Your lunchtime long read for the day is John Lorinc's excellent piece in the November issue of The Walrus, headlined "How Toronto lost its groove", where he details all the ways that Toronto is a mess. It's heavy on history and policy, noting all the ways in which Toronto simply isn't governed the way that other cities in Canada, much less the world, are. It's unfair to single out any one part, but here's one thing that's crucial:

Following Vancouver’s lead, Dalton McGuinty set up a regional transit agency in 2007 called Metrolinx, which was charged with developing a long-term, integrated transportation strategy for the GTA and neighbouring Hamilton. The agency’s mandate was to take the politics out of transit planning, and transit planners found much to praise in its Big Move strategy, a twenty-five-year, $50-billion initiative that called for more LRT routes, commuter rail, bus rapid transit, and high-occupancy vehicle lanes. But unlike Greater Vancouver’s TransLink, which is funded through fares and a portion of municipal property taxes, as well as provincial fuel and parking taxes, Metrolinx lacked a predictable revenue stream, relying on one-time pledges approved by the provincial cabinet.

With all the talk about how to fund transit in this city, the idea of merging the TTC with the Toronto Parking Authority and then charging higher rates for parking (both on-street and off) could potentially be a way to move people out of their cars and fund TTC improvements. And while road tolls are a political non-starter in this city, a combination of gas taxes and higher parking rates could actually have much the same effect.

So we don't even have to ask why Toronto can't be as well-governed as Chicago or New York. We can start more modestly: why won't Queen's Park let Toronto be as well-governed as Vancouver?

Blog photo "Rotting" by detsang via Flickr.