A Grand Plan

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The Big U and the little u

The Transit Investment Strategy Advisory Panel has ventured off its supposed path of looking at ways to fund transit growth in the GTHA to at least one proposal for a change to the Metrolinx Big Move plan.  This showed up at recent open houses in a handout that is not yet available online.

InvPanelOfficeEmpAndTransit

[The image above was posted on Twitter by Rishi L (@CdnEnginerd).  Click for full size version.]

The purpose of this map is to show how office employment is not sited along existing or proposed rapid transit lines.  With this as a jumping off point, the Panel suggests there is a need for a “Big U”, a much enhanced GO Transit route from Meadowvale, through Union Station and then north via the Uxbridge Subdivision (Stouffville line) to Markham.

A related factoid (one of those handy bits of information whose presence is supposed to silence critics) is that employment concentrations generate far more transit usage than residential ones.  It is certainly true that it is much easier to serve a place like downtown Toronto with a transit network that acts like a big funnel, but this does not eliminate the need to serve the residential ends of those trips.

Toronto’s Bloor-Danforth subway and GO’s commuter lines, for example, spend much of their time running through comparatively low-density neighbourhoods, collecting passengers as walk-ins, park-and-rides, and transfers from the surface transit network.  Every time a new transit route is proposed, we hear how it will only be viable if stations are surrounded by huge condo developments.  This is utter nonsense because any transit route has a catchment area.  The problem is to ensure that transit, sidewalks and bike lanes serve that area and deliver riders to a network that will take them where they want to go.

What is missing from the chart above is any indication of where the people who work in those centres actually live.  Looking at the Meadowvale end of the line, how many people come from the area that would be served by the GO corridor and a feeder network to it?  There is a lot of territory north, west and south of Meadowvale for which a rapid transit line to the east will do absolutely nothing.  Similarly, many who work in Markham live west, north and east of the employment centres.  Indeed, most of the red dots on that map are well west of the rail corridor.

Much as I sympathize with the Panel’s desire to get people talking about how parts of any network proposal might actually serve the region, I fear that we are seeing a classic example of someone who got out their crayons and drew a map.  The job will quickly change from discussing the philosophy of transit planning (and, don’t forget, funding) to defending the specifics of a proposal.

That is precisely why I have been so restrained about getting out my own crayons except in special circumstances.  The recent Don Mills Subway discussion needed a line on a map to illustrate how the “downtown” focus needed to change.  Well over half of the debate this triggered became a matter of dueling proposals between “my” line and “your” line that added little to the real issue — the need to see what such a line could connect and serve beyond simply diverting trips away from Bloor-Yonge Station.

People would even argue that there wasn’t “enough” development in some locations to justify such a route ignoring what is there today, what is in the pipeline for tomorrow and what could occur with planning and political encouragement.  Meanwhile, we build a subway to land that was recently the middle of nowhere, and propose one through miles of low density residential development as a vote-buyer claiming that only with a subway will Scarborough reap the development it “deserves”.

There is one big problem with the “Big U” — it diverts attention from the “little u” otherwise known as the “Downtown Relief Line”.  It doesn’t help one bit that the version of the “little u” shown on the map is the Pape-Queen-Roncesvalles alignment, one that is guaranteed to be very expensive and fails to recognize shifting development patterns (ironically, one of the goals of the “Big U”).  It ignores the southerly shift of population and jobs, avoids the available Weston rail corridor where we are spending a fortune to intensify transit infrastructure for a Toonerville Trolley to the airport, and it stops at the Bloor-Danforth subway missing the opportunity to reach further north to be more than a “downtown” line.

“Alternatives analysis” is a fine art in many projects, but the real art for many agencies is to ensure that what you always wanted to build is the “preferred” choice.  This is often guaranteed by setting up straw man comparisons so that the one you want shines out as the best of breed.  Such may be the situation with the DRL where, on darker days, I suspect that the whole idea is to paint as grim a picture as possible so that it will never be built.  Remember that the TTC for decades claimed we didn’t need a DRL, that they could stuff everyone into an upgraded Yonge-University line.  Expanding YUS capacity on a heroic scale was their “preferred alternative”.

With the Big and little U’s, we risk being trapped into specifics of route designs that looked good on a napkin in a bar, but which need much more thorough discussion as to purpose and specifics.  They are good as starting points for discussion, but are most definitely not the final answer in their respective fields.  Moreover, they are not alternatives to each other, a point that is often lost as the political imperative says “build in the suburbs, not downtown”.

The Big Move and the Investment Strategy that supports it have one gaping hole.  Very little attention is paid to the role of or funding for the feeder network to a regional system.  Moreover, the plethora of lines on the map hides the fact that many of them will not have the most frequent service on the planet.  Not all “rapid transit” lines are created equal.  As a recent Metrolinx report noted, the growth in “rapid transit” recently has mainly been in “BRT Light” for which the infrastructure requirements are minimal along with the service levels.  Crowing about progress in bringing transit to the millions ignores the question of how attractive that transit will be and how people will connect from the trunk routes, such as they may be, to their homes, work and other destinations.

This will be an important issue for network design on both the Big and little U’s.  One would serve rail corridors and be totally dependent on local service to deliver riders from homes and to employment locations.  The other would serve established and growing neighbourhoods and would enjoy an existing, well-developed set of local transit services as feeders.  These are not trivial differences, but they show the problems that will arise if the study does not look beyond the edges of station platforms.

This is the real debate the Transit Panel should engage — does The Big Move really serve the market it claims to address?  How useful will it be in attracting trips out of cars and onto transit?  Can developers and owners of residential and employment properties expect a real improvement in travel to and from their developments, or will their value be strangled by poor access?  Underlying all this is the basic question of whether we are spending all of those billions in the “right” place and what benefit each component of the proposed network will achieve.  That speaks directly to the concept of spending wisely, not just for the sake of generating construction jobs and photo ops for the next generation of politicians.

Returning to the “little u”, there will be a motion before Council from Councillor Josh Matlow, seconded by Cllr. John Parker (also a member of the TTC Board), to accelerate work on the EA for a “Relief Subway Line”.  Moreover, it asks that Council confirm such a route as “Toronto’s next subway expansion priority”.  It will be intriguing to see how this motion fares amid the current circus at City Hall, the recent battle over the Scarborough Subway and a faction claiming that downtown “has enough subways” already.

If this proceeds, it will be vital that it not be hamstrung with narrow terms of reference that filter out options before they are even discussed.  A major shortcoming of the new “Transit Project Assessment” protocol is that there is no consideration of alternatives because the decision that something is a “good project” is already assumed.  Debating alternatives just gums up the works in what is supposed to be an expedited process, but actually winds up as an exercise in selling an already-determined choice.  This is precisely the criticism many had of Transit City that compounded the process with less than stellar detailed planning and “sales”.  (Moreover, once a project is approved, it can be amended beyond all recognition, even though the original design was the one that “justified” the project in the first place.)

There is no point in doing a study if the underlying desire at the political and staff level is to sell a “Big U” as a replacement for the “Relief” line, whatever we call it.  The terms of reference must ensure that all options are reviewed, including cross-jurisdictional issues such as repurposing the Weston corridor’s UPX trackage for rapid transit.  We must not prejudge the outcome by requiring one continuous line to serve both legs of the U/u, especially considering that in some variants both western legs run in the same corridor.

Will Toronto Council, Metrolinx and Queen’s Park embrace the need for a full study of these routes without prejudice toward any preconceived doodlings on maps?

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Measuring The Big Move

At it’s September Board meeting, Metrolinx received a report on a strategy for tracking the benefits of their regional plan, The Big Move.  At the time, this and other business was overtaken by their slavish support for Transportation Minister Murray’s alternative to the Scarborough Subway.  Now that the panel reviewing the Transit Investment Strategy has begun its public meetings and will soon report with recommendations on how we will all pay for The Big Move, a look at the measurement tools is in order.

Regular readers here will know that I deeply distrust “Key Performance Indicators” from my own days in public sector management.  They can be an exercise in so compressing information to a single-dimensional value that meaningful oversight is impossible.  Even worse, they may be constructed to validate what management is already doing in an uncritical way.  I have approached the new Big Move KPIs with the same skeptical outlook.

The Baseline Monitoring Report and its appendices are linked from the main Big Move page on the Metrolinx site (not to be confused with the Big Move’s own website).  By looking at the proposed KPIs, we can learn what Metrolinx considers to be a mark of “success” and, conversely, what they don’t bother to measure.

The Full Report gives an overview of the scheme and how it was developed, but the details of the KPIs are found in Appendix A: Monitoring Handbook.

The report notes that circumstances have changed since The Big Move was first published with shifting demographics, population growth, and economic effects that alter how people make choices (if options are available) about travel.  This provides a context for the current set of KPIs, although there is no discussion of how sensitive these might be to major shifts in the economic and transportation context.

The table below shows the questions Metrolinx seeks to answer and, broadly, the types of measurements they would use.  [Page 7]

BaselineKPIOverview

Having set out to define metrics, the Full Report then turns to the more general area of “progress” and poses these questions:

The Big Move sets out ten strategies with 92 Priority Actions and Supporting Policies to achieve its vision, goals, and objectives. Are we making progress towards each of the Priority Actions? Are we implementing the Supporting Policies? [Page 10]

What follows are many pages listing all of the projects in various stages of planning, execution and completion throughout the GTHA.  What is absent, however, is any quantification of the contribution each of these has made to achieving the overall goals (or will contribute when long-promised projects actually start providing service rather than photo-ops).  While all this has been going on, the progress, as measured by some of the KPIs, of actually improving transportation has been less than stellar.

A major challenge to any planner, operator or politician is that our environment is not static.  Every year, the regional population grows by about 100K, and much of that growth occurs in areas poorly served by transit.  Moreover, the travel demands from this growing population are many-to-many and do not lie conveniently along a handful of corridors where a few strategic upgrades could solve all of our problems.

If the population were static, we could talk about new lines providing real benefits.  However, when the population grows by 1-million in the decade needed to deliver major transit projects, any benefits are swamped in the losses to inaction in those parts of the region where no transit upgrades worth mentioning have occurred.

The past decade’s history is a classic cycle — a boom leading to grand announcements (including The Big Move itself), a bust in which the dreams are shattered and most plans go into limbo, and a tentative recovery where announcements of a bright future collide with “we’ve heard it all before”.  What did not stop was the population growth, and our collective timidity to invest in better transit has left the region ever more dependent, overall, on auto-based transportation.  This is not the work of evil, car-loving maniacs bent on environmental destruction; it is the simple choice of millions of people for whom the car is the only viable option.

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The Transit Investment Panel: The Transit We Need

The provincial Transit Investment Panel has published the second of three discussion papers in advance of public meetings slated to start next week.  The paper is entitled “The Transit We Need” and it addresses filtering criteria by which possible transit projects should be judged.

This paper is odd on a few counts.  First off, it covers similar territory to the first “Hard Truths” paper by talking about meaningful criteria for inclusion of projects in competition for funding.  Second, it does not include specific proposals for alternatives to The Big Move, even though such a proposal was mooted by the panel’s Vice Chair Paul Bedford at a recent public presentation at UofT and obliquely mentioned in a Globe and Mail commentary (only available online).

The idea of a regional relief line that would connect several of the existing and proposed Metrolinx projects in a single line linking municipalities from Mississauga to Markham via downtown Toronto is worthy of exploration. Indeed, Metrolinx is in the midst of studying regional relief strategies right now. This would not constitute a re-mapping of the Big Move, but rather a strategic modification to better accommodate current and anticipated growth.

There is a fascination recently with advocacy for anything that might remove the need to build the Downtown Relief Line (or Don Mills Subway, or whatever we might call it), and the “Big U”, as Bedford calls it, is politically attractive because it goes out into the 905.  There is even a possibility at some distant future date that counter-peak flow to job centres in the 905 would add to the value of such a line provided that there is any local transit service to act as a distributor.

This does not eliminate the need for more local capacity into the core area especially if fare structures leave 905 residents clamouring for a subway to give them a cheap, frequent ride into downtown and riders from the 416 be damned.

The panel proposes a number of filters by which new lines would be evaluated, but gives no indication of the relative priority of these filters, or any relationship between the capital (and future operating) cost of a line versus the effect it might have (or not have) under these criteria.  This is rather like someone saying that we will cut taxes through “elimination of waste” without bothering to define the term or explaining how to find it.

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A Don Mills Subway For Toronto

This is a companion article to one of the same name on the Torontoist website in which I argue that Toronto should have a subway line from Front & Spadina to Eglinton & Don Mills.  Formerly known as the “Downtown Relief Line”, this should be called the “Don Mills Subway” and there should be no pretensions about it stopping at Danforth.

Drawing subway lines on maps, especially for the DRL, has been a cottage industry among transit advocates and city watchers for several years, and everyone has their preferences.  I have stayed away from that territory most of the time because the torrent of comments (including a long thread on this side) is more than I care to moderate.

However, the Don Mills line needs advocacy and a good indication of what it might look like to counter the “downtown has enough subways” drivel dished out by Mayor Ford.

My proposed alignment is not intended to be definitive although parts of it are locked down to make specific connections and to take into account physical constraints on the route’s placement.  Other alignments are possible in places, but I don’t want to revisit that discussion in excruciating detail when the basic purpose is to show what a new line could achieve.
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Updating TTC Wayfinding

This article has been split apart from the coverage of the October TTC Board meeting to accommodate updates and to keep the comment thread separate from other issues.

The Board considered a presentation entitled New Wayfinding Standards which, among other things, proposed a change in naming for subway lines to the use of numerals.  This has provoked no end of comment, some on this blog, as an ill-advised waste of money.

More to the point, this presentation is neither a “standard” nor a comprehensive review of TTC wayfinding.  It is an overview of a few changes, and even these are not set out on a thorough basis.  What we have here is a proposed trial, but not a systemic review of wayfinding.

The goals are simple: avoid multiple styles of signs, convey information in a consistent way so that riders know the “language” of the signs across the system, make maps easier to understand, and make all forms of wayfinding more accessible.  One style, one letter font, one style of branding should identify a “TTC” message wherever it appears.

Consistency and legibility are not important just for the casual user, but for the regular passenger who  may be in an unfamiliar part of the system.  They may walk through their “home” station on auto-pilot, but off of their regular territory, they too will be “tourists”.

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How Does The City Grow?

The October 22 meeting of Toronto’s Planning & Growth Management Committee saw the launch of the 2013 edition of a report tracking residential and commercial development patterns in the city.

How Does The City Grow Website

If anyone needs proof that downtown is the focus of development in Toronto, they need only look at the numbers in this report.

Development in the Greater Toronto Area is strong, but Toronto itself is taking a larger proportion of the total.  Across the GTA, dwelling unit completions have been on a long decline since a peak in 2002 while completions within Toronto have grown.  Toronto’s proportion of the total rises as a result with over 40% now located inside the City.

Grows13Fig1

City Planning tracks development applications within a five-year “pipeline” which allows for the long lead times between initial applications, approval, construction and occupancy of buildings.  This smooths out year-over-year variations, but also flags a turndown in future growth if the early stages of that pipeline start to dry up.  There is little sign of this happening up to the 2012 data, although the proportion of applications relative to the total rose slightly.

Grows13Fig5

The overwhelming type of new residential development is in the apartment form (this includes condo and rental projects).  This is not surprising considering that there is almost no vacant land in the city suitable for low-rise development on the scale we see in greenfield subdivisions outside of Toronto.

Grows13Fig4

New development is not evenly distributed across the city, but is concentrated in a few locations, notably downtown.

Grows13Tab3

During the five-year period 2008-2012, 41% of the proposed residential units were downtown.  This shows very strong market demand to live close to the core, but a related number is the 39% of proposed non-residential floorspace (GFA in the chart above) that is downtown.  Downtown commercial development in Toronto is, today, 25% of all such development in Canada.

Although City Planning puts a brave face on things, Table 3 also reveals the comparative failure of the “Centres” as planning mechanisms to focus development.  Only 8.7% of all residential and 3.5% of non-residential proposals are in the four centres: Etobicoke, North York, Scarborough and Yonge/Eglinton.  Scarborough Centre has almost no development planned at all.

The data presentation caused some confusion at the P&GM meeting when North York Councillor Filion compared the “38%” number for his centre with the numbers for downtown.  He was gently reminded that this was 38% of the 8.7% for all of the centres combined.

Where data consolidation does mask important details is in The Avenues, those major streets that are targets for future development, and in the “Other” category.

Almost one quarter of residential proposals are sited on The Avenues (the brown stripes in Map 1 below), but this is not broken down by city region.  Some areas have a great deal of development proposed and already built (many of the early projects in the 2008-2012 pipeline are already substantially completed), while other areas have nothing.  Are The Avenues actually directing development or simply endorsing what would happen naturally?

Grows13Map1

Almost 40% of non-residential development lies in “Other” areas many of which are designated employment zones.

The actual development patterns are clear in the overview maps (for full size versions of all illustrations here, please download the source document from the City’s website linked above).

Grows13Map2

Grows13Map5

The growth of downtown residential population is not tracked in this report, but a few comments at recent meetings give some indication of what is happening.  Cllr. Vaughan spoke of the development pressures in the Entertainment District where the population has gone up 125% in the past four years.  At a recent briefing on the Gardiner Expressway, Deputy City Manager John Livey noted that the population of Planning District 1 (downtown from roughly Dundas to Lake Ontario) has tripled between 2006 and 2011.  With the developments in the pipeline, this pattern will continue.

Non-residential space translates to jobs, and this puts great pressure on the transportation network.  Some of these jobs will be taken by people who will walk, cycle or take surface transit to work, but many commuters will come from further afield via the subway and GO Transit.  The idea that downtown “has enough subways”, to quote Mayor Ford, would be dubious with the existing level of demand, but seen in the context of future development the statement shows foolhardy disregard for investment in city infrastructure.

There will be growth in the suburbs, but not at the scale of the core area.  Moreover, it is unclear that simply designating an area for growth will actually produce the desired effect without considerable incentives.  Motions by Cllrs. Vaughan and Nunziata approved by the Committee speak to opposite sides of the same issue:

The Planning and Growth Management Committee:

1. Directed the Chief Planner and Executive Director, City Planning to report on how to create a policy framework to cap growth in areas of hyper intensification and re-direct development in a strategic way to other parts of the city.

2. Requested the Chief Planner and Executive Director, City Planning in consultation with the General Manager of Economic Development and Culture, to report back to the Planning and Growth Management Committee on the methods the City of Toronto could employ to stimulate economic development in areas currently underused or vacant.

In the case of downtown, there are areas where developments, many proposed at substantially above the zoned density for the land, are skewing the property market and straining services for current and future residents.  In other parts of the city, notably Weston which is among the lowest income areas in Canada, there is plenty of land to develop, but no activity.  How much power does the City actually have (or wish to exercise) in shaping its future growth?

Major transit lines are planned or under construction, but it will be a decade before we see their effect.  Meanwhile, large areas now served by subway lines see little development.  How much of this is nimby-ism throttling growth and how much is simply market forces building where there is both a market and a profit?

The disconnect between actual and proposed development, and the goals and dreams of the City Councillors and their neighbourhoods is quite striking.  Without significant intervention by Council, a move that would be ideologically distasteful to many and certainly would be subject to legal challenges, controlling development, especially that which can occur “as of right”, will be very difficult.  Should the transit system be built to serve what is there today and what we know will develop, or will Council persist in planning based on dreams that do not match market realities?

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The Transit Investment Panel: Hard Truths

After Metrolinx produced its report on revenue sources that might fund their regional plan, The Big Move, the whole thing was turned over to a newly created panel by Queen’s Park to review the options.

This panel now has its own website, and has issued the first of three discussion papers on the “Hard Truths” about transit in the GTHA.

One of the most damning statements about the depths to which Toronto has fallen appears in the Introduction:

Toronto used to be considered a transit system leader and all levels of government made bold investments to earn that reputation. We are reaping the benefits of those investments to this day, as a city, region, province, and country.

The Toronto region now ranks as the worst performer in Canada in moving people to and from work and is near the bottom of global rankings.

That’s what happens to a city that rests on a decades-old reputation for its transit network.  Toronto was spared some of the worst effects of hollowed-out downtowns thanks to postwar immigration and a robust local economy, but this masked deeper problems with the lack of investment in mobility around the city and region.  The central city, the one in all the tourist posters, prospered while gradually the suburbs strangled in traffic.

Debates about transit plans and funding are mired in misconceptions about what can and should be done, and the Hard Truths paper is intended to reset the discussion.  Whether the panel will be successful in their aim given the highly polarized political context remains to be seen.

These are hard truths, but until we accept them, we will not be able to have a mature discussion. Decisions will not be based on reason and evidence, but will be one-off decisions aimed at short term political gain.

The six truths are:

  • Subways are not the only good form of transit.
  • Transit does not automatically drive development.
  • The cost of building transit is not the main expense.
  • Transit riders are not the only beneficiaries of new infrastructure.
  • Transit expansion in the region is not at a standstill.
  • We can’t pay for the region-wide transit we need by cutting waste in government alone.

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Moving People Downtown: The Gardiner East Is Only The Beginning

On October 16, 2013, the second public meeting in the Gardiner East Environmental Assessment presented additional information and refinement of the options for dealing with the expressway’s segment between the Don River and Jarvis Street.

The purpose of the meeting was to report on the options that would receive further analysis in the next step of the EA and to provide comparative information about costs and benefits of the various schemes.  Broadly, there are four families of options:

  • Maintain the existing expressway with necessary repairs to make it sound for several decades’ more service.
  • Replace the expressway on a new structure either above or below ground.
  • Improve the existing expressway by selective reconstruction to open up space under the road deck.
  • Remove the expressway and create an at-grade boulevard.

Some options have been dropped from further study:

  • An underground alignment 1km long transitioning to/from existing elevated structured at the Don and at Jarvis.
  • An elevated alignment over the rail corridor.
  • A surface alignment on a berm abutting the south side of the rail corridor.

For any tunnel option, an important consideration is that most of the traffic arriving from the DVP and Lake Shore East is bound for the core area rather than as through trips to the western side of Toronto and beyond.  Therefore, access ramps are essential to any option that is not at grade so that traffic can actually get to downtown.  (By contrast, the “Big Dig” in Boston provided a link between the north and south sides of the core area on a route where 80% of the travel is through traffic and does not create demand for local ramp structures.)

The study claims that 80% of inbound trips have downtown destinations and this argues against a tunnel from which access would be difficult.  However, consider the origin-destination charts on page 15 of the presentation:

GE2P15

Of the traffic arriving from the DVP:

  • 40% leaves at Richmond Street
  • 7% exits to Lake Shore
  • 53% continues onto the Gardiner East, subdivided as
    • 10% exits at Jarvis/Sherbourne
    • 25% exits at Spadina/York/Bay
    • 18% travels beyond downtown.

If we were contemplating a tunnel across all of downtown, the argument about ramps and O-D patterns would be valid, but in this case, from the point of view of such a tunnel, most traffic is “through” traffic.  Only 10% of traffic that would enter a tunnel westbound at the Don leaves at Jarvis, and even this would be served if an off-ramp were incorporated in the transition from tunnel to elevated.  Similar arguments apply to the other O-D maps above.

The real problems with a tunnel are its cost and the barrier effect created by ramps linking the tunnel to the elevated structures at the Don and at Jarvis Street.

The schemes involving the rail corridor have both been dropped because they cannot be fitted into the space available.  In the case of an elevated, there is no room for the support structures needed (not to mention access ramps), and in the case of the berm, the area is reserved for future expansion of rail operations.

A far more important issue hinted at by the presentation but not explored in detail is the wider context of transportation into the core area.

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Once Upon a Time in Scarborough

Mike Filey passed along to me a clipping from the Toronto Star of June 29, 1977.

A high-speed streetcar line providing service between the Scarborough Town Centre and the Bloor-Danforth subway has been approved by Metro Council.

The $108.7-million line … was approved on a 23-8 vote.

Streetcars on a separate right-of-way should make the trip in about 15 minutes.

The cost of this route was to be shared 75-25 between Queen’s Park and Toronto.

It is no secret that this line was not built, nor was the planned extension to what is now Malvern Centre.  Instead, Queen’s Park, always happy to meddle in Toronto’s transit planning, strong-armed Toronto and the TTC into changing to the technology we now have on the RT at a cost, by the time the line was finished, of about $240m.  The hope for low-cost transit expansion was dashed by a technology that was almost as expensive as a subway.

The network that might have sprung from this to serve Scarborough and other suburbs never materialized.  Instead, we have endured 36 years of arguments about where we can afford to put our next subway lines, one at a time.

Premier Bill Davis may have said that the city is for people, not for cars, but he did bugger all to advance that position by making Toronto a showcase for a failed transit technology rather than a burgeoning network that grew along with and shaped its suburbs.

Scarborough LRT Study, April 1977, Excerpts

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Will Scarborough Get Its Subway? (Updated: Probably)

Updated October 9, 2013 at 1:20am:

Toronto Council, by a vote of 24-20, has approved proceeding with the Scarborough Subway project including a three-stage property tax increase totalling 1.6% to finance the City of Toronto’s share of the budget.

There is little new to add at this point on the technical issues all of which were covered on this site before.

My personal reaction is disappointment, but more strongly, disgust at the behaviour of some Councillors and a few City Officials.  The outright hatred and slander against “downtowners” and their motives in “pushing” LRT does not bode well for cordial relations on Council, not to mention sowing equivalent feelings among the electorate.  There are arguments to be made for the subway option (many of them have appeared here in the comment threads), but this should be done in a civil manner relatively free of distortion.

Instead, we got warped versions of the truth about both the subway and LRT options, and not a few outright lies.  TTC CEO Andy Byford, one who trotted out the “100 year subway” myth was forced to backtrack on two counts by questions at Council.  He admitted that the tunnels last for 100 years, but much of what is in them does not.  Meanwhile, he talked about LRT lasting 50 years, not the 30 year figure that has been bandied around of late.  The obvious issue is that a tunnel may very well last 100 years, but if you don’t have to build one in the first place, and can save the expense, what does it matter?

We will have to wait a decade to see whether the suddenly much rosier projections of demand for a rapid transit line in Scarborough come from the same well-cooked land-use and population assumptions that brought us the vastly overstated estimates for the Sheppard Subway (and for growth at Scarborough Town Centre).

In any event, the vote is taken, and barring a discovery of a major extra cost for the City appearing during detailed design, the decision is as final as we can expect to see from this Council and the provincial government.

How the rest of the LRT network will fare really depends on the 2014 municipal and provincial elections.  Mayor Ford has already declared that subways on Sheppard and Finch are goals for his next term.

The half-hearted advocacy for LRT from Metrolinx and Queen’s Park plays a big part in this situation, but I never thought their hearts were in it going right back to the early days of Metrolinx when I was persona non grata for asking their newly-minted Chair if they would consider this mode as an option in their grand plan.

How many more ridings will the Liberals feel the need to buy off with a subway promise?

The original article from October 4 follows the break.

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