I received a note from Braz Menezes, a member of the Metrolinx Advisory Committee. Braz and I both sit on the community panels for the waterfront east transit EA studies.

As you know Metrolinx is putting quite a lot of emphasis on public consultation. Can you please ask your readers how easy it has been to access information and make comments to the website for Metrolinx. It would be good to iron out any technical glitches early in the process.

Sincere thanks,
Braz

I will start off by noting that the page asking for consultation contains a link only to the first of the Green Papers, even though drafts of these have appeared in the Board Agendas. However, if you go into the detailed consultation page, options for papers 2 and 3 also appear.

You can find Green Papers 4 and 5 in the February 2008 agenda.

Please put your comments about this site here so that everyone else can read what you think. I will moderate the comments only to the point of taking out flagrant insults to other writers (but not to the designers of the Metrolinx site itself), and tidying up your layout and spelling. Also, please don’t give Braz a hard time, he is just passing on the request to my fine readers.

I am particularly looking forward to Joe Clark’s contribution.

In the process of replying to the thread about streamlined Environmental Assessments, I made remarks that deserve a post of their own.

My concern is that a lot of bilge has flowed recently about what the EA process is supposed to protect, and the strong implication is that if we don’t hurt any plants or wildlife, the EA has done its job. Moreover, public input is seen as a nuisance holding up much-needed works.

My criticism lies with the underlying assumption that somehow the professionals present perfect transit schemes that, but for rabblerousers like me, would have made Toronto a paragon among transit cities worldwide years ago. This is complete nonsense, and many of the fights that have entangled EAs have turned on the absence of good planning and design, not to mention, until recently, complete ignorance about alternatives in transit technology.

Wearing a Transit City hat, yes, it would be wonderful to see these lines built as fast as possible, but wearing my advocate’s hat I look at the fact that there was virtually no consultation before the network was announced. This time, it happens to be a scheme I support, but who knows what a new political crew might bring?

The centre poles on St. Clair are a prime example. Clearly, the decision on that design had been taken long before the first public consultation, and the staff were absolutely immovable on the subject. This design has been repeated on Fleet Street.

I understand that the new street lights for St. Clair had already been purchased, or at least selected, even though the project didn’t have official approval. The fact that they have had to be replaced at least once, possibly twice because the designs were unsuitable, tells me all I need to know about the expertise that went into that choice. The politicians who are loathe to criticize staff realized only after the line was up and running that the design could have been better, and even this was not enough to change the style for the phase now underway.

Why should we care about street lights? Well, these lights were the underlying reason for the centre poles because originally there would be far fewer side poles much further apart with much more powerful, but fewer lamps. That scheme didn’t work out, and the side poles are in fact at the same spacing as the centre ones. This is but one example of the stupidity that can occur even when the technical folks are challenged, and much worse design flaws may fly through under the guise of an expedited review.

Those centre poles, in turn, limit the ability of buses and emergency vehicles to use the right-of-way. Word on the street is that the emergency services were told to shut up and accept the design even though they didn’t like it.

If we actually had a meaningful planning process in this city, we would discuss design issues and neighbourhood impacts. I’m not saying we should stop projects in their tracks, but that often the pros get it wrong, and there needs to be a mechanism for review and fine tuning.

There are specific provisions about the content of an EA, from the Environmental Assessment Act (RSO 1990, Chapter E18):

(2) […] the environmental assessment must consist of,

(a) a description of the purpose of the undertaking;

(b) a description of and a statement of the rationale for,

(i) the undertaking,

(ii) the alternative methods of carrying out the undertaking, and

(iii) the alternatives to the undertaking;

(c) a description of,

(i) the environment that will be affected or that might reasonably be expected to be affected, directly or indirectly,

(ii) the effects that will be caused or that might reasonably be expected to be caused to the environment, and

(iii) the actions necessary or that may reasonably be expected to be necessary to prevent, change, mitigate or remedy the effects upon or the effects that might reasonably be expected upon the environment, by the undertaking, the alternative methods of carrying out the undertaking and the alternatives to the undertaking;

(d) an evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages to the environment of the undertaking, the alternative methods of carrying out the undertaking and the alternatives to the undertaking; and

(e) a description of any consultation about the undertaking by the proponent and the results of the consultation.

Just because you want to build something doesn’t absolve you of the need to review alternatives and consult with people.

If we build infrastructure that harms neighbourhoods, this will have an impact on quality of life, on economic activity, even on the attractiveness of the transit system. As I have said before, “the environment” includes neighbourhoods.

It is worth quoting the definition of “environment” from the Environmental Assessment Act:

1. (1) In this Act,
[…]
“environment” means,

(a) air, land or water,
(b) plant and animal life, including human life,
(c) the social, economic and cultural conditions that influence the life of humans or a community,
(d) any building, structure, machine or other device or thing made by humans,
(e) any solid, liquid, gas, odour, heat, sound, vibration or radiation resulting directly or indirectly from human activities, or
(f) any part or combination of the foregoing and the interrelationships between any two or more of them,

in or of Ontario;

Quite clearly, the Act is intended to protect not only the flora and fauna, but also the communities affected by a project. Anyone taking the narrow view hasn’t read the legislation.

I’m all for moving transit projects forward quickly, but we must get past the idea that just because it’s a transit project, it must be ideal and we cannot criticize it. If the new timelines are to be enforced, then the TTC, GO Transit, Metrolinx and their armies of consultants will have to be much, much more responsive when issues are raised. Today, we can wait months for feedback on proposals even from “friendly” EAs where the staff actively try to engage the community. The new timelines invite staff to run the clock and say “sorry, that may be a great idea, but we had to file our documents last week”.

This is a recipe for exactly the sort of contention that led to the Environmental Assessment Act in the first place, and it will give transit projects an unjustified bad name in the very communities they seek to serve.

In yesterday’s Star, we learned that Queen’s Park has gutted the Environmental Assessment process by imposing a six-month cap on the period an EA can be under development. The claim is that transit’s opponents, those who would delay projects to no good end, have tied EAs in knots preventing much needed, environmentally friendly transit development.

I beg to differ.

What has caused the most grief to every recent transit proposal has been questions of detailed design and implementation. Time and again, we have seen schemes that trample over neighbourhoods for the simple reason that the “professionals” don’t understand what they are doing. There are two ways to handle this type of problem: work with local communities to improve the plan, or fight them to the wall. As recent examples:

• The West Donlands LRT EA produced a completely new scheme for running the Cherry Street right-of-way along the side of the road rather than in the middle. This only happened because the EA took the time to work with the community.
• The East Bayfront EA is mired in questions about a second portal to the Bay Street tunnel. With the accelerated EA, what will quite likely happen is that a new portal on Queen’s Quay itself will be rammed through over local objections despite much work in good faith to find an alternative.
• The Waterfront West EA is a procedural nightmare with many overlapping studies producing, at best, second rate results. The presence of an already-approved EA nearly two decades old for part of the line further limits discussion because an analysis done years ago under different circumstances cannot be challenged.
• The St. Clair right-of-way project ran into serious problems because of neighbourhood impacts and a design that left much to be desired. A major delay arose from a legal battle, not from the EA process itself. The credibility of the project has been further undermined by the chaos with which it has been managed, using that term rather loosely.

Dalton McGuinty may think that he’s doing transit a big favour, but what has really happened is that the EA process is reduced to little more than a quick review. If the proponents of various schemes expect co-operation from the public, their professionals (staff and consultants) must learn how to be more inclusive, how to integrate community concerns in the process.

Only last year, a new streamlined “Class EA” was defined for most transit projects that eliminated the hugely wasteful “terms of reference” stage in which an army of consultants, engineers, facilitators and other hangers-on went through the charade of deciding that, yes, this project we want to build is the project we want to build. The next year was spent in actually looking at the options in detail. This farce, thankfully, is over, and EAs were expected to drop to about a year.

Now, McGuinty wants it down to six months. The single biggest problem with the old process was a “Catch 22”. You couldn’t talk about detailed design (the thing most people actually care about) until you had an approved EA, but by the time that happened, mysteriously the design had progressed to the point where significant changes were difficult or impossible, and all a neighbourhood could do was choose the colour of paint on the transit shelters.

Time and again, the professionals have shown that they don’t look at all the options, in some cases because external influences cause filtering of what is considered. No better example exists than the WWLRT. The ghostly presence of the Front Street Extension prevented potentially superior options from getting on the table until the community and local politicians demanded it. Under the new rules, such options would likely never be seen because it would take too long to analyze them.

The Environmental Assessment process does not exist simply to protect the odd spotted newt that may live in the path of a new transit line. “Assessment” includes looking at the impact on communities, and “Alternative Assessment” means considering ideas other than the one the planners cooked up over lunch.

The dedicated lane for Toronto’s St. Clair streetcar, for example, was held up for months at the assessment stage with fights over curb heights, which had nothing to do with the environment. In the end it took two years to get through the assessment.

I don’t know where the Star got this blinkered view of the St. Clair debacle, but a lot more was going on than debates about curb heights. The big issues were sidewalk cuts, intersection design, lane widths, parking and host of other matters affecting how the project would affect the neighbourhood. That’s “environment” the last time I looked.

Under existing rules, if someone objects to a streetcar, the transit authority has to come back with a study showing the implications of a bus, train, or even a hot-air balloon servicing the corridor instead.

“If someone wanted to talk about a new idea using cable cars or catapults you would have to evaluate them,” TTC chair Adam Giambrone said.

Giambrone forgets that Transit City, a network of LRT lines, only exists because for years advocates like me objected to subway schemes saying “there’s a better way”. Indeed, even though the Sheppard Subway was already on the books east from Don Mills to Scarborough Town Centre, the TTC now plans an LRT line along Sheppard itself.

There’s a reason we take a second look at official proposals. Even I, a supporter of Transit City, worry that the momentum of LRT could be lost if, suddenly, we wake up to find a completely new proposal on the table and plans to ram it through without debate. Transit City may benefit from streamlined approvals, but the same process could be used to change it beyond recognition.

Are we headed back to the bad old days when governments simply built whatever they wanted and the public be damned? How many decades has it taken just to get some reasonable understanding of what transit can be, other than ruinously expensive subway projects?

The key to all this lies in the Star’s sidebar:

The scope is limited to environmental concerns. Right now, everything that was argued over during the municipal planning process, including how wide a dedicated bus lane should be or whether a streetcar project is even needed, is rehashed at the environmental assessment.

This presumes that we have a municipal planning process that actually works and involves communities rather than fighting them. I don’t remember much communuity consultation, much “municipal planning process” around a lot of the projects on the table, in part because everyone assumed that the Environmental Assessments would be the venue to sort all of that out.

The entire process needs an overhaul right from the overall policy framework, the early stages when proposals are little more than doodles on a napkin, through the formal EA, and into detailed design. If all we actually get is planning-by-election-announcement, followed by perfunctory EAs and superficial design consultation, transit projects risk needless alienation of the very people they are meant to serve.

In a flight of fancy which even the most ardent conservatives on this blog have never attempted, Lawrence Solomon wrote in yesterday’s National Post about the creation of suburbia. It’s all the fault of megaprojects by governments to build transit to the hinterlands. Really!

He starts off with the Statscan report that more trips are taken by car today than in years gone by, moves on to the BC $14-billion announcement for transit expansion and finally turns his sights on MoveOntario’s $17.5-billion. All of this encourages sprawl according to Solomon.

In Toronto, it’s all the TTC’s fault:

Before the province of Ontario directed the Toronto Transit Commission to service Toronto’s outer suburbs in the early 1950s, the suburbs were largely rural and undeveloped, with densities so uniformly low that they could support but a handful of public transit lines. Only after the province stepped in by creating Metropolitan Toronto as a vehicle for massive infrastructure spending in the suburbs did sprawl on a grand scale unfold. Within a decade, the TTC’s route mileage increased by 75%, almost all of it to accommodate the suburbs and almost all of it uneconomic. In the process, the TTC — until the advent of Metropolitan government a self-sufficient enterprise that helped make Toronto one of the continent’s most compact cities — became a burden for city taxpayers and an arch agent of sprawl.

This convenient rewriting of history ignores the fact that we didn’t even have a subway on Bloor Street until 1966, and then only from Keele to Woodbine. Suburban bus expansion got underway seriously after the subway was extended into Etobicoke, Scarborough and later North York. The real financial crunch for the TTC came in 1972 with the elimination of the zone fares at the insistence of suburbanites whose tax dollars were helping to pay for the TTC. By then, suburban sprawl was well-entrenched.

Solomon’s feet completely leave the ground with this gem:

… when politicians first started promoting a Greater Toronto, they recognized that the city’s transit systems, then privately owned, were a great deterrent to the desire for the rapid outward expansion of the city that was then in vogue. Privately owned public transit companies were interested in providing service to paying customers, not in developing routes that met the development dreams of local politicians.

… Only after the government did, indeed, seize the private transit companies could dreams of a Greater Toronto be realized. With profits from transit diverted from private shareholders to a public purpose — uneconomic routes servicing low-density areas — sprawl made its debut in Toronto.

In case anyone hasn’t noticed, the TTC has in been in public hands since 1921, and it was created because the predecessor Toronto Railway Company refused to extend service in such unprofitable, low-density suburbs as North Toronto, the Danforth, Bloor West Village and St. Clair Avenue West. Moreover, the city system was falling apart thanks to years of disinvestment, a classic problem with a private sector more bent on maximizing profits than on providing service.

With the creation of Metro Toronto in 1954, the TTC took over the small private bus companies serving the old suburbs, but major service improvements would not come until the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those companies couldn’t possibly have funded the scale of suburban service expansion we have seen, and even the TTC did a less-than-stellar job. “Leading development with transit” was a phrase heard only in planning seminars, not at Council tables, as the suburbs grew.

The solution to everything would, of course, be an expressway network, not a transit system, and that juggernaut wasn’t stopped until nearly two decades after Metro came into being.

I have no problems debating the merits and faults of public sector investment in transit expansion, but the idea that somehow we wouldn’t have had suburbs sprawling beyond Barrie, Oshawa, Guelph and Burlington without transit is utter nonsense. Sprawl was built by and for the car, and transit has little chance of ever catching up.