Ford thinks big, falls short
Cheaper is never the better way.
But cheaper is apparently what we’re getting because thrift is all this city can afford when it comes to public transport at its lowest — that is to say street-grade — common denominator. Slapdash is what we’re getting. Second-class is what we’re getting.
Light rail transit is what we’re getting, presumptively, if city council is now, retrogressively, of that unalterable and inflexible majority view.
Subways are what we deserve. But subways have been thrown under the bus — unless deferment to a blue ribbon panel resuscitates Mayor Rob Ford’s Sheppard subway fancy. Don’t hold your breath.
We used to think big in Toronto. Now we think puny and practical. Vision is for dreamers, for folly.
Karen Stintz got her way. That doesn’t make the TTC chair Joan of Arc for public transit. She’ll burn at the stake if the brothers Ford have anything to say about it. They are unforgiving. Or Stintz could challenge Rob Ford in the next mayoral election, denials notwithstanding, but she’d have to take a number. There won’t be many votes coming from Scarborough.
The dirty side of politics was well on display this past week, soiling everyone who participated in the arm-twisting — pardon me, tactical strategizing — that preceded Wednesday’s special council session on whether/whither the building of people movers in a gridlocked metropolis.
Ford ran on a one-track subway scheme and surely that preference must have resonated with those who voted for him. He doesn’t like streetcars. He REALLY doesn’t like above-ground light rail transit, the son-of-streetcars that was at the heart of Transit City, which took a lifetime to move from concept to blueprint to approval to gerrymandered provincial funding agreement.
Stintz presumably was on board before she suddenly got off, saw the light and turned either traitorous or martyr-virtuous, depending on your perspective. She called for and secured the about-face vote that has buried 21st century subways, with council casting its lots behind the expanded aboveground option, resurrecting the ghost of David Miller’s Transit City past. Beneficiaries will be those heretofore schlepping on buses along the Finch corridor route where an LRT has been promised.
We’re back, essentially, to the LRT network that Queen’s Park had formerly rubber-stamped to the tune of $8.4 billion before Ford rewrote the prospectus.
Streetcars make ample sense downtown and are part of the city’s aesthetic fabric. Trolleys are Toronto. But there’s nothing pleasing and little inspiring about LRTS clanking through the ’burbs on a cold winter’s morning. Not that Stintz’s own constituents will have to worry about that. No above-ground and live-with-it Eglinton Crosstown line in her ward, uh-uh; they’ll get the underground LRT, pseudo subway, rocket-lite, on a track that emerges into daylight east of Laird. Listen, light rail could work, fitfully, for Toronto. It just won’t work optimally. Not world-class but half-assed, a reach that doesn’t exceed anybody’s grasp. You can certainly do more with less money. Inevitably, though, you get what you pay for — a system that doesn’t fare well and won’t wear well and rises only to the level of minimal satisfaction for its patrons. Even at that, it’s no sure thing the LRT cost estimates will withstand the challenge of construction. One has only to look at the exorbitant cost overruns and community misery exacted by the St. Clair dedicated streetcar line disaster. There was more creepiness than poignancy to the photos posted of Ford’s midnight ramble on the Scarborough RT some five hours after the 25-18 vote that slapped him down — sock to the jaw, more like — at council. Many will take smug pleasure at Ford’s hubris, regardless of their views on public transit. For a political veteran, he left his flank badly exposed and was ridiculously outmanoeuvred. Someone with better consensusbuilding skills should have been able to avert the showdown, preemptively eliminate or placate the threat that Stintz posed, or solidified Ford’s support before the vote by trading off favours. The mayor’s opponents are not without their own niche interests that might have been exploited. But Ford is adamantly not conciliatory, not collaboratively tactful and apparently delusional to boot if he thinks council’s will can be ignored, or that he’s got a circumventing ally in the premier. Dalton Mcguinty may hold the pursestrings but he’s not going to get bloodied in a battle that rightfully belongs on another level of government’s turf. In this battle, Ford has nothing left in the arsenal. Dogmatic about not charging a new subway to the taxpayer — a disingenuous position because the money always comes out of our pockets, no matter which government pays the freight — he unilaterally refused to consider surtaxes or tolls to fund his beloved Sheppard subway. Colleague Royson James eloquently charted the interlocking calamities of that position in his column Thursday: Queen’s Park endorsed Ford’s scheme, diverting funds earmarked for Finch and other lines to the Sheppard subway; he agreed to put the Eglinton line underground while somehow finding $4 billion in private sector funding, through public-private partnerships, development fees and other sources for Sheppard. As if. So, no Sheppard subway in the offing and no financial plan beyond Gordon Chong’s recently released mish-mash to make it a reality even if what was undone could be un-undone.
All the negatives rendered Stintz’s deke irresistible to both Ford’s enemies on council and his fairer-weather friends. Subways are what we all want in our hearts but Ford never shunted his vision from heart to brain. His projection, expounded in campaign rhetoric, never left the station. And the lugs on council opted for the quantifiable pedestrian over the ambitious.
Toronto used to be a city that dreamed big, with leaders of passion and shrewdness. That’s what got the University line extension built and thank heaven for it.
We’re small-minded now.