Could vagueness be SmartTrack’s salvation?
It’s a plan bedevilled in its details, but maybe that gives Tory more wiggle room to really impress us
It’s one year since John Tory was elected mayor and his signature campaign promise, the SmartTrack transit plan, seems somehow less clearly defined than it ever has. As Metro columnist Matt Elliot summed it up this week, for many around city hall the question “What is SmartTrack, anyway?” remains unanswered.
I’ve spent the past few weeks trying to figure out if this could actually be a good thing.
Back during the campaign, I wrote that SmartTrack was like a pointillist painting, because the whole vision of it, at a big-picture glance, was interesting and maybe inspiring, but the closer you looked at it the less clear the image became. For all that Tory’s team pointed to background research and financing projections, it was always bedeviled in its details. It was a concept — piggyback on the province’s Regional Express Rail (RER) plan to substantially beef up local service — that needed to be turned into a plan.
Tory readily admits this: He told me last week, as he told others, that it was always going to need real study to determine how it would work, study that he says is now being done by qualified city staff. The thing is that these studies are, in the eyes of many observers, making it less clear, rather than more so, what this service will be, or should be. Bruce McQuaig, the head of the provincial agency charged with implementing RER, wrote privately that running SmartTrack as an independent service would be “unaffordable and unworkable.”
The city staff report makes it clear that much of the plan as originally proposed will be a “costly and complex challenge,” as my colleague Tess Kalinowski summarized.
Still, in separate conversations this month, two Tory advisors and the mayor himself told me the plan is still a go as promised: Built within seven years (I guess that’s six, now), providing local service, all that. And Queen’s Park and Ottawa have hopped on the train, more or less, promising funding.
This is where I wonder if the much-commented-on vagueness underneath the SmartTrack brand provides wiggle room for Tory to do something really smart to put the city on track, so to speak. What would that look like?
First of all, the big draw of SmartTrack for many of us in the beginning was that it would ensure RER improvements on the lines in Toronto might actually benefit Torontonians. Even without a separate service and 22 new stations, local needs could be well served if the new every-15-minute service on GO lines was offered at existing Toronto stations at the same price as TTC service and if TTC bus service was re-routed to actually feed passengers into the GO stations. That sounds like a big climb-down, but it would be a big bill to fill in and of itself. And for many people in many parts of Scarborough and Etobicoke, it could still be a massive transit bump-up. Best of all, as big a job as rerouting buses is, it’s a much smaller job than the construction SmartTack called for and could presumably be completed faster. And much cheaper. Which means perhaps money could be reallocated to what we might call enhancements to the SmartTrack plan that improve transit service. The spur Tory proposed to the Mississauga Airport Corporate Centre requires massively complex and costly tunneling that looks silly compared to the ready-to-go, cheaper and easier plan to extend the Eglinton Crosstown LRT west.
Seriously: Was a single Toronto vote won on the promise of fast heavy-rail connection to a mid-sized office park in Mississauga? So why not swap the Crosstown in? It’s smart, runs on track and could intersect with the GO line. Call it part of the SmartTrack network, brought in under the original budget (and possibly on an even faster schedule).
There would still be money left! Transit blogger Steve Munro has offered a dream scenario in which some of that money funds recently abandoned Scarborough LRT lines. You could give the TTC-integration treatment to all stops on the Lake- shore line, too, or put a down payment on the subway Relief Line. Or whatever planners say gives us bang for our buck.
Because of the ballyhooed vagueness of Tory’s plan, he could stand under his SmartTrack sign at the ribbon-cutting for this adaptation and say Mission: Accomplished.
This isn’t a prediction. It’s a hope. Perhaps an unrealistically silly one.
I know it’s unlikely Tory would abandon so much of his own original vision to pursue one like I just outlined. I suspect if he did, many of his most vocal critics who have opposed SmartTrack from the beginning would say, “That’s not what you promised!”
But which would you prefer: That Tory stick to the lines-on-a-map specifics of a plan that was never all that clear in its details to begin with? Or that he deliver on his big-picture promise of “relief” for transit commuters, delivered quickly and affordably, in a way that best and most efficiently serves the needs of Toronto commuters?
If we prefer the latter — and I know I do — then it’s just possible to imagine SmartTrack’s vagueness could be its biggest asset. Edward Keenan writes on city issues. Email ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire