TRANSIT WOES
Lack of clear plan by the government to manage subway upload results in frustration, fear,
Frustration doesn’t begin to describe the outcome of Thursday’s conflab at the U of T’s Munk School of Global Affairs and its Institute on Municipal Financing. The venerable institutions convened a discussion on governance models for a successful regional transit system.
Considering that Premier Doug Ford has decreed that he will take over Toronto’s subway system, because he can, the questions posited seemed like fertile ones to produce muchneeded answers: “Who owns it? Who pays for it? Who delivers it?”
As the referees say at a football game when video replay shows they blew a judgment call, “Upon further review ...” Except, we didn’t get much light. And, upon further review, there is no “light” to come.
The desire to take over the subway system has no genesis in planning principles or a goal to improve mass transit in the Greater Toronto Area. Ford did not file foundational studies or views or plans showing the facility and efficacy of a takeover. As sure as the sun comes up, he went to bed and woke up thinking, “Today I’m going to do what my (late mayor) brother Robbie wanted — kill any thought once and for all of those dammed LRTs clogging up our streets in Toronto and build subways out to the Richmond Hills and Pickerings — yeah, even Oshawa. And the people will love me for it. And vote Conservative.”
Members of the audience groaned as transit planner Michael Schabas with his worldly experiences from Vancouver to Sydney, Austra- lia, glibly stated the obvious: Across the world, this kind of transit is delivered on a regional level — meaning at a level broader and higher than the jurisdiction of a single city. Well, of course.
But what does that mean for us here in Greater Toronto — where we have no regional government and where we may be poised to create even more Toronto-like megacities without a co-ordinating body to take care of cross-border matters?
One wanted to hear if the regional transit authorities in the U.K. and Australia and Paris were set up carefully over time, if they evolved organically into place, or were put together in some kind of slapdash political tomfoolery by a state or provincial government intent on scoring political points in a kind of electoral coup.
Maybe the questions themselves were irrelevant. Ford says he will take over the subway system, own it and pay for it — while allowing the TTC to operate it. Everyone should be happy. It is much more sustainable for the provincial government to pay the capital costs of building transit that serve more than the local property owner. Subways are an economic development tool of a region. So why were the grey-haired “elites” at Thursday’s gathering not particularly enthused — despite the cheerful endorsements of the takeover from Schabas and local urban whisperer Joe Berridge?
Because we don’t know what’s coming. And worse, there is little evidence that the City of Toronto and its mayor, the supposed guardians of the assets and culture built up around transit the last 80 years, have our back. Or that they are fighting to ensure the Ford takeover is not an uncontested surrender. By now, Mayor John Tory and city bureaucrats should have filed an easy-to-read primer on the basic, bottom-line demands of a provincial takeover — demands that serve the acquired needs of the nearly half a billion rides a year. Instead, Tory has agreed to a team of people negotiating the takeover from a position of weakness. His negotiators face a rapacious province intent on bargaining an asset takeover only, when the TTC is so much more than rail, bricks, metal and rubber.
“In theory I am an uploader, yes,” Berridge said after Thursday’s session. “But I’m nervous in practice.” Why?
While it’s clear GO Transit and the TTC should not operate as independent agents anymore when our lived region extends up to an hour each way, across hill, vale and municipal borders, there is no government body or agency with planning capacity or authority — like they have in London and Paris — to make the big decisions.
Worse, government pronouncements like the one from Ford are not just suspect, but demonstrably ill-conceived and doomed by political dogma, electoral ambitions (read, deliver votes) and personal animus.
Yes, there is a lot to improve with the current transit system. There’s also a lot that could get worse in a provincial takeover. Care and caution is needed where we now have political grandstanding.