No. Good plans forecast demand for decades
Transportation planners have a wonderful phrase that applies to Premier Ford’s transit plan: pencil crayon planning. Forgive their peevishness. The trained professionals who actually build things know that real planning is long, hard, boring work. Perspiration, not inspiration.
To succeed, transit must be planned as a network that connects every front door to every other front door with only a short walk at each end. It has to be reliable, quick, safe and comfortable.
A good plan matches demand to the right technology. A subway carrying 8,000 people per hour is a waste. A bus line carrying 24,000 won’t work. A good plan forecasts demand decades into the future.
Toronto has had such a forecast since 2006. It has the boring name of Official Plan Map 5. Map 5 suggests transit improvements for streets where bus and streetcar routes are at capacity, or approaching it. Map 5 is why we have the King St. Pilot and the Eglinton LRT.
Building those improvements is where the merely boring becomes hard.
Designing a subway that moves 2,000 people each way through a tunnel every two and a half minutes requires precision and care. Trains can only handle the gentlest curves or changes in grade. Electricity has to be supplied. Air has to be pumped in. Water has to be pumped out. A signal system and the training to use it are musts. Locating stations and train storage adds still more headaches.
All of that has to be threaded through an already-built city, avoiding water and sewer pipes, natural gas lines, building foundations, fibre optic conduit, etc. Construction must not shake any of that loose, lest a building collapses.
The TTC is the very best organization on the continent at this work. By contrast, the province has done little, if any, such work to support its plan. Instead, the premier appears to have cast his eye over a map of the city, found two attractions named “Ontario” and decided to link them with a transit line named … “Ontario!”
He also wants to add stations to the controversial Scarborough Subway because, “This one’s for you, Rob.”
Worse, in what looks like a punishing afterthought, the provincial budget cuts $1.1 billion in funding earmarked for maintaining our existing system.
In 1990, another premier sat down with a box of crayons and created Let’s Move.
Like Premier Ford, that premier overturned an existing TTC plan, which included the Downtown Relief Line.
So began the worst decade in TTC history.
Ridership plummeted. The TTC had the worst accident in its history. We ran out of buses, streetcars and subway cars.
Thirty years later, all that remains of Let’s Move is half a Sheppard subway, a very different York University Subway (both of which are woefully underused) and the spectacle of yet another premier ordering the tunnel for the Eglinton East Subway filled in.
In 2002, Steve Munro (Toronto’s preeminent independent transit thinker) and I published Transit’s Lost Decade. We reviewed where pencil crayon planning had got us and asked the TTC to do one simple thing: look at every conceivable way to get people to ride transit and tell us which ideas move the most people for the fewest dollars.
The TTC came back a year later with a list that emphasized: fixing the existing system; funding day-to-day operations; running more frequent service; and looking at Map 5 (which was awaiting final approval) for modest expansion projects. They called it the Ridership Growth Strategy and it led to the largest transit ridership increase in a generation.
It was also the jumping-off point for Transit City, which has since been pared down to Eglinton (the biggest transit expansion in my lifetime), and Finch (fingers crossed).
Some of us still hope to see LRT lines in Scarborough and the Waterfront LRT east and west.
It’s 1990 all over again. There’s a fancy new plan, but: we’ve stopped listening to planners; we’re out of money to run what we’ve got; we’ve started losing riders; parts of the system are breaking down and getting dangerous; and, we are short on vehicles. If the premier gets his way we will lose another decade or three. Pass.