Streetcars or... or... or... subways??

Just a follow-up to my earlier post on the new streetcars Toronto is seeking.

When I attended the info session at Yonge and Dundas, I crossed paths with a gentleman who was just giving it to one of the volunteers - his argument basically boiled down to: "it's all fine and dandy to make the streetcars wheelchairs accessible - what about making the street wheelchair accessible?" If we are truly going to emulate the euro model as Minneapolis did, we'd be looking at converting major streets into ROWs - I don't see the merchants of Little Italy allowing this for the 506, for example. What makes the Minneapolis line work is that among other things they took entire blocks in the downtown and converted them to ROW combined with pedestrian ways. Now, I'm all for it, but I don't see how that would fly on some of our major routes.

This same gentleman was also passionately arguing against streetcars in the downtown, period. He asked the billion dollar question, "Why aren't we building subways instead?" Naturally, I piped up that no one exactly has $20 billion floating around, and his response was basically, find the money. Now, I know this has been beaten to death here, but he had what sounded like intriguing ideas about funding that I am simply too ignorant of the basic laws of economics to refute, so I thought I would try and recall them here as best as possible and see what you might have to say.

His main example cited the city of San Francisco in the Depression, wanting to build one of the bridges that crosses the Bay (it wasn't clear to me which one). No one had the money for this, but the city secured an interest-free loan from the State - possibly the Federal level too, this was after all a conversation in a crowded mockup of an LRT - that they were able to pay off by 1960. I'm sure there are all sorts of reasons why this wouldn't work here - but could it? The other thought he had was that the City could sell bonds to raise the capital funding. Again, it strikes me as improbable, but I'm not in a position to say.

The reason that I felt it worth sharing this at all (and didn't chalk it up to the ramblings of some nutter) was that the gentleman in question identified himself as the owner of a well-known restaurant downtown that has been there for years. So, fine, he knows a little about money. He also said that he has a disabled son, which is why he's more passionate than some on the issue of accessible streetcars. I suggested to him that he's the one with the ideas, he should be contacting City Hall with them, but he didn't seem to think it was worth trying. So what I'm wondering is, whether we're talking about subways or streetcars, do his funding ideas hold any water? With the recent threatened budget cuts, it would seem that thinking outside the box is overdue anyway.