Shouldn’t we work to end air travel, instead of trying to share the effects justly?
Right now, Canada uses air travel better than other countries. Unlike most other developed nations, we don’t subsidise airlines; on the other hand, we subsidise train travel. And nobody has yet come up with a workable alternative to air travel in the Canadian North. In many cases, given the environmental costs of a rail or road corridor, air travel makes the most sense.
But putting it this way misses the point. We can work on improved technologies for tomorrow— but we have to have equity today. If the kids growing up in Rexdale and Malton have all the effects of Toronto’s air travel dumped on them today, a high speed train to Windsor or Chicago ten years from now isn’t going to give them their childhood back.
Aren’t you conceding that air travel pollutes?
Of course flying produces pollution. So does heating your home and cooking your dinner. Every living person produces waste. We try to minimise the waste, and ensure our activities and our lives do more good, to us and to others, than harm.
Won’t locating air travel downtown produce more pollution?
No. Because of the configuration of Toronto City Centre Airport, carrying a passenger from City Centre Airport creates less local pollution than carrying the same passenger from Pearson.
Won’t the new high-speed rail link to Pearson solve that problem?
No. The configuration of Pearson International means that planes have to taxi further, and planes moving on the ground create most of the local pollution in an airport.
But do people even live near Pearson?
Absolutely. 150,000 people live within the area of significant noise impact for Pearson International Airport. One of the leaders of Community Air, a group lobbying to send the noise and pollution to Rexdale and Malton claimed that “nobody lives” within six miles of Pearson airport. The graphic to the right will show how wrong that is: the pink areas are residential, where at least 30,000 people live. Almost a quarter of those people are children under 15.
Isn't this fight the same as the fight over the Spadina Expressway?
No. The leaders of the Spadina Expressway fight had a clear and convincing alternative expanding automotive traffic: public transit. Nobody arguing against the Spadina expressway proposed to "consolidate" the traffic, noise and pollution in a poor neighbourhood; they had a real solution. The fight against the Spadina Expressway was a fight to reduce pollution, using resources the city of Toronto already had available. The fight over Toronto City Centre Airport is about moving pollution, not about reducing it.