As much as the King St. pilot project will help bring Toronto’s wholly inadequate transit system into the 21st century, more important, it will enable the city to establish contact with reality, albeit to a limited degree.Since 1998, when the province forcibly amalgamated Toronto and its surrounding suburbs, the megacity, as it was then known, has existed in an infantilized state. Rather than acknowledge the facts of life in a growing city, Toronto has buried its head in the sand and resorted to the tired rhetoric of the “War on the Car.”Fuelled by these nonsensical notions, Mayor John Tory has launched a series of minor traffic fixes. Some have promise — why shouldn’t deliveries be made before or after rush hour? — others are more symbolic. Does anyone really believe we can eliminate illegal parking? Still, in a city that never lets reason get in the way of transit planning, these tweaks matter enormously.But now, for the first time in living memory, the city has taken a step that prioritizes public transit over the private vehicle, streetcars over cars, truth over illusion. This represents a huge change, a paradigm shift of monumental proportions. Of course, the stretch of King included in the pilot is too short. Toronto never does in full measure what it can do by half. The Bloor bike lanes are another example of a city trapped in its own timidity. The lanes are too short, but 2.4 kilometres was as far as council could see.The real issue — mobility — has historically been equated with vehicular traffic. But the automobile is only one of many forms of mobility. This is a point that civic and provincial politicos have difficulty grasping. For them, getting around the city begins and ends with the car. It’s no surprise, then, that Toronto transit has fallen two or three decades behind much of the advanced world. The King St. experiment accepts that transit isn’t simply an alternative to the internal con ...
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