Why Vaughan should stay out of Toronto transportation planning

Last week Vaughan councillor Alan Shefman challenged Toronto’s “no-capacity mythology” when it comes to the Yonge subway line.

Thestar.com
March 8, 2016
By Edward Keenan

Have you ever been to Vaughan? From what I can tell from my admittedly brief visits, it is a dystopian suburban hellscape of endless asphalt dotted with scrubgrass and children’s birthday party venues. It feels like an asphalt version of the vast desert autodrome battlegrounds of Mad Max: Fury Road, except with some roller coasters.

Vaughan’s main industry is being located next to Toronto - a feature so important to it that for almost two decades they made it the official slogan, “The City Above Toronto.” Its occupants’ main occupation appears to be idling their cars on Highway 7, an alleged transportation corridor that seems to serve in practice as a parking lot from which to look onto the rolling acres of big-box Smart Centres and Boston Pizza outlets that comprise the municipal shopping and restaurant district.

It looks more like horror movie screenwriting than urban planning to me, but I long ago resolved not to stick my nose, or any other part of my body, into the business of Vaughanwegians. (Vaughntonians? Vaghanians?) Live and let live. Still, it strikes me as a good rule of thumb to never accept transportation planning advice from a member of that city’s government.

This is a rule that bears repeating, since Vaughan councillor Alan Shefman took it on himself last week to challenge Toronto’s “no-capacity mythology” when it comes to the Yonge subway line.

I thought at first that Shefman must be employing new slang. In the same way that today’s youth use “epic” and “legendary” to mean “amazing,” I thought perhaps Shefman meant to suggest that overcrowding on the Yonge subway was so legendarily epic as to have reached mythological proportions - as if to say the lack of capacity is such that stories of the crowds wedged into the trains near Wellesley station will be handed down through generations as a form of moral teaching. “The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly push his body into a Yonge subway train each morning ... ”

But no. It appears Shefman was actually trying to suggest that there is space for more passengers. A bunch of city officials from York Region have been pushing to have the Yonge line extended north into Richmond Hill (a neighbour city of Vaughan’s, up there in the northlands above Toronto), and as they make their pitch to the federal Liberals for funding, Shefman was suggesting that project could proceed before 416 transit priorities such as the downtown relief subway line.

There are two possibilities here. One is that Shefman is a clown. Anyone who has ever seen a famous clown-car routine, in which dozens of bozos will come parading out of a Volkswagon Beetle, will know that clowns have a different idea of transportation capacity than the rest of us. It could be that Shefman simply sees entertaining circus-style public transportation opportunities in having riders fold their bodies under seats and sit atop each other’s shoulders and whatnot.

The other possibility is that Shefman simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. If you want to see if overcrowding on the Yonge subway is a myth or a reality, you could go to Yonge-Bloor station during the morning rush and try to wedge yourself onto a train. If you survive that experience, and you want to imagine what that same situation will look like down the road, you could consult the city’s recently released studies. They show that without any new construction, by 2031 ridership on the Yonge line at Bloor during rush hour is expected to be 39,600 - some 10 per cent higher than the capacity of the line. If an extension is built to Richmond Hill and the relief line and SmartTrack are not built, as Shefman and his 905 colleagues suggest, the projections show 41,600 passengers per hour - and that includes an 8.3 per cent drop in passengers transferring from the Bloor line because, the report says, “these passengers have been ‘driven away by overcrowding.’”

It is possible driving those people away is part of his plan - that he’s merely thinking that if the extension is built, there will be capacity at the north end of the line where trains will begin their trips south to allow York Regionites to get on, and those trying to board further south, at Eglinton or Bloor, who will face trains even more crowded than they are today, are of no concern to him.

He does complain, after all, about “Toronto dominating the conversation” about the TTC right now. Which is a dubious travesty, given that the TTC-including the Yonge subway line - is owned and operated and for the most part paid for by thecity of Toronto.

There is some good news. The same TTC reports show that if the relief line and SmartTrack are built, then there may be enough space to accommodate a Yonge extension to Richmond Hill, and we can expect local politicians here in Toronto, the ones actually in charge of the TTC, to advocate for funding for that, putting the projects in the right order. Sure enough, that’s what Mayor John Tory and TTC Chair Josh Colle have been saying in response to the York Region lobbying.

Imagine that: in Toronto transit politics have often seemed like a big clown show. But the addition of the perspective of a councillor from Vaughan suddenly makes our leaders sound reasonable.