Transit Realities In Toronto

Transit realities are coming into the fore in Toronto and Toronto’s mayor Ford is being dragged screaming and kicking into the 21st century; even the Mayor’s political appointees are singing the light rail song!

The Mayor’s anti-LRT stance is based on many factors, including;

• Subways keep traffic lanes open for cars, thus are poor in attracting the all important motorist from the car, but makes the various auto lobbies very happy.
• Subways are very expensive, with lots of money to spread around for engineers, planners, contractors, cement manufacturers and alike, mostly friends of the government.
• Subways are cool to cut ribbons in front of, because of the physical size of the project, it gives the taxpayer an impression of money well spent.
• Subways are the great excuse for bad transit planning, when congestion becomes problematic, politicians always rely on the old; “but we built a subway for that, now it’s up to the people to use it!”
• Subways become development and land speculation tools, where cronies of the government buy and sell land along a subway route like a Monopoly game.

Vancouver and TransLink planners should take note with what is happening in Toronto, with their grandiose yet poorly planned SkyTrain subway planning, lest the regional taxpayer demands that they too be dragged kicking and screaming into 21st century transit realities, or be replaced with much more transit savvy experts, who actually know what they are doing.

TTC chair fires first salvo at Ford’s LRT plan

From Tuesday’s Globe and Mail

Published Monday, Jan. 23, 2012

 

TTC chair Karen Stintz took a risky but  important step when she questioned plans for the Eglinton-Scarborough Crosstown  transit line. Risky because it puts her at odds with the man to whom she owes  her post, Mayor Rob Ford. Important because it opens a debate on the biggest  transit project in the city.

The $8.2-billion light-rail line is to carry  passengers from Black Creek Drive in the west to the Scarborough City Centre in  the east, linking up with existing subway lines and easing congestion. The  original plan for the line would have seen it travel through a tunnel in the  centre of the city on either side of Yonge Street, but above ground on less  dense areas such as the eastern stretch of Eglinton Avenue. When he took office  in 2010, Mr. Ford ripped up that plan, along with the rest of Transit City, and  said that the whole line must go underground.

That, Ms. Stintz says, makes no sense.  Light-rail vehicles are designed to travel on the surface, and the broad streets  of east Eglinton have plenty of room for them. If it is going to be light rail,  she wants to go back to Plan A and make it a mixed line: part underground, part  above.

It would be much cheaper that way – $1-billion  to $1.5-billion cheaper, she says – and the money saved could be used to pay for  an extension to the Sheppard subway, Mr. Ford’s favoured project. Changing back  to the original plan could save time, too, because the environmental assessments  for Plan A have already been completed and, with less tunnelling required,  construction would be quicker.

There are two barriers to Ms. Stintz’s excellent  idea: the province and the mayor. Take the province first.

Less than a year ago, Mr. Ford and Premier  Dalton McGuinty struck a deal to have the province build an all-buried Eglinton  line and the city build a Sheppard subway. Given all the back-and-forth we’ve  seen over transit in recent decades – an Eglinton line was started then stopped  in the 1990s – provincial officials would be reluctant to change course yet  again.

But the political winds have changed since Mr.  McGuinty, facing a tough fight for re-election and trying to avoid a fight with  a popular and newly elected Mr. Ford, signed that memorandum of understanding.  The wording of the memorandum makes clear that it is a non-binding letter of  intent, not a binding contract. If city council voted to return to Plan A for  Eglinton and request the leftover money be used for Sheppard, Queen’s Park would  at least have to consider it.

Support is growing on city council for just such  a vote. It comes not only from left-leaning councillors who hope, against the  odds, to revive Transit City, but from moderate and even conservative  councillors who wonder how much sense it makes to spend hundreds of millions of  dollars tunnelling under the wide open spaces of Eglinton east with a light-rail  line, not to mention the expense of spanning the vast Don Valley.

Conservative-minded Councillor John Parker has  raised doubts about burying the whole Eglinton line and using LRT technology  designed mainly for surface travel. Centrist Josh Matlow says he is “on the same  page” as Ms. Stintz about the Eglinton line and urges the mayor to consider her  idea.

Will he? Changing his mind on Eglinton will not  be easy. His dislike of streetcars is well known, and the way he sees it, the  light-rail lines that would go on Eglinton east are just a fancy kind of  streetcar.

Gordon Chong, a Ford associate who is looking  into ways of financing a Sheppard subway line, sounds lukewarm on Ms. Stintz’s  proposal. “While her suggestion is one way to free up funds,” he told me in an  e-mail, “it’s not my preferred choice.”

But if the mayor would bend a bit on his  stubborn opposition to rails on streets, he has much to gain. His Sheppard  project is in trouble. Mr. Chong, who will present his report soon, has made it  clear that even if the city can woo private-sector investors to the project, it  will require government money, too. If more is left over from Eglinton by  running it above ground where possible, the mayor could get a bigger down  payment on Sheppard.

In an editorial, The Star says Toronto Transit Commission [TTC] chair Karen Stintz is risking Mayor Rob Ford’s wrath by suggesting the Eglinton light rail line doesn’t need to be totally in a subway:
http://www.thestar.com/article/1120014–ttc-chair-karen-\stintz-speaks-up-risking-the-wrath-of-mayor-rob-ford
“TTC chair Karen Stintz speaks up, risking the wrath of
Mayor Rob Ford.
(Monday, Jan. 23, 2012)

Karen Stintz has finally seen the light on a planned Eglinton light rail line — and it’s not at the end of a tunnel. In fact, what she sees isn’t much underground at all. And that’s the point.

As chair of the Toronto Transit Commission, Stintz has finally come to realize that it makes little sense to bury all 18 kilometres (11.1 miles) of the Eglinton line, at a cost of $8.2 billion. And she’s daring to voice that sensible view even though it could put her on a collision course with Mayor Rob Ford.

Stintz, usually a Ford ally, is far from alone in questioning the wisdom of tunneling the entire length of the Eglinton route. Since disclosure of that misguided plan last spring, transit advocates have said burying this light rail line would send costs soaring while providing service inferior to that of a true subway.

Under the original Transit City plan for Eglinton, about 11 kilometres of the line was to go underground, in the most built-up sections of Toronto’s downtown. It was correctly felt that, outside the core, there was ample space on Eglinton for both a surface light rail line and traffic lanes. Ford called that kind of sharing a “disaster” for drivers and ordered the entire line built under the street, out of motorists’ way. Since the switch didn’t cost the province any extra money, Queen’s Park agreed, shamelessly abandoning proper transit priorities.

Now Stintz is pointing out the obvious — this is a bad deal for those who ride the transit system and those who pay for it. And she offers some hope that rational planning might yet triumph.

As reported by the Star’s Tess Kalinowski, simply returning to the original Transit City plan for Eglinton likely wouldn’t involve any significant delay. New environmental assessments for an entirely underground route haven’t even begun, Stintz said. So there’s time to switch tracks and avoid Ford’s folly.