onnie Hu’s lived in Etobicoke for three years. Her intersection, Islington Ave. and The Queensway, is situated in a middle-class neighbourhood adjacent to the Gardiner Expressway’s escape from downtown, which has supported the growth of Toronto’s new families and immigrants.
“I am a renter, and it is important to me to live close to where I work or go to school,” Hu said over email. She’s proudly car-less, relying on Toronto transit to get around. The same is true for her mother, who earned her licence years after arriving in Coquitlam, B.C. from China. Without it, Hu’s mother could only work at a convenience store a kilometre’s walk from their home. Hu walked three kilometres to school.
Without adequate transit options, Hu’s mother was isolated. She said she found it difficult to contribute to her family. Transit was thus a necessity for Hu when she moved to Toronto. The same is true for many recent immigrants in Etobicoke who comprise 38 per cent of the community.
Over half of Etobicoke’s immigrants have settled in the area in the last thirty years. Before then the area was known as the hotel strip, said Mike Olivier, a founder of the South Etobicoke Transit Action Committee who moved to the area in 1994. “Nobody was walking along the lake unless you were staying at a motel. It kind of had this sleazy reputation,” he said. Mr. Christie’s landmark bakery wafted the smell of cookies over the lake breeze until it was shuttered in 2013.
In its place, a complex of 15 condo towers is planned to support the swell of new arrivals to the neighbourhood. The Etobicoke-Lakeshore district grew by 20.4 per cent between 2006 and 2016, compared to Toronto’s growth of 9.1 per cent. Toronto is expected to grow by another one million people in the next ten years. “The area’s completely changed,” said Olivier.
However, neither he nor Hu believe the TTC meets the mobility needs of new residents. “Other areas are getting a lot more attention for potential (TTC) expansion,” Olivier said. Meanwhile, Etobicoke sees daily bottlenecks on Lake Shore Blvd. and Park Lawn Rd.
As 164 candidates face election for 25 council seats across Toronto on October 24 (seven of which are without an incumbent), transit will be a top concern for many voters. It compelled Hu to put her name on the ballot as one of the youngest city council candidates.
The opportunity to support new immigrants with improved transit will also help advance Toronto’s TransformTO climate strategy. Its defining target — net zero greenhouse gas emissions under 1990 levels by 2040 — ranks it among the most ambitious city emissions goals in North America. It aims for 30 per cent of registered vehicles to be electric (332,000 vehicles) and that three in four trips under five kilometres be taken by foot or transit by 2030.
The desired effect is cleaving a chunk from the 4.5 metric tones of carbon equivalent produced by gas vehicles annually as of 2019; the largest source of emissions in Toronto’s transportation sector, itself a third (36 per cent) of Toronto’s emissions.
Great expense for improving transit will be paid in playing catch up, said Eric Miller, the director of the University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute. Toronto’s transit systems have fallen well behind the standards of similarly sized cities, Miller said. Munich, the capital of Bavaria, Germany, for example, operates 24 hours a day and provides access to virtually the entire city via a system of underground and suburban trains, street trams and buses.
To come close to parity with other world-class transit networks, the TTC requires greater density and hierarchy. “You need the local bus that can pick you up at your street corner and take you to the street car, (light-rail transit) or (bus rapid transit), which takes you to regional rail,” said Miller. Unlike peer cities in Asia like Seoul, Tokyo or Singapore, Toronto doesn’t have the “integrated, hierarchical, high quality (transit) systems that you need to be competitive.”
Olivier said a few solutions include full TTC and GoTrain fare integration and increasing the frequency and capacity of street transit (busses and street cars). At city hall, transit advocacy group TTC Riders said that council must support their push against TTC service cuts, regardless of post-pandemic ridership numbers.
However, the new faces at city hall will join a council recently recuperated from an era of squeamishness around climate. Former mayor Rob Ford, who surprised many with his success among urban and suburban voters and considered environmental groups “special interest,” turned several moderate councillors away from supporting new climate change policies between 2010 and 2014. (TransformTO was a product of John Tory’s subsequent city council, which found Toronto devoid of a carbon emissions strategy.)
“City hall’s agenda hasn’t advanced much in the years since,” said Miller. “For almost everything we do (in Toronto), the investments are made based on political considerations. ‘Will it buy me votes in Scarborough, or Markham or Mississauga?’ Rather than the question of ‘is this where we need to be spending money most effectively to build a transit network.’”
Olivier added that the city’s $1 billion allocation to rebuild the Gardiner Expressway East runs against the city’s emissions reduction commitment. “It’s a white elephant. We’re just throwing money at a 1950’s solution (to mobility),” he said.
On top of running at odds with supporting residents without cars and the city's emissions targets, road investments perpetuate the city's worsening air quality record, said Marianne Hatzopoulou, Canada Research Chair in Transportation and Air Quality at the University of Toronto. According to Hatzopoulou, diesel truck emissions have risen above pre-pandemic levels thanks to the e-commerce boom. This has diminished Toronto’s standing on the recently improved air quality standards of the World Health Organization. Any investment which promotes carbon emissions puts Toronto residents at genuine risk for respiratory disease and cancer, Hatzopoulou said.
With regards to TransformTO’s emissions target, Hatzopoulou said attention should turn away from personal electrification by buying electric cars, and instead toward building a better transit system. “We always think decarbonization is all about electrification. It’s not. Millions of electric vehicles on our highway system is not something we want to achieve.” Given the number of commuters it carries, a diesel bus produces the same carbon intensity as each of its riders driving an electric vehicle, she said.
As the new council gets to work Torontonians will see whether their officials pursue strategies for dense, sustainable and supportive transit, or continue down the slow North American city slide of cuts and austerity.
