T.O.’S transit follies
The University-bloor-danforth subway was accomplished on budget, without provincial funds. Is such a feat possible now?
The biggest challenge behind our transit system has always been figuring out who pays for it.
Torontonians have seen countless transit plans in recent years, but even the wildest fantasy versions haven’t considered time travel — and maybe that’s a shame.
If we could hop a Red Rocket to Nov.16, 1959, and get off at University Ave. and Edward St., we could witness an event locals might consider unbelievable.
And if planners and politicians were among the time travellers, local transit talk might be more relevant and productive, even before the ride back to 2012.
THE GUY IN THE ill-fitting red hard hat operating the steam shovel for the sodturning ceremony is Leslie Frost, premier since 1949. Mayor Nathan Phillips is among the dignitaries, along with “Big Daddy” Fred Gardiner, the Metro chairman who would prefer that expressways get priority. Allan Lamport, a former mayor who successfully argued that subways would be a better long-term investment, will take a turn with the earthmoving equipment after Frost is done.
Observant guests from the 21st century might note the absence of any giant cheque for the photo-op. And there is no spin-doctor’s slogan on a lectern placard, no printed backdrop screens lauding Queen’s Park for creating jobs or tackling gridlock. Of course, Frost has good reason to not blow his horn: he didn’t bring a penny to the project.
Instead, he delivers only a speech, a stern warning to municipal politicians that they’re on their own, that they’d better not get mired in debt for this $200 million University-bloor-danforth subway plan — 25 stations over 16 kilometres.
BY NOW, YOU KNOWTHE job got done, and it was accomplished on budget in just six years and three months.
“It was a remarkable feat,” says veteran civil engineer and consultant Ed Levy. “It took guts to go ahead without provincial funding, especially when you consider this was a much smaller and poorer city, and tunnelling technology was relatively primitive.
“The truth seems unbelievable today, after decades of paralysis and sickening blunders on the rare occasions when Queen’s Park has provided funding.”
In 1959, it had been five years since the original Yonge line from Union to Eglinton had opened (funded largely by farebox surpluses) and Toronto was eager to get building again, even if the province wouldn’t help.
To figure out how we did it, Levy says several factors must be considered. We were willing to put a surcharge on property taxes, though the towns of Mimico and Long Branch objected. But the biggest factor is almost certainly that “the economics are pretty well guaranteed to work when you put subway in the right places,” already dense, transit-supportive parts of the city.
“We don’t have a lot of that and, obvi-
“It took guts to go ahead without provincial funding, especially when you consider this was a much smaller and poorer city.” ED LEVY CIVIL ENGINEER, CONSULTANT
ously, we can’t build only downtown, but it was madness to stop building subway in old Toronto in the 1960s,” says Levy, whose first engineering job involved plans for shoring up buildings for the University line tunnels.
“We might yet be able to make the economics work in the suburbs, but it will take big changes to our whole approach, lots of upzoning and big increases in the densities of those areas.”
FIFTY-FIVE PER CENT of the tab for the University and Bloor-danforth lines came from property taxes levied by Metropolitan Toronto, a senior local government abolished in the1998 amalgamation. The Toronto Transit Commission, which didn’t need taxpayer subsidies for operations until the early 1970s, was profitable enough to pay 45 per cent. Eventually, Queen’s Park provided a $60 million loan, allowing a work speed-up that saw the line from Woodbine to Keele open in 1966 rather than 1969.
Can hiking property taxes make a difference?
The Toronto Board of Trade estimates we’d get only $22 million if we raised residential rates 1 per cent, but considering most people in 905 pay at least 25 per cent more in property taxes, it may be an option.
Transit advocate and blogger Steve Munro says one thing working against us now is that all construction costs have risen faster than the rate of inflation. The Bank of Canada says $200 million in 1959 is worth roughly $1.6 billion today, and there’s no way we could build those lines and the Greenwood maintenance and storage facility for the latter figure.
But Munro, like others, comes back to the relationship between land use and transit and the need to reconnect mutually supportive forces if we’re ever to make costly infrastructure pay and keep expansion ongoing.
“Some will argue that, ‘You don’t see lots of towers along the original BloorDanforth,’” Munro says. “But it worked because transit demand was already well-established for kilometres north and south of the new subway. The street could probably use redevelopment now, but it serves as a great example that effective urban form doesn’t have to include high-rises.”
Transport and energy consultant, author and former city councillor Richard Gilbert made a similar point in a 2006 paper titled “Building Subways Without
Subsidies.” In it, he calculated a combined 30,000 to 40,000 jobs and residential units within a square kilometre of each station on the $2.6 billion Spadina-york subway extension would allow it to pay for itself in 35 years.
“You could do all that without going over seven storeys,” he says, adding that there has been little development on the Spadina line.
“This extension into York shows few signs of paying back any better. People have to understand that subsidies are a substitute for density, and that’s fine if money is no object,” he says. “We’re making the same mistake again on Eglinton. We’re blasting more than $8 billion at it and the province hasn’t set any performance-based conditions. There’s not a single requirement about density around and above the stations.”
ERIC MILLER, DIRECTOR of the Cities Centre at the University of Toronto, says “we’ve been fooling ourselves for decades” with the idea that development and urbanization will automatically follow subways in places first developed around the car.
“Building heavy rail is a necessary but not sufficient condition to generate high density in the suburbs,” Miller says.
“We have to get really serious about ensuring that density, walkability and rich mixes of land uses happen and we can’t waste time.”
In January, TTC vice-chair Peter Milczyn made an encouraging announcement. He said he and TTC chair Karen Stintz would work to ensure all future stations had at least some development upstairs from the start.
But some see this and initiatives such as Metrolinx’s Mobility Hub concept as mere timid steps in the right direction; that small islands of urbanity in evergrowing seas of car dependence won’t do and that the full costs of sprawl must be identified and recaptured.
John Sewell, former Toronto mayor and author of The Shape of the Suburbs, argues the entire GTA had better come to grips with the urgency because Metrolinx’s investments in the 905 area are even less likely to pay for themselves than the subsidy-driven services we pushed into the older 416 suburbs beginning in the late 1960s.
“The GTA has to compete globally, and we’re guaranteeing ourselves negative real returns on a grand scale,” Sewell says, adding the financial burden will almost certainly further erode longterm political will to properly fund transit, even in places where transit is costeffective.
“Because of the way we’ve built the outer suburbs, any type of transit we put out there will require massive subsidies for operations,” Sewell says.
“That’s the problem with suburban form; sprawl is unsustainable — literally, financially unsustainable. Mississauga is just learning this now.”
Sewell is skeptical we can remake the suburbs. “It’s really hard to retrofit any place built for the car, they haven’t been evolving into urban places,” he says.
“If it’s going to happen, it’s going to take a really long time and I don’t know that we have it. Maybe if we took that train back to 1959 we could warn them, but I don’t know if that would help, either.”