Yet another review of subway plans is a sham
It’s a cruel hoax, this news that Metrolinx has convened a “panel of experts” to review plans for subway extensions on Line 1 north of Finch up to Richmond Hill and Line 2 northeast of Kennedy into the Scarborough Town Centre.
Their defined task? “To assess, critique and advise on technical and commercial deliverability,” “consider and evaluate potential alternatives,” and identify changes that might “deliver the benefits in a faster time frame, at less cost.”
The panel has a worthy task. The review may be real. But the expectation that reason and logic and technical merit will override politics or that the outcome will deliver what’s best for transit? There is the sham.
We know from the history of such panels that their recommendations are too often acknowledged but disregarded, buried and forgotten.
So, why the ruse?
The exercise in frustration is almost built into the system. Transit planners are required to look at alternatives and report them out. The planners engage experts to furnish international experience. Politicians must approve such studies and debate them. Citizens provide input. But inevitably, politics, not transit wisdom, trumps everything.
This particular expert panel moved the attention needle more than most because its stated work plan would seem to allow it to address some sacred cows in the transit pasture run by Premier Doug Ford and, frankly, grazed and fed by politicians and the public across the spectrum.
When Ford was a city councillor, he and his brother, then-mayor Rob Ford, drummed into our skulls that anything less than subways was inferior. The doctrine declared that subways meant underground, not surface travel. It mattered not that sections of Line 1 and Line 2 run above ground now. Scarborough “deserved” underground subways, because, y’know, Scarborough has been treated as the orphan child in the Metro Toronto family. It was nonsense, but it bought the Fords victim votes in Scarborough.
There is electoral evidence the public swallowed the nonsense. It is not lost
on anyone that as a member of one expert panel, Mitzie Hunter recommended LRTs over subways in the very corridor under review. Then she became a politician, converted to subways and won the Scarborough riding in a byelection.
So entrenched and subversive was the doctrine that Rob Ford, a mayor most allergic to property taxes, imposed a $41 a year tax on all Toronto residents for his idiocy. The tax continues for 30 years until 2043.
Understand that the subway is replacing the Scarborough RT. A 2013 TTC report reads, “Notwithstanding criticisms and misinformation over the years, the Scarborough RT has been the single most-reliable service operated by the TTC.”
But the TTC, at the city’s behest, let the RT rot and we are where we are today. How is that possible and how could any expert panel reverse this intractable arc towards folly? A short history: An LRT was planned from Kennedy station to the Scarborough Town Centre in the late 1970s. The Progressive Conservative government of Bill Davis opted instead for experimental, made-in-Ontario technology and the RT was born in 1985 as a demonstration project. TTC staff recommended it be modernized, even as Vancouver raced ahead, expanding the RT technology several times.
Mayor David Miller proposed the return to the LRT idea in his Transit City plan. The provincial government agreed, funding it 100 per cent. But Rob Ford became mayor, and inserted a subway into the corridor. Looking for votes, Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government flip-flopped and backed the subway. Then John Tory became mayor while promising SmartTrack, a plan that included multiple GO station stops in Toronto.
City staff were mortified, because the SmartTrack stations would cannibalize the subway stations. So staff came up with a gerrymandering solution: bend the subway east to McCowan, not to pick up passengers, but to move it away from SmartTrack. The subway would make the longest uninterrupted journey on the system, but fewer people would have access to it and bus rides to it would be longer. Passenger volume projections dropped after council voted to make the switch, and the cost escalated. Then Doug Ford became premier and announced he’d add two stations along the McCowan route. The price tag jumped to $5.5 billion and the opening date approached 2030.
This is one of the two projects the latest expert panel is to review. Metrolinx could easily get expert advice from consultants in its employ, including Michael Schabas, a transit planner who’s studied systems in Europe and North America and who reviewed the Metrolinx plans for an extensive Neptis Foundation Report in 2015.
“You would have to travel far and wide” to find a city foolish enough to build a one-stop subway in an area that will deliver only 2,000 new passengers and save five minutes — especially when it could have delivered similar benefits by refurbishing and modernizing the RT for one-tenth the cost, Schabas told the Star two years ago.
All that’s happened since is the subway’s price has almost doubled and its opening date delayed. So, will the expert panel be able to recommend we go back to LRT or RT?
Well, no. Metrolinx admitted to The Star’s Ben Spurr. It’s subway all the way.
Why bother?