SUBURBAN PIPE DREAM
Battle between subway extension to York Region and downtown relief line makes no sense, James,
The predictable, permissible pouting of Markham Mayor Frank Scarpitti underscores how ass-backward transit planning is in this city region.
Scarpitti has been disputing a Metrolinx report that says we should build the relief line subway before we extend the Yonge subway farther north into Richmond Hill and funnel even more people into an already packed toothpaste tube, south of Eglinton.
Metrolinx’s position seems reasonable. It also fits the TTC’s view of the world. But there are problems.
For one, Metrolinx had a different position a few years back — that the Yonge extension north of the current Finch terminus did not have to wait for the relief line.
The about-face strains their credibility, even though their defenders say the current position flows from a more rigorous study; and is defensible.
Secondly, York Region doesn’t want to wait any longer and will twist the narrative any which way to deliver the subway up to Highway 7 country. And immediately. And if Metrolinx and the TTC disagree then the province should take subway planning out of their hands and deliver the goods to York Region.
Finally, Premier Doug Ford has promised to take the subway into the regions beyond Toronto’s border. Because he can. And to underline this, Ford announced he will soon seize the subway construction from the TTC and refashion it in his own image.
Who will actually oversee the subway-building is unknown. Metrolinx, the provincial agency that oversees transit planning in the GTA and Hamilton, was the natural choice. Its latest position on the relief line vs. the Yonge subway extension may have rendered it alien to the new regime at Queen’s Park.
Ford doesn’t have the money to deliver on his promise — an unsustainable pipe dream not grounded in ridership demand or financial reality. The private sector won’t step in to fill the void, as Ford surmises. And commuters will get the shaft.
The conclusion, then, is this: There is no credible, dependable, uncorrupted source of information that can guide us through the mess that is transit planning. The politicians at every level either are parochial in the extreme or so politically motivated that they cannot be tasked with the job of deciding what is best for all our needs. And the planners and advisers have shown little backbone.
Meanwhile, there is no independent arbiter — civic group or media — that has seized itself with what is among our most costly and important infrastructure investment intended to last the next 100 years.
The talk around the relief line is a good example.
Suitably named, this release valve would take passengers off the Yonge line by avoiding it completely to get to downtown office towers. The bypass, from the east, would run from around Pape Station, connect to Line 1 at Queen, and so miss the bottleneck at Yonge-Bloor. Thousands now come in on the east-west Bloor-Danforth Line 2 and transfer to the already packed Yonge-University Line 1 at Bloor. That is a disaster now and getting worse.
According to TTC reports, improvements to signal controls and other advancements that increase the number of trains per hour during peak times will not provide the relief needed. Such enhancements only account for anticipated ridership increases.
If you can believe those claims, then the Yonge extension cannot precede the relief line. But what and who are we to believe?
Certainly, Ford heard that talk and read those reports while at city hall. John Tory has read the reports. Yet Ford will make the situation worse. And Tory, with his SmartTrack plan politically conceived and advanced as a competitor to the relief line, has been willing to support shaky proposals to garner votes for SmartTrack. To cover his tracks, he pledges fealty to the relief line as well.
I smiled at Scarpitti when he said the subway extension isn’t even needed to ferry York Region passengers downtown — the essential purpose of any subway line in our constellation of transit mode; it’s really needed to get the folks from Richmond Hill to the jobs and destinations hither and yon across the GTA, Scarpitti says.
I smiled because the mayor doesn’t even realize how his perverted concept of our subway system fuels his desire — and that of those in the edge cities, outside the core.
Isn’t it the truth that most of us just want that fixed rail line to take us from our chosen home across the southern Ontario landscape to our less than ideal job destination? And we want this while choosing to live where it is not economically viable to run a fixed rail line from our backyard to our job site.
This is not a slight against those seeking country living or an affordable house in Brooklin. There are tens of thousands of residents who will live in the Yonge-Sheppard corridor — only to find out the two subways right under Yonge and Sheppard do not take them to their jobs in Peel, Durham, Halton, York and beyond. And that the subways never will.
Subways exist in dense city centres to take people to job centres. Their passengers come from many destinations — via bus, minibus, cars, streetcars, LRTs — and fill the subway heading to job centres.
To figure out where to build our subways, follow the jobs — the office centres, not the condo towers, much less the subdivisions.