Spadina subway extension a classic Toronto transit screwup

Nationalpost.com
Jan. 16, 2016
By Chris Selly

“Look over there!” TTC CEO Andy Byford pointed and shouted to reporters aboard a chartered city bus early Friday afternoon. He was jokingly averting our eyes from a disabled TTC bus being towed away. But it was basically what he had been doing in earnest all morning, as he and site manager Peter Boyce toured us around York University station, midway point on the late and over-budget six-stop Toronto-York Spadina Subway Extension (TYYSE).

What we saw was a loud, muddy, freezing-cold construction site, but one in which an objectively impressive subway station - if you like that sort of thing - is taking shape. It has a nifty wavy roof. It has a grand entrance through which natural light will filter down to the platform. Passengers will ostensibly look up and marvel at the “waffle slab” concrete roof.

All very nice, but we were there because of bad news. As we bussed northward, the project officially got considerably more expensive: A staff report anticipates up to $400-million extra will be needed to settle what Byford says are routine disputes with contractors - 60 per cent to be borne by the city and 40 per cent by York Region. That brings the total price to around $3.2 billion for a subway line scheduled to open by the end of 2017 - a significant departure from an original budget of $2.6 billion and an original deadline of 2015.

Few Torontonians will be shocked. Byford, however, would like them to look on the bright side. “The good news is, the TYYSE is 80-per-cent complete. The track is virtually all in, the tunnels were completed back in 2013, the six stations are well advanced,” he told the cameras after the media tour. “So the end date of December 2017 remains on track.”

At one point, after all, staff told him it might be 2019. At that point he cleaned house and brought in civil engineering firm Bechtel to reorganize project management. It could be worse.

By the end of our three-hour tour, Byford had said “but at least you’re getting a great subway” so many times in so many different ways, and had shifted blame to so many third parties - previous TTC commissioners, the Ministry of Labour, contractors - that it was getting a bit much. Subtle message management this was not. On the other hand, he makes a compelling case that he inherited a heritage-breed turkey when he took the job in 2012, and has made the best of it.

This is in many ways a classic Toronto transit screwup, beginning with the fact the budget was set before the project had been designed - which was the most basic finding of a 2010 report into the legendary debacle of the St. Clair streetcar right-of-way, incidentally. To take just one maddening example: The TTC proposed modest stations, not unlike those on the Sheppard line - “fit for purpose,” as Byford put it, the purpose being to move people from Point A to Point B. Politicians decided they wanted to think bigger, so the TTC commissioned some architectural landmarks. “No, no, that’s too big,” the politicians demurred, and we got halfway bold designs instead.

That sort of dithering costs time and money. How could it not? And it’s not the TTC’s fault the Ministry of Labour shut down the York University site for an unconscionable six months after the death of a worker there in 2011.

Still, the problem remains: Not without cause, the TTC has a lousy reputation as a deliverer of on-time, on-budget projects. And as Mayor John Tory has often observed, that reputation is a significant obstacle for would-be city builders to overcome: Metro Vancouver’s referendum on a $7.5-billion suite of transportation projects failed in large part because TransLink, the regional authority, suffered from similar criticisms.

Asked how we might avoid trust-eroding sticker shocks like this in the future, Byford pointed to the multiple-contractor “design-bid-build” model the TTC adopted for the TYYSE, as opposed to the “design-build” option it rejected. “Design-build buys you that certainty because any cost overrun would typically be at the risk of the contractor,” he said. “The balance, though, is that you often pay extra to get that certainty.”

“Paying more” is something Torontonians are used to. “Paying more or less what they said it would cost” would potentially be a very productive novelty. As Byford says, there are important lessons to be learned here for the TTC. We must hope its political masters are willing to learn them as well.