKING CARE OF STUFF, then I guess you could argue that you’re saving money by not spending it. Only problem is … well, see above.
So yeah, maybe it does save money in some reality-free bubble somewhere when you don’t spend money on infrastructure maintenance. But then the kind of people who buy into that kind of reasoning are probably rolling around in the schadenfreude right now because this is happening downtown.
Hey, nobody said this had to be logically coherent.
(This grew out of a Facebook discussion with the divine Septembre Anderson, so it’ll be a little abrupt. Indulge me. Tips of the chapeau are also due to Rosalind Robertson, Breeyn McCarney, and Daniel Cowans.)
The context was a juxtaposition of revenue from city recreational programs, and a proposal that those programs should be free, and the loss of municipal revenue from the Vehicle Registration Tax, regularly caricatured as part of the Leftie Downtown Elitist War on the Car. This isn’t really intended to get into the specifics of that; it’s more of a step back, let’s look at the big picture and try and see this in historical context (oh Christ, there he goes again — ed.) kind of thing.
Anyway, someone on Septembre’s FB feed was talking about the way we “penalize” car owners whenever the city needs revenue. I jumped on it, perhaps a little more intemperately than I might have:
The idea that you’re being “penalized” by having to pay a tax is where the debunking begins. I’d suggest a review of Alex Himelfarb‘s Tax is Not a Four Letter Word for starters. And if you do something as fundamentally self-centred, anti-social and environmentally destructive as driving a private automobile on a regular basis, then quite frankly I don’t have a problem with you being required to pony up more …
I’ve never met a group of people more obsessed with their own privilege — and less willing to acknowledge it — than motorists. Their sense of entitlement to absolute primacy on the roads is boundless. I don’t care about other users, and why do I have to stop for that goddamn streetcar, and get the fuck out of my way cyclists because I just wanna go wherever the fuck I want as fast as I can. And it’s my god-given right to park my private car directly in front of my destination, as opposed to actually having to walk a block or two from a bus stop or something. Angry, aggressive, impatient, and selfish. Ford is just an extreme and grotesque example.
Bluntly, I’m out of patience. Don’t like gridlock? Don’t like road tolls? Don’t like scrambling for parking spots (which are also heavily subsidized, BTW)? Get out of your fucking car and take transit. Or ride a bike. Honestly, just stop whining and grow up.
The discussion continued, with the same participant arguing, not without justification, that he couldn’t rely on public transit to get where he needed to go in a timely manner. He also complained, again with some reason, about the wasted time and lost productivity due to service interruptions, overcrowding, poor service, and all the other problems besetting public transit in Toronto. (I’m paraphrasing, and in truth, it would be fairer for me to allow him to speak for himself, so in that regard, if he wants to respond here, I’ll commit to publishing whatever he wants to say, unedited, at as much length as he wants.)
At any rate, that prompted this additional outburst of sanctimonious wankery:
… if you find public transit inefficient, perhaps you should work to improve it, and support public initiatives that will do the same. (Ruinously wasteful subways that will never justify themselves in terms of ridership might be a good place to start.) Honestly, where is it written that public transit has to be slow, inefficient, dirty, overcrowded, poorly maintained and unreliable? It doesn’t have to be that way at all. There are jurisdictions all over the globe where a well-maintained and functional public transit system is recognized as the Public Good that it is, and in fact it’s the preferred method of getting around. Private cars are well down the list.
Now, I’ll grant you that it’s not necessarily the best or fastest way to get around in the GTA. It’s no secret that our current urban form has been built around private automobiles: large highways, single-family homes on large lots, huge malls with large parking lots, low population density have all combined to make public transit very difficult to operate efficiently. And we’ve structured our lives and jobs and communities accordingly. You drive to work, you drive the kids to school or daycare, you drive to the mall to get groceries, you shlep all your stuff around in a car. It’s just the way it is.
Problem being, that’s simply not sustainable. I don’t need to get into greenhouse gases or climate change or emissions control; suffice it to say that our addiction to private automobiles is one of the biggest sources of smog and air pollution in North America, so there’s the impact on health and productivity to consider, never mind the environmental impact. Factor in the advent of peak oil and it becomes clear: we simply can’t structure our cities and our lives around cheap gasoline and abundant energy and inefficient land use any more. Sadly, we’re stuck with infrastructure and urban form that’s built around that, so it makes efficient and low-impact transit that much harder to achieve. But that also makes it that much more imperative. It’s not a question of cars being evil so much as a recognition that reliance on them as the primary means of getting around simply doesn’t work any more. And part of fixing that includes getting motorists to assume a greater share of the costs they’ve been offloading onto the rest of us. Whether you want to admit it or not, private automobiles are subsidized up the yingyang. As those subsidies are phased out, more and more people will make the rational economic choice of opting for other ways of getting around.
What I’ve impatiently characterized as selfishness and entitlement on the part of motorists, in that context, has to be seen for what it is: privileged distress. When you have a group of people who’ve enjoyed preferential treatment for so long that they’ve come to see it as the natural order of things, they’re going to see any revisiting of the arrangement as an attack on themselves. Suddenly they’ve become victims. It’s like MRAs who see feminism as a giant conspiracy to attack men, or bigots who whine about Political Correctness. It’s where you get idiotic memes like the “War On The Car.”
And so on. Again, nothing that hasn’t already been said, previously and more eloquently, by better people than me, but given the way things are likely to be framed over the next twelve months, worth emphasizing.
This is my dog. His name is Koba, he’s a Black Russian Terrier, he’s five months old, and he’s pushing 80 lbs. Oohs and aahs.
So I was at City Hall last week, talking to Mike Layton and his assistant Marco Bianchi about the possibility of having part of a local park set up as an off-leash area. (Disclosure: Mike Layton is my city councillor. I’ve been privileged to work with him on a couple of local matters. He’s awesome.)
I’ve written previously about the emotional import of local planning matters, but I wasn’t prepared for this. As with many things, it was another demonstration of my own naivete. I won’t go into the minutiae. It’s enough to note that the local politics can be, er, difficult. The conflict among dog people, non-dog people, parents, dog haters, cat people, etc. can be, in Mike’s words, almost feral. He talked about what he described as the colossal failure of an attempt to make one local park something that could be shared among the various stakeholders, and said the police had been involved because things had even come to blows.
But once again, it was an education. In my Pollyanna/Rodney King way, I want to believe that when mature and reasonable people act responsibly and deal with each other in a spirit of generosity and accommodation, most conflicts can be resolved. Competing interests can be balanced, things can be managed, who gets to do what can be worked out. (If you’re a dog owner, you pick up his/her shit, you keep him/her under control, and you don’t let him/her run around where the kids are playing. No-brainers, really.) It’s the “Don’t Be An Asshole” principle; in response to the observation that it only takes one idiot to fuck things up for everyone, I chose to think that peer pressure and public shaming would be effective antidotes.
Silly me. Thanks to Mike and Marco, I got an express ride on the Clue Train. Imagine my shock upon learning that people don’t pay attention to signs, don’t respect schedules, and don’t follow rules. Combine that with the inevitable confrontations among dog owners and parents (disclosure: I’m both, but I try not to be smug about it), the occasional but undeniable reality of people who don’t pick up after their dogs, and you have a formula for public meetings that make the 109 Ossington dispute look like a Board of Trade luncheon.
It was Mike and Marco’s description of just how heated those meetings can get that triggered the lesson, though. You should see just how crazy people can get, they told me. It’s the kind of thing that makes ordinary reasonable people step back shaking their heads and think “whoa. I don’t want to get involved in that.”
I thought about that for about half a second, and then it occurred to me. “But ordinary reasonable people have to get involved,” I said. “Otherwise, the assholes win.”
Perhaps there’s nothing especially new about it, but it’s worth repeating just the same. Whether it’s crazy anti-dog people, dumbass mayors and their brain-dead supporters, or authoritarian prime ministers who want to muzzle all opposition or contrary evidence, the public conversation and discursive boundaries can’t be left to the loudest or meanest or stupidest people. If we want better, we have to stay in the game.
The amazing and energetic @yvonnebambrick appears in this timely report wherein the chairman of the Toronto Police Services Board calls for an updated and responsive approach to the way dooring incidents are tracked.
No point in going through all the facts, again, about how and why cycling is growing in popularity — exercise, agility, gridlock, environment, and all that. Working to make cycling safer, as a matter of public policy, ought to be a no-brainer, no?
And yet, incredibly, it seems we’re still having to fight this battle from square one. Not only are we ripping out bike lanes, we’re still hearing braying from certain Neanderthals for the removal of even more cycling infrastructure. The current administration’s hostility to cyclists and cycling is a matter of record, of course, but it’s not just a matter of stupidity or coarsening public discourse; it has real and tangible effects on public safety.
In some of my smart-assier moments, I quip about this being another front in the War On The Car. I kid, of course, but we all know there are people, too many people, who actually see it that way. They’re serious. I don’t know how to educate, reach out, or engage them, and I’m the first to admit that’s probably not one of my strong points, but then I’ve got cyclist friends who’ve almost gotten killed by asshole motorists, so forgive me if my first reaction isn’t one of diplomacy and understanding.
Really, this isn’t a Downtown Elitist thing. Plenty of people ride bicycles, for whatever reason. They shouldn’t have to feel that they’re taking their lives in their hands every time they mount up.
If you’re bored or desperate enough to return here on a semi-regular basis, then you know about this little corner’s pedantic obsession with the quality of conversation and with the meanings of words. It’s not just because I like to wank on about abstractions (well, maybe not entirely — ed.). If I go on about it (you do, boychik, you do — ed.), it’s because rational discourse and critical thought are the most basic currency of citizenship and civic engagement. If we can’t have mature and intelligent conversations, then how can we make sensible decisions?
Two essential bits of reading this morning from two thoughtful and and indispensible observers of the contemporary political scene: Matt Elliott and Steve Munro. (Actually, Matt’s piece is from this morning; Steve’s is a bit older than that. I’m just slow.) I skim the tops of the waves and attempt to summarize, but they go into the detail and provide better context and analysis than I’m capable of. (Disclosure: they’re both friends as well.)
So I won’t waste time trying to improve on or filter their work. They’ve already made the case for LRT over subways and why it makes sense in this particular context; go and read them today. My observation is more about that tiresome obsession of mine: discourse.
It’s no secret, of course, that if you can control the discourse and frame the issues, you’re halfway to winning the argument. If you can control the conversational turf and force your opponents to accept your definition and argue on your terms, you’ve essentially won the discussion before it’s even begun; you’ve picked the battleground, you’ve positioned the goalposts, and you’ve dictated the terms whereby the conversation will take place and the decisions will be made.
And there are numerous ways whereby political operators, ethical and not so ethical, attempt to control the discourse; they can obscure meanings, they can cloud issues, they can drag the conversation from the realm of rationality and civility into emotional and volatile terrain and use that to manipulate people. One of the most notorious, but unfortunately successful techniques, is the Big Lie. Or more prosaically, the attempt to confuse the issue with clouds of bullshit. Witness, for example, the seemingly endless repetition of the misleading, cynical, and factually baseless “St. Clair Disaster” meme, and the continuing attempts to conflate it with LRT technology.
Add to that the reframing of the subway / LRT debate as a question of who “deserves” a subway, and you’ve got two essential elements in the colonization and subversion of the discourse; as a result of the endless drumbeat of “disaster” and “deserve,” we’re not talking about which transit solutions make the most sense for the most people, but rather “second-class citizens” and “Scarborough getting screwed.” The subway fetishists have succeeded in investing a workable, rational, and sensible solution, for which the funding is already there, with negative emotional connotations. So much so, in fact, that people who should know better are seemingly afraid of even using the term “LRT.” It’s become political poison.
Well, in the words of The Dude, this will not stand.
It is not merely misleading; it is a lie. Plain and simple. And it is a lie advanced by people who do not care about Scarborough, about Toronto, about rational and sensible transit or city building, about spending infrastructure resources wisely, or about serving the public good.
Which is why it’s so important to push back against it. I’m not a transit expert or a planner and I don’t pretend to know everything there is to know about infrastructure, about ridership, about engineering, or about density. There are arguments for LRT and for subway. There are priorities to be set, funding strategies to consider, and opportunity costs to evaluate. In my naivete, I’d like to think we’re all committed to approaching those guided by a shared dedication to achieving the greatest good for the greatest number. I’m not sure how to accomplish that.
What I am sure of, however, is that we need to be able to have an intelligent and thoughtful conversation about it, and that when smart, dedicated professional public servants like Joe Pennachetti, Jennifer Keesmaat and Andy Byford are stressing the urgency of addressing our congestion problems, we need to listen. We need to be able to discuss it like adults. And we can’t do that when the discussion is continually and repeatedly poisoned.
A modest proposal, then: let’s reframe the discourse. Let’s talk about LRT without emotional baggage, without manipulation, without cynicism, and without lies and pandering. And let’s leave those who can’t do that out of the conversation.
We all know by now what happened at Toronto Council this week. Not much I can say about it that hasn’t been said already, and in the interests of remaining measured and temperate, I’m not going to single out anyone by name. It’s enough to observe, in passing, that it’s already running into some, er, complications.
I’m shocked. Shocked!
Well, that’s this morning’s cheap laugh. But given my fascination with things like nuance and subtlety, I think it’s worthwhile setting out why they’re not likely to apply in this situation.
First of all, hands up all those who think subtleties are among this administration’s strong points.
(Aren’t they great, folks? They’re here all week. Try the veal.)
In fairness, I’ve heard from some of the people who supported the subway option that they did so because there were several safeguards and conditions built in. Federal and provincial funding, tax hikes that reflect the capital and operating needs of the new undertakings, no diversion from other badly needed transit upgrades such as the Downtown Relief Line or the Sheppard, Finch and Eglinton LRTs, and not at the expense of other city services, yada yada yada.
Yeah, well. I like to make fun of myself for my own naivete sometimes, but … seriously? Look, these are worthwhile conditions, but
does anyone really think they’re going to be met?
does anyone really believe what’s happened this week, even with all these safeguards, furthers the cause of Clarity on Toronto’s Transit Future?
Let’s review: We had a Master Agreement in place. Planning, approvals and funding all set. Now we have … what, exactly? A big question mark. A giant gap in the transit needs not only of Scarborough, but the entire city of Toronto. Another several years of delay and a nebulous “solution” that
isn’t guaranteed
will cost more
will take longer to implement
will depend more on externalities to be cost-effective
will be less accessible …
… assuming it ever materializes at all. A notional “subway” that appeals to people who think in terms of shallow catchphrases and childish notions of “deserve” and “second-class citizens,” and plays into the hands of the politicians who pander to them.
Bottom line: we had clarity. Now we have uncertainty. I’m not carrying water for the province or Metrolinx, but honestly, would anyone blame them if they just pulled the plug at this point?
Pressed by Sol Chrom 