Off The Rails Part 1

The following is from the Globe and Mail and attempts to address costly issues building rail transit in Canada.

I think three issues are paramount. First major transit projects in Canada are built to win elections and tend to be gold plated, with little consideration about actually providing a user-friendly transit service. Second, there is no standard for transit systems, thus in Canada, most light rail systems tend to be much more expensive light-metro systems and the term light-metro has all but but disappeared from the Canadian transit lexicon. Third, lack of due diligence as the government shovels out billions of dollars for transit, but there is zero due diligence as to what the politician’s and transit authority wants and the actual product they will get.

A good example is now the $16 billion investment extending the Expo and Millennium Line 21.7 KM, yet both extensions will attract very few new customers to transit, catering to traffic loads that buses can easily carry.

We hear all sorts of terms such as rapid transit (heavy rail metro) rail rapid transit (anything you want it to be) light rapid transit (again can mean anything you want it to be), which adds to the public’s and most politician’s confusion.

Calling Montreal’s REM light rail instead of being called what it really is, a light-metro is a classic example.

The current BC NDP government and TransLink’s spiel about new BRT lines, which are really BRT “light” or just tarted up B-99 Express buses is another example of a “bait and switch” transit planning.

A final note; the Canada Line is used as an example of a good transit project coming in on time and on budget, yet the Canada Line is the only heavy-rail metro in the world, built as a light metro, having less capacity than a modern tram or streetcar costing a fraction to build. Also the now around $150 million annual operating fee charged by the SNC Lavalin lead consortium, operating the Canada Line has greatly added to is initial cost.

I doubt this system would have passed any true due diligence or independent peer review.

Dud on the tracks

Across Canada, much-needed transit projects are indefinitely delayed and way over budget. Why? Political micromanagement and public-private partnerships each play a big role.

Canadians waiting for new transit could be forgiven for feeling like Charlie Brown having the football snatched away. The opening dates for major projects slip repeatedly, and sometimes disappear entirely. When will the $13-billion Eglinton Crosstown LRT line in Toronto open? No one knows.

These difficulties are not unique to Canada. The English-speaking world is rife with examples of hugely expensive and delayed transit projects. But the problems pose a challenge to political leaders as cities grow rapidly, straining already clogged roads.

Building more roads doesn’t reduce congestion, decades of research shows. The only way to do that is to give people options that don’t require driving. Transit is far more efficient at moving people than personal automobiles. But first it has to get built, and people have to have enough confidence that will happen to be willing to support the disruption and cost of construction.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government is committed to an array of long-delayed transit megaprojects, as are several of his counterparts in other provinces.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press

As Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government touts Toronto’s new Ontario Line subway project, part of the biggest transit-building effort in provincial history, the government is undermined by the awkward fact that it has opened no Toronto-area transit lines during the party’s more than six years in power.

The provincial government announced in early December that Phil Verster, the embattled chief executive officer of Ontario’s public transit agency, Metrolinx, would be resigning. However, he will be replaced by the CEO of a Crown agency that has worked closely already with Metrolinx on transit delivery, suggesting that the switch does not portend a radical change in direction.

Also in December, a report from four researchers at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities shows that the cost per kilometre to build rail transit in Canada is more than 60 per cent higher than the global average. The authors, who blame this on factors including designs that are overbuilt and the heavy use of consultants, warn that soaring costs are undercutting efforts to create meaningful transit capacity.

They note that Canadian officials have reacted to cost increases by shrinking transit projects to make them cheaper, rather than by tackling the reasons for price inflation. “If construction costs can be meaningfully reduced, more ambitious projects with greater benefit and larger scope can be built at lower costs,” they wrote.

A worker emerges triumphantly from a tunnel-boring machine beneath Vancouver in 2008, a milestone for the new Canada Line.Richard Lam/The Canadian Press
Montreal has had a comparatively smooth ride opening its REM light-rail system, which soft-launched in July of 2023.Andrej Ivanov/The Globe and Mail

Not all Canadian transit projects go sideways. The Canada Line SkyTrain project in Vancouver was completed on time in 2009, albeit under the looming deadline of the city hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics. Montreal’s 16-kilometre Réseau express métropolitain had a few teething problems when it opened last year, but nothing like the issues seen on other projects. And other transit expansions have begun to look better as they recede in the rear-view mirror. Although the extension of Toronto’s subway to the suburb of Vaughan, Ont., that opened in 2017 went over budget, and was one reason Queen’s Park took responsibility for transit construction away from the Toronto Transit Commission, its price per kilometre was far lower than for the Ontario Line now being built by the province.

But there is also a long list of projects that have limped into service late, been delayed indefinitely and seen their budgets surge. While the problems with each one are different, there are some common themes.

Experts say that transit approvals and design are highly politicized. There’s also been so little transit built in the last generation in Canada that governments have lost the knowledge needed to oversee a project, even one built by the private sector. And methods used on some early projects held up as success stories would no longer fly politically. Toronto transit watcher and blogger Steve Munro notes that much of the city’s east-west subway line was built in the 1960s using a method called cut and cover. This involves digging a trench, building subway infrastructure in it and then capping it. “The entire Bloor line was built north of Bloor [Street] and demolished everything in its path,” he said. “You can’t do that any more.”

Another development is that city transit agencies no longer do their own expansion work. In recent decades, governments in Canada and elsewhere have relied heavily on arrangements known as public-private partnerships. These were once lauded, but in the public transit world, they have now fallen from favour, for governments and the private sector.

A recent Canadian project that showed off problems with the P3 model was in Ottawa. The public inquiry into that city’s troubled light-rail project found the approach contributed to an adversarial relationship between the city and the companies building the line, leading to litigation. This poisoning of the well may have long-term effects, inquiry commissioner William Hourigan noted, with the same private partners contracted to maintain the line for 30 years.

“The people of Ottawa now face the prospect of a rail system being maintained in circumstances where the relationship between the City and the maintainer is largely dysfunctional (and bearing the costs of any disputes that result),” he wrote.

Before the age of the P3, transit agencies generally designed projects (either in house or with a hired firm) and then picked construction companies to build them. The new P3 model was meant to rein in costs while also transferring more of the risks of a project to a contractor, which is often tasked not just with building a transit line, but with designing it, borrowing the money required up front, and even operating and maintaining it for decades. Vancouver’s Canada Line was the first major transit project in the country to embrace this P3 model.

Matti Siemiatycki, a geography and planning professor who heads the Infrastructure Institute at U of T, said P3s swept Canada as an unassailable orthodoxy for governments for all sorts of building in recent decades, and remain common. But the model faltered as it ran up against the sheer size and unpredictable complexity of large public transit projects.

“It started with hospitals, and it moved into other types of social infrastructure, and in those instances worked generally okay. And then it came over to transit, and it just hit a wall,” Prof. Siemiatycki said. “And you can see it right across the country.”

Governments here and in other places, including once-P3-happy Australia and Britain, have started to back away from this approach for large transit projects, at least as they used to be conceived. So have big companies in the private sector that used to bid on them.

P3s generally have fixed prices, with financial penalties for contractors that miss deadlines, but would leave most of the details of construction up to the private sector. This has led, in some cases, to bitter legal disputes between governments and companies hired to build transit when things have gone awry.

Toronto’s Eglinton Crosstown LRT is among the projects that have ended up in court. It remains in limbo without an opening date, long after its proposed 2020 opening day came and went, and is among the botched projects that have forced a P3 rethink. Andrew Hope, the chief capital officer for rapid transit with Metrolinx said lessons have been learned from the Eglinton Crosstown experience and put into practice with the Ontario Line subway now under construction. Instead of a massive, risky P3 contract – in which private-sector bidders were no longer interested – the latest line was broken up into several more manageable pieces.

Parts of the Ontario Line, including its main operations and maintenance contract, are conventional P3s. Other chunks, however, use what the industry calls a “progressive” or “negotiated” model, which sees governments and contractors collaborate in the early design phases to iron out problems and anticipate cost overruns before a final price tag is set. This avoids a key issue with P3s, which generally force contractors to lock in pricing before they are able to do a fully costed design – a situation that set the stage for delays and lawsuits.

“The world has changed pretty dramatically,” Mr. Hope said. “We’ve learned a lot. Contractors have learned a lot.”

These lessons have not kept a lid on price increases. In 2019, Ontario Line construction was pegged at $11-billion. Three years later and the cost, now including trains, signalling and 30 years of operations, was up to $19-billion. In 2024, it was up again, according to Global News, to $27-billion.

Although eager to offload risk through the P3 model, politicians have remained keen to insert themselves into transit planning – which doesn’t help keep prices down or projects on time.

In Calgary, the planned Green Line has changed scope repeatedly and nearly died after the province pulled its funding. Only after recent talks was there an agreement to preserve the provincial investment and find a new way to move forward with a shorter version of the light-rail project.But its fate still remains unclear.

In Toronto, residents with long memories remember that the Eglinton Crosstown LRT was not the first time the need for underground transit in midtown was recognized. A subway there was part of a plan called Network 2011, and was approved by Bob Rae, Ontario’s NDP premier in the early 1990s. But it was killed by his PC successor, Mike Harris. It wasn’t until 2011 – the year the original subway would in theory have opened – that construction began on the Eglinton Crosstown, a partly buried light-rail line.

Politicians also throw sand in the gears by micromanaging aspects of design, said Marco Chitti, a fellow in the transportation and land use program at New York University who has studied Canadian transit.

He noted that elected officials can be susceptible to hyperlocal concerns that complicate a project.

Drivers might want a transit line buried, so as not to interfere with traffic, increasing the price tag by billions. Residents might then complain about plans for an exhaust outlet for that line near their property, forcing a cascading series of design changes that add cost. And then homeowners might raise concerns about vibration, forcing very deep construction that costs massively more.

Mr. Chitti said that a loss of transit-building knowledge exacerbates these issues, as leaders make political decisions with little sense of the impact on a project.

“The people who are making choices are not fully aware of the cost and the implication,” he said.

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