Etobicoke North residents want transportation to be affordable and accessible

Many of Fatima Filippi’s clients at Rexdale Women’s Centre depend on transit to access their basic needs: to get to work or school, to buy food, to seek out health care, to live their lives.

But what happens when, as is all too often the case, their bus is running late? Paycheques are deducted, classes and appointments are missed, stores close – in short, life stalls along with the bus. Too common are such tales of transit woes in Ward 1 (Etobicoke North), making transportation one of the top local priorities heading into the Oct. 25 municipal election.“Transportation is certainly an issue we hear a lot about, and accessibility is always a concern,” said Filippi, executive director of Rexdale Women’s Centre. “You have women with children travelling on buses and sometimes the bus schedules are not as frequent as people want or need…As a suburb, Etobicoke was initially built around the car. The question that needs to be examined is: is our transit system in line with the kind of community we want to be, and with the kind of community needs that we have?”

According to the Ministry of Transportation and City of Toronto’s joint Transportation Tomorrow Survey (2006), only 19 per cent of Ward 1 residents’ 40,741 daily work trips are travelled via transit, while 78 per cent of those trips are made in cars. Sixty per cent of daily work trips from Ward 1 are made within the city of Toronto, and 11 per cent within ward itself. Such statistics beg the question: why aren’t more Etobicoke North residents riding to work ‘the better way’?

Shamsher Singh, chair of Albion-Islington Square BIA, is just one of those Ward 1 residents who opts to drive rather than take transit. His reason? Exorbitant fares: why wait for a slow-moving bus and pay $6 for a four-kilometre round trip that takes him just minutes in his car?

Given all the issues surrounding transit, The Guardian put the question to all six Ward 1 councillor candidates: what will you do to better transit service in Etobicoke North?

Several spoke out in support of the Etobicoke-Finch West Light Rail Transit (LRT) line of the Transit City plan, which would run west from Finch subway station along Finch Avenue and end at Humber College’s North Campus.

One of the project’s biggest proponents is incumbent Suzan Hall, who said she was ‘devastated’ this spring upon hearing news that the provincial government pulled $4 billion from the $9.5-billion plan to build light rail lines along Finch, Sheppard, Eglinton and along the Scarborough RT, effectively delaying the start of the Finch project until 2015.

“It’s something that we definitely need to keep working on because the light rapid transit across Finch will give us speed to get to the subway, and then downtown,” she said, noting a recent poll of her constituents showed an 84 per cent approval rating of the LRT line.

“Sure, everybody in the world would love to have subways, but I think we have to be practical…we don’t have the density to warrant spending that kind of cost on a subway up here.”

Peter D’Gama is another candidate bent on making the Finch LRT a reality. If elected, he said he’d work toward getting that provincial funding reinstated so that the project can get underway as soon as possible. In the meantime, D’Gama said there are adjustments that could be made now in order to ease transit woes immediately.

“We can make improvements on existing bus transit in terms of trying to get improved frequency,” he said, noting he’d add more express buses to both the 96 Wilson and 191 Highway 27 Rocket routes.

Vince Crisanti – who lost the Ward 1 councillorship to Hall by a mere 97 votes in the 2000 municipal election – isn’t as keen on the Etobicoke-Finch West LRT.

A proponent of subways over streetcars, Crisanti said while he believes a link between Yonge Street and Humber College is a critical one, the existing plan – to reduce lanes on the already-congested Finch Avenue in order to build the LRT – makes “no sense whatsoever.”

“We gotta do it right. Of course subways cost more money, but by getting the private sector involved (ie advertising rights), the money will be there,” he said. “My big concern with the LRT plan is that we’ll be duplicating what they did down on St. Clair…the impact it had on businesses, the fact that it went way over budget and it’s not really moving people around any quicker.”

Fellow candidate Ted Berger said that while he shares Crisanti’s fear of the Finch LRT turning out like the St. Clair debacle, his main priority is to get the TTC deemed an essential service.

“I think that’s long overdue, not just in Ward 1, but in the whole city of Toronto,” he said. “It’s absolutely necessary because we have had several strikes in the last years and it’s just total chaos. The residents and taxpayers paying for this service need such a service at all times.”

Both Omar Farouk and Sharad Sharma said they believe politicians should have no role in running the TTC.

“Transit is the lifeline of any vibrant economy,” Sharma said. “I personally visualize the Toronto transit system to be developed as an enterprising business model, run like an efficient, effective and productive business entity. It must be void of any political or union interference.”

Farouk, who proposes to buy “better, more reliable” buses so that wait times are decreased, said the key problem with the TTC right now is a “lack of priorities” among the politicians running the system.

“The people in Ward 1 depend on reliable TTC services because they need to get to work and their businesses on time, but that’s not happening,” he said. “In 1989, the politicians decided to take over the TTC as opposed to allowing it to be run by the professionals, and this is the core of the problem. This is the main reason why were are in this dilemma and why we need to change.”

- Cynthia Reason

Posted in Etobicoke, News