Dispatch by Seth Brown
Seth Brown is a York University Design Honours alum interested in finding the political borders of work and play.
On September 27th, 2024, the CIVIS: Urban Governance and Citizenship Research Cluster and the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies hosted a round table talk on the theme of “What is Public About Public Transit?” I dropped into the talk as an undergraduate dispatcher for the Robarts Centre, finding a modest board room attended by almost a dozen scholars and a fellow student dispatcher. The special guest James Perttula, Director of Transportation Planning for the City of Toronto, capped the discussion with input from the planning side.
Dr. Theresa Enright began with an orienting analysis of public demonstration relating to public transit globally. From protests across Chile, exploding against fare increases in Santiago, to mass fare evasion in New York City, protesting a police shooting of multiple after the escalation of a fare-evasion arrest; public transportation is increasingly emblematic of the clash between those who manage public systems as a profession, and those who rely on it to live and work.
This perspective gap was evident in national research, presented by Dr. Orly Linovski for the Mobilizing Justice working group. Elected officials across Canada were surveyed and interviewed, gauging their opinions on transit policy across a variety of dimensions. With 90% of officials owning a car, and an approximate 20% knowing someone who struggles with transit fare, most officials had little personal proximity to transit systems. Officials more frequently cited individual constituents, such as those who attend public meetings, as sources of information than more representative constituent associations and groups.
"Relating specifically to Canadian Studies, all three talks demonstrated the generative potential of comparative approaches to public planning for those within and without governmental structures."
Seth Brown
Completing the scheduled talks, Noah Kelly of McGill U presented focused research on Toronto -- a pilot study of the Transit Access Project (TAP) for homeless youth. A comparative analysis of transit affordability in Canada informed the program, finding that Toronto’s discounted fare is more costly and less comprehensively offered than many other Canadian cities.
I found the research presented at the roundtable surprisingly mapped onto the affective relationship to the TTC which I see in myself and others: the overcrowding and poor service, particularly at early morning commute times when construction workers and nurses who build our city crush into physically overflowing busses or are passed by entirely; friends experiencing homelessness, struggling to keep work while employing bizarre and baroque methods to use the system, contemplating between fare or food for the day; attending a therapy group to find a terminally-ill regular member absent because Wheel-Trans required a complete 24 hours notice. There is a pervasive sense that when transit commuters talk, no one listens.
This talk definitely hit home for me. It emphasized the importance of local advocacy groups, such as Toronto’s TTC riders, to re-politicize transit users as a bloc in municipal decision-making, and to intervene in effective venues. Our access to transportation decides when we wake, where we work, and what resources we have access to; what could be more public than that?
Dispatchers in Canadian Studies are undergraduate students who attend events related to the study of Canada and report on what they witness and learned through blogposts. This initiative is in collaboration with Brock University, Mount Allison University, and Trent University.