Council to push forward on subway
Mayor and allies rejected request for analysis of one-stop extension
Mayor John Tory and his allies have rejected a request for a value-for-money comparison between the proposed one-stop subway extension and a light-rail alternative before voting to move forward with the $3.35-billion subway plan.
“We’ve got to get on with this,” Tory told reporters after the vote Tuesday night, following arguments he made at council that no one would doubt it was a wise investment decades from now.
“I think there’s been plenty of sources of informa- tion put in front of people.”
For hours earlier on the floor of the council chamber, city staff — including the head of the public service, city manager Peter Wallace — repeatedly explained they had been directed by council to bring forward a subway plan and that they had never been directed to do the comparison with an LRT, nor had it ever been provided.
Asked if it was possible to conclude the subway is better value for money, Wallace said, “We obviously would not know the answer to that in advance of doing the work.”
Councillor Josh Matlow made a motion to ask staff to provide that business case analysis. The motion failed 27 to 17 without Tory’s support.
Council voted 26 to 18 to advance the design work of a 6.2-kilometre subway tunnel aligned with McCowan Ave. to the Scarborough Town Centre.
“I think it’s reckless, it’s irresponsible and it’s disappointing,” Matlow said after the vote.
“Whether one believes that we should have one mode of transit versus another, at the very least I think we should expect that the decision and the debate be based on factual information and evidence and anything other than that should have no place in this room.”
The failed motion followed a tense question-and-answer period at council, with staff providing a unified statement to council on whether the subway or an LRT was a wise investment.
“Staff are at this point responding to city council direction,” Wallace said.
There’s something that probably ought to be cleared up. There’s a perception out there — it arose during Tuesday’s city council meeting debating (again) the extension to the Bloor subway line to the Scarborough Town Centre — that proponents of the competing LRT proposal have somehow delayed the construction of the subway for years.
Councillor James Pasternak said so again in a speech, saying subway skeptics have “delayed and delayed,” before Councillors Gord Perks and Shelley Carroll loudly objected. In truth, as they pointed out, there has been no delay of the subway extension at all. Since it was proposed by Karen Stintz and Glenn De Baeremaeker as an alternative to the LRT plan that was to be constructed, it has proceeded, gaining approval by council, and having that approval affirmed with every adjustment of the plan since then, and every update from city staff on the revised budgets, timelines and plans.
It has taken a long time, and there’s debate each time, but there have been no delays of any kind — as Carroll said in her speech, Mayor John Tory and his allies have won every vote, every time.
No, LRT proponents have not delayed this subway extension. In fact, as city staff clarified under questioning, the big source of delay came from the other side: if the seven-stop LRT plan had not been shelved and replaced by the subway extension plan, it would be under construction now and would be completed by 2019. Something for the “get on with it” crowd to chew on.
City staff also clarified something else that might run contrary to widespread perception. In as long as we’ve been having these LRT versus subway debates in this city, the city’s government has never done a sideby-side business case comparison of the two plans in this corridor.
City manager Peter Wallace and chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat were emphatic about this — city council has never asked the professionals who report to them to evaluate the proposals side-by-side, which means essentially that staff have been forbidden from doing so.
Repeatedly, Keesmaat clarified that the rationale for the one-stopplus network plan she presented last year did not come from a comparison of the plan against the LRT alternative, it came from the explicit instructions of city council to build a subway.
So, for all the debate we have had, there have been no delays in the subway process. And for all the debate we’ve had, there has been no professional direct comparison of the alternatives.
During the debate on Tuesday, subway skeptics did not put forward any proposal to delay the process of building the subway extension.
But they did put forward a motion to do the side-by-side comparison so that during future debates our government will have some basis for comparison to judge how worthwhile it is.
Now something this delay-free, comparison-free years-long debate has featured a lot of is an aversion to information on the part of the subway advocates. Former mayor Rob Ford set the mould in which regional grievance is the only valid basis for debate, and LRT should be defined as some kind of insult while subways defined as a form of validation. Mayor Tory and his allies, especially including De Baeremaeker, have continued the tradition, going on about what Scarborough “deserves” and about how downtowners who never visit Scarborough want to deprive them of it.
The Scarborough subway extension has not been delayed, and nothing that happened at the meeting will change that.
The comparison to LRT that has never been made will not be made either, as Tory and his team voted down the request for information.
No matter how long we discuss this, some things never change.
Other things do change: the cost goes up. The number of expected riders goes down. The Scarborough subway extension, we heard at Tuesday’s meeting, will be a deep tunnel — bored in bedrock to get it under the watery earth and creeks it needs to get past. Its terminal station will be buried deeper than any other in the system, which is part of why it will be so expensive, it needs so much more concrete, so many more levels in the station. Into this deep tunnel we will pour everything: oodles of money, the opportunity to build other projects to serve the people of Scarborough, years of our lives in debate. A majority of our politicians are not just determined to bury so much in that tunnel, but to consider that there is any other alternative worth even looking at. Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire