A Commentary by Doug Draper
My wife Mary recently returned from her first trip back to her homeland of Italy since leaving there with her family as a young child and one of the first things she discussed was the culture shock she felt after she got back down on the ground here.
Less than a year after the ribbon cutting for a three-year-pilot inter-municipal transit system in Niagara, Ontario, some reginoal councillors already want to pull the plug on it. File Photo from September, 2011 by Doug Draper
What she was talking the seemingly endless maze of roads and highways, with cars and truck buzzing in and out of clogged asphalt lots for box stores and strip malls, and in and out of the dead worm roads and cul de sacs for those those low-density, residential zones we so loosely describe as “planned communities” or “family-oriented neighbourhoods.”
‘You don’t see anything like this over there.” Over there, she said, people live, work and enjoying spending their free time in the heart of the city. They can walk or bike (which, she said, may explain why so few people in Italy are as obese as we are) and you don’t see anywhere near the number of cars. They have wonderful public transit.
It is that last part – the part about public transit – that I want to focus on the most. Interestingly enough, a few days after Mary shared her observations about the difference between Italy and we North Americans when it comes to our hyper dependency on cars sustaining our economically and environmentally unsustainable community planning conditions, St. Catharines regional councillor Al Caslin rose at a meeting of the region’s council this past July 5 to discuss how impressed he was with the public transit services in Europe during a recent trip of his own there.
“Éurope has great public transit,” Caslin said. “People don’t need cars.”
Think about it. A place where people don’t really need a car. Just think of all the money we could save if we didn’t have the expense of having two or three of them in the driveway, which is about the average number of cars in a Canadian residential driveway these days, according to statistics.
Think of how much we would save (even if we had one less vehicle in the driveway) on insurance, the cost of which is getting ever more outrageous by the year, and on the cost of repairs, which is a gold mind for those peddling auto parts?
Yet here we are in Niagara, still stuck in a car culture as opposed to at least trying to balance that off with a fully efficient, accessible and centrally controlled public transit system. In other words, this regional government is prepared to spend potentially millions of dollars on a new interchange to help accommodate traffic coming off the 406 Hwy in west St. Catharines to the new Niagara Health System super hospital there –located at a site many Niagara residents disagreed with. And it is not willing to spend more than a couple of million of dollars a year on a three-year ‘test pilot’ public transit system that might at least give people who live further a field from that hospital, a chance to get to it if they have a loved one there.
Indeed, we have 20th century neanderthals on regional council like Andy Petrowski of St. Catharines who are already arguing to unplug the regional transit buses less than a year into their three-year pilot run. It is “unaffordable,” he argued this past week, and it is burning regional taxpayers.
Which taxpayers is he talking about? The ones who can afford cars to go to the proposed mega-mall along the QEW in Niagara-on-the-Lake that he so passionately supported this June, or those among our younger people who don’t have cars to drive to that mega-mall, and who have made it clear in surveys done in this region that they want and need to use transit services here. Or how about the growing numbers of seniors in our region who also need transit services?
Excuse me if I join other councillors like Caslin, Grimsby regional councillor Debbie Zimmerman and Port Colborne Mayor Vance Badawey who view public transit as an essential service regional government should play a lead role in providing. Another St. Catharines regional councillor, Tim Rigby, noted that “it is clear” that Ontario’s Go Transit will not expand its services in Niagara unless it knows that once the commuters are left off their trains and buses, they will have regional transit services available to them. And yet another St. Catharines regional councillor, Bruce Timms, said he views any dollars spent on getting a regional transit service going a “strategic investment” in Niagara’s future.
Enough said. Can we please now move on and establish a truly regional transit service as opposed to the fragmented, parochial patchwork of bus services we have now?
Let’s join other regions in Ontario like Waterloo, York and Hamilton, and finally move into the 21st century when it comes to affordable, accessible transit services for our people.
(Niagara At Large invites you to share your views on this post. But beware.NAL only posts comments by individuals who dare to also share their first and last names.)
Niagara At Large 
Absolutely! We need to move Niagara into the 21st century and out of the 1950’s when every home had a car and one wage earner could earn enough to support the entire family. Leave it to Beaver has discontinued its episodes a long time ago, only to be replayed in the minds of many people here that seem to have an “attitude” of superiority and pomposity over the fact that they can drive in this region and that fact alone gives them access to all the jobs and regional investment in this area, while those who cannot drive for varying reasons (e.g. age, health, suspended license, money) are treated like second class citizens, like we don’t even belong here. If you don’t believe that attitude exists, if you drive and have done so for quite some time and live here, leave your vehicle at home for one month and still attempt to do everything you do everyday without it — that is, go to work, get groceries, arrange for your children’s transport to their own activities, try to attend various events in the region (most of which are held outside of the areas covered by transit)m and visit friends, go to doctors, get tests when they are ordered, and so forth. Then tell me, when you start running into problems when it take you more than half a day to get ONE thing done, how you would feel if this happened to you day after day after day … and until the Photo ID card came, a driver’s licence was the most accepted IDENTITY document. What if you had no driver’s license and if what you had, such as a health card, a SIN card and even student card was not acceptable? Yes, you get treated as a non citizen. Until some of these dinosaur politicians (who have been named in these columns in the past) have to go through something like this, they will never and I mean NEVER adequately speak for the population of this region …
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A centrally coordinated system of light rail, buses and GO transit would be great for this region. If people spoke to some of the older people that live here, they will remind us that Niagara once had one of the best transit systems serving all of its communities, using streetcars and light rail, until unfortunately, we became a GM town with attitude.
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Doug:
You have excellent points about European transit (we just “went to London to visit the Queen” and our dot). However, as Angela points out, how can we expect the many citizens of Niagara who do Not live in our bigger cities to pay for something they can rarely ever use? What we have now does Not work.
We do NOT need super-high-speed-mass-transit for our spread-out region. Our dispersed, car-based subdivisions already exist, and we’re not going to turn them back into farmland and move everyone into high-rise-apartments … are we?
We need some sort of subsidised Transit-Taxi. Twill be even worse ifever they force one big Niagara South hospital on us, no matter whether it’s built in Niagara Falls or Welland. No car-less person (many seniors) will be able to visit it without a day-long expedition by mass-transit, so patients will take Longer to recover and the hospital will Always have longer stays & higher costs than the big-city hospitals against which the Ministry of Health will measure us. (Ironically, can’t you see the NHS will proposing the Volunteer Driver system as their solution, as is now used to transport Niagara patients to cancer & heart treatments In Hamilton & beyond?)
PLEASE, Doug!!!! Research and write a story on Niagara-On-The-Lake’s new-ish transit system where they use a transit-taxi system for a spread-out, rural population, a mini-Niagara Region.
– Does it work?
– What are the weaknesses?
– What do their Planners think?
– What do their Politicians think?
– What do their Transit Riders think?
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Lorne, before we became GM Town with an Attitude (and yes, you can patent that expression ;-), we did have an excellent light rail system within and between the cities of Niagara. It was popular among residents and tourists alike. Our “suburbs” still existed, but as different communities … Port Dalhousie, the Township of Grantham, the Township of Chippewa, etc. but regardless of where you lived, you were able to access some form of light rail or bus transit in those days. It can be brought back, but we need the following to take place: (1) drivers to pay more of the real costs of automobile use, as opposed to all taxpayers and consumers (of goods sold in malls and shopping centres, for example); (2) extra surcharges for road tolls, especially heavily used regional roads to be put directly into a transit budget; (3) much improved transit that is convenient, available, accessible and reliable (which in itself will take some drivers out of their cars alone); and (4) coordinated transit centrally to ensure coverage across Niagara at an affordable rate. The difficulty Niagara Region Transit has is its marketing protocol, its price ($6 one way — that doesn’t bother me because I had to pay for taxis at $35 – $40 one way without it, but some people will not use NRT because of that), and overlap and gaps in service due to four different systems, plus GO buses vying for markets … a centrally coordinated body would ensure all routes are covered and even the smaller communities get some service.
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Lorne, for example, the music festival in NOTL that was supposedly planned for six months to ensure traffic was running smoothly, etc. turned out to be inaccessible to those that do not have access to a vehicle and from two letters to the editor in my local daily so far, inaccessible to people with disabilities and mobility needs. Our new pool in St. Catharines is not on a bus route for evening and weekend service. I get told glibly by a city staffer that there is a bus three blocks over that runs every hour at those times. If they had placed the PARKING LOT at that same place, you better believe me how many people would complain … the value of people’s time, efforts and access to taxpayer financed activities appears to focus solely on those that are able to drive and have access to vehicles only. If I were personally in charge of planning the event in NOTL or the location of the pool in St. Catharines and an employee of mine skipped any consideration of non drivers, as this one obviously did, I would have fired them right off the bat … an example of incompetence that seems to prevail in many areas in this region, not just transportation.
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I agree, transit in the region must improve. I keep trying to get my friends that are personal-vehicle-dependent to try taking transit instead, but people are so used to having vehicles and driving them everywhere, they look lost and confused when I mention the word transit, and a bit scared when I suggest they try taking it.
I understand how they feel. I used to drive. I understand the complete freedom of being able to drive, to go anywhere you want, all the time. The feeling of being able to make multiple stops and get everything you need on the way home from work and not have it take 6 hours after a long day of working. When I drove, I paid a little less than $100/ month for insurance. I had a $225 car payment for my brand-new Hyundai. and I spent about $200 – $250 per month on gas (commuting from St. Catharines to Welland for work, being the main driver in my group of friends, and driving often for pleasure around the backroads of our region). So that freedon came at a price, and one that I really couldn’t afford, about $550 per month, which is what I currently pay in rent.
Now, I spend $160 per month on my NRT pass, and I can take ant regional or local transit system bus. The money savings is astounding (nearly $400 per month). The service is ok. If the service was great, that coupled with the saving of money would drive more than a few cars off of the road, I think. Unfortunately for Niagara, we’re talking about a huge paradigm shift for our residents, especially those my age and younger that were brought up thinking that you had to own a car or you couldn’t do anything (which unfortunately is almost true in this area).
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Maybe in order to slowly change the attitudes towards Public Transit we should first LOWER the speed limits on the highways as well as rural and urban speed limits. If not for the needless carnage on our roadways then lets do it for our commitments to reducing Green House Gases. One last point I remember when they introduced Photo Radar . I thought like everyone else that my comute to Toronto would take longer. But to my surprise I arrived on average 13 minutes sooner. Not only that I arrived relaxed and wasn’t harassed by idiot drivers pushing for every in of road. With the thought of the police looking over their backs ( nobody knew if they their or not ) everybody just relaxed and went with the flow. For crying out loud bring back PHOTO RADAR —Big Brother is watching you in more intrusive areas than any loss of privacy we experienced in Photo Radar —- and you might just save a life ——YOURS!!!
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