John Tory's SmartTrack going ahead with six new stops

The stations will be added as part of Metrolinx’s $13.5-billion initiative to implement regional express rail service.

Thestar.com
June 21, 2016
By Ben Spurr

John Tory’s signature transit plan is moving ahead, with the mayor touting Tuesday’s announcement of six new GO stations to serve his SmartTrack line as a fulfilment of his pledge to bring a speedy, subway-free commute to thousands of weary TTC riders.

But his much-ballyhooed project has shrunk significantly from the 22-station vision he put forward on the campaign trail, and critics say it’s become virtually identical to the province’s pre-existing Regional Express Rail initiative.

The city and province jointly revealed plans on Tuesday to build new stations on existing GO lines that Tory said will be part of SmartTrack, the “surface subway” plan that formed the bedrock of his 2014 election platform.

Stations to be added along the Kitchener and Stouffville/Lakeshore East GO Rail corridors would be built at St. Clair Ave. West, Liberty Village, the Unilever site, Gerrard St., Lawrence Ave. East, and Finch Ave. East.

At a joint press conference in rapid-transit-hungry Liberty Village, Tory said he was making good on his campaign promise to boost service quickly using existing rail corridors.

“SmartTrack is about connecting people to opportunity. It is about getting Toronto residents where they're going on the rail corridors that already run through the city of Toronto and were, until this investment that we're all making together, underutilized,” Tory said.

The six new stations are fewer than half of the 13 new stops Tory had proposed, and the 15 total stops now being contemplated for SmartTrack are fewer than the 22 he pitched during the campaign.

But the mayor said he was actually delivering more stations that he had pledged. That’s because, earlier this year, the western spur of SmartTrack that would have connected to Pearson Airport was deemed unfeasible and replaced by plans for a westward extension of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT instead. The LRT could have up to 15 stops.

Tory said that if those stations, as well as his plan to expand the network in Scarborough, were considered the result would be “way more transit than I talked about, in terms of the number of stops and the number of neighbourhoods covered, than I had said when I was seeking election.”

But Councillor Gord Perks (Ward 14, Parkdale High Park) charged that “we’re not getting anything close to what the mayor committed to.”

Perks said Tory’s SmartTrack promises “change day to day and they never add up . . . The fact of the matter is that the proposal that was made during the election campaign said: using existing rails, 22 stops.”

The six new stations being proposed do not include a stop at Ellesmere Rd. in Scarborough. That stop was included as part of the “optimized” plan for Scarborough transit that Tory and chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat championed in January, when the city replaced plans for a three-stop subway extension to the Scarborough Town Centre with a one-stop “express” subway.

Two SmartTrack stops, one at Lawrence Ave. and the other at Ellesmere, were supposed to complement the subway and a newly proposed 18-stop LRT to the University of Toronto Scarborough campus.

All the SmartTrack stations would be built as part of provincial transit agency Metrolinx’s $13.5-billion initiative to implement regional express rail, or RER, along five GO rail corridors in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. The project will involve electrifying the rail lines to allow more frequent, two-way service.

In a report released Tuesday, Metrolinx proposed building 12 new stations as part of the RER initiative over the next 10 years. Eight would be in Toronto, including the six claimed as part of SmartTrack, and two more on the Barrie line: at Bloor St. West and Lansdowne Ave., and at Spadina Ave. and Front St.

All the new stations will be provincially owned, and it’s not clear how service to the stations deemed to be part of SmartTrack would differ from service to other stations under RER.

Tory said “the service levels are quite likely to be different,” but the Metrolinx report envisaged SmartTrack stations being served by trains running at GO RER frequencies, or every six to 10 minutes during peak periods, with travel times slightly increased for long- and medium-distance trips.

“There is still work that’s still ongoing between Metrolinx and the city with respect to exactly what the service concepts will look like,” said provincial Transportation Minister Steven Del Duca.

Transit expert Steve Munro said there is now little difference between SmartTrack and GO’s RER plan. “It’s quite clear that SmartTrack and RER are kind of merging with each other. This has been obvious for months,” he said.

Tory shot down suggestions that SmartTrack was indistinguishable from RER, however, and said his efforts had secured stations Metrolinx wouldn’t have otherwise approved.

“If SmartTrack wasn’t a reality, why did I have to go and get the money for it? Why did I have to have extensive discussions with Mr. Del Duca and (Metrolinx president Bruce McCuaig) and others about where we would get stations?” he asked. “And it was quite a long discussion, and we didn’t get absolutely everything that we might have wanted, but we sure got a lot for the people of Toronto. This is a very real project; regional express rail is very real.”

New details on the cost of SmartTrack were also released Tuesday. The province has agreed to pay for $3.7 billion in infrastructure related to RER that is considered “foundational” to Tory’s plan.

But incremental costs - including construction of the six new stations, which Metrolinx estimated at between $700 million and $1.1 billion, as well as the Eglinton West LRT line, estimated at between $1.5 billion and $2.1 billion - would be paid by the city, the federal government and other sources of funding such as development charges. The city would also have to pick up the tab for operating the Eglinton West LRT line.

During last year’s federal election campaign, then-Liberal leader Justin Trudeau pledged to contribute $2.6 billion to SmartTrack. A spokesman for federal Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi told the Star in an email: “We remain committed to the funding announced for this project during the campaign.”

For SmartTrack to proceed, Metrolinx said the city needs to commit all necessary funding by Nov. 30.

Although Metrolinx and the city have reached an agreement on some of the stations for SmartTrack, the two parties have not yet agreed on what fares to charge for SmartTrack service.

During his campaign, Tory promised that Torontonians would be able to ride SmartTrack for the same price as the TTC, and keeping the ticket price low is seen as crucial to enticing riders off of packed subway lines and onto surface rail.

The SmartTrack plan will be debated at a meeting of Tory’s executive committee next Tuesday as part of a larger transit report.