And people wonder why there was a fare hike. It costs absurd amounts of money to operate a large-scale transit system, let alone to improve and upgrade it. I’ll never understand, though, why it seems to cost so much more to build new things here than it does in Europe, where subway extension is a given rather than a far off dream. Really, though, what do we expect, being in the country where owning a cellular phone is a serious investment – that improving our infrastructure should come cheap? Who do we think we are?

The city’s streetcar fleet, which is approaching antiquity, is finally and fortunately being replaced by an all-new lineup of fancy newfangled thingamawhatsits which should be trolling the arterials by 2012. As we all know this is a very liberal estimate, as 2012 translates loosely into transit speak as “???????!” Regardless, sometime within my lifetime, there will be at least 204 European-style Light Rail Vehicles on the prowl in Toronto.

The cost of these 204 streetcars the city has commissioned: $1.2 billion. Fine.

Reasonably, the city cannot continue using the current model of streetcar, the presumptuously titled Canadian Light Rail Vehicle for much longer, as the CLRVs and their Articulated cousins that are used primarily on the Queen route have been in service since the late 1970s, thus putting them fairly far out of code. And here we are now, where because of the price tag the general no-brainer of replacing aged public vehicles has become a source of some uproar. I’ve decided, given the fact that last month’s column was nothing but ranting, to avoid sermonizing for today and leave angry taxpaying motorists and transit-illiterate mayoral candidate Rocco Rossi alone for the time being.

Instead I want to talk for a bit about the really cool new streetcars that are being built specially for us, and why I think streetcars are really great in general. OK? Here we go:

So the new cars that are being built by Bombardier are called the Flexity Outlook, which is a low-floor, articulated LRV that has similar models operating in cities such as Brussels and Marseille. Below is a photo of one of Brussels’ Flexity Outlook cars:

Pretty cool, right? These things are larger and leagues more accessible than the CLRVs, plus they will apparently be air-conditioned and just generally all modern and fancy. I’m kind of stoked. Not much is known about the specifics of the Flexity Outlook in Toronto – seeing as how each model has to be very meticulously tailored to meet its city’s needs – however there appears to be some issue over track gauge, which may have to be modified on the street as it differs from standard street car routs, the SRT (which is set to be converted to LRV) and the upcoming Transit City routes. When extending the subway, you can just start digging a hole and away we go because the underground infrastructure of a major city is vastly more complex than one might immediately imagine and the same principal goes for streetcars: the city can’t just pick a model and plonk it down on Queen Street without much thought – it isn’t like buying a car. This is my general mode of thinking for when I’m feeling bitchy about city projects taking way longer than is convenient for me personally: there’s probably a lot going on that I’m not considering.

Anyway, I like the streetcar. I like riding streetcars way more than riding buses; maybe the streetcar seems like a more elegant form of transit compared to the bumpy, dusty crassness of buses. People in general seem to be much friendlier on the streetcars than on buses for reasons I’ll never be able to explain. I like to stick my hand out of the streetcar window on nice days in the summer and the nine-year old toy-truck-and-dinosaur-loving boy in me delights to no end when the operators ring their bells at each other.

Mostly though, I like streetcars in Toronto because they add a lot of character to the city and I think that those lumbering, red sources of motorist rage – slow and bunched-up though they may sometimes be – are something of an identifying point for Toronto. There is a good reason why the city blog, Torontoist’s logo consists of stylized images of the CN Tower, City Hall, OCAD’s Sharp Center for Design and a streetcar: the streetcar is an integral part of the city’s identity and the downtown Toronto experience, in my opinion just as iconic of Toronto as those other things, important parts of our architectural image. Everyone that visits me from out of town is always fascinated upon first encountering the CLRVs traipsing and buzzing down Dundas and indeed when I first moved here, I was completely enamored of their bizarre charms.

There are also many technical advantages to streetcars, as Steve Munro will be quick point out, such as the obvious point of being that they can carry a lot more people than buses. They’re also, on the whole, a lot more efficient, able to run much more smoothly and tend not to need replacing as frequently (as reflected by their cost to the city); to date only one of the original CLRVs has been scrapped completely, though many are now beginning to fail after decades of service. Today I’m not really feeling like going into this, though, as I’m instead feeling very sentimental and am for some reason trying to express my love for Toronto through a discussion of public transit.

Before the CLRVs were built, the city was considering scrapping streetcars altogether, but they changed their minds at the last second. Their extremely car-friendly schemes also at the time included plans to connect Allen Road to the Gardiner, effectively slashing some of downtown’s most vibrant neighborhoods such as the Annex, Little Italy and Kensington to pieces in favor of a network of highways that would essentially make downtown Toronto an overwhelmingly unfriendly place for pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders. Instead, goodness won out in the end – perhaps by act of divine intervention, and much to the chagrin of commuters we all get to enjoy a downtown core you’d have to be insane to want to drive in. I for one cannot imagine sitting on some College Street patio without the nasal whir of the 506 filling my ears.