Why are Toronto’s brand-new LRTs so slow, when light rail in Copenhagen, Amsterdam and even Kitchener-Waterloo flies past traffic?
In this episode of DemograFix, Cara Stern talks to Jason Slaughter, creator of the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes, about how Toronto’s new Finch West and Eglinton Crosstown LRTs stack up against light rail around the world. They dig into why the lines are so slow, what real transit signal priority looks like, why the same trains run so much better in Kitchener-Waterloo, why Torontonians seem so complacent about mediocre transit, and why Jason refuses to praise mediocrity.
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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.
Cara Stern: If you’ve used one of Toronto’s new LRT lines, a few things will really stand out. The stations are large and clean, they’re significantly more accessible than any other transit line in the city, and they are incredibly slow. And I’m talking slow like, when they’re above ground, you can watch every car and bike pass you.
Today we’re excited to have Jason Slaughter, the host and creator of the very popular YouTube channel Not Just Bikes, on to talk about how Toronto’s LRTs stack up globally.
Jason Slaughter: Hi, thanks so much for having me on.
Cara Stern: The last time you were on was almost two years ago, and that actually turned out to be our best performing episode ever. So we’re really glad to have you back, and we’re hoping we’re going to break that record.
Jason Slaughter: Has it really been two years? It feels like it wasn’t even that long ago, but I guess I didn’t have a beard back then.
Cara Stern: Did it take that long to grow it?
Jason Slaughter: Yeah, definitely.
Cara Stern: About a year ago, you were filming a video of what was then the brand-new Finch West LRT. Your major takeaway in that video was that it is super slow. And you mentioned that the bigger problem is that if this is your only exposure to LRTs, you’re going to come away thinking it’s just a very slow form of transit, and maybe that’s just not true. As someone who has travelled and experienced many forms of light rail in many different countries, how do we compare?
Jason Slaughter: Frustrating. I had such high hopes for the Finch West LRT and the Eglinton Crosstown. I was following those projects for a long time, because I used to live in Toronto. I now live in Amsterdam, but I did transit advocacy, and I was really excited even when Transit City was proposed, which is ultimately where these two transit lines come from.
They come from a plan by Mayor David Miller to build a bunch of LRTs across Toronto, which actually does make sense. The population density is there. They were all cancelled by Rob Ford, but two of them were sort of resurrected, and that’s where we ended up with the Finch West LRT and the Eglinton Crosstown.
It was frustrating to me because I ride transit a lot. I ride transit in the Netherlands, but I also have a travel show called Day Pass on Nebula, which is a public transit travel show. I literally go to different cities around the world and explore the city through public transit.
So I routinely ride LRTs all over the world. And one of the things that was very frustrating to me is that I had been in Copenhagen filming a Day Pass episode before coming to Toronto for the opening of the Finch West LRT.
Copenhagen had recently opened an LRT line through their suburbs. It was fast, it didn’t get stuck at red lights, it was really efficient, and I loved it. It looked great in the episode. And then I came to Toronto, and it was the polar opposite. It was so freaking slow.
Two comparable cities, both opening new LRTs, and yet Toronto was painfully slow. What I really want to get at is that if you see those LRTs in Toronto and think, “Yeah, that’s what an LRT is,” no, it’s not. That’s what a mismanaged, poorly operated LRT is. And unfortunately, that’s all we’ve got right now.
Cara Stern: Whose fault is that?
Jason Slaughter: That is a very difficult question to answer, but there are a couple of parts to it. I made a video about my experiences with the Finch West LRT and my frustrations with it. For what it’s worth, some stuff has gotten a little bit better since I made that video, and I’ll talk about that.
But there are two things. There’s Metrolinx, the government organization that plans transit in the Greater Toronto Area, and there’s the TTC, which operates it. I have a lot of complaints about the way Metrolinx constructed it.
A lot of this is political and about not wanting to slow down cars. When you really get down to it, the real reason the LRTs are so poor in Toronto, and the streetcars as well, is because Toronto refuses to do anything that might even potentially slow down a hypothetical car driver, ever.
That is the fundamental underpinning of almost all of the problems. But Metrolinx built this without the ability for high-quality signal priority. In most other countries, when they build an LRT, it is very normal for the lights to go green for those LRTs.
Of course it makes sense, because there could be a hundred people or more on that LRT. Why would they sit and wait for half a dozen car drivers to go through? It doesn’t make any sense at all. So that was step one. But another part of it is that the TTC is very, very conservative in its operations.
They require streetcars and LRTs to slow to 25 kilometres per hour through intersections. It used to be 10 on the streetcars, for what it’s worth, which is insane.
So there are two elements: Metrolinx and the way it was constructed, and the TTC and the way it’s operated. Although I do want to stress that the underpinning of all of this is Toronto’s inability to restrict cars in any way, even the tiniest way, to improve the quality of public transit.
Cara Stern: The thing about going through intersections really slowly is very weird to me, because they claim the trains go up to 60 kilometres an hour on the streets, and then they have to slow down to, what is it, 20 kilometres an hour through the intersection?
Jason Slaughter: I believe it’s 25 now. It’s tough to keep track of. Obviously, I’m not a TTC LRT driver.
Cara Stern: I guess they’re doing it because they think it’s hard to slow down in case they need to stop for a pedestrian or something like that. How do other places deal with that?
Jason Slaughter: Not like that. This is again the highly conservative operations you find with the TTC in particular, but with many transit operators in Canada. You do need to be careful with trains. You don’t want them to derail, for example.
You want them to go slowly around very tight corners, and LRTs sometimes have almost 90-degree corners. You don’t want them going too quickly over a whole bunch of switches. But this is really not that. Other cities just aren’t going to have those kinds of speed limits.
The arguments that come up will be around safety, which is very difficult to argue with. People are crossing the street, and you don’t want them to be hit by the LRT. Or maybe a car might run into it if the driver’s not paying attention.
So you want to go slow. And yes, it’s true that the slower things go, the safer it is.
But if it’s dangerous for vehicles to go through an intersection so quickly, why aren’t we doing anything to restrict the cars?
Why is there a 50 or 60 kilometre per hour speed limit for cars? Toronto doesn’t even ticket unless you’re going at least 10 over. People are routinely going 10 or 20 kilometres per hour over the speed limit, and cars are killing so many people in Toronto.
They are by far the most dangerous thing on the road. That’s how most people are killed: they’re killed by cars. So this idea that we have to be so incredibly conservative and safe around our LRTs, and yet throw caution to the wind for car drivers, just doesn’t jibe at all.
The end result is public transit that’s vastly inferior to driving. If you’re driving along Finch West, you’re going to get there faster, and all the parking is free. There are parking lots all over the place.
So who’s going to take public transit? That’s the fundamental issue.
When I was in Copenhagen, I talked to people on the train, and they said, “Yeah, I have a car, but of course I’m going to take this. It’s so fast, it’s convenient, it’s great. We didn’t have this before.” They were so excited about it. When you talk to people on the Finch West LRT, if anything, they’ll say, “Well, it’s smoother than the bus I was taking before.”
You’re not getting a bunch of people who switched from car to transit. Of course you aren’t. They’ve kept driving so much better by over-prioritizing driving, but also made transit worse.
Cara Stern: Yeah, I feel like it was made for the people who were taking the bus, so it would be better than the bus, but it isn’t that great. I’d never seen the words “signal priority” launch in Canadian media the way they did when the Finch LRT launched.
Jason Slaughter: Yeah, I was really thankful to see that, by the way. As somebody who has been involved in public transit for so long, I was like, “Oh my God, finally, people are talking about this very basic concept.”
Cara Stern: I think they were so embarrassed. For the audience who doesn’t know what the signal priority issue is, can you explain it quickly?
Jason Slaughter: Like I mentioned earlier, it’s fairly normal in many other countries that when transit vehicles get to a traffic light, it goes green for them. That’s called transit signal priority. And it just makes sense. Transit vehicles are going to have dozens, if not over 100, people on them.
They should always go first. They should not hit red lights. This is one of the things that really frustrates me. Living here in Amsterdam, it’s absolutely shocking to take the tram compared to the Toronto streetcar, because I’ve done that many times, where one day I’m taking the tram in Amsterdam, and then I fly to Toronto and the next day I’m taking a Toronto streetcar. In Amsterdam, the tram starts moving, gets up to 50 or 60 kilometres an hour and just keeps going. Every light turns green for it as it goes. Well, not green, it’s a little white signal, but whatever.
The point is it’s not red. It just sails right through. And the thing I really want to stress is that this is normal. This is not some weird, new, fancy technology. That’s what we’re talking about when we say transit signal priority.
Cara Stern: Man, this is Canada. We don’t look at other countries before figuring it out. We have to come up with our own brand-new ideas of how to do things.
Jason Slaughter: It is very frustrating, because whenever I talk to Canadians about stuff like this, they always bring up winter, as if no other country in the world has winter. They’ll say, “Oh, what if the rails are icy, or there’s too much snow, or poor visibility?”
And I’m like, what do you think they do in Scandinavia? Do you think they don’t have trams in Sweden or Norway? It drives me freaking crazy that Canada refuses to look at any other country except maybe the United States, just to point out that at least we’re not that bad.
Come on, guys. Please look at Scandinavia. At least look at what they’re doing. You could do the same thing.
Cara Stern: That’d be so nice. I think it was the Toronto marathon last year whose slogan was “Faster than a streetcar.” And I was like, that’s kind of sad, but accurate. I know that when the Finch West LRT started, people were racing it on foot and winning.
I think that was something the city got really embarrassed about. And I think they realized that if that happened with the Eglinton LRT, after so many years of delays, when that thing was under construction for well over a decade, it would be a disaster.
So they said, okay, we’re going to put in signal priority. But it seems like they did a half version of signal priority. How much better could it be from where it is now?
Jason Slaughter: Oh, it could be miles better. I think a lot of it, honestly, was people racing it and that kind of stuff going viral on social media. But the fact that it had been delayed for so long and then was so slow, with a lot of people saying it was slower than the buses it replaced, which is just insane, put a fire under city council to look into it. And yes, they did a few things. The TTC will say that they have signal priority. They have this thing they call advanced signal priority. “Advanced” meaning early, not “advanced” meaning high-tech or useful.
They actually have it on some traffic lights in Toronto for buses as well. But the way it works on the TTC is that if a transit vehicle is running behind schedule, and almost only if it’s running behind schedule, and it gets to a traffic light that has a custom signal for buses or LRTs, it can turn green a little bit earlier.
That is a form of traffic signal priority, but it’s really not what we’re talking about here. I’m going to use the Netherlands as an example, because the Netherlands has unbelievably smart traffic lights.
You know that thing where, whether you’re driving or biking or walking, you’re at a red light and nobody’s going by the other way?
Cara Stern: You’re like, why is this red?
Jason Slaughter: I will tell you that almost never happens anywhere in the entire Netherlands. It’s shocking how that never happens. And it’s not very high-tech. It’s fairly straightforward technology that’s been around for decades, not some fancy AI. It just works.
When a tram is coming towards the traffic lights, the system knows where the traffic is. You know those loops on the ground for cars, the ones you drive over that detect your car and turn the light?
Cara Stern: Yep.
Jason Slaughter: They have more of those, not just at the stop line, but also farther out. So they know how many cars are coming at that time, and if there’s a gap, they’ll turn it red for the cars so the trams can go through. The timing is just so much more intelligent. The Netherlands is fairly advanced when it comes to this stuff, but this is still pretty normal.
The idea that a transit vehicle should ever have to wait at a red light is ridiculous. And there are so many other things the TTC could be doing. Traffic lights in Canada tend to be quite dumb. I did a degree in electrical engineering at Waterloo, and I literally had classes about traffic signal systems. They’re really stupid in Canada.
They’ll be green in one direction for a certain amount of time. There may be a few things that change that time, like whether somebody pressed the walk signal, so it might stay on a little bit longer.
But generally, they stay green in one direction, then go red and go green in the other direction. That is typically how Canadian traffic lights work. So here’s the thing. If an LRT comes up and traffic is going, fine, maybe the LRT needs to stop. It can’t suddenly turn green with a bunch of cars in the intersection. There’s a certain amount of time you need to wait.
But the very next thing it should do is go green for the LRT, every single time. Not only if it’s going this direction that time around, not only if there’s not a car in the left-turn lane.
Every single time, the very next thing to go green should be the LRT.
And again, this is not unusual in other cities in the world. That’s the most frustrating part to me. They’ll say, “Well, that’s going to make the level of service worse for the cars in the other direction.” And I’m kind of like, I don’t care.
You’ve got a hundred people on this freaking LRT, or at least you should. Maybe you don’t today, because it’s not very good. They should be going first. They go through, and then the traffic light can go back to what it was going to do before. Now, maybe there’s a bus the other way that’s also being blocked, and it’s got 50 people on it.
I completely understand that. But these are solvable problems that cities all over the world solve on a regular basis. This is just a line item among the hundreds of things they do when building a transit system. It should not be such an area of discussion. It should be a very normal thing to do, so that transit runs faster and more efficiently.
Cara Stern: How expensive is that to put in now, versus when they were building it? City council is talking right now about a hiring freeze. They say there’s a billion dollars they need to find somewhere. I can hear them saying, “We don’t have the money for this.” How expensive is it to retrofit?
Jason Slaughter: Well, I don’t know myself how expensive it would be to retrofit the Finch West LRT or the surface portions of the Eglinton Crosstown. There is some level of signal priority there already.
So there are things that are possible. But one thing I really do want to stress is that a huge amount of the slowdowns on the LRTs and the streetcars are related to operational issues, coming back to that conservative way the TTC operates.
There are a whole bunch of things that could be done almost overnight for little or nothing if we just said, “Come on, guys. We need to look at how other countries and other cities run their transit, and get more in line with that kind of operating style.” A lot of that could come for free.
Cara Stern: While you’re talking, I’m thinking, oh my gosh, I’ve got to send this to the TTC people. I’ve got to send this to Mayor Chow’s office.
Jason Slaughter: A lot of them know this stuff already. I get that a lot with my YouTube videos. People say, “I’ve got to send this to my city council.” And I’m like, yeah, it’s fine, you can send it to them, but trust me, a lot of people know this stuff already. A lot of this is decades of doing things a certain way, which is very difficult to change. But every little bit helps, I guess.
One of the frustrating things for me, though, is that I talk a lot about Europe, and obviously the Netherlands because I live here, and about the cities that I visit on Day Pass episodes. The last season was all in Asia, where things were working beautifully. But I recently visited and made a video about Kitchener-Waterloo.
The Kitchener-Waterloo ION train literally uses the exact same trains as the Eglinton Crosstown, with a different coat of paint. And yet they run so much better.
Cara Stern: Why?
Jason Slaughter: So even if you’re one of these people who says, “Oh, well, that’s Europe,” go to Kitchener-Waterloo and you’ll see it done better. And why? It wasn’t built by Metrolinx. It was done by other contractors, completely separately, and it’s operated differently. Now, they also have some issues with operating very conservatively. They have some speed limits that I think are unreasonable. They do a very silly thing around curves, where they have low speed limits but don’t speed up again until they’re all the way through the curve, whereas in most other cities, like here in Amsterdam, as soon as the front of the tram is through the curve and on the straight part, it accelerates. There are little things like that Kitchener-Waterloo could do better.
But when it comes to traffic signal priority, it’s night and day better than what you see on Finch West or the Eglinton Crosstown.
That was the most frustrating part for me. I’ve become used to travelling around the world and seeing public transit, cycling and many other things related to urban planning and mobility done better in other countries. But it was frustrating to see Kitchener-Waterloo, right nearby, doing it so much better. Come on, guys, get it together.
Cara Stern: We just had an election in Toronto, and I heard a lot about transit fares. One of the big campaign promises of Mayor Chow, who won, was reducing the number of fares needed to pay for a pass, which is great. But my read is that people just think streetcars are inherently slow.
She said she did improve the signal priority, but I don’t think anyone actually thinks they’re better at this point. When I talk to people who drive, or even people who take transit, they say streetcars are just a lost cause. And on the subway, which should be really fast, we’ve accepted unbearably slow zones for years.
I’m thinking of Eglinton to Davisville, for example, where you could just walk.
Jason Slaughter: There was an area around Rosedale, just north of Bloor, that was really slow for over a year.
It’s quite frustrating to me, because if car drivers had to slow down that much for some reason, it would be fixed overnight in Toronto. Transit riders are just not taken seriously at all.
And it’s incredibly frustrating, because a lot of people take public transit in Toronto. It is a non-trivial number of people. It’s millions and millions of people who take public transit in and around the Greater Toronto Area. And yet cars are prioritized at every level of every discussion, absolutely everywhere.
If you talk to people in Toronto, they will tell you that traffic is one of their major problems. It’s infamous in Canada how bad the traffic is in Toronto, on the 401, all through downtown and on the Gardiner Expressway.
Everybody talks about how terrible the traffic is. I know it. I used to live in downtown Toronto and work in Markham. I used to drive up the Don Valley Parkway every day. It sucked. Of course, I had no other choice. And this is something I’ve talked about so many times before, and urban planners have known it for decades: there’s no solution to car traffic except viable alternatives to driving. You can’t just make lanes wider. The 401 is already the widest highway in all of North America, including the United States.
There’s no solution to car traffic except viable alternatives to driving.
Even the Katy Freeway hasn’t beaten it yet, but they will. They’re expanding it.
Cara Stern: We’ll just keep adding lanes. It’s fine. We’re going to beat the Katy Freeway.
Jason Slaughter: It’s bonkers to me that Toronto sees traffic as such a major issue, and then has something that could solve it, like the streetcar network. Look, every city everywhere had streetcars and trams.
Look at any city. Look at Regina, Saskatchewan. Look at London, Ontario. They all had streetcars. The whole world did. And they were torn out in the 20th century as cities made more room for cars.
A few cities maintained some level of historic streetcar network, and Toronto is a famous example of one that kept a surprising amount of it. But cities all over the world have now realized that trams and LRTs are one of the absolute best ways of getting people around a city, for so many reasons.
And they are rebuilding these streetcar and LRT networks. You see it all over Europe. Cities everywhere are building new tram lines and new LRT lines.
There are cities that would kill to have a streetcar network like Toronto’s.
And yet Toronto has it and completely squanders it by letting it run so incredibly poorly. The streetcars are getting stuck in traffic almost all the time. But even when they have their own lane, like on Spadina, they’re still painfully slow.
Their speed limits are painfully slow, they don’t have signal priority, and they get stuck at red lights. Cities around the world are purposely building new tram lines all the time, and one of the major reasons to do that is to reduce car traffic and get people onto public transit. Toronto talks all the time about having this terrible traffic, and yet it refuses to do anything with the thing other cities are literally spending billions of euros to build. It’s so frustrating to me to take the streetcar in Toronto. They’re terrible.
They’re really, really bad. They’re still boarding in the middle of the street, where cars come in and you see people trying to dodge around them. I have a video of a woman in a wheelchair, with snow around, trying to get past parked cars to get onto the streetcar.
And it’s like, what are you doing, people? It’s so incredibly frustrating.
Cara Stern: Do you have any idea why even transit riders in Toronto seem so complacent about mediocrity when it comes to their system? They say they want it to be cheaper, but I don’t see a mass uprising saying we need to make it better. Why aren’t even the transit riders doing that?
Jason Slaughter: Part of it is that people just don’t know. Not everybody has the privilege of being able to travel around the world like I have. You can read about it and see videos about it, but you don’t really internalize it until you’re sitting on a tram in another city and you’re like, “Wow, we’re going 60 kilometres an hour. We’re flying past the traffic. All the lights are turning green for us. This is awesome.”
You don’t really get that unless you’ve had the chance to try it for yourself. So that’s a big part of it. People just don’t know better.
I don’t say that in an insulting way. They may know in theory that it could be better in other cities, but they haven’t internalized just how much better it could be.
Another part of it, though, is that Canadians really don’t like complaining about things. This is something I’ve talked about before, and something I’ve really noticed about Dutch culture compared to Canadian culture. When I would bring up issues like this in Canada, back when I lived there, people would very often say, “Stop complaining. At least they’re building something.”
Or they’d say, “It could be a lot worse. I was in Boston and it was terrible.” I’m like, okay, great. But it could also be better, right? So there is a cultural thing where a lot of Canadians don’t like complaining about things.
They don’t like causing a fuss. And there is this thing that’s super annoying about the Dutch: they complain all the time. It’s always something with them.
It is annoying. But at the same time, it’s how things get better: by complaining about them. It’s never quite good enough. And they exaggerate so much.
They’ll say, “Our trains are the worst trains in all of Europe.” And I’m like, no, they’re really not. They’re actually some of the best. Come on, guys. But they’re always striving for something better, and that’s something I really wish Canadians would do more often.
I used to get it back in Toronto, and I still get it as the largest urbanist YouTuber: Canadians saying, “Oh, you’re too negative. You’re always complaining. It’s not that bad.” And I’m like, no, guys, you need to complain more. You really, really do, because it’s not going to get better otherwise.
Look at what happened with transit signal priority on Finch West. When people started saying “This is freaking ridiculous” and pointing it out on social media, city council said, “Oh, damn, we have to do something about this.” It lights a fire under them. They have a million things to worry about.
They’re not going to worry about something if the only time they hear about it is when, every once in a while at a public consultation, somebody comes up and says, “Actually, I think the streetcars could maybe be a little bit better.” That’s not going to work. And yes, they have done a few things to improve the transit signal priority a little, and to improve the speed limits.
They did that before the Eglinton Crosstown opened, so it is a little bit better. But it’s not even close to good enough, guys. You’ve got to do so much better than that.
Cara Stern: Speaking of things that are not even close to good enough, I have to think the bike lane situation in Ontario is one of the worst. I think you called it the worst legislation?
Jason Slaughter: The dumbest bike lane law in the world, or something like that. I forget what I called it. It was a while ago. But I will tell you that the rest of the world is laughing at you. They really are. I see it all the time. They say, “Oh, you’re from Toronto? You’re removing bike lanes? How backwards are these guys?”
It’s really, really bad. There’s a very pro-car ideological bent, because there is no rational reason to remove bicycle lanes. The province had a report commissioned on it, and that report explicitly said it’s not going to improve traffic congestion, but they did it anyway because it’s ideological. This goes back to that whole “war on cars” thing from Rob Ford, which was ridiculous. There’s no war on cars in Toronto at all. Cars are overwhelmingly prioritized.
Look at the budget, look at the space given to them, look at how much time city council and the rest of city staff spend on them. Cars are overwhelmingly prioritized. It’s a freaking joke to say there is a war on cars in Toronto.
The fundamental problem with Toronto, and with a lot of North American cities, is that almost every single scrap of space between buildings has been given over to cars. Apart from a little sidewalk here and there, and some places only have a sidewalk on one side of the road, or none, almost all the space has been given over to cars. So in order to do literally anything, you have to take space away from cars, simply because there’s no space left. What else are you going to do, bulldoze buildings? When they built the Finch West LRT, they didn’t bulldoze buildings, but they had to buy adjacent properties to widen the road, because they refused to take a lane away from cars.
There were lots of reasons why the Finch West LRT was late and expensive. But one of them was that in other cities, even Kitchener-Waterloo, when they build an LRT, they take a lane from cars and put the LRT there.
Toronto refuses to take any space away from cars, ever. So you can’t just take a four-lane road, put a tram down the middle and leave one lane on either side for cars. No, it has to keep the same number of car lanes forever. That means you have to widen the road, which means moving traffic lights, water pipes and sewer pipes, all to widen that road.
There is this ideological problem in Toronto, and in a lot of Canada, that cars have to come first. And I’m sorry, but until you get rid of that ridiculous ideology and actually build things that are better, it is never going to get better.
I travel to all of these cities with less space for cars and higher population densities, and yet less traffic. Why? Because they’ve created viable alternatives to driving. They’ve put destinations close together so people can walk to them.
They’ve made it safe to cycle, so some people will cycle. They’ve made public transit efficient, even faster than driving, so lots of people use it. And there are roads, too, but they’re only being used by the people who have to drive or who really, really want to.
Cara Stern: I’m convinced a large part of this is because our political system really overemphasizes votes in the suburbs. That’s how you win, and the suburbs are mostly car-dependent at this point. I don’t know how we get away from that as long as we have a system that emphasizes it.
Jason Slaughter: Honestly, I’m not sure. And again, this is where people say I’m too negative about improvement in Canada. There are a lot of really systemic issues that need to be overcome to improve the urbanization of Canadian cities, and that’s a big part of it.
Canada is, I believe, the most suburban nation on Earth. The United States certainly has a lot of people living in car-centric areas, but it also has many historic places, like Manhattan, where a lot of people take public transit.
But the share of people who live in a car-dependent place in Canada is, I believe, the highest in the world, or if not, number two. That’s a fundamental issue. In the Netherlands, there are lots of ways of getting around. People certainly do drive, but lots of people don’t, too.
The city of Amsterdam is very much trying to remove cars. It has an active goal to reduce the number of people coming into the city by car, and other cities in Europe have similar plans, because they know they need to reduce the number of cars in the city.
I cannot imagine Toronto ever coming out and saying, “Here’s our plan to reduce the number of cars by 40% over the next five years.”
Cara Stern: Never.
Jason Slaughter: It’s never going to happen under the current regime, but it has to happen. I’ll tell you, it has to happen. There’s also this expectation in Toronto that, even if you live in the suburbs, you should be able to drive downtown, have a parking spot, get there easily and never hit any traffic. That’s just an unreasonable expectation.
It should not be normal to drive into cities.
It should be normal to drive to, say, a GO station, hop on the train and go in. And if that’s not good enough, make it better.
It’s frustrating when some Canadians tell me, “If I take the bus to work, it’ll take me an hour and 15 minutes, but if I drive, it’s half an hour.” Somehow that’s always used as a reason to prioritize cars, not as a reason to make public transit better. And until you get over that, it’s never going to get better. When I see people complaining, “I’m trying to drive into downtown Toronto and there’s so much traffic,” the answer should be: why are you driving into downtown Toronto?
That should be the normal answer everybody has. Are you carrying two tons of stuff? Are you unable to use public transit? Those should be the reasons you drive into downtown Toronto. If you say, “Well, no, I’m going to work,” I’m like, why?
This should not be a normal thing to do. And people will say, “Well, public transit is too slow.” And I say, yes, that’s why we’re trying to make transit better. I just want to shake them.
Cara Stern: And it’s a growing city. We have a lot of people coming into the Toronto area. I always respond to people that there’s a geometry problem here. There is not enough space for the number of cars, and people need to recognize that, because it’s not sustainable in the long term. I don’t know if anyone who’s really into driving their car downtown has made it this far through the interview, but...
Jason Slaughter: Does anybody enjoy driving in downtown Toronto? Seriously, has anyone ever driven in downtown Toronto and said, “Wow, that was great, I loved that”?
Cara Stern: It’s not fun.
Jason Slaughter: No, of course not, because it sucks, because you shouldn’t be driving. And like you said, it really is a geometry problem. Cars are the most space-inefficient way of getting people around a city. That’s a fact. I guess you could bring them in by helicopter.
Space is ultimately the prime resource in a city. If we can take space away from cars, we can build more green areas, more housing and more dedicated public transit lanes, and all of these things make cities better.
This is consistent everywhere I’ve been all over the world: the fewer cars you have in a city, the better it is. That’s just a fact. Whether Toronto wants to admit it is the real problem.
Cara Stern: Last question. I really love the way you directly address people who find your videos too negative. Toronto-area YouTubers think you’re too negative about Toronto, and Montreal-area YouTubers think you’re too negative about Montreal.
Do you worry that people will think you hate North America, or have you made peace with being the guy who says your city’s not as great as you think it is?
Jason Slaughter: Well, the one thing I’ve really tried to do is be consistent when I look at different cities. One of the things I very often see among North American urbanists is that they apply different standards to different places. Every once in a while they’ll even admit it. They’ll say, “This city is done really well by North American standards.”
And I’m like, I don’t have North American standards, European standards or Japanese standards. I have standards. That’s it. Here’s an example. Say I said every city everywhere should have an area where cars are not permitted.
If I said this to someone in the Netherlands, or in Germany, even Germans who love their BMWs, Audis and Mercedes would say, “Well, of course. Every city needs that little area in the centre that is fully pedestrianized.”
Brussels expanded theirs recently. This is a perfectly normal thing.
If you said that in Canada, people would lose their freaking minds. If I went to Canada and said, “I really think everything south of Bloor, east of Bathurst and west of, I don’t know, the Don Valley Parkway should be off limits to cars, except for loading, unloading and special permits for residents,” people would lose their freaking minds. But that is exactly what Oslo did. Oslo also has snow, guys. So when people say I’m very negative about North America, it’s because I’m applying the same standards to North America that I apply to the rest of the world.
Here in Amsterdam, there’s a giant plan called Amsterdam Autoluw that is specifically designed to move towards a nearly car-free city. That’s the stated goal of the municipality.
That’s the level we’re operating at here. So when somebody tells me, “Oh, but Toronto built 1.3 kilometres of bike lanes,” I’m sorry, that’s just not good enough. I get that it is some progress, although it is now being taken back, which is insane.
The problem is, I am fundamentally not willing to praise mediocrity. I’m just not. That’s something I always got in trouble for when I was doing advocacy in Toronto. People would say, “Well, at least they’re building something. It could be worse.” And I’m like, no, I am not going to praise mediocrity.
I don’t care if they built two kilometres of bike lanes if it’s all painted lines. That’s not good enough. They put in these stupid plastic sticks you can just drive over. That’s not good enough.
I refuse to praise mediocrity. It’s actually one of the reasons I started my YouTube channel. I got really frustrated by the content that was online before I came along. A lot of it was the equivalent of your toddler coming home with a crayon drawing and you saying, “Oh, this is so beautiful, let’s put it on the fridge.”
I’m not doing that. You’re not toddlers. You’re grown adults, and this isn’t good enough. So, I’m sorry.
Cara Stern: I’m so grateful you got annoyed enough to start the YouTube channel, because I do think it’s most people’s entryway into urbanism. I talk to a lot of people who are interested in housing advocacy, transit, bike lanes, anything urbanist, and it seems like the vast majority got into it by watching your videos.
Jason Slaughter: I’m in touch with somebody who just got elected to London, Ontario, city council. He sent me an email and said, “I did it. I got into this because of your videos.” It happens. And this is one of those funny things about the people who say I’m too negative, that I should be nicer, that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
One thing I really want to stress is that my channel didn’t become popular in spite of my approach. It became popular because of my approach. If you just put out a long 30-minute video full of facts and data, nobody is going to be converted by that.
The only people who will sit through it are the people who are already on your side. When I call it “fake London” and call it a car-infested shithole, yes, it pisses people off, but it also gets their attention. I wish it weren’t true, but people are just not swayed by having all the facts put in front of them. They are brought over to your side by strong arguments, confidently stated.
And yes, there are going to be people who get upset. I’ve had conversations with people who said, “I watched your videos and I was so turned off. I was so pissed off at what you said about my city. And then a few days later, it was twisting in my mind, and I was walking around and thought, no, actually, he’s right.”
Because it gets in people’s minds. They wonder, how can this guy believe this, because it is actually true. They get upset about it, but that’s where the actual change starts to happen. That’s where people start to get converted.
I have heard from literally hundreds of people who have gone into urban planning, into politics, into traffic engineering or into advocacy because of my videos, and I’m really, really thankful for that. All of those people are doing the actual hard work.
I’m just out here taking the shots from the people who are cranky with me. But I’m thankful to say things are getting better. Having someone who’s a fan of my videos elected to London city council is how we’re going to change things in Canada.
Cara Stern: We’ll get there, I hope. Unless it’s all fought back by the province.
Jason Slaughter: Yeah, that’s a whole other issue. Cities need some sort of autonomy. It’s absolutely bonkers that a city can vote for something, the residents can want it, city council can vote for it, and then a higher level of government can just say, “Nah, you can’t have that. We’re taking it away.” That is so unbelievably undemocratic. It’s crazy that Canadians are willing to accept that.
Even if you don’t like bike lanes, the fact that that kind of undemocratic thing can happen should not be acceptable in a civilized society.
Cara Stern: Thank you for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin. And if you’re still driving into downtown Toronto, why? Let us know in the comments, and we’ll see you next time.
Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:
Jason Slaughter, Not Just Bikes
How can a NEW Transit Line be THIS BAD!? (Finch West LRT)
This Small City’s LRT is so Good it Made me Angry
North America Will Never Be the Netherlands - Interview with Not Just Bikes