Two transit plans, but no promise of good service
You could be forgiven, if you listened only to the candidates talk, for thinking Mayor John Tory and mayoral candidate Jennifer Keesmaat have wildly different transit plans for Toronto.
Tory calls Keesmaat’s a “risky proposition.”
And Keesmaat says Tory’s is a “mirage.”
However, when you look at Keesmaat’s “network planning approach” — illustrated neatly by a map showing the whole long-term plan for a network of subway lines, LRTs, and express bus routes — and then you look at the longterm plan John Tory led council in approving, you’ll notice they bear a striking resemblance. This isn’t actually that big a surprise. After all, the bulk of Tory’s plan was developed and brought to city council by Keesmaat when she was the city’s chief planner working under him as mayor.
Perhaps it’s fitting, given Tory’s famous on-the-one-hand-on-the-otherhand political positioning, that when he isn’t characterizing Keesmaat’s plan as a reckless rubbishing of years of hard work, he’s claiming it is essentially the same as his plan.
(He sometimes makes both criticisms in the same statement).
And as long as we’re pointing out rhetorical dissonance, it’s worth noting that for all Keesmaat’s trashing of SmartTrack, her own plan keeps all but two of the “new GO stations” in place.
One way of looking at this is that both leading mayoral candidates — and a majority of the outgoing city council — all seem to agree on the broad strokes of the transit network plan we should proceed with.
The similarity, in this regard, is actually encouraging.
No one is suggesting throwing everything out and starting from scratch yet again.
And both look something like a complete network across the whole city.
That doesn’t mean they are exactly the same, though.
There are important differences in emphasis and execution.
The bad news, for some, is that we appear to be stuck with the Scarborough subway extension of the BloorDanforth subway line. Both candidates have it on their maps. The worse news is that we can’t escape more debate about the damn thing.
While Tory’s plan is for a single-stop extension to avoid competing with his SmartTrack station nearby, Keesmaat’s new plan goes with Premier Doug Ford’s preferred three-stop option, and instead cancels the nearby GO/SmartTrack stop.
Keesmaat’s map, also in deference to Ford’s presumed provincial intentions, also includes a possible Sheppard subway extension through Scarborough that would “close the loop” by joining up with the Bloor line extension at Scarborough Town Centre.
The other big noticeable difference in actual lines on the map is that Keesmaat revives the Transit City-era plan for a Jane Street LRT, running from north of Finch (where it intersects with the Finch West LRT) to the Bloor subway line, connecting north Etobicoke into the city’s rapid transit network.
But the real change is in emphasis.
Tory continues to highlight his much-scaled-back SmartTrack brand, alongside the Scarborough subway extension and the subway downtown relief line as his leading priorities.
Keesmaat, meanwhile, puts much of her emphasis on the relief line — especially on showing it going all the way to north Sheppard and west to the High Park area — while promising to finish it three years sooner than under the current plan.
She also places a lot of prominence on the “network” concept (as she did as chief planner), and highlights making the King St. streetcar pilot project permanent.
I would emphasize that differences in emphasis are not trivial:
I’ve written before that most of the flashy, elaborate transit plans of the past 30 years have wound up truncated.
And only the one or two most prominent parts, I’ve said, have wound up being built.
Transit watchers have pointed out some possible problems with both plans, especially about two questions.
Where’s all the money coming from? And how can you keep Doug Ford from just lighting your whole plan on fire while laughing maniacally?
I don’t have good answers for either candidate in answering those questions — and the latter one in particular may be an unavoidable daily puzzle confronted by whoever is running the city in the near future, one it will be hard to blame any mayor for.
What is missing from both plans is a real commitment to service levels and low fares.
Frequent service on all forms of transit and reasonable fares are possibly the two most important elements of making transit service reliable and useful to riders.
They are also the easiest elements to compromise when budgets get tight. A plan — and commitment — to an affordable fast-service network on the existing map is as valuable in real terms as any map of long-term construction ideas.
Edward Keenan is a columnist based in Toronto covering urban affairs. Follow him on Twitter: @thekeenanwire