I didn't read the whole book, just the transport section and a steady skim of the rest. Interesting stuff, with lots of Toronto history that I was completely ignorant of. The story of transport driving land development is echoed time and again in these pages. The "tragedy" of the title refers to the general hardship of the times, and also to the fate of the blue collar workers who built their own homes on the fringes of Toronto in the leadup to the depression, many ultimately starving or freezing when they could no longer afford the burden of home ownership.
In 1891 the city [of Toronto] negotiated a thirty-year agreement that gave the Toronto Railway Company (TRC) a monopoly. [...] The TRC interpreted teh agreement to mean that it was legally responsible for service only within the city limits that existed in 1891. After 1900 it added some new routes, but too slowly to keep pace with urban growth. [...]
In the early 1890s the Belt Line Railway was providing an object lesson in the perils of speculative optimism. Prosperity during the 1880s had encouraged a group of businessmen to form the Toronto Belt Land Corporation, which subdivided and attempted to sell land at and beyond the further reaches of the then built-up area. To promote the land, the same group established a Belt Line Railway Company, which began a commuter line to encircle most of the city. When the economy crashed in 1889, the company was taken over by the Grand Trunk Railway, which completed construction and began running trains on 30 July, 1892. The line ran through undeveloped suburbs, the original idea having been that transportation would promote development, but this did not happen. At first, twenty-four trips a day were scheduled, soon reduced to twelve, then to six. Finally, in November 1894, service was withdrawn. [...]
The experience of the Belt Line underlined the riskiness of building public transportation in sparsely settled suburbs. Even the civic car lines that were built between 1910 and 1919 lost money, although they served areas that by that time were more than half built up. In contrast, the TRC reckoned that by restricting service to the most densely settled parts of the urban area, it could maximize profits. The degree of restriction was obvious. Michael Doucet has calculated that by 1915, Toronto had only 0.17 miles of streetcar trackage for every thousand people. This compared unfavorably with Montreal (0.26) and very unfavorably with Winnipeg (0.8), Calgary (1.25), and Vancouver (2.42). Equally obvious was the profitability of the company's operation. The system had much lower operating costs per mile than those in Montreal or Vancouver, and net revenues were higher. In fact, the Toronto system bore comparison with any on the continent. A 1912 survey found that, compared with "U.S. cities of similar size... Toronto had the lowest miles of track per capita and the highest receipts per mile of track." As a result, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the TRC averaged a 10 percent annual rate of return, compared with the 4-5 percent earned by companies in other Canadian cities and a measly 2.8 percent earned by electric lines in the United States between 1909 and 1917. Unusually, in Toronto such statistics were all that the transit company cared about. The owners of the TRC were "spectators, not speculators" on the real estate scene, and the company was, in the words of Donald Davis, "the atypical street railway that served no greater end than its own profitability."
The consequence of TRC policy was to make rush hour commuting miserable. Even those who lived and worked in the city faced overcrowding. [...]
Of greater significance in the long run, the effect of TRC policy was to encourage a relatively dense pattern of settlement. Even if suburban commuters were willing to walk across the municipal boundary to reach the end of a car line, the caution of the TRC discouraged low-density settlement.
[pp. 35-38]
It's interesting that when the speculative element of land development is removed from running a private transportation company, high densities are the rule. I wonder what our cities would look like if transportation had remained private?
In day-to-day life, it seems ugly—the book shows pictures of loooong lineups at Broadway and Danforth, where commuters had to transfer form the suburban rail system to the TRC streetcars, and talks about 40% of commuters standing on the streetcars in overcrowded conditions. But in the long run, it seems to encourage density, instead of the ridiculous sparseness of our modern cities.