Remember who led you to this transit mess

Big number: 28,000 minutes, or 19.4 days, the amount of additional time Scarborough transit riders could spend commuting between 2023 and 2030, based on a TTC report recommending the shutdown of the Scarborough RT ahead of the planned 2030 opening of the Scarborough Subway.

Following news that the TTC is officially recommending squeezing Scarborough commuters onto shuttle buses for seven years in 2023, after the expected shutdown of the Scarborough RT, here’s my recommendation to those transit riders: start keeping a mental list of those responsible for your sad transit reality.

Start with the late former mayor Rob Ford and his brother, now-Premier Doug Ford, who substituted a slogan of “subways, subways, subways” for actual transit plans. Then there’s former TTC chair Karen Stintz, who stickhandled the initial vote to support the Scarborough subway through Toronto council, reversing support for the LRT alternative.

Don’t forget former councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker, whose rhetoric cast all who didn’t support the subway project as an enemy of Scarborough. And, of course, Mayor John Tory, who kept the subway plan alive against a mountain of evidence, based in part on literal hand-drawn sketches, and has continued supporting it even when it was clear we’d end up here: with a report recommending the Scarborough RT should shut down in 2023, even though the subway can’t open until 2030.

There are more names on the list. A lot more. Look, it’s a really long list. But that’s OK, because Scarborough transit riders will have a lot of time to think. The report from the TTC released last week says replacing the moribund Scarborough RT with buses will increase the commute time for travelling from Scarborough Centre to Kennedy Station from 10 minutes to between 15 and 18 minutes.

Let’s be realists and take the high estimate. An eight-minute travel time increase, twice every working day, for seven years equals an extra 466 hours the Scarborough commuter will spend on the bus by 2030. That’s a full 19 days of your life, taken from you.

So lots of time to list those who wronged you. Like former Liberal MPP and transportation minister Glen Murray, who helped shift funding from the approved and primed-forconstruction Scarborough LRT plan to a subway plan with no completed design. And former prime minister Stephen Harper, who supported the subway with federal funds at a critical juncture, and ex-Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne, who could have stepped in and stopped the subway madness when the price tag kept rising, but didn’t.

And there’s a gaggle of Scarborough councillors past and present who spun magical tales about the benefits of the subway project: Norm Kelly, Gary Crawford, Michael Thompson, Jim Karygiannis, Michelle Holland and others.

One Scarborough politician who’s not on the list: Coun. Paul Ainslie, whose repeated votes against the subway over the years reveal there was never any truth to the idea Scarborough residents would only accept a subway. Ainslie boosted the LRT option, recognizing that it was the only funded and designed plan that could get improved transit to Scarborough sooner rather than later. He also kept winning elections by gigantic margins.

Ainslie’s experience proves that none of this was necessary nor inevitable. And yet many of those responsible for foisting this irresponsible plan on Scarborough continue to serve in or around government. Some of them will continue to be involved in making transit decisions for years to come.

They should at least strive for accountability — and atonement. Instead of shrugging their shoulders and letting Scarborough transit riders deal with bus service the TTC says will be slower, more crowded and spew more greenhouse gases, they should be working overtime to come up with the best possible substitution for after the RT shuts down.

If Scarborough residents must ride buses, they should be the best buses in the city. That’ll mean buying new vehicles — preferably electric buses — and looking at all options to speed along service, including dedicated bus lanes and corridors.

That won’t be cheap, and some drivers will grouse about losing road space to buses, but the time for those kinds of complaints has long since past. For the next decade, the priority must be salvaging any semblance of decent public transit from the wreckage of this Scarborough transit debacle. A long list of people made this mess. They should at least try to clean it up.