Culination Civics Active Citizen Paper

Active Citizen Paper by Heather Collett

The TTC (Toronto Transit Company) is a transit system that affects everyone in the city in one way or another which makes its imperative that when there is a problem that it be solved. The problem right now is our TTC extensions and how much money they cost. Presently the Spadina line is being extended but the few hundred million being used to build it is merely pennies compared to some of the plans still in store. One of the plans is for a Sheppard line which has an estimated cost of 4.2 billion dollars. The cost of these lines is too much for the city and province that has an ever growing deficit higher than California. The funding is just not coming from the right places and they don’t have the money for these plans. Karen Stinz, the Toronto Transit Chair mentioned that the province is not giving enough money seeing how a lot of the TTC users are not from Toronto, so why should the municipal government have to put up the money? It continues to go further. They asked Ex-TTC manager David Gunn to come in to give them some advice and he was completely negative about everything. He called them out about the underground low-floor streetcars costing more with a bigger tunnel and being less efficient than a subway train, the capacity problems they will be adding to on the yonge line and all the costs of new maintenance for all the equipment, tracks and vehicles they are buying. After calling him in for help they took none of his advice and told the press he was wrong about everything. He may have been mistaken about some things but he sure isn’t incorrect about the cost.

One of the solutions that are being used at the moment is a plan that is running through city council. The plan is to make a 324 million dollar advertising deal. It will entail making the number of advertisements per a bus or streetcar, go up from thirty-five to fifty per a vehicle. The other part of the plan and the most controversial of...