Subway fanatics refuse to go away

Transit options for Scarborough remain as contentious as ever — no, please don’t leave! This is still very important and interesting, really. Chris Selley, Matt Gurney and NOW’s Jonathan Goldsbie discuss whether it’s worth plowing ahead with a subway project that’s increasingly recognized as a mistake.

Goldsbie This week, city council will once again consider the wisdom of proceeding with a three-stop extension to the Bloor-Danforth line. But that consideration won’t take the form of a debate, so much as a reckoning — thanks to a series of questions formally submitted to the city manager by Coun. Josh Matlow, our elected officials may finally come to terms with the consequences of choosing a so-called “Scarborough subway” over a vastly cheaper light rail line that would serve more people. We might at last learn: how much the city has to pay in LRT cancellation costs (believed to be $75 million to $85 million); how much the city will have to pay in ongoing capital maintenance and operating costs for the subway extension; whether SmartTrack would cut into the extension’s already-quite-low projected ridership; whether those already-quite-low projected ridership numbers were artificially inflated from even lower figures; and how many new trains would the TTC actually have to buy and how frequently would they run. You’d hope that most, if not all, of these things would have been transparently sorted out beforehand. But of course honesty and forthrightness weren’t exactly hallmarks of the Rob Ford era. Should the city abandon what appears to have been a poorly considered folly? Or are we so desperate for any semblance of progress that we should just cut our losses and get on with building the damn thing? Selley That’s a bit like asking what you “should” do if you find yourself naked and covered in fish guts in the polar bear enclosure at the zoo. Whatever you “should” do, assuming you survive, the most important thing is to sit down and have a long think about just how you managed to find yourself in that situation in the first place, and to ensure it never happens again. It wasn’t lack of “forthrightness” that got us here, after all — that implies the councillors who voted for the subway actually knew what the costs would be and chose not to tell us. The fact is they didn’t know, and didn’t care. My long-stated policy on Scarborough is to stick with the plan we have, whatever the plan happens to be, because the very realistic alternative possibility is that the SRT will be replaced by buses for 100 years while council changes its mind and changes it back again. And I’m not changing my mind. Right now the plan is the subway, and I support it. If council changes its mind and the provincial Liberals consent to break their promise to voters in Scarborough — which they obviously would if they thought it suited their purposes — then I would support the LRT (again). But if John Tory is even somewhat tempted by that possibility, he had better make damn sure that by the time the next election rolls around, that LRT project is at a stage of construction where even Rob Ford wouldn’t be able to argue for its cancellation. Otherwise, everything is back on the table yet again. Gurney A few years ago, Chris posed the entertaining possibility of then mayor Rob Ford, unable to admit that the Sheppard subway was not going to get built, would just drive back and forth on Sheppard making choo-choo noises. Three years or so later, we have somehow found a way to screw up a transit project even worse than that. Chris says he supports whatever the plan currently is, and I guess I’m in that camp, but the equally attractive option is just saying, screw it. Scarborough gets nothing. Not to take out the dysfunction on them, as they aren’t entirely responsible for it, but I wonder if we need a spectacular failure to finally shake things up. Something even worse than streetcars that freeze or filling in the Eglinton West station. Those weren’t drastic enough. Maybe, in a depressing way, the best thing that can happen is for the SRT to stop working and buses to go out and everyone just keeps bitching and moaning. Maybe then Scarborough would just demand that something be built and settle for the damn LRT, and we’d all see it isn’t a terrible option and then all learn. Oh, who am I kidding? Goldsbie Among the problems with spite-based solutions, even satiric ones, is that there are some people who would legitimately prefer nothing over the LRT. They may be in the minority, but they’re disproportionately vocal. Take Giorgio Mammoliti, who told The Globe and Mail last fall that he would “lie on the road if I have to” in order to stop construction on the Finch West LRT. As much as we would surely enjoy that spectacle, Mr. Mammoliti’s is a frightening degree of fanaticism that ruins the transit debate — and by extension transit — for everyone. The anti-LRT movement is a little like the anti-vaccine movement: Not only does baseless ideology poison the overall discourse, but by choosing to abstain from a larger social contract in favour of blind-faith deliverance, you’re screwing over the population at large.

Baseless anti-LRT ideology poisons discourse