Everything’s riding on forecasts for transit plans

We've been burned before, so advocates for both SmartTrack and the Downtown Relief Line deserve some scrutiny next week, writes Royson James.

Thestar.com
March 4, 2016
By Royson James

A bundle of statistics, data, ridership forecasts, job growth predictions and population growth estimates have landed at city hall, ahead of an executive committee meeting on Wednesday.

By June, city councillors are expected to make decisions on what projects to fund.

Reading between the lines of the spread sheets and graphs and charts, it’s clear city planners are recommending that when it comes to transit, Toronto should have it all. Staff support:

• Mayor John Tory’s SmartTrack plan because it delivers thousands of riders, provides relief to the congested Yonge line and reduces the number of transfers at the Yonge-Bloor interchange;

• Building a subway from Kennedy to the Scarborough Town Centre right next to the SmartTrack corridor. This, despite analysis that shows SmartTrack, running at the preferred interval of five minutes, would cut ridership on the subway to below 10,000 in the peak hour. A subway is built to carry more than three times that number;

• Build the Downtown Relief Line from around Pape and Danforth to Nathan Phillips Square and city hall, even though SmartTrack does a similar job of diverting passengers off the Yonge line.

The relief line provides a variety of other benefits, but advocates for both SmartTrack and the DRL should expect a grilling at city council.

The scope and pace and cost of what’s being considered is unprecedented.

For the past quarter century, Torontonians have groused about the slow buildout of transit projects. Over that time, the TTC has built the Sheppard Subway - plagued with abysmal ridership - and the delayed extension of the Spadina line out to Vaughan at Jane and Highway 7, to open in 2017.

Plans for the next 25 years would see the equivalent of 10 times that kind of transit building, much of it unfunded. This prompts observers to ask, seriously: “Are all these projects needed - especially ones that seem to duplicate service?”

The answer lies here:

The chief planner and much of the transit planning intelligentsia see the relief line as a cause celebre. Nothing short of that will satisfy what is a decades-old desire and demand.

The mayor must get a solid segment of his SmartTrack plan approved so he can claim victory in his re-election campaign in two years.

The provincial government will fund Tory’s SmartTrack so long as the Scarborough Subway is maintained. The re-election fortunes of MPPs like Brad Duguid and Mitzie Hunter depend on the subway going ahead, as Premier Kathleen Wynne has promised.

Consequently, there is something for everyone in the numbers released. Except maybe the many commuters looking for a new way to get around.

Of the 115,600 riders the Scarborough subway extension is projected to capture per day, only 7,130 are new riders. So, $2 billion later, we get 7,000 riders. Hmm. The math isn’t pretty.

We could toss around numbers and permutations spit out by the brand new “demand forecasting” modelling system but what’s the use? The water is already poisoned. Political interference has turned observers skeptical, if not cynical.

When we built the Sheppard subway, for example, some projections called for 12,000 passengers per peak hour. We have not cracked 5,000 per hour.

Projections called for 50,000 new jobs to arrive at the Scarborough Town Centre between 1986 and 2011. By 2006, the centre had a net loss of 700 jobs. By 2010, the total jobs topped 14,700.

North York Centre, with two subway lines feeding it, fared only slightly better - with 38,800 jobs in 2010, compared to a projection of 64,000.

And how do these people get to work from the North York Centre? Instead of 60 per cent taking transit as projected, only one-third are out of their cars.

We need ridership forecasts. They are supposed to help us prioritize tough choices. History shows they fail us. Remember all that in the blizzard of ridership numbers, statistics and data to be debated this spring.