Anyone who has watched the transit “planning” debates at Council or at the TTC will know that various schemes for higher order transit pop up from time to time, but they are rarely considered as a set, let alone compared to each other. The basic premise is “my ward deserves …” and there ends the detailed evaluation.
In the context of the Fords first at City Hall, and now at Queen’s Park, we got a whole map that was, at least allegedly, the Mayor’s or Premier’s own creation. Tunnels figured prominently regardless of the vehicle that might run through them.
The big plan may take some major projects out of discussion, but this leaves many more ideas competing for funding and attention. Which should be retained, added to or removed from the Official Plan (OP)?
A report at Toronto’s Executive Committee on February 29 makes a first, very rough attempt at answering this question.
Twenty four projects were evaluated to measure their contribution to the City’s various goals for transit spending, city improvement and equity. The actual scoring system attempts to provide a fair, if early, comparison, but the level of abstraction in the process will confuse more than it enlightens. (I will go into this in more detail later in the article.)
The list of projects was compiled from the existing OP, schemes that Councillors have promoted over the years, and a few busy bus corridors. An important product of the exercise will be to update the OP to match current priorities, and to adjust the map of target road widths to protect corridors where a surface right-of-way might be needed.
After the scores were brewed, the projects were sorted into quintiles with the highest being the most promising and the lowest likely to remain on the shelf. The report stresses that the rankings are relative and that a low score does not necessarily mean a project has no value, merely that others perform better.
This will not please advocates of the lower-ranked projects such as the Sheppard subway extensions east from Don Mills and west from Yonge, the Ontario Line extension to Dundas West, the Line 2 Sherway extension, and the Waterfront West LRT. Whether the affected Councillors will attempt to have the priorities, and hence the focus of further study, shuffled, and whether Council will approve, remains to be seen.
It is easy to vote for a request to look at a single project in isolation, some day, maybe. Much more difficult is to try juggling a priority list when the City has finite resources to study or build anything. Another problem is that development does not necessarily follow transit plans, and can be affected by access to expressways.
This map shows the location and status of the projects, and shows those that are not already in the OP:
Steve Munro 