Late last month, council once again decided to launch a fool’s errand to investigate selling the naming rights to subway stations. We’ll resist the impulse to enumerate for the eleventy-billionth time why, for symbolic reasons alone, auctioning off the names of civic spaces to the highest bidders is a recipe for shame. Instead, we’ll merely repeat one element of the argument we’ve made before that we think should be enough to send the prospect of “Tampax Heavy Flow (With Disposable Applicator) Station” to the graveyard of bad ideas: the economics don’t work.

It’s highly unlikely that anyone would pay enough to make considering a sellout of our transportation infrastructure worthwhile. Air Canada paid $40 million for the naming rights to the arena on Bay Street where the Raptors and the Leafs play. In exchange, the airline has its name mentioned repeatedly in sportscasts across the continent almost every night throughout the basketball and hockey seasons; gets its name and logo featured weekly on Hockey Night in Canada, one of the country’s highest rated TV shows; gets mentioned in the lead of newspaper sports and entertainment stories in every city in North America frequently; gets to associate itself with two institutions that (even if they never win) are enduring sources of civic pride; and gets to put its name and logo on a street-level landmark visible to daily commuters on the Gardiner Expressway and Lakeshore Boulevard.

Consider what a tiny fraction of that price a sensible company would be willing to pay for the rights to Donlands or Bessarion subway stations, with the attendant glamorous station announcement and transit map exposure that entails. Are we talking $1 million? $2 million? At most?
Now consider that the TTC’s annual operating budget is more than $700 million. Lost revenue from the one-and-a-half-day strike was roughly $1.4 million.

We’re going to sell the very identity of our subway stations for the equivalent of a day’s fare-box take? We recognize that any number with seven digits to the left of the decimal looks big to small-minded city hall politicians, and they look big to us, too. But in the scope of transit system funding, these are crumbs. If we’re going to investigate ways to sell our soul, we could at least investigate methods that would give us some cash to play with. If a corporate buyer comes a knocking looking for naming rights to a station with, say, $1 billion (which would allow lots of light rail construction across the city or fund the entire system for a year), then we can talk philosphy. Until that happens, we should focus on raising real revenue from the provincial and federal governments.

Dumb Denzil, Vol CXXI

Denzil Minnan-Wong shows just how hard it is to stick with his Against-The-Mayor-Right-or-Wrong strategy of politics, with the dumbest quote of the week: “If the panhandling community saw that the city was taking a tough approach, we’d see less panhandling.”
While Dizzy Denzil thinks it’s the perception of softness that causes people to stand out in the elements and beg for pocket change, we agree with Mayor David Miller and the majority of councillors who backed him that it is actually the perception of hunger and the perception of rooflessness among the panhandling community that causes such high levels of panhandling. And the city’s Streets to Homes program, which helps people get out of poverty and addiction, is a better way to eliminate panhandling than whatever “tough approach” Minnan-Wong would suggest.