Scarborough plan about politics, not transit

Toronto's chief planner played the terrible hand she was dealt and, amazingly, found a compromise that might get through city council.

Thestar.com
Jan. 22, 2016
By Royson James

Don’t drink the Kool-Aid just yet on the Scarborough transit “peace treaty” unveiled at city hall this week. There are many skirmishes to come in this political war.

Chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat has crafted the best chance yet to navigate the rough seas around how to link the city’s eastern communities into a network of transit options. But, great transit wasn’t the goal here; political peace was.

Keesmaat, caught up in the civil war between the “subways, subways, subways” cry of Rob Ford and the intransigent demand for light rail from many city councillors, sought common ground where, seemingly, there was none.

Then her task became near-impossible when John Tory ran for mayor on a platform promising to build “surface subways” on the GO line right next to the Scarborough subway route.

For months Keesmaat and transit planning staff stared at the obvious conundrum. Scarborough politicians at the provincial and municipal level have all promised a subway. Tory duplicated those designs by inserting SmartTrack’s surface subway just a few kilometres away. And those who felt a subway is an overbuild for the constrained ridership in the corridor were beside themselves when two subway lines were being proposed where they felt only an LRT was needed.

Keesmaat played the terrible hand she was dealt and, amazingly, she has found a compromise that might win enough votes at city council.

But is it the best way to serve Scarborough’s 625,000 residents? No. That wasn’t the goal here.

Keesmaat’s imperative was to find a solution that keeps the Scarborough subway option and John Tory’s SmartTrack plan viable. She says she has. But questions abound:

As she admitted this week, a cursory glance at the two proposals tells you the obvious. They are too close to each other. They would steal riders from each other and render both lines woefully underused.

Keesmaat’s compromise sees the Bloor-Danforth subway extended from Kennedy up to the Scarborough Town Centre, non-stop. She eliminates the Lawrence stop and removes the Sheppard station. In essence, ridership numbers have never supported subway at those locations. And they duplicated the SmartTrack stations Tory wants to add on the GO line to Stouffville.

“Stations at Lawrence Avenue East and Sheppard Avenue East would generate limited ridership due to the low densities that surround these stations,” her report says.

As such, the compromise plan shows GO stations at Lawrence, Ellesmere and Finch, branded as SmartTrack. Metrolinx has not said if it is prepared to add more stations that will turn an express GO service into a subway-type trip. We don’t know if they can physically accommodate the five-minute service needed to deliver the number of passengers that makes the service profitable. And we don’t know the ridership numbers for the corridor.

What we do know is the compromise allows Tory to say SmartTrack is viable; and it allows Scarborough councillors to say they are delivering not one, but two subway lines to their constituents.

Keesmaat then adds a sweetener - one designed to seal the deal. Using the money saved from a one-stop subway extension, she proposes the Crosstown LRT be extended beyond its terminus at Kennedy and go east to Kingston Rd., and then north to the University of Toronto campus near Morningside and Highway 401.

In fact, the LRT to U of T may be the most cost-effective line proposed, and the one that will do the most to connect Scarborough’s transit-starved citizens.

Most of us in our businesses would have done the due diligence and determine the best plan - even if it means killing one or both options. But Keesmaat didn’t have that option. She knew she had to keep the subway. And she had to keep Tory’s SmartTrack.

Her compromise is workable solution - given the options. But don’t tell us this is the best way going forward.