Last decade’s transit plans are coming together

The new Scarborough plans create compromise while happening to make good sense.

Thestar.com
Jan. 21, 2016
By Edward Keenan

And when the smoke cleared after the head-spinning transit plan explosions of this half-week, you imagine former Mayor David Miller lighting a cigar and saying, “I love it when a plan comes together,” like George Peppard did at the end of every episode of The A-Team.

(If some readers find that reference dated or obscure, it remains a vast improvement over the more recent-vintage conclusion of every Rob Ford-era transit episode, where the appropriate catchphrase seemed to be “The Aristocrats!”)

The quiet restoration of Miller’s legacy project is among the unexpected results of the week. One upshot of Tuesday’s SmartTrack studies was the reinstatement of the Transit City Eglinton West LRT to the airport, and one element of the new Scarborough transit plan that emerged Wednesday was the reintroduction of the Scarborough-Malvern LRT. The Eglinton-Crosstown LRT is already under construction, the Finch and Sheppard LRTs remain parts of Metrolinx’s plans, and voila: All of phase one of Transit City’s LRT network, and more than half of its phase two, are suddenly, once again, central to Toronto’s transit future.

And while it’s probably a little too early to light any celebratory cigars just yet, I’ll echo that sentiment: I love it when a plan comes together. I’ll need more time to fully absorb and study the nuances, details and fine print, but that’s certainly what appears to be happening in Scarborough - a plan is coming together. A better plan than we had for Scarborough last week. A good plan, in fact.

The big headline-grabbing change - making the Scarborough subway extension just one stop, an express run from Kennedy to Scarborough Town Centre - is at first a puzzler. But when you consider it alongside the revived Scarborough-Malvern LRT, and consider both alongside Tory’s SmartTrack (and then add the Sheppard LRT and Express GO service on the Lakeshore line), you see something interesting emerging: a network covering most of west and central Scarborough that can serve long, short, and regional trips.

The reintroduction of the 17-stop Scarborough-Malvern LRT is the best transit news to emerge in a while: it will connect people across a broad swath of the area’s most densely populated and highest-traffic neighbourhoods to each other through high-order transit, and connect them, too, to the routes into downtown. And because of the changes to the subway extension, it can be built from the same pool of dollars, roughly, as the already-approved and funded subway plan.

About that one-stop subway extension: I remain uncertain that it is better than the previously planned and much-discussed Scarborough LRT. But if provincial and local politicians have determined that a subway extension is a hill-to-die-on political necessity, then the express run to the Town Centre may make more sense than the three-stop extension that was planned.

Not just because it costs about $1 billion less (freeing up dollars for Scarborough-Malvern). And not just because Scarborough Town Centre station accounts for the vast majority of the trips on the current RT line (though it does: 70 per cent of current riders get on or off the train at the big mall, and another 10 per cent are bound for McCowan, a station located the other end of the Town Centre parking lot.) It’s also because Scarborough Town Centre is the one place on the old planned line where massive new development of former industrial areas is possible. In the meantime, it already has the parking and bus terminal space (and even highway access) to serve as a regional hub, and should be able to accommodate any increase in riders attracted by the shortened trip the subway would offer (my back-of-the-envelope math says the new subway could shave about 5-6 minutes off the trip downtown over the existing RT-subway combination).

As for SmartTrack, well the questions about it we had yesterday are the same today. But if it can deliver frequent service at TTC prices, it picks up some of the mid-range traffic the old subway line would have served, and also stretches north up to Finch and Steeles, where currently there’s no access to fast transit lines.

The mayor’s office has embraced this plan, but it was apparently developed by the city’s planners, who tried to reconcile some political imperatives they’d been given by council with good planning. It appears they’ve found a way to serve commuters into downtown and local traffic too, and to do it for roughly the same dollars already committed. We have, until now, been debating the projects of various political teams (Ford’s Subway! Miller’s Transit City! Tory’s SmartTrack!) as if they were mutually exclusive competitors in the transit arena. Bringing elements of each together appears, improbably, to make sense. They’ve assembled transit ideas from the past decade, and, as the man on the old TV show used to say, made a plan come together.

Now, like everything on that old TV show, transit plans in this town have a habit of blowing up. We’ll soon see what devils lie in the details. But today, quite unexpectedly, is a good day, for we seem to have a far better plan than we had yesterday.