While Christmas is a long way off, Mayor Rob Ford decided to dangle a shiny bauble in front the eyes of North York and Scarborough voters, pledging during his radio campaign commercial, uh, show, that privatizing garbage collection east of Yonge will be on his to-do list for the 2014 election. This obvious diversion tactic must be considered in the light of a pair of new polls that offer some key insights into the changing complexion of voter attitudes towards the city’s most vexing problem, which, it must be said, is not garbage. Last week, Stratcom (whose principals worked on George Smitherman’s mayoral campaign) released a poll showing that Ford’s approval ratings fell sharply in both Scarborough and North York since February. In North York, his numbers plunged from 56 to 40%, while Scarborough’s approval rating dropped from 48 to 41%. Just over a third of Toronto respondents overall felt he is doing a good job — a figure that nudges up against David Miller’s all-time low of 29%, during the garbage strike. (Stratcom’s poll of 954 voters is accurate within 3.2%, 19 times out of 20.) Voters in those parts of the city, it would be reasonable to surmise, may be growing weary of Ford’s empty and undeliverable transit promises. Indeed, according to a new Environics survey of GTA residents, Ford looks to be on the wrong side of one of the region’s most top-o’-mind concerns: transportation. The Focus GTA poll results, which Environics generously agreed to share with Spacing Toronto readers, reveal that the number of respondents who cited transportation as the GTA’s single most pressing issue jumped sharply, from 22% to 38% between last fall and this spring. Six in ten found commuting to be stressful or very stressful, although that figure is somewhat smaller (52%) within the 416. (Environics’ results are based on 1,436 responses to an online survey.)

Street Scene will appear each week showcasing the illustrations of local artist Jerry Waese.

Street Scene will appear each week showcasing the illustrations of local artist Jerry Waese.

In  Saturday’s Globe and Mail, I wrote about a Markham councillor – a conservative, no less – who has a radically sensible notion: That Metrolinx and the Toronto Transit Commission should actually work together to create an integrated transit network. Imagine that: cooperation in the public sector. What a concept! In particular, Jim Jones has been talking up a plan to twin the tracks on the GO rail corridors, buy electric trains, and develop a two-tier express/local commuter rail service linked to the TTC’s east-west lines. Building on the anti-diesel movement in the west end, Jones’ scheme not only delivers rapid transit to Scarborough, it also opens up a space to re-cast the debate about the downtown relief line, which, to date, focuses mainly on another subway line. But before Jones’ untested idea can receive any kind of serious technical and financial scrutiny, the province and the city need to make a concerted effort to coordinate the way Metrolinx and the TTC carry out their long-ranging planning. The lack of interoperability between GO and the TTC is an old and much commented-upon phenomena rooted in jurisdictional rivalries and the physical constraints of the city’s rail infrastructure. The consequences are writ large on our geography: with a few exceptions – Union Station, Yorkdale, Finch, etc. – the GO network doesn’t connect to the TTC, and the city, for its part, turns its back on the GO stops (e.g., Oriole Station, hidden cleverly under the 401, off Leslie).

Street Scene will appear each week showcasing the illustrations of local artist Jerry Waese.

Street Scene will appear each week showcasing the illustrations of local artist Jerry Waese.

Street Scene will appear each week showcasing the illustrations of local artist Jerry Waese.

Is there an app that would help Mayor Rob Ford figure out the transit file? Late Friday afternoon, the mayor’s office leaked the news that the city’s 2011 year-end surplus will be $285 million (net), which is a good deal larger than the initial projections, although somewhat south of what David Miller (and his budget chair Shelley Carroll) achieved in the final year of the previous term. Those dollars, according to council policy, are to be placed in a fund for the purchase of replacement streetcars. When I consider the current council’s fiscal policies, this one stands out and deserves praise, on several fronts: First, municipal governments need healthy reserve funds. Second, council’s decision to impose policy discipline on said reserves not only establishes an important precedent – earmarked transit funding; it also builds some much needed transparency into the always opaque budgeting process. The provincial Liberals, prior to the recession, enacted a similar measure – legislation requires that any budgetary surpluses be distributed to municipalities for infrastructure – as did Paul Martin, who, in his tenure as federal finance minister, split surpluses evenly between debt reduction and targeted investments, such as post-secondary education.

This week, Spacing presents five excerpts from Straphanger, the new book by Montreal-based author Taras Grescoe. The book examines the success stories, challenges, and future hurdles of 14 transit systems from across the world, including Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.   TODAY: Toronto (last excerpt) I’d always planned to end up in Toronto. After all, it was the city where I started. I was born at the old Women’s College Hospital, near Queen’s Park station on the Yonge-University line, in 1966. At the time, my parents were renting a top-floor flat in a house on Lytton Boulevard, a short stroller’s push from Yonge Street; an auspicious first address for a newborn, it turned out, as it had belonged to one of the inventors of Pablum (his widow spoon-fed me the vitamin-rich baby mush, which may explain why I never developed rickets). When I was only four years old, my parents joined the exodus to suburbia, and we moved to a cookie-cutter bungalow on a curvy street in Burlington, twenty-five miles west along the shore of Lake Ontario from Union Station. I used to wonder if this early exile from the city was the foundational trauma that led to my lifelong bias against subdivisions, but my Kodachrome-hued memories of Riverside Drive—of netting crayfish in the nearby creek, of walking to Frontenac Elementary School, and of pretending I was Bobby Orr in street hockey games—are for the most part fond, and at worst emotionally neutral. My parents tell me they bought the house as a short-term investment, but if they were hoping the suburbs would be a healthier setting than the city, they seriously misjudged Southern Ontario. Less than a mile from our carport were the multimillion-gallon storage tanks of the Oakville refinery, where British Petroleum was busy making jet fuel, and beyond a tiny stand of oaks known as Sherwood Forest Park lay the Queen Elizabeth Way—six lanes of rushing traffic that, in the days before emissions controls, must have created a formidable cancer corridor of leaded gas exhaust. My parents lasted two years in Burlington, before giving up on the land of loops-and-lollipops and bundling my sister and me onto a westbound train.

Street Scene will appear each week showcasing the illustrations of local artist Jerry Waese.